Anthropic's $30 billion, the Claude Code Meetup and "Something Big is Happening"

Anthropic raised $30 billion last week at a $380 billion valuation, the second-largest AI startup fundraise in history, just behind OpenAI. Revenue has grown ten times every year since 2023, from zero to $100 million, to $1 billion, to $9 to 10 billion, with another few billion added in January alone. Eight of the Fortune 10 are now Claude customers, and Claude Code alone runs at $2.5 billion in annual revenue and accounts for 4 percent of all public GitHub commits worldwide.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat down with Dwarkesh Patel last week for an interview that got a lot of attention. He said the most surprising thing to him is "the lack of public recognition of how close we are to the end of the exponential." He put a number on it, 90 percent confidence that we reach a "country of geniuses in a data center" within ten years. In one to two years, he expects AI to handle end-to-end software engineering, including setting technical direction and understanding the full context of a problem. He said AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade, and that "growth and economic value will come very easily." The hard part, he added, will be distributing the benefits.

And it is not just talk. AI startup founder Matt Shumer put what many in the industry are feeling into words. His LinkedIn post "Something Big Is Happening" hit 30 million views in 24 hours. "I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job," he wrote. But Shumer is not out of work, he is building faster than ever. He describes telling the AI what to build, walking away for four hours, and coming back to find the work done. The AI opens the app itself, clicks through buttons, tests features, iterates on the design, and only comes back when it is satisfied with the result. One person now ships what used to take a team.

We see it ourselves. We are becoming conductors. We are shipping more than ever, but the thing that used to make you you at work is no longer yours to do. The big shift came when Opus 4.5 landed, and Skills turned Claude Code from a coding tool into something that handles pretty much everything. So if the AI does the work, what is left for us? Paul Graham put it well last week, "the big differentiator is what you choose to make." The conductor's real job is taste.

Something big is happening.

Claude Code Meetup at Mesh

300 people signed up, and the waitlist is growing. Our Claude Code meetup at Mesh Oslo is filling up fast and we cannot wait to get everyone in the same room. Live demos, real workflows, good conversations. If you want in, get on the waitlist now.

• Wednesday 25 February, 16:00 to 20:00, Mesh Youngstorget, Oslo
• 16:00 Mingle and pizza
• 16:30 Welcome and introductions
• 16:50 Talks and demos
• 19:00 Live Q&A with an Anthropic engineer
• 19:30 Wrap-up

Organised by local Claude Code enthusiasts in collaboration with Mesh, supported by Anthropic. See you next week.

AI Pulse

A bite-sized curation of this week's most important AI news.

• Google upgraded Gemini 3 Deep Think for science and engineering, scoring 48.4 percent on Humanity's Last Exam and 84.6 percent on ARC-AGI-2.
• OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a real-time coding model running at more than 1,000 tokens per second on Cerebras hardware, built for instant interactive coding.
• Anthropic shipped a 2.5 times faster version of Claude Opus 4.6, now available through Claude Code and the API.
• OpenAI upgraded Deep Research to GPT-5.2 with interactive sessions and mid-run intervention. They are also rumoured to be building a native Skills layer for ChatGPT.
• Anthropic brought Cowork to Windows with full feature parity, including file access, plugins and MCP connectors.
• Claude Code added multi-repo sessions, diff visualisation and slash commands to the web version.
• Microsoft launched the Power Apps MCP Server in public preview, adopting Model Context Protocol for agent-to-app connectivity in its enterprise platform.
• ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, a video generation model that accepts images, video, audio and text simultaneously for precise scene and motion control. Hollywood is not happy about it.
• ElevenLabs launched studio-quality audiobook creation at $200 per book, compared to the traditional $5,000 to $10,000 production cost.
• Anthropic committed to covering 100 percent of electricity price increases consumers face from its data centres, a first from a major AI company.
• Subframe launched Design Canvas, a drag-and-drop visual editor for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex that lets you iterate on UI designs visually instead of re-prompting.
• Claude Code on desktop now supports slash commands that work across both Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
• OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT for users on the Free and Go tiers. No chat data is used for ad targeting.
• Paul Graham wrote that taste is the big differentiator in the AI age. "The important thing is what you choose to make."
• claude-mem launched as an open-source plugin that remembers user settings across Claude Code sessions, cutting repeated token usage.

New: Claude Code Academy

We are launching a series of Claude Code Bootcamps with both online options and in-person sessions at Mesh Oslo. Two tracks to start: Claude Code for Developers and Claude Code for Everyone. More details are coming soon. Sign up for Claude Code Academy.

How to master context in Claude Code

Learn context engineering for Claude Code. This is the difference between sessions that drift and sessions that deliver exactly what you need. The /context command changed how I use Claude Code is episode three in our Mastering Claude Code series. New to Claude Code? Start with episode zero.

Work smarter with AI

2025 was about learning to work with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. 2026 is about something else entirely. Join our AI community. Practical, fast, and built for people who want to get more value from AI. Learn the skills and workflows that help you work smarter, automate tasks and bring ideas to life with AI tools. Join the GritAI community.

Best, Aleksander and Simon