Anthropic, the European unicorn ripper?
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The phrase of the week is clearly a variation of “the new Claude Mythos AI model is so good that it’s too dangerous to release to the public.” Once again, Anthropic dominated the headlines and captured all the air in the room with the announcement of a new model that is supposedly much smarter than existing models.
It’s definitely concerning when it comes to cybersecurity as all the AI labs tend to catch up to the latest state-of-the-art models pretty quickly these days. How long until an open-weight model has the capabilities of finding “vulnerabilities [that] are often subtle or difficult to detect,” sometimes even “ten or twenty years old” just like Mythos? Could a bad actor use it to break down the financial system altogether? Fun times ahead…
But let’s pivot to Anthropic’s other big launch this week: Claude Managed Agents. The easiest way to think about it is as a Platform-as-a-Service for AI agents. Just like Heroku, Fly.io, Render, Upsun, Clever Cloud, and Qovery abstracted cloud infrastructure, Anthropic abstracts the messy parts of running autonomous agents.
You define your agent’s role and tools, hit deploy and that’s it. Anthropic manages sandboxing, credentials, monitoring and all the other tedious things required with long-running AI agents — no OpenClaw required.
I can imagine shivers running down the spines of many startup founders who have been working on the ability to build and deploy AI agents at scale. LangChain, which recently reached a $1.25 billion valuation, provides a platform (LangSmith) that does the same thing as Claude Managed Agents.
Which raises the question: if Anthropic continues down this path, could it eventually compete with platforms like n8n, which allow visual AI agent building? Leave our European unicorns alone, please.
TikTok is spending €1 billion on a new data center in Finland. It turns out TikTok plans to spend as much as €12 billion on data centers across Europe, and I only learned about it this week.
ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, likely wants to avoid repeating what happened in the U.S. Earlier this year, the U.S. Government forced the Chinese parent company to form a joint venture and sell 80% of TikTok to Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX and others, valuing the company at just $14 billion (it’s extremely low for an app with roughly 200 million users generating billions in ad revenue in the U.S. alone).
In other construction news, Revolut seems to have a thing for Paris. Per Bloomberg, the fintech giant just signed a lease for an entire six-floor building on rue Réaumur. It plans to hire up to 400 employees.
But the reality is that Revolut relies more and more on India to staff its team. The company plans to have 5,500 employees in the country by the end of the year. That’s 40% of its global workforce with people working on customer support, product development and finance.
Revolut is often seen as the fintech company at the bleeding edge of product innovation. It’s interesting to see that it is still hiring aggressively across multiple markets even though many companies are slowing down hiring due to AI-driven productivity gains.
This is further proof that Jack Dorsey used AI as an excuse to lay off a large portion of Block’s workforce. The reality? Block’s performance has been underwhelming lately.
The New York Times published a riveting story on the creator of Bitcoin. It’s been 17 years that various reporters have tried to find out who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure who wrote the original Bitcoin research paper.
And it turns out Satoshi could be British. The article points to Adam Back, a low-profile British cryptographer who contributed to the Cypherpunk mailing list in the 1990s and 2000s. It was a small circle of privacy-obsessed, sometimes libertarian-leaning technologists.
And yet, despite the mounting evidence, Adam Back denies it. Worth noting: Satoshi is still believed to hold around 1 million bitcoins worth around €66 billion today. Not exactly an incentive to step into the spotlight, especially when you care so much about privacy.
The reason why it’s always important to have a glance at the byline when you read a story: the article is co-written by John Carreyrou, the reporter who exposed Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and wrote Bad Blood. It’s a pretty good track record in investigative journalism.
This week, Greece announced plans to ban social networks for teens under the age of 15. France is moving in a similar direction, with Emmanuel Macron and former digital minister Clara Chappaz pushing for comparable measures.
But what will it look like in reality? If you live in the UK and use an iPhone, you may have been surprised by iOS 26.4’s new rules. Apple asked users to scan their passport or enter credit card numbers to confirm that they are 18+ to lift restrictions on adult content.
These are just the first restrictions on online content and they are specifically targeted at children. However, it raises a broader question: what if a government wants to restrict access to essential services for certain groups, such as foreigners? Scan your ID or move along.
Thank you for reading and feel free to reply to this email if you have comments.
Have a good day ☀️
Romain