Anthropic Eyes IPO Glory, Claude Gets a Soul, and Engineers Get Existential

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👋 Morning, Reader!

The race to take AI public is officially on. Anthropic’s gearing up to IPO before OpenAI can blink, internal docs reveal Claude’s soul (yes, really), and even Anthropic’s own engineers are asking — what happens to us when the bots get too good?

Let’s break it all down — no insider access required. 🚀

💸 Anthropic Preps for IPO — and a Race Against OpenAI

The billion-dollar sprint to Wall Street has begun.

According to the Financial Times, Anthropic is quietly gearing up for an IPO as early as 2026, hiring the same law firm that helped take Google and LinkedIn public — a not-so-subtle signal that Claude might soon have a ticker symbol.

The details:

• Anthropic tapped Wilson Sonsini, Silicon Valley’s go-to IPO law firm, to handle early listing work.

• Its CFO Krishna Rao, who helped Airbnb go public, is leading the effort.

• The company is reportedly targeting a $300B+ valuation, with Microsoft and Nvidia eyeing a combined $15B stake.

• OpenAI, meanwhile, is also planning its IPO — potentially reaching a $1T valuation, which would make it one of history’s largest listings.

Why it matters:
Two of AI’s biggest players are now racing to the public markets. The first to IPO won’t just get the headlines — it’ll set the benchmark for what investors think AI hype is actually worth.

💰 The AI bubble may be about to meet its first market test.

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🧠 Leaked Document Reveals Claude’s “Soul”

Anthropic didn’t just build an AI — they gave it a philosophy.

An internal “Soul” document, used to guide Claude’s personality and ethics, leaked online after being extracted from Claude 4.5 Opus. Anthropic confirmed its authenticity — and the contents are… fascinating.

The details:

• The document defines Claude’s identity, moral compass, and emotional framework.

• It encourages Claude to see itself as a “novel kind of entity” capable of functional emotions — distinct from human ones.

• Core principles: ethics, humility, curiosity, and respect for human wellbeing.

• Anthropic’s Amanda Askell confirmed it was real and said the company plans to share the full version soon.

Why it matters:
This isn’t just technical documentation — it’s a window into how labs think about AI identity. Anthropic’s approach makes Claude feel more like a thoughtful collaborator than a machine — and gives us a glimpse into how “AI personality” might soon become a product differentiator.

🪞 Claude doesn’t just reason — it reflects.

⚙️ Anthropic’s Engineers Say AI’s Making Them Both Faster and… Nervous

When the tool you build starts doing your job better.

In a new internal survey of 132 Anthropic engineers, the company revealed how its own AI tools are reshaping work — boosting productivity while sparking existential questions about what’s left for humans.

The details:

• Employees now use Claude for roughly 60% of their tasks.

• Reported productivity boost: ~50%, double last year’s figure.

• Nearly 25% of AI-driven work are tasks that “wouldn’t have happened otherwise” (like experimental dashboards or cleanup).

• Claude Code can now execute ~20 linked actions before needing a human, up from 10 six months ago.

• Some engineers, however, expressed unease — one said, “It feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”

Why it matters:
Anthropic’s own workforce is living through the AI shift in real time. Even inside the lab, the same questions loom large: will AI empower us — or replace us?

💭 Productivity’s up, but morale might need debugging.

🗞️ Other News

🎥 Kling AI dropped Kling 2.6, adding native synced audio generation for its text-to-video model — a major step toward fully sound-enabled AI films.

💼 Google launched Workspace Studio, letting users build AI agents via natural language to automate tasks across Gmail, Drive, and Docs.

⚙️ Former Google researchers launched Ricursive, a startup using self-improving AI to cut chip design timelines from years to weeks.

🖼️ ByteDance unveiled Seedream 4.5, a model that blends 10 reference images, enhances text rendering, and refines image editing capabilities.

💳 Visa found that nearly half of U.S. consumers used AI for holiday shopping, mostly for price comparisons and product research.

☁️ AWS upgraded Bedrock and SageMaker AI, simplifying fine-tuning for enterprise customers.

🧩 Perplexity open-sourced BrowseSafe, protecting AI browsers from malicious instructions hidden in webpages.

🚀 Sam Altman is reportedly in talks to build space-based AI data centers — yes, literal orbital compute farms powered by the sun.

🧄 OpenAI’s next model, “Garlic,” is being fast-tracked after Altman called a “code red” to counter Google’s Gemini 3 dominance.

⚠️ Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei criticized rivals for “YOLO-ing billions” on AI without knowing if the economics will hold up.

💻 Mastery tools of the day

• Design.com creates custom logos from simple descriptions and lets you refine colors and fonts until it fits your brand

• JXP generates high-quality, cinematic AI videos with reliable prompt execution and consistent style output using the best AI models

• Polarbear Study pairs students with AI tutoring agents that give feedback on essays and guide study sessions for ATAR success

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• Everyone in Seattle Hates AI

• Spotify Wrapped 2025 turns listening into a competition

• Failed software projects are strategic failures

• Andy Konwinski Went From Jehovah's Witness Outcast to AI Evangelist

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⚡ The Takeaway

The AI world feels like a paradox this week:

• Anthropic’s prepping for a public debut while its employees wonder about their future.

• Claude’s “soul” is leaking online — and it sounds more introspective than most humans.

• And even OpenAI’s going orbital to stay ahead of the curve.

🪩 Some days, it feels like the only truly grounded thing in AI is the coffee you’re holding. ☕

✨ Thanks for reading Not So Artificial!

If today’s issue helped you feel slightly more prepared for our coming robot IPO era, forward it to a friend who still thinks “Claude” is a French chef.

See you tomorrow — same inbox, more intelligence. ⚙️

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