AI agents need a new kind of banking platform

Take the Leap, @Anthropic There's been a lot of debate about whether now is the right moment for Anthropic to complete its IPO. Markets are jittery, the calendar is crowded, the valuation conversation is loud. And most importantly, there are valid, serious concerns about the safety of these technologies.  But I want to make the case for why going public will be a net good for society. Not as a bystander, but as someone who took a company through this exact door fifteen months ago, in a sector that was  contested. When Circle listed on the NYSE, we were operating critical financial infrastructure in a space defined by technical complexity, fast-moving regulation, and deep public skepticism. A lot of people thought the smart move was to stay private, keep our heads down, and let the noise settle. What we found was the reverse. Going public didn't expose us to scrutiny we couldn't handle. It gave us the highest-standard framework in the world for demonstrating that we deserved trust. Audited financials. Quarterly disclosure. Independent board governance. Sarbanes-Oxley controls. Real-time accountability to millions of shareholders and to regulators in every market we serve. The result wasn't fragility. It was confidence. Banks, governments, and enterprise partners who had been cautious about stablecoins could finally look at us through a lens they already understood.  Going public wasn't just good for us and our shareholders.  Public-market discipline turned a novel technology into legible infrastructure. But public-market discipline is only half of that equation. The other half is clear rules of the road. Innovation at infrastructure scale needs both: companies willing to subject themselves to transparency and accountability, and policymakers willing to define durable standards for how that technology can operate. For stablecoins, the GENIUS Act helped provide that regulatory architecture - moving the conversation from whether the technology belonged inside the regulated financial system to the standards under which it could operate there. That distinction matters for AI. An IPO cannot substitute for fit-for-purpose public policy, and regulation cannot substitute for the discipline of public markets. They are complements. One makes companies legible to investors and the public; the other establishes the obligations, protections, and boundaries that allow an emerging technology to earn durable institutional trust. AI is at precisely that moment now, and the stakes are higher. Frontier AI companies are becoming core infrastructure for the global economy. Their model capabilities, safety practices, compute commitments, revenue concentration, and governance structures are matters of genuine public interest. Right now, most of that lives inside private companies, visible to a handful of investors and whoever reads the leaks. An IPO changes that. It brings a frontier lab into the most rigorous disclosure and governance regime humanity has built. It forces clarity about risks, dependencies, and how decisions get made. It gives the public, policymakers, and the market a durable way to hold the company accountable, not through episodic drama, but through the boring, relentless cadence of public reporting. Anthropic has built its identity around safety and transparency. The public markets are the institutional embodiment of those values. Yes, the timing is never perfect. It wasn't for us either. But there's a window right now where the world is asking hard questions about who controls the most powerful technology of our era and how. The best answer isn't a press release. It's an S-1, a listed ticker, and the accountability that comes with them. We should be encouraging these great companies to take the leap to public markets, to subject themselves to public scrutiny and accountability, and we as a society need to do our part to hold them to the highest standards.

Good to see @Apple finally making a foldable. And, of course, they made sure it was best in class before bringing it to market. The iPhone Duo is more than a new product, it marks a well-orchestrated handover, years in the making, from @tim_cook to @johnternus @Apple will have an order backlog for the Duo for many, many quarters to come since iPhone owners have been wanting something different for years to try. I’m excited to see what developers dream up and build for an entirely new iPhone form factor. wired.com/story/apple-debuts…

Introducing Warp Factories: open, flexible infrastructure for building cloud software factories. - Configure your factory as code - Use any model and any harness - Measure quality with evals and benchmarks on your own data - Built-in self-improvement and memory

Nice work!

Agent Community hackathon in SF tomorrow: luma.com/agentcommunityKicko… @edyson wrote about the organization here: estherdyson.substack.com/p/k…

Om.

We’ve raised a $310M Series B to accelerate world models! We believe AI that can understand and simulate the world will be one of the most important technologies of our time. We're excited to partner with Natural Capital, Amazon, GV, AMD, IQT, and others to bring this to life.

Hardware is hard. Opal knows how to deliver magical experiences.

Fort Poor Wording

Grateful.

This week, @cerebras IPO'd in one of the largest technology IPOs in history. We didn't get here alone. There are many people and companies to thank. To our families. It is not easy to be married to someone trying to build a company. The hours are long and so are the years. Their patience knew no bounds. To our team. They bet big chunks of their careers on 5 guys who said we could solve a problem nobody had solved in 75 years. There were 18 months between 2017 and 2019 when we couldn't make a single chip work. We were burning $8M a month. Every six weeks we'd sit with our board and say: not yet. Not yet. Not yet. The team stayed steady. They solved problems nobody else could. When our first wafer worked in August 2019, the technology was solved. But it was still 2019. OpenAI was nascent. There was no Anthropic. AI was still a parlor trick. Then the models got good enough to be useful. In some areas, necessary. And when something becomes useful, speed is everything. Our business exploded. To our early investors - @benchmark, @FoundationCap, @EclipseVentures, @coatuemgmt, @AltimeterCap and many more - whose support never wavered through years of challenges. To TSMC, who agreed to work with us when we were a 40-person team with big ideas. To our earliest customers - Argonne, Sandia, GSK - who bet on us when the product was raw and the roadmap unproven. To Peng at G42, their Chairman, and the leadership of the UAE, who believed in us when many people were afraid. And to many others not mentioned who contributed in ways large and small. We say thank you. Today starts a new chapter for us. But it is still, just the beginning. Photo Credit: @Nasdaq / Vanja Savic

Grateful to be an angel in @cerebras, and much gratitude to the amazing @ericvishria who introduced it to me as “engineering marvel”. Congrats to @andrewdfeldman and team, and thanks for all the hard work!

I’m so happy to share that we’ve closed Wisdom Ventures Fund II and raised $77.7m (against our target of $50m.) WSJ Coverage: lnkd.in/gJ7Ncka4 Press Release: lnkd.in/gtHaqpiM Incredibly grateful to my partners - Cecily Mak, Soren Gordhamer, Zoe Rogers, Vivek Murthy, Ruchika Sikri, Diego Perez, and Jack Kornfield. What an amazing and unexpected constellation of heart, mind and soul.  Privileged to be on this ride together.

Humans ∪ Machines ⊃ Humans △ Machines

You can now run any CLI agent with first-class support in Warp, including Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Gemini CLI. • Vertical tabs • Notifications when they need you • Integrated code review • Remote control from mobile • Rich input editor Download Warp for free today.

For anyone in Boston / Cambridge next week... Go see design.mit.edu/events/genera… and meet Tony, Megan and Sloo... Fantastic tale, beautifully told. Count the innumerable luminaries you see and hear mentioned... Learn the many lessons!

Grep just achieved SOTA on the three major deep research benchmarks, beating Perplexity, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We're a two-person founding team.

BREAKING: Moda by @trymoda is #1 on Slides Arena with an Elo of 1270! Moda is in the same performance band as Claude Opus 4.6 Powerpoint by @AnthropicAI Huge congrats to the team on the launch!

I'm excited to back @anvisha a second time as she builds Moda. In a short time, this team has built an expansive product with a broad customer base from all over the world. It's time for design to be democratized. Congrats on the launch!