Anthropic Files for IPO, Microsoft Offers Sixty Thousand Buyouts

Full transcript

Alex: Good morning, and welcome to Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October twenty-eighth, twenty twenty-six. I am Alex.

Jordan: And I am Jordan. Today, the A I boom is showing both sides of its ledger at once. A frontier lab files to go public with eye-popping growth and an eye-watering loss, and one of the biggest companies in tech asks tens of thousands of employees to consider leaving, all to keep funding the A I buildout.

Alex: We start with Anthropic. On Monday, Anthropic publicly filed its S one prospectus, applying to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker A N T.

Jordan: The headline numbers are almost hard to believe. Anthropic reported about sixteen billion three hundred million dollars in revenue for the first half of twenty twenty-six, up from about one billion two hundred million dollars in the same period a year earlier. That is roughly fourteen times the year-ago figure.

Alex: And yet the same filing shows a net loss of eighty billion seven hundred million dollars for that half year. Before you gasp, most of that loss is not cash walking out the door. About seventy-two billion four hundred million dollars of it is a non-cash accounting charge tied to the rising value of convertible notes as Anthropic's valuation climbed.

Jordan: The operating picture underneath is much calmer, and honestly more interesting. The operating loss for the half was six hundred ninety-three million dollars, and the second quarter alone produced an operating profit of about nine hundred seventy-four million dollars.

Alex: Two more things investors will obsess over. First, the filing leaves the share count and price range blank, so no shares can be sold until a later amendment takes effect. Second, the founders keep control through a special share class carrying just over fifty percent of the vote, and the filing discloses compute commitments of roughly two hundred sixty-five billion six hundred million dollars as of the end of June.

Jordan: And the spending does not stop there. The same day the filing landed, four financial firms announced sixty-three billion dollars in financing to lease Broadcom chips and networking equipment to Anthropic.

Alex: Which brings us neatly to Microsoft. Also on Monday, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about sixty thousand employees, more than a quarter of its global workforce of about two hundred twenty-three thousand people.

Jordan: Let us be precise about what this is and is not. This is a voluntary exit offer, not a layoff notice. Eligible employees in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India, at vice president level and below in participating teams, can choose to leave with financial support and career planning help.

Alex: The teams in scope tell the story. Employees working on A I experiences, Copilot, Windows and Devices, Xbox, finance, and human resources are eligible, while security, marketing, and data center groups are largely excluded.

Jordan: The context is the bill. Microsoft has forecast one hundred seventy-five billion dollars in capital spending for calendar year twenty twenty-six, mostly data centers and chips. Microsoft reports quarterly results after markets close today.

Alex: Now to hardware, where Apple had a busy Tuesday. Apple unveiled a new fourteen-inch MacBook Pro and a new twenty-four-inch iMac, both powered by its latest M six chip, which Apple describes as its first chip built on a two-nanometer process.

Jordan: The MacBook Pro starts at one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars, and Apple claims up to thirty percent faster graphics and up to twenty-five percent faster A I performance than its M five predecessor, plus up to twenty-four hours of battery life.

Alex: The iMac starts at one thousand four hundred ninety-nine dollars, skipping the M five generation entirely, and Apple claims up to five times faster on-device A I performance than the M four model it replaces.

Jordan: One timing note. These launches land a day before Apple's Pro and Tell event in Los Angeles, where Bloomberg has reported Apple is expected to show its first touchscreen MacBook Pro.

Alex: Meanwhile, Oracle used its A I World event to make a very different kind of hardware statement. Oracle said it will expand its Nvidia Vera Rubin systems to multi-gigawatt scale, and at the same time offer chips from other suppliers.

Jordan: The headline is Google. Oracle says it will be the first cloud provider outside Google itself to offer Google's T P Us, starting in calendar year twenty twenty-seven. It also plans to offer Cerebras inference in twenty twenty-seven, along with chips from SambaNova.

Alex: Oracle's cloud president was quick to say this is not a pivot away from Nvidia, calling Nvidia's chips the best and most fungible. But the message to enterprise buyers is clear. The cloud wars are becoming chip wars, and Oracle wants to sell you whichever silicon fits the workload. Cerebras shares closed up about ten point one percent on the day.

Jordan: OpenAI, meanwhile, is pushing toward cheaper and more capable agents. OpenAI has made G P T six point one Terra generally available, a faster, lower-cost model built for computer-based tasks, visual reasoning, and software development.

Alex: The detail that matters for builders is price. OpenAI cut the price of agentic computer use by about fifty percent, and Microsoft is integrating Terra into its Foundry platform, while GitHub Copilot is evaluating it for coding.

Jordan: Time for security, and there is a lot moving. The U S Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added two flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on October twenty-seventh. The first is Node Two Shell, a flaw in Google's Brotli compression library that can corrupt process memory and potentially allow remote code execution. Federal civilian agencies have been told to address it by November tenth.

Alex: The second is PolyShell, an unrestricted file upload flaw in Adobe Commerce and Magento. Security researchers say attackers have used it to breach hundreds of online stores, in activity assessed as ongoing since at least July twenty twenty-five. If you run a store on that platform, checking for prior compromise matters as much as the patch itself.

Jordan: Attackers are also already probing a newly patched critical flaw in Oracle E-Business Suite, a SQL injection issue that could allow remote takeover. The first probing attempts were observed on October twenty-seventh, just days after Oracle's October patch update.

Alex: And a quick follow-up to a story we covered on Monday. Tailscale has now released version one point one zero four point four to fix the Tailworm S S H flaws we discussed. The fix changes socket forwarding so it runs as the logged-in user rather than as root. No use in real attacks has been reported, but the self-hosted Headscale server does not yet fix the reported issues.

Jordan: A quick hit before we wrap. Anduril and Qualcomm unveiled BlueChip, a rugged laptop built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips and designed and assembled in the United States, aimed at government, defense, and first responders. More than ninety percent of the prototype's parts cost comes from U S or allied suppliers, and orders open in twenty twenty-seven.

Alex: So what is the takeaway today? The A I boom has entered its infrastructure phase in earnest. Anthropic's filing shows staggering growth funded by staggering commitments, Microsoft is reshaping its workforce to pay for its share, and the chip menu is widening, from Apple's M six to Oracle's multi-vendor cloud.

Jordan: If you take one thing into your day, make it this. The companies winning the A I race are not just building better models. They are financing, staffing, and supplying their way through a buildout whose costs keep growing.

Jordan: That is Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October twenty-eighth. Thanks for listening, and we will be back tomorrow with whatever this industry does next.

Alex: See you then.