Tech Brew Ride Home - Anthropic’s Laundry Has Been Aired

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

OpenAI closes a monster round, but does Anthropic continue to steal their thunder? Is that Anthropic code leak from yesterday a bigger deal for them than I thought it was? What can happen when all the self-driving cars shut down at once. And you are finally able to change that embarrassing Gmail account you’ve been living with. OpenAI closes record-breaking $122 billion funding round as anticipation builds for IPO (CNBC) OpenAI raises $3bn from retail investors as part of record funding haul (FT) OpenAI Is Falling Out of Favor With Secondary Buyers (Bloomberg) Anthropic Races to Contain Leak of Code Behind Claude AI Agent (WSJ) Claude Code Leak Reveals Always-On ‘Kairos’ Agent (The Information) Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways (Wired) You can finally replace your embarrassing Gmail username (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Open AI closes a monster round, but does Anthropic continue to steal their thunder? Is that Anthropic coat leak from yesterday a bigger deal for them than I thought it was? What can happen when all the self-driving cars shut down at once? And you are finally able to change that embarrassing Gmail account you've been

living with for years. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. OpenAI has officially closed $122 billion in committed capital led by SoftBank, A16Z, and others, at an $852 billion post-money valuation after previously saying the round would only total $110 billion, so they got $12 billion more. Quoting CNBC, opening eye said Tuesday that it's generating $2 billion in revenue per month. It made $13.1 billion in revenue last year. The company is still burning cash and is not yet profitable, but the company also notes that enterprise sales now account for more than 40% of revenue and enterprise is on track to reach parity with consumer sales by the end of 2026. In February, Open AI revealed $110 billion of commitments from some of its strategic investors that anchored

its funding round. Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in the startup. Invidia invested $30 billion, and soft bank invested also $30 billion. The additional $12 billion in capital that OpenAI raise came from a broader pool of investors. Open AI said it extended participation to investors through bank channels for the first time and raised $3 billion from individual investors, end quote. More on that from the FT, quote, OpenAI has tapped retail investors for the first time through a trio of banks and exchange traded funds managed by Kathy Woods, Ark Invest. The company framed their participation as a way of giving more people the opportunity to share in the upside economics of Open AI and the AI era. The deals were the largest private placements the banks had

completed, said Sarah Fryer, OpenAI's chief financial officer. Retail investors are expected to play an important role in the public listings anticipated over the next 12 months, accounting for as much as 30% of Space X's float and participating in IPOs for OpenAI and Anthropic, said people familiar with the matter. Friar said, broadening access was consistent with the company's mission of ensuring powerful AI was created, quote, for the benefit of humanity. That meant, quote, not just access to the technology, but access to the financial upside, she said on Tuesday. Currently, only wealthy retail investors could access the stock, but Friar said one of her main priorities was to expand that in time, end quote. But did you take note that OpenAI really wants

you to know things are still going gangbusters in terms of growth, especially in sales to the enterprise? You want to know why? Well, Bloomberg is noting something that I've heard whispered about and actually seen myself in recent weeks. Quote, OpenAI shares have fallen out of favor on the secondary market, in some cases, becoming almost impossible to unload as investors pivot quickly to Anthropic, its biggest competitor. Even as Open AI raced in recent months to raise tens of billions of dollars next round capital founder, Ken Smith said his secondary marketplace was seeing a drop in demand for the artificial intelligence giant's shares. About half a dozen institutional investors, including hedge funds and venture capital firms that hold large stakes, approached his company in recent weeks looking to sell about $600 million worth of Open AI shares. Last year, they would have been snatched up within days, but now no one's biting.

We literally couldn't find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares, said Smith, whose firm has handled $2.5 billion worth of transactions. Meanwhile, buyers have indicated they have $2 billion of cash ready to deploy. into Anthropic. Other marketplaces are also seeing record demand for Anthropic, including Augment and Hive. The large gap between OpenAI's $852 billion valuation and Anthropics' $380 billion valuation has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley. It's just better risk reward right now, he said. People are betting that Anthropics valuation will catch up with Open AIs. But if you buy Open AIs shares, it's less clear what the return will be in

near term. Primary fundraising and secondary sales don't always follow the same playbook. In fundraising rounds, existing investors are often offered the chance to buy more shares to maintain their stakes. And instead of saying no, which founders may not like, they can buy in and then sell some of that exposure on the secondary market. Anthropic and OpenAI don't allow investors to trade shares on the secondary market without their permission. Still access to the shares is available on many platforms as investors sell their interests through other mechanisms, such as special-purpose vehicles. Some investors have grown cautious over OpenAI's soaring operating costs. The company has committed to spend far more than Anthropic on infrastructure to support its AI ambitions in the coming

years. And while Open AI touts a strong consumer base, it's moving slowly on capturing more lucrative enterprise clients. Anthropic, meanwhile, has dominated that higher margin market, and as a result, its growth trajectory appears to be stronger than OpenAI's Crawley said. Next round sees bids for OpenAI coming in at a valuation of about $765 billion, a 10% discount from the previous $850 billion. The market is much more in demand for Anthropic, Augments Crawley said. His firm and next round are both seeing huge bids for Anthropic that value it at roughly $600 billion, more than 50% higher than its previous funding round.

