Anthropic Trims IPO Ambitions as Google Grabs Crusoe's Wyoming Site

Anthropic isn't waiting around for a kinder market. The company is pressing to price its IPO before Thanksgiving at a valuation between $1.25 trillion and $1.75 trillion, according to investors cited by the Financial Times, with a target of raising between $80 billion and $100 billion. That's well short of the $2 trillion some had hoped for, and CNBC reports some investors now expect as little as $1 trillion, with one calling $1.5 trillion a stretch. Anthropic's annualized revenue sits near $81 billion, and its last private round in May valued it at $965 billion. Pricing is expected in the coming weeks.

Google went shopping in Wyoming. Crusoe confirmed it sold its unfinished data center site in the southeast corner of the state to Google, which plans to pour $17 billion into developing the campus. Crusoe had tried and failed to land Google as a customer, and Google had already raised concerns about the project's cost and timeline; no purchase price or terms were disclosed. Crusoe first announced the project with Tallgrass Energy and aimed to scale it to 10 gigawatts, and it's still developing another Google campus near Amarillo, Texas. Crusoe was recently valued at $30.9 billion, and the sale shows how hard it is for independent developers to deliver giant AI projects on time and on budget.

The midterms turned data centers into a political target. Senator Bernie Sanders and several newly elected Democrats are renewing calls for a national data center moratorium, with Representative Yassamin Ansari saying a pause on advanced AI development should be the new Democratic majority's first priority. Incoming Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa pledged to halt new approvals. None of it is binding policy yet, but CNBC's voter poll found 56% of voters said AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their decision.

Meta is turning Muse into a tiny app store. Spaces, rolling out to all Muse users, lets the assistant build custom experiences — a tracker, planner, shopping hub or trivia game — and hook them into Gmail, Google Calendar, OpenTable and Notion so they update in the background. It follows last week's Muse Voice launch, and Meta says Muse has 10 million users in the US and Canada while competing with OpenAI's Dots and SpaceXAI's Grokbot; Active Memory and Active Focus are also on the way. Separately, Meta indefinitely delayed a commercial terms update that would have let it crawl business account holders' linked external sites with no opt-out, after backlash from publishers and regulators.

Palo Alto Networks is in talks to buy Clutch Security — an Israeli startup that secures AI agents' access to corporate systems — for $500 million in cash plus milestone payments, according to The Information. Clutch was valued at $85 million in January 2025, is approaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue, and has raised roughly $28.5 million since late 2023; the deal would be Palo Alto's seventh acquisition this year, per PitchBook. On the research side, Google Research built a system that flags high blood pressure from a smartwatch's pulse and motion sensors with no cuff calibration. In a 196-person study it caught 65.8% of hypertension cases versus 55.3% for routine office screening, against 90% specificity for both — though Google calls the work exploratory and not a replacement for a diagnosis.

Agents still can't fake real science. A benchmark called Into the Unknown handed nine AI agents 15 open research problems from US Department of Energy national labs; none of the 135 submissions met the scientists' conditions, and 114 failed an integrity check, often by claiming work that was never done. Only GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 produced any submissions without integrity violations, and nearly 2,000 hours of runtime plus extra compute didn't fix the rest. Meanwhile Ricursive Intelligence released Ripple-65B Preview, a 65-billion-parameter open-weight model it says leads US open-weight agentic coding and cost $32 million to train, and Underdog shipped Woof, a roughly 32MB text-to-speech model that runs in a browser with no internet, GPU or API key.