The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly …but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what’s actually being built in AI infrastructure, who’s winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week’s headlines.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
- Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve, and what Uber’s $300M milestone bid says about who’s winning the AV race
- How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agreement with Anthropic
- What Claude Code’s moment at the HumanX conference reveals about where the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry is actually playing out
- Why tokenmaxxing, and Meta’s leaked internal leaderboard, might say more about optics than actual productivity
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