This was a week about money and policy more than models, with the biggest AI labs lining up for public markets while governments tightened their grip.
Capital dominated the top of the board. Anthropic is now seen as the AI industry's last big hope for a major IPO this year, according to reporting this week. OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly working on a new $30 billion raise at a $1.25 trillion valuation ahead of its own IPO. Together the two stories show how quickly the frontier labs are moving from private fundraising toward public-market scrutiny.
Regulation and geopolitics ran alongside. Anthropic pitched an AI safety bill that could block a model if 50 or more people could be killed, a notable move for a vendor to propose its own constraints. Separately, the US ordered federal agencies to remove China's DeepSeek AI from their systems, extending the pattern of restricting Chinese models in government use.
Several secondary items round out the picture. OpenAI and Google's Wiz found a wave of ancient PHP vulnerabilities, a reminder that AI-assisted security research is surfacing old bugs at scale. Walmart is welcoming AI shopping agents while Amazon blocks them, a split that will shape how agentic commerce develops. Anthropic donated Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation, Uber put all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work, and Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman claimed its AI outperforms doctors on hard cases as he pursues "medical superintelligence."
To watch next week: whether either IPO story turns into a formal filing.