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Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.

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Anthropic on Monday announced Claude Opus 4.5, its latest artificial intelligence model that the startup says excels at coding, using computers and assisting users with complex enterprise tasks. 

Claude Opus 4.5 marks Anthropic’s third major model launch in two months, and it serves as the latest example of the nonstop pace of development within the AI industry. The startup unveiled its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model in late September, followed by its Claude Haiku 4.5 model in October. 

“The amount that we’re releasing to the market and the feedback loops that we’re generating from it just make me so unbelievably excited,” Scott White, product leader for Claude.ai at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview.

Anthropic is an AI startup that was founded by a group of former OpenAI researchers and executives in 2021. Microsoft and Nvidia announced multi-billion-dollar investments in Anthropic last week, boosting the AI lab’s valuation to about $350 billion. 

The company is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude. It assigns new numbers to the models as they advance across generations, but the largest model in the family is typically called Opus, the midsized model is called Sonnet and the smallest model is Haiku. 

The last Opus model, which Anthropic released in August, was called Claude Opus 4.1. 

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The ideal users for Claude Opus 4.5 will be professional software developers and knowledge workers like financial analysts, consultants and accountants, White said. People who are “excited to push their own creativity, build new things, expand their professional purview” will also find the model useful, White added. 

The new model is “meaningfully better” at everyday tasks like working with spreadsheets and slides and conducting deep research, Anthropic said in a blog.

Claude Opus 4.5 is also state-of-the-art for agentic coding, outperforming rival models like Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, which was announced last week, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, according to SWE-bench Verified, a test set that measures an AI system’s software coding abilities. 

Anthropic said it tested Claude Opus 4.5 on a difficult take-home exam that it gives to prospective performance engineers, and the model scored higher than any human candidate ever had. 

Claude Opus 4.5 will be available everywhere, and it will be the default model for Anthropic’s Pro, Max and Enterprise offerings.

In addition to the model launch, Anthropic announced several other product and feature updates on Monday. 

Claude for Chrome, the startup’s extension that allows Claude to take action across browser tabs, is expanding to all Max users, the company said. Claude for Excel, which can understand and edit spreadsheets, is now generally available to all Max, Team and Enterprise users.

Anthropic is also bringing Claude Code to its desktop app and adding new capabilities to its developer platform. 

WATCH: Anthropic valued in range of $350B following investment deal with Microsoft, Nvidia

Anthropic valued in range of $350B following investment deal with Microsoft, Nvidia

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a ‘generation ahead’ of Google’s AI chips

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a 'generation ahead' of Google's AI chips

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025.

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Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.

“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”

The post came after Nvidia saw its shares fall 3% on Tuesday after a report that Meta, one of its key customers, could strike a deal with Google to use its tensor processing units for its data centers.

In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.

“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.

Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for artificial intelligence chips with its graphics processors, analysts say, but Google’s in-house chips have gotten increased attention in recent weeks as a viable alternative to the Blackwell chips, which are expensive but powerful.

Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.

Earlier this month, Google released Gemini 3, a well-reviewed state-of-the-art AI model that was trained on the company’s TPUs, not Nvidia GPUs.

“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed rising TPU competition on an earnings call earlier this month, noting that Google was a customer for his company’s GPU chips and that Gemini can run on Nvidia’s technology.

He also mentioned that he was in touch with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Huang said that Hassabis texted him to say that the tech industry theory that using more chips and data will create more powerful AI models — often called “scaling laws” by AI developers — is “intact.” Nvidia says that scaling laws will lead to even more demand for the company’s chips and systems.

WATCH: Meta reportedly in talks to use Google’s AI chips

Meta reportedly in talks to use Google's AI chips

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What Dick’s Sporting Goods’ earnings report tells us about Nike’s turnaround

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What Dick's Sporting Goods' earnings report tells us about Nike's turnaround

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Musk’s xAI to close $15 billion funding round in December: sources

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Musk's xAI to close  billion funding round in December: sources

Elon Musk attends the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 19, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is expected to close a $15 billion round at a $230 billion pre-money valuation next month, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The deadline for allocation is the end of day on Tuesday, with the round expected to close on Dec. 19, the sources said.

This confirms earlier CNBC reporting that the company was raising $15 billion. The Tesla CEO later called the report on the round “False” in a post on the social media platform X.

At the time, sources told CNBC that xAI would use a large portion of the money for funding graphics processing units responsible for powering large language models.

CNBC had previously reported in September that the startup was looking to raise $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation.

The funding round is yet another sign of the insatiable demand for AI tools. Companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have raised billions and reached sky-high valuations as investors pour more money into companies building foundational AI models.

Sam Altman‘s OpenAI finalized a $6.6 billion-share sale at a $500 billion valuation last month, and Reuters recently reported that the ChatGPT maker was eying a $1 trillion initial public offering.

Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round in September that roughly tripled its valuation from March.

Musk’s xAI is responsible for creating the Grok chatbot that has come under fire for disseminating hate speech, including antisemitic content. The company recently debuted Grokipedia, an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia.

In March, Musk announced the merger of xAI with X in a deal valuing the social media platform at $33 billion.

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