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Anthropic Hits $965B, EU Scraping Rules & the VC Concentration Trap
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Anthropic just surpassed OpenAI in valuation at $965 billion while 86% of U.S. venture capital floods into AI mega-rounds — but the broader startup ecosystem is quietly shrinking. Plus: Europe's new GDPR training-data rules, an Asian founder exodus, and Mercor's agent-infrastructure bet.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Four hundred and twelve billion dollars flowed into U.S. venture capital in the first half of this year. That number sounds like a boom.
The clearest example of that concentration sits at the top of the frontier lab race. Anthropic just closed a sixty-five billion dollar funding round at a post-money valuation of nine hundred and sixty-five billion dollars.
While capital concentrates in the U.S., Europe is tightening the rules on how that capital gets deployed. On July eighth, the EU Data Protection Board adopted Guidelines zero three slash twenty twenty-six.
The geographic story of AI is also shifting. More than thirty founding teams have relocated from Asia to the U.S. via Antler since twenty twenty-five.
Mercor, the AI unicorn that hit two billion dollars in annual recurring revenue in June, acquired simulation platform Deeptune. The strategic logic is direct.
The final thread worth tracking is infrastructure. Asian investors are pivoting away from growth-at-all-costs AI toward what they're calling resilient AI.
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