OpenAI is a drama company. Will that hurt its IPO chances? And Anthropic tries to get ahead of the cyber risks its own models are accelerating

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…lots and lots of OpenAI news…Anthropic secures more compute from Google as its current capacity is strained…Google DeepMind releases its latest open weight Gemma model…Anthropic says AI has emotions (sort of)…and Google DeepMind shows AlphaEvolve can help solve real world enterprise problems.

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OpenAI dominated the news over the past few days. In fact, so much has happened related to the company that it’s hard to know where to start. It’s also hard to discern which OpenAI development will prove, with the benefit of hindsight, to be the most significant. I’ll cover the OpenAI news in a sec.

But first, I want to highlight three pieces of news from Anthropic because I think, in the long-run, they might matter more than any of the OpenAI stuff.

Anthropic unveiled today what it is calling Project Glasswing, a coalition of major technology companies and cybersecurity players, that is dedicated to trying to secure the world’s most critical software before AI-enabled hackers wreak absolute havoc around the globe. The coalition partners have been given access to a special cybersecurity-focused preview version of Anthropic’s yet-to-be-released Mythos model, in the hopes that Mythos can discover zero day attacks and other vulnerabilities and that they can be patched, before a production version of Mythos and similar AI models with superpowerful cyber capabilities from OpenAI and Google, debut. My colleague Beatrice Nolan, who broke the news about Mythos’ existence a few weeks ago, has the news on Project Glasswing here.

Project Glasswing is further evidence of the growing concern within the AI labs, cybersecurity companies, and among government officials, that we are entering an era of unprecedented and potentially catastrophic cybersecurity threats due to the increased coding capabilities of recent AI models. The New York Times has more on that evolving risk in this story here.

Anthropic also announced that it would no longer allow people to use their monthly Claude subscriptions to power third-party agentic harnesses, such as the virally-popular OpenClaw and its prodigy. Now, in order to use Claude to power these tools, people will need to subscribe to Anthropic’s API and pay per-token usage fees, as opposed to using all-you-can-consume monthly subscriptions. Anthropic has in recent weeks shown that it does not have the computing capacity to handle the skyrocketing adoption rates it has experienced, especially with agentic tools like OpenClaw (Anthropic also imposed strict usage caps during peak hours that have annoyed many users.) In part to address this compute crunch, Anthropic announced an expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom to access data centers running Google’s TPU chips coming online by 2027. (More on that below.) But, in the meantime, Anthropic’s decision may have a big impact on how AI agents get used, perhaps slowing adoption, or perhaps driving many more people to start using open-source models as the brains behind these agents.

Anthropic also said it has achieved an annual revenue “run rate” of $30 billion. The figure implies a 58% revenue surge in March alone. The number is also higher than the $25 billion annual revenue run rate OpenAI reported in February. (Although Anthropic and OpenAI don’t use the same method to calculate their run rates, so it is a bit of an apples to orange comparison.) But it clearly shows that Anthropic is on a tear and that matters, especially in light of the other news coming out of OpenAI.

Ok, so without further ado , the OpenAI stuff:

OpenAI likes ‘constructive’ media coverage, so it’s buying some

The OpenAI development that probably matters least, but which nonetheless had everyone in the media talking, is OpenAI’s decision to buy the year-old vodcaster TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) for an amount that sources told the Financial Times was in “the low hundreds of millions.” OpenAI, in announcing the deal, said that it’s “become clear the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us,” and that the company needed “to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center.”

The word “constructive” here is doing a lot of work. While OpenAI insisted that TBPN would retain its editorial independence, many are skeptical, noting that, among other things, the video broadcast operation will report to Chris Lehane, the bare knuckled-political operator who serves as OpenAI’s policy communications chief. This seems like just the latest and perhaps most extreme case of a tech company trying to control the narrative by “going direct”—using social media and in-house produced content to reach audiences and bypass traditional journalistic outlets that are often more critical and tend to ask the kinds of questions that executives don’t want to answer.

Altman’s honesty questioned

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