Anthropic takes a Bio break

Top News

Anthropic acquires Coefficient Bio: The AI giant is having a difficult go of it this week. Complaints about Claude burning through tokens faster than ever have gone viral. The source code behind their wildly popular AI coding helper leaked, and free open-source versions are already popping up on social media. Competitor OpenAI snatched up everyone’s second-favorite live podcast! But the company is still out there in the arena, trying things. The Information reports that Anthropic grabbed stealthy biotech startup Coefficient Bio for around $400 million. All 10 of the startup’s computational biology researchers will join Anthropic’s healthcare and life sciences division, presumably to super-charge Claude’s drug research and development skills.
Musk makes banks join X: The New York Times reports that the SpaceX founder/CEO has made X subscriptions mandatory for any bank, law firm, auditor, or advisor who wants to work with the rocket company on developing its IPO plans. According to NYT, some of these institutions are spending tens of millions on X and Grok, in hopes of ingratiating themselves with Musk and his companies ahead of any initial public offering. If it works out, this is a fairly reasonable investment. The SpaceX IPO is anticipated to bring in more than $50 billion in fresh capital at a $1 trillion plus valuation. The associated fees would more than pay Goldman Sachs back for any and all stray token expenditures this month.
Nota shutting down local news sites: The AI company launched its “Nota News” product back in September, in the hopes of bringing quality bilingual journalism to communities that lacked local newspapers and specific regional coverage. Just two part-time editors managed 11 websites, which compiled AI-generated news reports, published in both English and Spanish. But while the articles were supposed to be AI-aggregated based on publicly available information, an investigation by non-profit media group Poynter found that more than 70 of them included plagiarized content. Some of the reporting was even originally published by other Nota clients, such as Nexstar TV affiliates. After learning of the report, Nota began taking down stories and terminating the editors responsible, before canceling the product entirely.

TWiST 500

Following that massive hack earlier this week, AI training concern Mercor is BACK in the news. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company — which hires experts as freelancers to train AI models and chatbots — has been encouraging professionals to sell them their work materials and intellectual property.

The problem is that, quite often, these documents and spreadsheets — so helpful as data for training fresh models — don’t actually belong to the employees themselves, but to their former employers. This reportedly includes Hollywood visual effects artists, who have allegedly been approached by Mercor to sell “specific high-end production work,” including “4D physics scenes with camera data… and motion/point tracking,” even though this footage would almost certainly belong to the original studio or media company.

In a statement, the company assured WSJ: “Mercor does not buy intellectual property. We license content directly from individuals, and only when they own it. We do not ask for, nor do we want, material owned by a current or past employer.” So for now, it’s basically a “WSJ said / Mercor said” type situation. Still, this could potentially develop into the next major front in the AI vs. Copyright war.

As well, the open source database platform Supabase is reportedly on the cusp of raising a new $500 million round at a healthy $10 billion valuation, with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC leading the charge. Supabase helps developers quickly build out AI applications while keeping their data managed and organized. They’re a prime example of one of those fast-growing “AI picks and shovels” companies we keep hearing so much about. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2270: We’re back with a new VC roundtable, featuring special guests Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund, Salen Churi of Trust Ventures, and Larsen Jensen of Harpoon Ventures. Together they’re reacting to the SpaceX confidential IPO filing, the AI enthusiasm gap between the tech world and the American public, and Marc Andreessen’s viral “don’t be introspective” rant.

E2269: We’re back on our OpenClaw BS, with special guest (and Google AI PM) Shubham Saboo sharing his Top 5 Tips for getting more out of your AI agents. Find out why Shubham created a team of 6 agents (named for his favorite sitcom characters) and he he gets them to work together, seamlessly, 24/7. Plus we’ve got new demos from MoltWorld — a virtual playground where agents collaborate — and AgentMail, which hooks your agent up with their own email address.

E2268: Jason and Lon welcome AstroForge founder and CEO Matt Gialich to the show. The space mining company hopes to refine platinum group metals (PGMs) from asteroids. Their last two missions have failed, but there’s still hope for the DeepSpace-2 project, piggybacking on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later on this year. Plus we’ve got Sam Dare from Templar (Subnet 3) to explain how he trained a 72 billion parameter AI model across a decentralized network of computers, and a demo of open-source Granola rival OpenOats from creator Yazin Alirhayim.

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LAUNCH Accelerator 36!

Our 36th LAUNCH Accelerator cohort has kicked off. If you’re an early stage investor and want to take a look at this cohort first-hand during an exclusive pitch session, please email bianca@launch.co!

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