Latest AI News
Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage
It’s about to become more expensive for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools. According to a customer emailshared on Hacker News, Anthropic said that starting at noon Pacific on April 4 (today), subscribers will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw.” Instead, they’ll need to pay for extra usage through “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.” The company said that while it’s starting with OpenClaw today, the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly.” Anthropic’s head of Claude Code Boris Chernywrote on Xthat the company’s “subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools” and thatAnthropic is now trying“to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term.” The announcement comes after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he wasjoining Anthropic rival OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open source project with support from OpenAI. Steinberger postedthat he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic” but were only able to delay the increased pricing by a week. “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger said. Cherny, however,insistedthat Claude Code team members are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “just put up a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically.” “This is more about engineering constraints,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds for subscribers. “We know not everyone realized this isn’t something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and explicit.” Meanwhile, OpenAI recentlyshut down its Sora app and video generation models, reportedly to free up computing resources and as part of a broader effort to refocus on winning over the software engineers and enterprises that are increasingly relying on products like Claude Code.
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Anthropic to Stop Covering OpenClaw, Other Third-Party Tools Under Claude Subscriptions
Users will still be able to access such tools using their Claude accounts, but usage will be billed separately under a pay-as-you-go model.
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OpenAI’s New Product Isn’t a Frontier Model—It’s Influence
OpenAI’s acquisition of popular AI and tech podcast TBPN gives the ChatGPT maker more direct control over how it markets its models.
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Anthropic is having a moment in the private markets; SpaceX could spoil the party
Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands. As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses solely on private securities markets and facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-bitingly large moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. The upshot: the storyline is more complicated than the headlines suggest. Anderson’s read on Anthropic is consistent with what Bloombergreportedearlier this week: demand for the company’s shares has become almost insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, saying that buyers had indicated to his outfit that they had $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic, even as roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares that investors are trying to sell haven’t found takers. Anderson sees something similar at Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to source in our marketplace is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his Miami home. “There’s just no sellers.” Part of what turbocharged that demand, Anderson argues, was Anthropic’svery public standoffwith the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but has wound up becoming a gift. “The app got more popular, people rallied around the company as kind of a hero, taking on big government,” he said. “I think it amplified the story and made it even more differentiated from OpenAI.” That distinction is becoming increasingly meaningful to investors navigating a market where, for years, the prevailing logic was to bet on everyone. Anderson notes that many institutional investors still want exposure to both Anthropic and OpenAI. “The jury’s still out,” he said, on which AI model will ultimately win – but the momentum, at least in the secondary market, has shifted. That doesn’t mean OpenAI has fallen off a cliff. Anderson pushes back slightly on a binary reading of the situation. “I wouldn’t say it’s a one-or-the-other conversation,” he said. But the excitement isn’t there. “It’s not nearly as vibrant a market as Anthropic right now,” he acknowledged. On valuation, Anderson broadly confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting that OpenAI shares on the secondary market are trading as if the company were valued at $765 billion — an appreciable discount to the company’s newest $852 billion primary-round valuation. He cautioned that he was working from memory, but said the Bloomberg figure was “in the right range.” OpenAI itself has tried to assert more control over secondary trading. “People should be extremely cautious of any firm that purports to have access to OpenAI equity, including through an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, noting the company had established authorized channels through banks, with no fees, to counter what it described as a high-fee broker model. Perhaps tellingly — at least for now — banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have begun offering OpenAI shares to their high-net-worth clients without charging carry fees, according to Bloomberg. Goldman, meanwhile, is charging its customary carry – often 15% to 20% of profits – for clients seeking Anthropic exposure. What none of this accounts for is SpaceX, which stands apart amid shifting sentiment around these other powerful brands. Anderson describes it as one of the only names in Rainmaker’s universe that never experienced the punishing correction that hit much of the private market between 2022 and 2024, a period when many private companies’ shares fell 60% to 70% from their peaks (after their valuations were run up just as fast). The rocket and satellite behemoth has “been pretty much consistently up and to the right,” Anderson said. Anderson, who, naturally, has an economic interest in flattering the company and its earlier backers, credits SpaceX’s management with disciplined pricing and not squeezing every last dollar out of each funding round or tender offer. “A lot of companies will fall for the temptation to maximize the price of their stock in every round,” he said. “The problem is that that doesn’t leave any room for error.” SpaceX, by contrast, played it conservatively, by “not getting too greedy,” and the payoff for earlier investors has been enormous. “You can imagine if someone got in in 2015 what kind of