The AI lab finished May by surpassing OpenAI in market share of business spending for the first time, Ramp just revealed. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation (also besting OpenAI) at the end of May, then waltzed into June by filing confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly on the strength of its first-ever profitable quarter. Then on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its war on the model maker by sending a letter demanding it ban non-Americans, including Anthropic's employees, from accessing its state-of-the-art models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded version of Mythos released to the public three days earlier, called Fable 5. Although the White House invoked an obscure export control directive when ordering the ban, the exact cause remains unclear. The chatter was that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5's guardrails, which were intended to prevent access to Mythos' capabilities. That model is so good at finding security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself marketed it as dangerous and restricted its public release....

We have limited time on this Earth to get a good look at one another's belongings. We need to move on this'fast'because the years we spend alive could well be our only opportunity for snooping. And it's so interesting to see what everyone has! To be a secondhand shopper is to see the riches of the world and be satisfied that they are enough. Don't turn any sand into spanking-new champagne coupes on my account. It is also to indulge the wanton impulse of every person to spy on other people. Archaeologists have been cataloging dump sites since at least the early 19th century, when Danish scientists began pawing through heaps of mollusk shells that had been discarded by their Stone Age ancestors. Indeed, studying what people throw away (eventually, people throw away almost everything) is one of the most efficient ways to learn about them. One needn't be an archaeologist to snoop through others' trash. In the United States, the layman can do this any day of the week, especially Saturday, if the weather is nice. This spring, I decided to see what I could learn about my fellow Americans' lives'and how much I could improve my own life through their discards'for $100....

For more than a decade, customers spent their software budget procuring vertical SaaS products. ACVs, or annual contract values, were modest, customer acquisition cost had to stay below a ceiling, and the resulting go-to-market playbook was product-led growth, SDR-led and content-driven. With AI, many products are no longer SaaS but usage and outcomes based. They are replacing labor, not software. At my investment firm, Defy, we call this new category of companies vertical AI. Vertical AI spend doesn't just come from a customer's software budget. It often comes out of headcount as well, a much larger line item. As a result, ACVs have jumped meaningfully to 6- and 7-figure deals. I've written before about how AI opened up distribution for vertical SaaS, and how the value framing shifted from subscription pricing to labor substitution economics. As ACVs have grown in vertical AI, the go-to-market motion is changing too. We've explored tactics to drive a more efficient sales process. Direct sales has historically only worked at true enterprise scale. The cost of an AE's time wasn't warranted for smaller ACVs. Below a certain deal size, the math didn't work for high-touch sales. That's why SaaS GTM became PLG and SDR-led....

Paperwork filed with Delaware's division of corporations shows that the online used car retailer was given a warrant to buy shares in the startup in 2025 ' around the same time Slate Auto was starting to put together its $650 million Series C funding round. The transaction with Carvana comes as the retailer is looking at ways to expand into new car sales, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company has reportedly purchased a number of Stellantis dealerships across the United States. Asked about new car sales on a recent earnings call, CEO Ernie Garcia III told analysts to 'stay tuned.' Slate Auto is also just weeks away from announcing final pricing and taking the first nonrefundable preorders for its low-cost EV, which is expected to start in the mid-$20,000 range. Slate has said it will deliver its first vehicles by the end of this year. Similar to Tesla and other all-electric car companies like Rivian, Slate says on its website that it 'won't have traditional dealerships.' The company has said it will sell vehicles directly to customers, but it hasn't offered much detail about how it plans to handle the logistics of the car-buying experience. Selling through physical Carvana dealerships could help mitigate some of those logistics headaches while also raising the startup's profile....