Meanwhile, Hive has registered more than $1.6 billion of demand for Anthropic shares also at a premium, said co-founder Prabraton. The demand is one of the highest we've ever seen, Crowley said. It's essentially unlimited interest, end quote. But Anthropic has other problems. Remember the whole Department of Warwick or Fluffle from last month, but also there was this from just yesterday, quoting the journal. Anthropic is racing to contain the fallout after accidentally exposing the underlying instructions it uses to direct Claude Code, the popular artificial intelligence agent app that has won the company an edge with developers and businesses. By Wednesday morning, Anthropic representatives had used a copyright take-down

request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies and adaptations of the raw Claude Code instructions known as source code that developers had shared on a programming platform GitHub. The leak of, quote, some internal source code, didn't expose any customer information. information or data, a spokesman for Anthropics said, nor did it divulge the valuable inner mathematics, sometimes called weights of the company's expensive and powerful AI models. This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We're rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again, the spokesman said. But the leak did reveal commercially sensitive information, including Anthropics' proprietary

techniques, tools, and instructions for cajoling its AI models to work as coding agents. Those techniques and tools are called a harness because they are what allow users to control and direct those models, much like a harness allows a rider to guide a horse. The result is that Anthropics competitors and legions of startups and developers now have a detailed roadmap to clone Claude Cod Codes features without needing to reverse engineer them, something that is already common in the cutthroat AI race. The leak also gives hackers a large amount of new information to probe for bugs they could use to exploit the Claude Code software, or manipulate its Claude AI model into helping with their cyber attacks, creating risks for Anthropic and the developers who use its tools. The leak is a blow for Anthropic because it risks both undermining its reputation for safety and also revealing valuable trade secrets in the pitched battle for enterprise customers.

Anthropic has been writing a wave of growing use because of the viral popularity of Claude Code, helping it close a new round of funding that values the company at $380 billion ahead of a possible public offering this year. Much of the excitement about Claude Code is about how it manages to stitch together the company's AI models and coax them into working well in a way that helps developers get work done, something called tooling, that in AI is as much an art as it is a science. Programmers combing through the source code so far have marveled on social media at some of Anthropics' tricks for getting its clawed AI models to operate as Claude Code. One feature asks the models to go back periodically through tasks and consolidate their memories, a process it calls dreaming. Another appears to instruct cloud code in some cases to go undercover and not reveal that it is an AI when publishing code to platforms like GitHub. Others found tags in the code that appeared pointed at future product releases. The code even included a Tamagachi-style pet called Buddy that users could interact with, end quote.

More on all that from the information. quote, while this is far from a disaster and doesn't involve the proprietary model weights of Anthropics' AI models, competitors now have a window into upcoming features it will launch for Claude code. One of the most significant is Kyros, a collection of updates that will allow Claude to work in the background, sending updates about its progress to a customer's phone, and using a dream mode to automatically consolidate Claude's memories from past sessions. The updates also include a proactive feature that prompts Claude to, quote, take initiative, explore, act, and make progress without waiting for instructions.

Kairos is an ancient Greek word that can mean an opportune moment. These features continue Anthropics' efforts to catch up to OpenClaw, the software for creating AI agents that run in the background on a user's computer and automatically update their memory files. Of course, we've seen multiple examples of how the proactive nature of OpenClaw and similar agents can backfire, so let's hope that Anthropic has found some solutions. Kairos also introduces a chat interface for interacting with Claude Code. Right now, customers use a standard computer terminal window to talk to the product.

Anthropic also intends to release buddies or virtual duck avatars to visualize the coding agents. The leaked source code implies Anthropic hopes to generate, quote, sustained Twitter buzz from the feature. One competitor to Claude code told us that, thanks to the source code leak, they might change their product development plans so they can beat Anthropic to the punch when it comes to launching some of these features. As for the idea that more companies could launch Claude-Code-like products to rival the original, Don't count on it because much of this secret sauce is still tied to the underlying AI models, end quote. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer?

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A suspected Baidu system failure apparently caused a number of robotaxies to stop all across Wuhan in China, trapping passengers inside those vehicles, and reportedly causing traffic disruptions and crashes, quoting Wired. An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxies owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour. In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis. People on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways,

often in the fast lane. A college student in Wuhan tells wired that she was stuck in a Baidu robo-taxie with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. She asked to be identified only by her last name, he, to protect her privacy. The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road, and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelts on and wait for a company representative to come in, quote, five minutes, according to a photo he shared with Wired. He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone.

They kept saying it would be reported to their superior, but they didn't explain what caused the outage or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come, he says. No one ever came. And after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves. The doors weren't locked. On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu's customer support. I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line wouldn't go through, and when I pressed the SOS button, it told me it was unavailable.

So then what exactly is SOS for, wrote one person in a post on Red Note alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her robotacks. Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology, she wrote. Baidu didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was likely caused by a system malfunction, but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured, and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added.

It's unclear how many of Baidu's robotaxies may have been impacted. One dash cam recording posted to Red Note shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxies by breaking or changing lanes at the last minute, end quote. Finally today, Google says all users in the U.S. can now change their Google account username. Users are restricted to one username change every 12 months, but that effectively means, quoting the verge, if you've been stuck with a regrettable Gmail username you picked

years ago, you might finally have a way out. Starting Tuesday, Gmail users in the U.S. can change the portion of their email address before the at gmail.com section as reported by Android Authority. After changing your Gmail username, your old email address will remain connected to your account as an alternate address, so any messages sent to it will continue reaching your inbox. Choose carefully, though, you could only create one new email address every 12 months. You also won't be able to use whatever new username you pick for a separate Google account in the future. The option to change your Gmail address started rolling out last year but is now available to all Google account users in the U.S.

Besides replacing embarrassing email addresses, it could also be useful for updating your email address after a name change. Keep in mind, after changing your Gmail username, you may need to manually update your email address in your login info for any apps and websites you use it to sign into. To try out the feature, open the Gmail app and tap your profile icon. Select manage your Google account to go to your account settings, then tap personal info, and choose the email option in that menu. You should see an arrow button beside your email address, which shows the option to change Google account email if you tap it.

If you already changed your username already, this option might not show up, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin.

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