Larry Dignan

The Wall Street Journal has a story detailing the tough investor questions Anthropic is seeing ahead of its IPO, which should be this Fall. According to The Journal:

"Company executives have played down the impact of Chinese competition in meetings, telling investors that Anthropic is hyperfocused on offering cutting-edge AI models, the people said. Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other top U.S. AI leaders have publicly said that most users want the most intelligent AI systems available at any given time, suggesting that Chinese systems are less of a threat since their capabilities generally trail those of top AI models by at least a few months."

A business that depends on being a few months (or weeks) ahead of open models is one of two companies driving the AI economy. There are no details on pricing of shares or the financials yet. I can't wait to see the numbers.

• Anthropic: Opposed to open model ban, wants safety testing for all models
• My internal monologue reading Anthropic's big idea posts

Intel said it raised nearly $20 billion in a common stock offering. The company was originally looking for $15 billion. In a statement, Intel said the proceeds would go to general corporate purposes and maintaining a strong balance sheet.

The chipmaker priced the underwritten public offering of 210,526,315 shares of common stock at a public offering price of $95 per share.

OpenAI released GPT-5.6-Cyber, a more cyber permission version of GPT-5.6 Sol, and expanded its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative. Daybreak will now have two tiers. Daybreak Blue, provides access to frontier models, and Daybreak Red, which features purpose-trained cybersecurity models.

Monday topped second quarter estimates, but provided a light third quarter outlook. Monday reported second quarter earnings of 8 cents a share on revenue of $346.6 million, up 22% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the second quarter was $1.48 cents a share, well ahead of estimates.

For the third quarter, Monday projected revenue of $368 million to $370 million, up 16% to 17%. The company said its push upmarket is showing results.

CBRE released its mid-year review of the commercial real estate sector and noted that "preference for 250+ megawatts with 125+ acres of land continues to drive site selectors in new markets."

The issue is that power procurement is extending beyond a decade so data center operators are looking at natural gas, small modular nuclear reactors or co-location at existing energy sites. Electrical equipment supply chain shocks also a pressing concern.

In addition, the average construction cost per megawatt is running $14 million to $16 million.

CBRE's note on risk is worth a look:

"Counterparty and tenant risk remain a focus in 2026 and differentiate landlord strategies. While certain landlords and operators are willing to lease significant capacity to non-investment-grade tenants, others are opting to only serve the world’s largest technology companies. In the event of a slowdown, the bifurcation of financial health of operators will reveal itself."

OpenAI said that its early testing of its upcoming Astra model may have critical cyber capabilities that may delay its launch. Astra wasn't involved in the Hugging Face incident. OpenAI is implementing stricture security control, pausing Astra internal activities and adding universal monitoring for risky actions.

At Black Hat, OpenAI reconstructed the Hugging Face incident. The video is worth a watch for background.

Anthropic said it updated Claude Fable 5's biology safeguards to reduce false positives by about 85%. These fallbacks would result in users being bumped down to a less capable model over safeguards.

AMD said it will acquire Taalas, which specializes in AI inference silicon. AMD said Taalas' technology will complement AMD's full-stack AI platform, including AMD Helios, AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD ROCm software.

OpenAI said it is updating Chat to GPT-5.6 Sol for Plus and Pro users. Free users will get GPT-5.6 Luna as the default model with unlimited text chats.

CEO confidence rebounded slightly to an index score of 52 in the third quarter, up from 47 in the second quarter, according to The Conference Board. In the first quarter, the CEO confidence score was 59.

The Conference Board in collaboration with The Business Council fielded the survey July 13 through July 27.

CEOs were most concerned about cybersecurity, AI and new technology and geopolitics.

NetApp said it will acquire Jetstream Software, a specialist in VMware disaster recovery and mitigation. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Last month, NetApp acquired DataPelago.