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Anthropic on Wednesday announced its first-ever enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.

The generative artificial intelligence startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon, and in the past year, it’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.

The new plan for businesses, dubbed Team, has been in development over the last few quarters and involved beta-testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries such as technology, financial services, legal services and health care, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview, adding that the idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product.

“So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses is people are kind of using Claude at the office already,” Amodei said.

The Team plan offers access to all three of Anthropic’s latest Claude models, with increased usage limits, admin tools and billing management, as well as a longer “context window,” meaning the ability for businesses to have “multi-step conversations” and upload long documents like research papers and legal contracts for processing, according to Anthropic. Other features coming include “citations from reliable sources to verify AI generated claims,” per the release.

The Team offering costs $30 per user per month when billed monthly. It requires a minimum of five users.

Anthropic iPhone app

Anthropic’s first iOS app is free for users across all plans and also available starting Wednesday. It provides syncing with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone.

There are plans to launch an Android app, too. “We actually just hired our first Android engineer, so we are actively working on the Android app,” Amodei told CNBC, adding that the engineer starts next week.

News of the Team plan and iOS app comes more than a month after Anthropic’s debut of Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The new tools are called Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.

The company has said the most capable of the new models, Claude 3 Opus, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate-level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics. This is also the first time Anthropic has offered multimodal support: Users can upload photos, charts, documents and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.

The other models, Sonnet and Haiku, are more compact and less expensive than Opus. The company declined to specify how long it took to train Claude 3 or how much it cost, but it said companies like Airtable and Asana helped A/B test the models. In a release on Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed that other current clients using Claude include Pfizer, Asana, Zoom, Perplexity AI, Bridgewater Associates and more currently.

The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It’s become the buzziest phrase on corporate earnings calls quarter after quarter. Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias, but even so, it’s quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and more.

Around this time last year, Anthropic had completed Series A and B funding rounds, but it had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or major fanfare. Now, it’s one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that directly competes with ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.

Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,00 words, or a sizeable book, about the length range of “Moby Dick” or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Its previous version could only summarize 75,000 words. Users can input large data sets, and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.

In January, OpenAI came under fire regarding its enterprise offering, for quietly walking back a ban on the military use of ChatGPT and its other artificial intelligence tools. Its policies still state that users should not “use our service to harm yourself or others,” including to “develop or use weapons.” Before the change, OpenAI’s policy page specified that the company did not allow the usage of its models for “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including: weapons development [and] military and warfare.”

Anthropic’s stance on the military use of Claude is similar to OpenAI’s updated policy.

“The way that we draw the line there today is we don’t discriminate based on industry or based on business, but we have an acceptable use policy that says what you can and can’t use Claude for,” Amodei told CNBC, adding, “Any business in the world that’s not in a sanctioned country, of course, [and] meets basic business requirements, can use Claude for all kinds of back-office applications and things like that, but we have… very strict guidance around Claude not being used for weapons, basically anything that can cause violence or harm people.”

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Public companies bought more bitcoin than ETFs did for the third quarter in a row

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Public companies bought more bitcoin than ETFs did for the third quarter in a row

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Corporate treasuries have surpassed ETFs in bitcoin buying for a third consecutive quarter as more companies try to benefit from the MicroStrategy playbook in a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment.

Public companies acquired about 131,000 coins in the second quarter, growing their bitcoin balance 18%, according to data provider Bitcoin Treasuries. ETFs showed an 8% increase or about 111,000 BTC in the same period.

“The institutional buyer who is getting exposure to bitcoin through the ETFs are not buying for the same reason as those public companies who are basically trying to accumulate bitcoin to increase shareholder value at the end of the day,” said Nick Marie, head of research at Ecoinometrics. 

Public company bitcoin holdings increased 4% in April, a tumultuous month after the market was rocked by President Donald Trump’s initial tariffs announcement, versus 2% for ETFs, he pointed out.

“They don’t really care if the price is high or low, they care about growing their bitcoin treasury so they look more attractive to the proxy buyers,” Marie added. “It’s not so much driven by the macro trend or the sentiment, it’s for different reasons. So it becomes a different kind of mechanism that can push bitcoin forward.”

Bitcoin ETFs, whose collective U.S. launch in January 2024 was one of the most successful ETF debuts in history, still represent the largest holders of bitcoin by entity with more than 1.4 million coins held today, representing about 6.8% of the fixed supply cap of 21 million. Public companies hold about 855,000 coins, or about 4%.

Regulatory relief

The trend reflects the significant regulatory relief the crypto industry broadly is benefiting from under the Trump administration. In March, Trump signed an executive order for a U.S. bitcoin reserve, sending a strong message that the flagship cryptocurrency, which has long been a source of reputation risk among many investors, is here to stay. The last time ETFs outpaced public companies in bitcoin buying was in the third quarter of 2024, before Trump was re-elected.