gain they’re sitting on right now,” said Anderson. To put a finer point on that comment: SpaceX was valued at roughly $12 billion in 2015, when Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion in the company. Someone who got in at that price is now sitting on a gain of more than 100x, with the company valued at more than $1 trillion ahead of its planned IPO. That IPO is now imminent, seemingly. SpaceX filedconfidentiallythis week for an initial public offering, setting the stage for what could be one of the largest market debuts in history, with Elon Musk reportedly aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, possibly in June. Only Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut, which valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion, has come close. Unsurprisingly, the rumored filing has already changed the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX shares, according to Anderson. “Today, I saw a flood of SpaceX investors coming to me saying, ‘Can you give me SpaceX?’” he noted. “It’s been a very active buy side.” But supply is drying up. The closer a company gets to an IPO, the less incentive existing shareholders have to sell because they can see the liquidity event on the horizon. That’s where things get a little dicier for OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are reportedly exploring public offerings of their own and have signaled they could move this year. But SpaceX, by filing first, is about to test the market’s appetite in a major way, and Anderson suggested that whoever follows will be at a disadvantage. “SpaceX is going to soak up a lot of liquidity,” he said flatly. “There’s only so much money out there allocated to IPOs.” The first mover gets to the trough first; those who follow face both more scrutiny and, potentially, less capital. It’s a dynamic that plays out in every so-called vertical and from which the AI companies aren’t completely immune, despite the attention being showered on them right now. Time your IPO too early and you’re the one testing market receptivity. Wait for someone else to go first, and you may find the biggest checks have already been written. You can hear more of our interview with Anderson in the upcoming episode of theStrictlyVC Downloadpodcast, which drops every Tuesday. In the meantime, check out recent episodes, including those with Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.
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AI companies are building huge natural gas plants to power data centers. What could go wrong?
Who doesn’t love a good round of FOMO? From dot-com to Web 2.0, virtual reality to blockchain, the tech industry has had its share of being too afraid to miss out on a trend. The AI bubble is the big daddy of them all. Its first offspring — the rush tolock down power for data centers— is now begetting a mad dash to secure natural gas supplies and equipment. If FOMOs could have babies, then the AI bubble is already having grandkids. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it’s working with Chevron and Engine No. 1 tobuild a natural gas power plantin West Texas that could grow to produce 5 gigawatts of electricity. This week Googleconfirmedthat it’s working with Crusoe to build a 933 MW natural gas power plant in North Texas. And last week, Meta announced that it was adding another seven natural gas power plants to its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, bringing the site to 7.46 GW of capacity —enough to power the entire state of South Dakota. Are we missing anyone? The recent investments are concentrated in the southern U.S., home to some of the largest natural gas deposits in the world. Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there’s enough in one region to supply energy to the entire United States for10 monthsby itself. Every data center operator seems to want a part of it. The scramble for natural gas has led to a shortage of turbines for the power plants, with prices likely to rise 195% by the end of this year relative to 2019 prices,accordingto Wood Mackenzie. The equipment contributes 20% to 30% of the cost of a power plant. Companies won’t be able to place new orders until 2028, and it’s taking six years to get turbines delivered, the consultancy notes. That means tech companies are betting that the AI fever won’t break, that AI will continue to needexponential amounts of power, and that natural gas generation will be necessary for success in the AI era. They may come to regret that third assumption. Though natural gas supplies in the U.S. are plentiful, and because shipping the fuel isn’t cheap, the country remains somewhat insulated from the turmoil in the Middle East. But supplies aren’t unlimited, and recently, growth in production in the big three regions — responsible for three-quarters of all U.S. shale gas production — hasslowed considerably. It’s not clear how insulated tech companies are from price swings since none of them have disclosed specific terms of their agreements. A lot will depend on how firm the price is in those contracts. Even if the contracted prices are as firm as can be, the companies could still face repercussions. Because natural gas generates about 40% of the electricity in the U.S.,accordingto the Energy Information Administration, electricity prices are closely tied to natural gas prices. Tech companies might be able to shield themselves from scrutiny for a bit by moving their gas power plants behind the meter — by skipping the grid and connecting them directly to their data centers. But natural gas isn’t an unlimited resource, and if their ambitions grow too big, even the behind-the-meter operations could drive up power prices for everyone. We’ve all seen how that’s played out. It won’t just be regular households getting upset either. Other industries, including those that remain much more dependent on natural gas and can’t yet turn to renewables, might balk at data centers grabbing so much of the resource. Powering a data center with wind, solar, and batteries is easy. Running a petrochemical plant? Not so much. Then there’s the weather. One cold winter could change the calculus by driving up demand among households. Wellheads might freeze off, crimping supplies dramatically,as happened in Texasin 2021. When gas runs short, suppliers will face a choice: keep the AI data centers running or let people heat their homes? By snapping up natural gas supplies and moving behind-the-meter, tech companies can claim that they’re “bringing their own power” and not straining the electrical grid. But in reality, they’re just shifting their use from one grid to another, the natural gas grid. The AI rush has illustrated just how physically constrained the digital world remains. Does it make sense for them to bet big on a finite resource? Tech companies might regret falling for the FOMO.
