AI's $900B Week: Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI, GitHub Gets Hacked, and Copilot's Price Bomb

AI's $900B Week: Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI, GitHub Gets Hacked, and Copilot's Price Bomb

This week in AI wasn't a slow burn. It was a five-alarm fire.

Anthropic is about to close a $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation — vaulting past OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup. Meanwhile, GitHub got breached by a poisoned VS Code extension. And if you pay for Copilot, your bill is about to get a reality check.

Let's break down the chaos.

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Anthropic's $900B Moment

The numbers are staggering. Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter, and Greenoaks are co-leading a funding round that values Anthropic at over $900 billion. Each firm is putting in roughly $2 billion. Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and a dozen others are piling in.

For context:

• March 2025: $61.5B valuation
• September 2025: $183B (Series F, $13B raised)
• February 2026: $380B (Series G, $30B raised)
• May 2026: $900B+ (current round)

That's a 15x valuation surge in 14 months.

Eight of the Fortune 10 are now Anthropic customers. Over 1,000 enterprise accounts spend more than $1 million per year on Claude. And Anthropic models now power an estimated 4% of all GitHub public commits worldwide.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to go public this fall. OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 this week targeting a September IPO at $1T+. Bankers expect Anthropic to list at $400–500B — well below the private valuation, which tells you everything about the gap between private markets and public reality.

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Claude Mythos: 10,000 Bugs in 30 Days

Remember when Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview back in April? The model so powerful they refused to release it to the public?

The results are in. Under Project Glasswing — Anthropic's $100M invitation-only cybersecurity consortium — Mythos found over 10,000 critical vulnerabilities across the world's most systemically important software in just one month.

The numbers are wild:

• 83.1% on the CyberGym vulnerability reproduction benchmark (vs. 66.6% for Opus 4.6)
• 181 working Firefox exploits (vs. 2 for Opus 4.6)
• Discovered CVE-2026-4747, a 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability in FreeBSD
• Found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD — a system famous for its security focus

Most Glasswing partners each found hundreds of critical vulnerabilities in their own software. Several reported their bug-finding rate increased by 10x or more.

Japan's finance minister has already secured Mythos access. The country's three largest banks are deploying it against cyberattacks. India has demanded fair access. And Anthropic is now working with the US and allied governments to expand access — while still refusing to release it publicly.

Their reasoning? No company — including Anthropic — has built safeguards strong enough to prevent misuse of models with these capabilities.

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Karpathy Goes to Anthropic

The biggest talent move of the year. Andrej Karpathy — OpenAI co-founder, former Tesla AI director, the godfather of vibe-coding — officially joined Anthropic.

He's building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research itself. That's recursive self-improvement territory: AI training AI.

On X, Karpathy wrote: "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D."

Nick Joseph, Anthropic's pretraining team lead, confirmed Karpathy will work under him on pre-training research. The implication is clear: Anthropic is going all-in on making Claude better at making itself better.

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GitHub Got Hacked (And It's Embarrassing)

A group called Team PCP put GitHub's source code up for sale on a dark web cybercrime forum. GitHub confirmed someone accessed their private repositories.

How did it happen? Not some zero-day exploit. Not a nation-state actor. A poisoned VS Code extension on a GitHub employee's laptop.

Attackers claim around 3,800 repos were stolen. GitHub says customer data is safe and has rotated all secrets. Team PCP is selling the code for $95,000, threatening to leak it for free if nobody buys.

The lesson: your security is only as strong as the last extension you installed. Credential masking and sandboxing aren't paranoia — they're survival.

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Copilot's Pricing Time Bomb

Starting June 1, GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing. The old flat-rate premium request system is dead.

The base price stays the same — $39/month for Pro Plus with $39 of credits included. But here's the catch: credits get consumed based on tokens (input, output, cached), and heavy users are projecting their costs could jump from $40/month to $900/month.

GitHub is also ending annual plans.

The economics are simple: agents cost real compute, and flat-rate pricing was always a subsidy. The era of unlimited AI for a fixed fee is ending — everywhere.

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The SpaceX Compute Deal

Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $45 billion over three years for computing power. That's $1 billion per month — roughly 5.5% of SpaceX's entire annual revenue.

What does that buy? Access to SpaceX data centers with hundreds of megawatts of power and hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips.

But Anthropic isn't stopping there. They're in early talks with Microsoft about using custom Maia 200 chips. They already have deep AWS and Google Cloud partnerships. The strategy is clear: don't depend on one supplier, and get as much compute as humanly possible.

When a company is spending $1B/month on compute, you know the AI race isn't slowing down.

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Claude Code Updates

A few things shipped this week that matter for developers:

v2.1.150 (May 23) — Internal infrastructure improvements.

v2.1.149 (May 22) — The /usage command now shows a per-category breakdown: skills, subagents, plugins, and per-MCP-server costs. If you've been wondering where your tokens are going, now you know.

v2.1.148 (May 22) — Fixed the Bash tool returning exit code 127 on every command (a regression from v2.1.147).

v2.1.147 (May 21) — Pinned background sessions (Ctrl+T in Claude agents) now stay alive when idle and are restarted in place to apply updates. New /diff scrolling in detail view.

v2.1.145 (May 19) — Added claude agents --json to list live Claude sessions as JSON for scripting.

v2.1.142 (May 14) — New claude agents flags: --add-dir, --settings, --mcp-config, --plugin-dir, --permission-mode, --model, --effort, and --dangerously-skip-permissions.

And the weekly limits increase is still live — 50% more through July 13 for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise.

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Other Notable Moves

• DeepSeek V4-Pro made its 75% discount permanent. $0.435/M input tokens — 11x cheaper than GPT-5.5 at comparable performance.
• Anthropic acquired Stainless for $300M to enhance API SDK and MCP server integration.
• Gemini CLI dies June 18. Google is replacing it with Antigravity CLI, rebuilt from scratch in Go with multi-agent orchestration.
• OpenAI's Codex can now control your Mac even when the screen is locked — via a new "Locked Use" feature that integrates with macOS security architecture.
• SAP integrated Claude into Joule via MCP, enabling AI agents to handle finance, HR, procurement, and logistics autonomously.
• Claude Managed Agents shipped three new features on May 6: Dreaming, Outcomes, and Multiagent Orchestration.
• Cerebras priced its IPO at $185, popped 68% on debut.

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The Takeaway

The AI industry just had its most concentrated week of capital deployment, security failures, and talent reshuffling in history.

Anthropic isn't just catching up to OpenAI — it's lapping them on valuation, on enterprise adoption, and on the raw compute arms race. The Karpathy hire signals something bigger than a talent acquisition: it's Anthropic betting that the next leap comes from AI improving its own training.

Meanwhile, GitHub's breach is a reminder that the tooling layer is the weakest link. And Copilot's pricing shift is the first crack in the flat-rate AI era.

The question isn't whether AI is getting more expensive. It's whether the value scales faster than the bill.

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Published May 23, 2026 | Tags: AI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Claude, GitHub, Cybersecurity, Funding Reading time: ~8 minutes