In the second quarter, GameStop began buying bitcoin, after its board approved it as a treasury reserve asset in March; health-care company KindlyMD merged with Nakamoto, a bitcoin investment company founded by crypto entrepreneur David Bailey; and investor Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap, kicked off its own bitcoin purchasing program and is going public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

Strategy, recently rebranded from MicroStrategy, is still the main behemoth in the bitcoin treasury game. The company pioneered the strategy that more than 140 public companies globally are now emulating. It holds about 597,000 BTC, and is followed by the bitcoin miner Mara Holdings, which has almost 50,000 coins.

“It’s going to be very hard to catch Strategy’s scale,” said Ben Werkman, chief investment officer at Swan Bitcoin. “They’re going to be the preferred landing spot for institutional capital because of the deep liquidity around their equity, while these smaller equities are going to be really good risk returns for retail investors and smaller institutions that want more of that upside – that initial growth that comes in kicking off the strategy – because a lot of people missed it with MicroStrategy.”

A long-term case?

Marie suggested that 10 years from now, there probably won’t be so many companies committed to the bitcoin treasury strategy. Firstly, he said, the more that enter the category, the more diluted the activity at each firm becomes. Plus, bitcoin may be so normalized by then that proxy buyers are no longer constrained by rules and mandates around direct exposure to bitcoin.

“You can think about this wave as a bunch of companies that are trying to benefit from this arbitrage,” Marie said.

Werkman pointed out that most investors that are attracted to bitcoin treasury companies today already have a thesis around bitcoin. For them, leveraged bitcoin equities are likely how they try to outperform bitcoin itself, the foundational component of their investments.

“What people really like about these companies, and why they like to get into these smaller companies, is because they can do something that the investors holding spot bitcoin can’t do: go and accumulate more bitcoin on your behalf because they have access to the capital markets and can issue securities,” Werkman said.

There’s also likely to be a fair number of companies that convert their existing treasury holdings to bitcoin without pursuing leverage the way Strategy does, Werkman noted.

“They’ve got that ability to generate more and more value behind their shares, backed by bitcoin, plus whatever the operations of the company are generating. It’s a unique value proposition,” he said.

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AeroVironment stock drops 7% on offering plan to pay off debt

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AeroVironment stock drops 7% on offering plan to pay off debt

An image of a Quantix drone made by AeroVironment.

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AeroVironment shares fell 7% Tuesday after the defense contractor said it plans to offer $750 million in common stock and $600 million in convertible senior notes due in 2030 to repay debt.

The drone maker said it would use leftover funding for general purposes such as boosting manufacturing capacity.

AeroVironment shares have soared 85% this year, ballooning its market value to about $13 billion.

Last week, shares of the Arlington, Virginia-based company rallied on strong fourth-quarter results, lifting higher as CNBC’s Jim Cramer called it the “next Palantir of hardware.”

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Last month, the company also closed its $4.1 billion acquisition of space-related defense tech company Blue Halo.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to boost drone production in the U.S. and crack down on unauthorized uses.

The company also has a high short interest level, which may have contributed to some of the recent gains, creating a short squeeze. This phenomenon occurs when a stock price surges, forcing those shorting the stock to purchase shares to cover their positions and prevent losses.

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AeroVironment CEO on European defense spending boost, U.S. defense spending and Trump

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Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default

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Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default

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Internet firm Cloudflare will start blocking artificial intelligence crawlers from accessing content without website owners’ permission or compensation by default, in a move that could significantly impact AI developers’ ability to train their models.

Starting Tuesday, every new web domain that signs up to Cloudflare will be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, effectively giving them the ability to prevent bots from scraping data from their websites.

Cloudflare is what’s called a content delivery network, or CDN. It helps businesses deliver online content and applications faster by caching the data closer to end-users. They play a significant role in making sure people can access web content seamlessly every day.

Roughly 16% of global internet traffic goes directly through Cloudflare’s CDN, the firm estimated in a 2023 report.

“AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, in a statement Tuesday.

“This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” he added.

What are AI crawlers?

AI crawlers are automated bots designed to extract large quantities of data from websites, databases and other sources of information to train large language models from the likes of OpenAI and Google.

Whereas the internet previously rewarded creators by directing users to original websites, according to Cloudflare, today AI crawlers are breaking that model by collecting text, articles and images to generate responses to queries in a way that users don’t need to visit the original source.

This, the company adds, is depriving publishers of vital traffic and, in turn, revenue from online advertising.

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Tuesday’s move builds on a tool Cloudflare launched in September last year that gave publishers the ability to block AI crawlers with a single click. Now, the company is going a step further by making this the default for all websites it provides services for.

OpenAI says it declined to participate when Cloudflare previewed its plan to block AI crawlers by default on the grounds that the content delivery network is adding a middleman to the system.

The Microsoft-backed AI lab stressed its role as a pioneer of using robots.txt, a set of code that prevents automated scraping of web data, and said its crawlers respect publisher preferences.

“AI crawlers are typically seen as more invasive and selective when it comes to the data they consumer. They have been accused of overwhelming websites and significantly impacting user experience,” Matthew Holman, a partner at U.K. law firm Cripps, told CNBC.

“If effective, the development would hinder AI chatbots’ ability to harvest data for training and search purposes,” he added. “This is likely to lead to a short term impact on AI model training and could, over the long term, affect the viability of models.”

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