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Anthropic ramps up its political activities with a new PAC
Anthropic has filed documents to create a new political action committee — a sign that, like its peers, the AI lab is committing significant resources toward influencing policy and regulation. AnthroPAC plans to make contributions to both parties during the midterms, including to current D.C. lawmakers and rising political candidates. The PAC will be funded by voluntary employee contributions capped at $5,000,Bloomberg reports. Astatement of organizationfiled with the Federal Election Commission includes a signature by Allison Rossi, Anthropic’s treasurer. TechCrunch reached out to Anthropic for more information. AI companies, which are comrades and competitors in a new and often turbulent industry, have increasingly sought to push their preferred policies at the state and federal levels. The Washington Postreportedlast month that AI companies had already contributed a whopping $185 million to the midterm races. In February, The New York Times alsoreportedon Public First, a new Super PAC that had reportedly received at least $20 million from Anthropic, and which had financed ad campaigns supporting a particular regulatory agenda. Anthropic’s political activities have ramped up as the company continues to be enmeshedin a nasty legal battlewith the Defense Department. The dispute erupted earlier this year over the government’s use of Anthropic’s AI models and what guidelines (if any) should exist for that usage.
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Anthropic buys biotech startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal: Reports
Anthropic has purchased the stealth biotech AI startup Coefficient Bio in a $400 million stock deal, according toThe InformationandEric Newcomer. Sources close to the deal confirmed to TechCrunch that it closed, though declined to comment on the amount. The deal comes as Anthropic continues its push into healthcare and life sciences, following itsOctober announcement ofClaude for Life Sciences, a tool that aims to help scientific researchers make discoveries. Coefficient Bio’s founders, Samuel Stanton and Nathan C. Frey, launched the startup eight months ago, having both worked in computational drug discovery at Genentech’s Prescient Design. Coefficient Bio was using AI to help make drug discovery and other forms of biological research more efficient. The team, consisting of around 10 people, is expected to join Anthropic’s health and life science team.
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OpenAI executive shuffle includes new role for COO Brad Lightcap to lead ‘special projects’
A handful of OpenAI executives are transitioning into new roles, according to a report fromBloomberg. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the personnel changes to TechCrunch. CEO of AGI development Fidji Simo announced in a memo that Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, has a new job leading “special projects,” which will involve “complex deals and investments across the company.” He will report directly to CEO Sam Altman. Denise Dresser, the former Slack CEO whorecently joinedOpenAI as chief revenue officer, will take over some of Lightcap’s commercial duties. NEW: OpenAI’s Fidji Simo announced exec changes to staff today: she is taking medical leave for several weeks, COO Brad Lightcap is transitioning to a new role, and CMO Kate Rouch is stepping down to focus on her cancer recovery.More here:https://t.co/EfAqZI7jN3pic.twitter.com/KmWoXUG0Iu Simo also had news of her own to share: She will be taking medical leave for the next several weeks to navigate a neuroimmune condition. “I have done everything possible to avoid it, but sadly my body isn’t cooperating,” Simo wrote in the memo obtained by Bloomberg. “The timing is maddening because we have such an exciting roadmap ahead that the team is executing on, and I hate to miss even a minute of it,” she said. While she is on leave, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman will manage product. Kate Rouch, OpenAI’s marketing head, will also be stepping down from her role to focus on cancer recovery, but will return to a “different, more narrowly scoped role when her health allows,” the memo said. The company plans to search for a new CMO. “We have a strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing frontier research, growing our global user base of nearly 1 billion users, and powering enterprise use cases,” OpenAI told TechCrunch in a statement. “We’re well-positioned to keep executing with continuity and momentum.” Update, 4/3/26, 6:25 PM ET with additional context around Dresser’s role.
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People would rather have an Amazon warehouse in their backyard than a data center
As data centers have grown and proliferated, so too has the backlash. A new Harvard/MIT poll found 40% of people supported the building of a data center in their area, with 32% opposed when asked about the building of different industrial facilities in their neighborhoods. One fun tidbit from the survey,per Axios: More people would rather have an e-commerce warehouse. Two-thirds of respondents in the 1,000-person poll conducted in November were worried that a new data center in their region wouldnudge electricity prices higher. Interest in jobs and economic growth helped the case for data centers, according to Axios — though that sentiment may fade as most data center projectsdon’t employ many peopleonce they’re up and running. Another survey, conducted last month andpublished earlier this weekby Quinnipiac University, found much more opposition to data center construction. That poll found 65% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their community. Only 24% of the 1,397 U.S. adults surveyed supported one being built. The new polls suggest that the debate over data centers is far from settled, and continued discontent from such a large swathe of the electorate is likely to continuespilling over into politics. Data centers once worked quietly in the background, more or less. Not anymore.
