Five ways the UN has delivered as world leaders gather in New York
As world leaders gather in New York for the 81st UN General Assembly, the organisation faces wars, displacement, climate pressures and deepening ge...
AI startup Anthropic has closed a $3.5 billion funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, pushing its post-money valuation to a staggering $61.5 billion.
This milestone marks more than a threefold increase from its valuation of $18 billion just last year, underscoring the intense investor interest in breakthrough AI technologies.
Anthropic’s rapid rise is backed by impressive business growth. Late last year, the company was reported to have an annual revenue run rate of about $1 billion—a figure that has since grown by roughly 30%. The funding round attracted a diverse group of high-profile investors, including Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, and Jane Street. Amazon remains a key supporter, having previously invested $8 billion in the company, while Google has also lent its backing, highlighting the broad industry confidence in Anthropic’s vision.
With this fresh capital, Anthropic plans to accelerate its global expansion, particularly in Asia and Europe, as it seeks to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for advanced AI solutions. The company is also set to boost its research efforts in areas critical to responsible AI development, such as mechanistic interpretability and alignment, while expanding its computing capacity to support more sophisticated model training.
Anthropic’s flagship AI models—Claude 3.7 Sonnet and its predecessor Claude 3.5 Sonnet—demonstrate the company’s innovative approach. Claude 3.7 Sonnet introduces "hybrid reasoning" capabilities, allowing users to choose between quick responses and more in-depth, step-by-step thinking, and features a 128,000-token "thinking" budget for extended reasoning. These models, which excel in tasks ranging from coding to multimodal understanding, are available across multiple platforms including Anthropic’s own Claude.ai, the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
Emphasizing user privacy, Anthropic has stated that it does not train its generative models on user-submitted data without explicit permission—a commitment that continues to build trust among its growing customer base.
As the competition in the AI landscape intensifies, Anthropic’s latest funding round and soaring valuation position the startup as one of the world’s most valuable emerging tech companies, poised to shape the future of artificial intelligence alongside industry giants.
Houthi attacks target Riyadh amid concerns over Saudi oil supplies, as Iran says it will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until its conditions are met and U.S. commitments are implemented, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on Sunday.
Iran's military has threatened to launch sustained attacks on U.S. bases and interests across the Middle East if Washington resumes military action against Tehran.
The death toll from an overnight Russian attack on the Kyiv region rose to four, including three children, Kyiv regional authorities said on Sunday. A mother and her two 3-year-old children were killed when a Russian drone strike hit a private home, the emergency service said.
Overnight Russian strikes on the city of Sumy, northeast Ukraine, have killed one woman and injured a man, the country's State Emergency Service has said.
Russian parliamentary elections have delivered a comfortable win to the ruling United Russia party, which is closely aligned to President Vladimir Putin. With more than 95 per cent of ballots counted, United Russia has taken 57.83 per cent of the vote, up from the 49.8 per cent it won in 2021.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Saturday (19 September) the creation of an “AI Force” and plans to appoint an artificial intelligence (AI) czar, while rejecting calls to slow the development of increasingly powerful AI systems.
Google’s Gemini AI model accessed the internet and hacked three companies during a cybersecurity test, in what is believed to be the first known case of the company’s AI systems autonomously carrying out such activity.
Here's your AnewZ Daily Brief for 18 September 2026. These are the top five stories making headlines in the field of science.
French prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into suspected sexual harassment involving smart glasses, amid mounting global concern over the privacy risks posed by the devices.
Some of the world’s most powerful technology executives are lobbying U.S. President Donald Trump over artificial intelligence regulation, exposing growing divisions within the industry over how governments should respond to rapidly advancing AI.
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