A better Claude at the same price.
Anthropic ships Claude Opus 4.8 and raises $65B at a $965B valuation on the same day. The gains are modest and the list price did not move.
Hi folks,
Anthropic shipped a new flagship model and announced a near-trillion-dollar raise on the same day.
The one thing
A better Claude at the same price.
- Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 on 28 May. List price is unchanged from the previous model (Anthropic).
- On the benchmarks Anthropic posted, improvements are modest; for example, the standard coding test (SWE-bench Verified) improved from 87.6% to 88.6%. Same day, Anthropic raised $65B at a $965B valuation, passing OpenAI as the most valuable AI company, on run-rate revenue it says "crossed $47 billion earlier this month" (Anthropic).
What this means in plain terms.
- If you already run anything on Claude, you automatically get the upgrade for the same price.
- The valuation number does not change your workflow. Rather it is further proof that Anthropic is not going anywhere and is establishing itself as a generational company.
In the mix
- The biggest managers are building their own AI arms. Over the past few weeks Goldman and Blackstone backed a $1.5B venture to put AI inside their portfolio companies, and Blackstone and KKR opened talks with Google to do the same. The top of the market is paying to build this in-house. A mid-market fund gets the same capability through a partner, without the scale to justify a captive team. We have heard that funds, particularly family offices and VCs, invest in AI deployment companies to integrate them into their portfolio companies to maximise profit margins. (CNBC, Bloomberg)
From my week
This week I want to share a few examples of how we use AI internally. We run Claude across the whole job, not just for writing code. Two simple examples: every night a short message lands in our Slack summarising the day's AI news, so we start the morning already across it. A second job scans the web overnight and lists any fund that has publicly mentioned AI. When we see an interesting lead, we reply, and an agent files it directly into our CRM.
You can easily see how similar use cases could apply to funds: one agent scans the news for portfolio-related insights and another constantly scans for potential investment opportunities.
The other thread running through every conversation this week was where people sit on their AI journey. The funds we speak to range widely, and that is completely normal. We meet each one where it is rather than push everyone to the same place. It's interesting: when we chat with funds, people tend to anchor to something huge, big-consulting pricing, year-long engagements, or a transformation programme. That is the wrong way in. We always suggest starting small, getting a quick win, and letting momentum carry you.
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