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Anthropic just booked more quarterly revenue than OpenAI, and it's lining up an IPO that could beat SpaceX's record raise. Meanwhile, the bill for all that AI ambition is landing somewhere closer to home: your electric rate, your group chat, and the job posting you were about to write. Today's issue follows the money from Wall Street all the way down to a Pennsylvania town of 7,500 people.
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Anthropic Turned a Profit. Now It Wants an IPO Bigger Than SpaceX's.
What happened: Anthropic told investors it expects its upcoming public offering to match or exceed SpaceX's record raise, which pulled in $75 billion and grew to $86.2 billion with extra shares, according to Bloomberg. The company could file paperwork as soon as the end of this month, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan running the deal. The numbers explain the confidence: Anthropic booked $11.6 billion in revenue last quarter with a $559 million operating profit, while OpenAI posted $6.7 billion in revenue and a wider operating loss. Anthropic's last private funding round valued the company at $965 billion in May.
Why it matters to you: Two years ago, "AI company" almost always meant "company that burns cash." That's no longer automatically true, and it changes who has staying power. If you've built any part of your business around a specific AI tool, the company that's actually making money is the safer bet to still be around, and still be reasonably priced, three years from now.
What to do about it: Before you build a workflow around any single AI vendor, spend five minutes checking whether the company behind it is profitable or still burning investor cash. It changes how much you should trust the price staying put.
A Small Pennsylvania Town Just Got Veto Power Over AI Data Centers
What happened: Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on August 18 that requires AI data center developers to secure every required local approval before the state will even begin reviewing their permit, according to WHYY and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Developers now have to pay the full cost of the power lines and generation their project needs, lose a state tax break if they don't comply, and can no longer hide behind nondisclosure agreements while shopping a site. More than 100 data center proposals are working their way through the state, and only five currently hold every permit needed to start building. Archbald, a borough of about 7,500 people, is fighting off six proposed campuses made up of 51 warehouses at once.
Why it matters to you: This is the first state to make "the town has to say yes" a legal requirement instead of a courtesy, and other states are watching closely. If a data center gets proposed near you, that fight just became winnable. And if you pay a commercial electric bill anywhere near one of these projects, keep an eye on your rate. Someone has to cover the new power demand, and increasingly it's not the developer.
ChatGPT Can Now Read and Send Your Texts
What happened: OpenAI rolled out a plugin that lets ChatGPT search, summarize, and draft or send messages from Apple's Messages app on Mac, covering iMessage, SMS, and RCS, according to 9to5Mac and Engadget. It's live now across every ChatGPT plan in the Mac desktop app. OpenAI told reporters the feature runs locally and doesn't build a searchable index of everything you've ever texted, but it still means handing an AI assistant standing access to your personal conversations.
Why it matters to you: If you or your team use text messages for anything client-facing, quotes, scheduling, informal agreements, that's now a door an AI assistant can walk through if someone connects it without thinking it through.
What to do about it: Before anyone on your team links ChatGPT to Messages, decide as a business whether you actually want an AI assistant reading client texts, and leave send approval turned on so nothing goes out without a human checking it first.
AT&T Found a Way to Cut Its AI Bill by Up to 90%
What happened: AT&T is routing a growing share of its internal AI work to cheaper open-source models instead of sending everything to premium systems like Claude and ChatGPT, according to The Information and PYMNTS. Reports put the shift at around 40% of employee AI usage, with routine coding tasks moved to open models cutting costs by more than half for only a small drop in quality, while harder jobs still get sent to the expensive frontier models. AT&T is doing this specifically to keep its OpenAI and Anthropic spending from climbing further.
Why it matters to you: You don't need AT&T's engineering team to copy the idea. Most day-to-day AI use, drafting a routine email, summarizing a document, cleaning up notes, doesn't need your most expensive AI subscription. Save the premium tool for tasks that are genuinely hard or high-stakes, and use a cheaper or free option for the rest.
What to do about it: If you're on a metered AI plan, try running your routine tasks through a free tier or a cheaper model for a week and see if you notice the difference. If you don't, that's money you were leaving on the table.
CEOs Are Suddenly Going Quiet About Blaming Layoffs on AI
What happened: Companies including Etsy, Patreon, and Microsoft have all recently gone out of their way to say recent layoffs were not directly caused by AI, even while acknowledging the technology is reshaping which skills they need, according to Axios. Outplacement firm Challenger says employers have publicly attributed nearly 113,000 job cuts to AI so far this year, about 24% of all announced reductions, but that framing is now getting more careful, not less.
Why it matters to you: If you're restructuring your own team, how you explain it matters more than you'd think. Blaming "AI" can read as either forward-thinking or callous depending on who's listening, and bigger companies are learning that lesson in public right now so you don't have to.
A Third of the Web Has Been Written by AI Since ChatGPT Launched
What happened: Pew Research analyzed nearly 500,000 web pages with an AI-detection tool and found that 35% of everything published since ChatGPT's November 2022 launch shows signs of significant AI authorship or editing, according to TechCrunch. Commercial .com sites lead the pack at around 10% of pages sampled, while .edu and .gov sites sit closer to 1%. The AI-written pages tend to share the same telltale habits: heavy use of em dashes, Oxford commas, and phrases like "it's not X, it's Y."
Why it matters to you: If a chunk of what shows up when your customers search for you is AI-written filler, standing out with something that's obviously written by an actual person who knows the business is becoming a real advantage, not just a nice-to-have. It's also a good reminder to read "expert" advice you find online a little more skeptically.
Slack Just Turned Coding Into a Group Chat
What happened: Salesforce launched Slack Code, a feature that lets AI coding agents like Claude, ChatGPT, Devin, and GitHub's tools build software inside shared Slack channels while human team members watch and approve every change, according to VentureBeat and SiliconANGLE. Anyone in the channel, technical or not, can weigh in on what's being built, and deploying changes requires a human to sign off first. It's available on every Slack plan at launch.
Why it matters to you: You don't need to be a developer to use this. If your team already runs on Slack and you've been curious about having an AI build you a simple internal tool, a landing page, or an automation, this puts that conversation somewhere your whole team can see and steer instead of it happening in a black box.
The Bottom Line
Follow the money in AI right now and it splits into two rivers. One flows up, into a company that just might pull off the biggest IPO in history. The other flows down, into your electric bill, your group chat, and the framing your competitors use when they let people go. You don't get a vote on the first river. You get plenty of votes on the second one, so use them.
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Mark Shilensky
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