AI Intelligence Brief - May 19, 2026
Anthropic raises at a $900B valuation while being excluded from Pentagon classified work. The same week the company is closing one of the largest private rounds in history (reportedly $44B ARR run rate, per The Signal), the Department of Defense awarded 8 classified AI contracts
📊 The Numbers
3 funding events; Anthropic valued at $900B
4 releases across 4 labs
20 primary sources cited
AI Intelligence Brief — May 19, 2026
🧭 The One Story
Anthropic raises at a $900B valuation while being excluded from Pentagon classified work. The same week the company is closing one of the largest private rounds in history (reportedly $44B ARR run rate, per The Signal), the Department of Defense awarded 8 classified AI contracts to OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, SpaceX, Oracle, and Reflection — explicitly omitting Anthropic after the company refused to amend its safety policies for classified workloads (idlen.io). This is the cleanest signal yet that the frontier labs are bifurcating on a policy axis, not just a capability axis. Anthropic is betting that commercial demand (enterprise + asset-manager partnerships, TechCrunch) will more than offset government revenue. Worth watching: whether a competitor with looser safety posture (xAI? Reflection?) captures the defense market that Anthropic walks away from.
🚀 Model & Tool Releases
- GPT-5.5 Instant is now the default in ChatGPT. OpenAI quietly flipped the switch this week. Faster than the prior default with comparable benchmarks. (tldl.io)