Anthropic Now Rents Its Compute From the Company Nobody Saw Coming

CoreWeave signed a multi-year deal with Anthropic on Thursday to provide GPU cloud infrastructure for Claude’s production workloads. That came one day after CoreWeave announced a $21 billion expansion with Meta, bringing its total announced deals to roughly $35 billion. Nine of the ten leading AI model providers now run on CoreWeave’s platform. A company that was mining Ethereum four years ago is now the backbone of the AI industry. The question is not whether the infrastructure layer matters. The question is whether anyone besides CoreWeave and a handful of hyperscalers will survive to provide it.

The Main Story: CoreWeave’s Quiet Monopoly on AI Compute

What happened: CoreWeave and Anthropic signed a multi-year agreement to bring Nvidia GPU capacity online across US data centers starting later this year. CoreWeave declined to disclose the deal’s value, but it follows the $21 billion Meta expansion announced 24 hours earlier. CoreWeave’s stock jumped 11% on the news.

Why it matters: The AI conversation fixates on models: who has the best one, which benchmark moved. But models run on infrastructure, and the infrastructure layer is consolidating fast. CoreWeave now serves nearly every major AI lab. That is a chokepoint. When one company controls the compute that powers Claude, GPT, Llama, and Gemini’s overflow, the model competition everyone watches is downstream of a competition almost nobody is tracking.

The TWO angle: Model companies compete on intelligence. Infrastructure companies compete on reliability and capacity. In a world where every AI lab needs more compute than it can build internally, the companies that own the GPUs have leverage that the companies that build the models do not. CoreWeave went from crypto mining to a $35 billion backlog in four years. That trajectory tells you where the real structural power in AI is accumulating, and it is not in the chat window.

Today’s Movers

Anthropic passed OpenAI in revenue for the first time. Anthropic hit $30 billion in annualized revenue, compared to OpenAI’s roughly $25 billion. The company also doubled its largest enterprise clients and signed a 3.5-gigawatt compute deal with Google and Broadcom. Revenue leadership does not mean profitability. But it means the market has decided Claude is worth paying for at scale.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are sharing intelligence to stop Chinese model theft. The three companies are pooling attack pattern data through the Frontier Model Forum to detect adversarial distillation attempts. Anthropic claims DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax collectively generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude via roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. The collaboration is notable because these companies agree on almost nothing except that their models should not be stolen.

News Corp signed a $150 million deal with Meta to let the social media company use content from the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and other publications to train its AI products. The publishers who once fought AI training are now selling tickets to it. The price tells you how the negotiation went.

Perplexity hit $450 million in annual recurring revenue, a 50% jump in a single month. The company’s growth is driven by AI agents that execute tasks rather than just retrieve information. Search is becoming action, and Perplexity is betting the entire company on that transition.

A critical vulnerability in the open-source notebook tool Marimo was weaponized within nine hours of public disclosure. CVE-2026-39987 allows unauthenticated remote code execution. If you run Marimo, patch now.

One Tool Worth Knowing

Rocket is an Indian startup building AI that generates McKinsey-style consulting reports from a simple prompt. Product requirement documents, competitive analyses, market sizing, all delivered as formatted PDFs. It is not going to replace a senior partner who has spent twenty years building client relationships. But it will replace the analyst who stays up until 3am building the slide deck that partner presents. If you pay for consulting deliverables, watch this space.

Wisdom Speaks

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” — Ecclesiastes 9:11

CoreWeave was a crypto mining company that pivoted to AI cloud when Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Anthropic was a safety-focused lab that most of the industry dismissed as too cautious to compete. Neither was the obvious winner. Both arrived at the top because they built the thing that mattered while everyone else argued about what would matter. Time and chance are real forces. But they favor the people who are already building when the moment arrives.