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AI companies are building huge natural gas plants to power data centers. What could go wrong?
Who doesn’t love a good round of FOMO? From dot-com to Web 2.0, virtual reality to blockchain, the tech industry has had its share of being too afraid to miss out on a trend. The AI bubble is the big daddy of them all. Its first offspring — the rush tolock down power for data centers— is now begetting a mad dash to secure natural gas supplies and equipment. If FOMOs could have babies, then the AI bubble is already having grandkids. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it’s working with Chevron and Engine No. 1 tobuild a natural gas power plantin West Texas that could grow to produce 5 gigawatts of electricity. This week Googleconfirmedthat it’s working with Crusoe to build a 933 MW natural gas power plant in North Texas. And last week, Meta announced that it was adding another seven natural gas power plants to its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, bringing the site to 7.46 GW of capacity —enough to power the entire state of South Dakota. Are we missing anyone? The recent investments are concentrated in the southern U.S., home to some of the largest natural gas deposits in the world. Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there’s enough in one region to supply energy to the entire United States for10 monthsby itself. Every data center operator seems to want a part of it. The scramble for natural gas has led to a shortage of turbines for the power plants, with prices likely to rise 195% by the end of this year relative to 2019 prices,accordingto Wood Mackenzie. The equipment contributes 20% to 30% of the cost of a power plant. Companies won’t be able to place new orders until 2028, and it’s taking six years to get turbines delivered, the consultancy notes. That means tech companies are betting that the AI fever won’t break, that AI will continue to needexponential amounts of power, and that natural gas generation will be necessary for success in the AI era. They may come to regret that third assumption. Though natural gas supplies in the U.S. are plentiful, and because shipping the fuel isn’t cheap, the country remains somewhat insulated from the turmoil in the Middle East. But supplies aren’t unlimited, and recently, growth in production in the big three regions — responsible for three-quarters of all U.S. shale gas production — hasslowed considerably. It’s not clear how insulated tech companies are from price swings since none of them have disclosed specific terms of their agreements. A lot will depend on how firm the price is in those contracts. Even if the contracted prices are as firm as can be, the companies could still face repercussions. Because natural gas generates about 40% of the electricity in the U.S.,accordingto the Energy Information Administration, electricity prices are closely tied to natural gas prices. Tech companies might be able to shield themselves from scrutiny for a bit by moving their gas power plants behind the meter — by skipping the grid and connecting them directly to their data centers. But natural gas isn’t an unlimited resource, and if their ambitions grow too big, even the behind-the-meter operations could drive up power prices for everyone. We’ve all seen how that’s played out. It won’t just be regular households getting upset either. Other industries, including those that remain much more dependent on natural gas and can’t yet turn to renewables, might balk at data centers grabbing so much of the resource. Powering a data center with wind, solar, and batteries is easy. Running a petrochemical plant? Not so much. Then there’s the weather. One cold winter could change the calculus by driving up demand among households. Wellheads might freeze off, crimping supplies dramatically,as happened in Texasin 2021. When gas runs short, suppliers will face a choice: keep the AI data centers running or let people heat their homes? By snapping up natural gas supplies and moving behind-the-meter, tech companies can claim that they’re “bringing their own power” and not straining the electrical grid. But in reality, they’re just shifting their use from one grid to another, the natural gas grid. The AI rush has illustrated just how physically constrained the digital world remains. Does it make sense for them to bet big on a finite resource? Tech companies might regret falling for the FOMO.
View
Microsoft AI Chief Wants to Deliver State-of-the-Art AI Models by 2027: Report
Microsoft's AI chief has reportedly set his sights on developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models by 2027. As per the report, the executive wants the Redmond-based tech giant to become self-sustaining in the AI space and handle all the different layers of the technology, from consumer-end implementation to development of foundational models, in-house. The company's ambition to become a leader in developing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models began after the collapse of the previous deal with OpenAI last year.
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Microsoft Releases New AI Models That Can Generate Images, Audio and Transcribe Text
Microsoft released three specialised artificial intelligence (AI) models on Thursday, focusing on image generation, voice generation, and speech-to-text transcription. The Redmond-based tech giant claims that these models outperform specialised models from rival companies, such as Google, OpenAI, and others. The models, MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2, are also said to focus on fast generation and competitive pricing. These are currently available via the Microsoft Foundry, and they are also being rolled out to various consumer products.
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