Google is bringing ads in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, betting that generative AI can open up new revenue opportunities even as growth in its core search advertising business slows. The announcement came Wednesday during Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call ,as the company reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year. But Search advertising growth continued to decelerate, and Alphabet shares fell 8% following the results. Google Search revenue grew 12% year over year in the third quarter, down from 17% growth in the second quarter and 19% in the first quarter. The slowdown puts added pressure on Google to turn its expanding AI features into a meaningful source of advertising revenue. 'We are now scaling high-quality ads within AI overviews in AI mode to more users and queries,' Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, said during the call with investors. 'This includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time. Today, we're announcing the expansion of ads in AI mode into international markets alongside multi-turn ads and AI mode in the U.S.'...

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Yet, according to Anthropic's S-1, none of those VC firms owns 5%, the threshold for being included in the principal stockholders' table. That's highly unusual. In a typical tech IPO, lead venture investors hold double-digit-percentage stakes in the startups they backed. The reason is Anthropic's size. At its $965 billion private valuation, a 1% stake is worth nearly $10 billion, so, for example, Menlo's roughly $14 billion position is only about 1.5% of the company, according to recently reported Bloomberg figures. While the venture firms may lack sizable percentage stakes, Anthropic sold large stakes to strategic partners, companies that are also its business partners. Indeed, Amazon is likely the single largest financial beneficiary of the IPO. Amazon first backed Anthropic in 2023 with a commitment to invest up to $4 billion in the AI company. Since then, Amazon has poured billions more into Anthropic. Instead of taking stock up front, Amazon structured much of its investment as convertible notes, a type of debt that converts into shares upon an IPO or sale....

The financials Anthropic shared with investors this week suggest that its AI coding tool, Claude Code, is every bit the business success the frontier lab wanted. The company recorded an operating profit in the second quarter, and 900% net revenue retention ' that is, spending from the same customers in Q3 2025 grew nine times in Q3 2026. Anthropic has focused on getting enterprise users to stick around and Wednesday announced a new suite of reporting tools designed to give those customers a more granular understanding of the value they get from their token spend. Using internal analytics and employee surveys, managers can view a team's work over a given date range, what the team produced, how much it cost, and where its workflows broke down. Anthropic says it won't use this data for model training by default. The reports will also offer recommendations on how to improve the results. This is a clear attempt to demonstrate the return on investment of Anthropic's tools and to show customers how to improve it ' a major concern among large customers. Anthropic is also creating pooled group budgets to allow teams to better manage token spending....