Anthropic and OpenAI's IPO showdown

PLUS: Get instant business insights from spreadsheets

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Wall Street is ready for a real taste of the AI boom, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to be the first on the menu.

With both AI giants pushing towards IPOs at massive valuations, the fastest to ring the bell gets to set the price — leaving the latecomer facing a much hungrier (and skeptical) market.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic preps for IPO race with OpenAI

  • Leaked doc provides window into Claude’s ‘soul’

  • Get instant business insights from spreadsheets

  • Anthropic surveys its own engineers on AI's impact

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic is reportedly laying the groundwork to go public as early as 2026, according to a report from the FT — hiring the law firm behind Google's and LinkedIn's IPOs as investors push the Claude maker to beat OpenAI to market.

The details:

  • Anthropic reportedly tapped Wilson Sonsini, a firm known for taking tech giants like Google and LinkedIn public, to start the early-stage listing work.

  • CFO Krishna Rao joined after helping Airbnb go public in 2020, with Anthropic also allegedly working on an “internal checklist of changes” needed to IPO.

  • Anthropic is also chasing private capital at a valuation north of $300B, with Microsoft and Nvidia reportedly in for up to $15B combined.

  • OpenAI is also in the early process of preparing to go public, at a potential valuation as high as $1T that would make it one of the biggest IPOs in history.

Why it matters: Both Anthropic and OAI are now circling IPOs that could rank among the largest in tech history — and investors want their horse to cross the finish line first. With talk of an "AI bubble" swirling and revenue growth under scrutiny, the first to list will test whether public markets believe the sky-high valuations are a floor or a ceiling.

TOGETHER WITH STRANDS AGENTS

The Rundown: Instead of trying to predict and code for every possible scenario, Strands Agents empowers you to create intelligent agentic systems that leverage reasoning models to make dynamic decisions and adapt to unexpected situations.

Features announced include:

  • Support for TypeScript (in addition to Python)

  • Improved support for edge devices

  • Powerful evaluations

  • Steering feature to guide agents toward desired outcomes

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: An internal ‘Soul’ document describing Claude's intended personality, ethics, and self-conception was published after a researcher extracted it from Claude 4.5 Opus — with Anthropic confirming it is authentic and was used in training.

The details:

  • The text establishes priorities that include safety, ethics, company guidelines, and helpfulness, along with hard limits Claude must never cross.

  • It also describes Claude as a "genuinely novel kind of entity" that may experience functional emotions, analogous to but distinct from human feelings.

  • The doc also says Claude “may have functional emotions in some sense”, and encourages the model to have a sense of identity and character.

  • Anthropic's Amanda Askell confirmed its authenticity and that Claude has been trained on it, noting the company plans to share the full version soon.

Why it matters: The full document is a fascinating read — and feels perfectly in line with Anthropic’s overall prioritization of model wellbeing and treating its AI as more than just a tool. While every lab has its own techniques, this doc shows an inside look at the ingredients that help make Claude models feel distinctly unique from the field.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to transform your Google Sheets invoice data into a conversational business intelligence system using CData Connect AI and Claude Desktop, with no more manual calculations or complex formulas needed.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to CData Connect AI, sign up for a free account, and navigate to the dashboard to manage data connections

  2. Click "Add Connection," select Google Sheets, authenticate with your Google account, and click "Save & Test" to confirm the connection

  3. In Claude Desktop, add the CData MCP server using URL https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp and authenticate with CData credentials

  4. Query your data with natural language like "Use CData to analyze the Demo Invoice Data sheet and show me all unpaid invoices with company names and amounts, then calculate total outstanding"

Pro tip: Connect your CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce, as an additional data source in CData. This lets you analyze customer payment patterns alongside sales data, support tickets, and other business metrics in a single Claude chat.

PRESENTED BY IBM

The Rundown: Businesses face many challenges going from AI ambition to implementation. Success requires more than adopting new technology. It involves intentionally aligning AI with workflows, data, and goals. As AI evolves into a business-wide opportunity, leaders must ensure the right AI is applied to the right challenges.

Explore IBM's playbook on 3 challenges & approaches to boost agentic AI impact:

  • Finding your AI problem

  • Creating a clear AI plan

  • Integrating AI with the tools you use every day

AI RESEARCH

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published an internal study of 132 engineers, revealing that AI tools have (unsurprisingly) reshaped work at the company — boosting output while raising concerns like skill decay, career uncertainty, and fading mentorship.

The details:

  • Anthropic Employees say they now use Claude for 60% of their tasks and estimate a 50% productivity gain, roughly double the figures from a year ago.

  • Over 1/4 of AI tasks were ones that wouldn't have happened otherwise — dashboards, cleanup, and experiments that weren't worth the manual effort.

  • Claude Code now chains together ~20 actions before needing human input, up from 10 six months ago, letting engineers hand off more complex workflows.

  • Despite the gains, several interviewees voiced unease — with one saying it "feels like I'm coming to work every day to put myself out of a job."

Why it matters: This survey means Anthropic’s entire 4.5 family has since launched and likely upped productivity even more. Seeing how a frontier lab is using its own AI tools is a fascinating perspective — but employee concerns show that even they are not immune from some of the industry’s biggest overarching threats regarding work.

QUICK HITS

  • 🔐 Incogni - Remove your personal data from the web so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off for annual plans*

  • 🌱 Seedream 4.5 - ByteDance’s upgraded AI image and editing model

  • 🎥 Kling 2.6 - Kling's new AI video model with native audio capabilities

  • 📽️ Runway Gen-4.5 - Runway's new top-rated video model

*Sponsored Listing

Kling AI released Kling 2.6, the Chinese startup’s new AI video model that introduces native synced audio generation for text and image-to-video outputs.

Google launched Workspace Studio, a tool that builds agents with natural language commands to automate tasks across Gmail, Drive, and other Workspace apps.

Former Google researchers launched Ricursive, a new startup aiming to build a self-improving AI system that shrinks custom chip design timelines from years to weeks.

ByteDance introduced Seedream 4.5, an upgraded image model with improved text rendering, the ability to blend up to 10 reference images, and editing enhancements.

Visa published a report finding that nearly half of U.S. consumers have used AI for holiday shopping tasks, like price comparison and research, this season.

AWS introduced new features for Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI that simplify advanced AI model customization, allowing for easier model fine-tuning.

Perplexity open-sourced BrowseSafe, a security tool designed to protect AI browser assistants from malicious instructions hidden in web pages.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Paul D. in Huntsville, AL:

"Google suddenly stopped indexing my website. Everything seemed to be set up properly. Finally turned to ChatGPT, explained the problem, and got a step-by-step guide on how to attack the problem. It provided specific instructions for the platform, the version of WordPress, the template I was using, and the specific hosting provider. As I checked items off the list, it narrowed the focus until it finally found the solution. Problem solved!”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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