Today on the AI Daily Brief, is Google now the AI leader? Before that in the headlines,

Anthropic closes a monster new round, plus the latest in the talent wars. The AI Daily Brief

is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

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shoot us a note at sponsors at AIdailybrief.aI. We are now officially selling into 2026. With that,

let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition,

all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. Today, our main story is all about

whether Google is now in the AI

lead, and so appropriately a lot of our headlines have to do with gyrations and moves among the

big labs. We kick off today with a story that I mentioned in passing yesterday as part of the

AI predictions, but will now give full coverage, which is that Anthropic has officially

closed their latest round of fundraising at a whopping $183 billion valuation.

The company brought in $13 billion in fresh capital, co-led by iconic fidelity and lightspeed venture partners.

There was a laundry list of participating funds, but very notably this round includes a lot of private equity,

sovereign wealth, and retirement funds alongside the usual VCs. This feels in many ways like the

round where the AI industry as a whole, not just OpenAI, have definitively outgrown the

capacity of Silicon Valley venture funds alone. Anthropics' previous round was $3.5 billion at a $61.5

billion valuation back in February, meaning they've more than tripled in size.

Now, part of why they were able to do this is that the company has gone from $1 billion to $5 billion

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