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Anthropic’s latest feud with the Trump admin may actually help it, sales data suggests

Published

3 weeks ago

June 17, 2026

Preport

Anthropic is having a month.

The AI lab finished May by surpassing OpenAI in market share of business spending for the first time, Ramp just revealed. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation (also besting OpenAI) at the end of May, then waltzed into June by filing confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly on the strength of its first-ever profitable quarter.

Then on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its war on the model maker by sending a letter demanding it ban non-Americans, including Anthropic’s employees, from accessing its state-of-the-art models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded version of Mythos released to the public three days earlier, called Fable 5.

This essentially forced Anthropic to pull its latest all-powerful model from the market altogether.

Although the White House invoked an obscure export control directive when ordering the ban, the exact cause remains unclear. The chatter was that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were intended to prevent access to Mythos’ capabilities. That model is so good at finding security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself marketed it as dangerous and restricted its public release.

This new drama comes after Anthropic famously refused to allow the government to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. As a result, in March, the Trump administration declared the company a supply-chain risk.

That didn’t deter Anthropic’s sales to businesses. Quite the opposite, Ramp’s data shows. Ironically, this latest feud with the Trump administration, which also appears to validate the hubbub over Mythos’ mythological power, may help rather than hurt Anthropic, according to Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian. Kharazian is the person who compiled the business-spending AI data.

“If anything, it’ll probably boost them,” Kharazian told TechCrunch. “Anthropic’s best month on record, as far as business adoption, was the month that the Department of Defense labeled them a supply-chain risk. There’s a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use.”

Ramp’s data isn’t granular enough for us to see how much of a financial hit the company will take by pulling Mythos and Fable 5 off the market.

Still the data, from more than 70,000 businesses that use its platform, shows that customers heavily use Anthropic’s Opus models and that business use has been growing.

For instance, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month. (OpenAI still greatly leads Anthropic in overall consumer usage, according to new data from Sensor Tower.)

Beyond subscriptions, the vast majority of what companies spend money on is API calls to the model, which cover token use for activities like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.

Ramp can’t always see from the spending data which models most businesses are using. When it can see the model details — in about one-third of transactions — businesses are mostly spending on various flavors of Claude Opus, particularly the later versions. Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and is still openly available.

In fact, in late May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8.

Mythos had not been on the market for that long, having been released to limited users as of April. And Fable 5 was shut down after a few days.

While we can’t predict how this latest drama with the White House will impact Anthropic’s ability to go public as it hoped to (public-market investors tend to be wary of companies embroiled in controversies with the government), the numbers indicate that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with businesses than ever before.

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Related Topics:admin Anthropics data feud latest sales suggests Trump

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NIIRA 2025: NAICOM Engages Police to Curb Fake Insurance Certificates on Roads

Published

6 minutes ago

July 8, 2026

Preport

BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—The National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) has organized a specialized one-day training program for officers of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), FCT Command, aimed at strengthening the enforcement of Motor Third-Party Insurance and other compulsory policies across Nigerian roads.

The initiative, held in Abuja, focused on equipping law enforcement officers with advanced skills to fast-track insurance policy verification and eliminate the proliferation of fake insurance certificates.

The training was themed “Building a Culture of Insurance Compliance: Police as Catalysts for Protecting Lives, Property and Enhancing Public Safety.” It was designed to empower officers to promote statutory compliance, verify the authenticity of insurance covers during routine checks, and help deepen public appreciation of insurance benefits.

Speaking on behalf of the Commissioner for Insurance/CEO of NAICOM, Mr. Olusegun Ayo Omosehin, Mr. Ekerete Ola Gam-Ikon underscored the strategic importance of the collaboration between the regulatory body and the NPF.

He noted that effective public safety extends beyond traditional crime prevention to shielding citizens from the severe financial consequences of unforeseen disasters.

“Insurance serves as a vital social and economic safety net, providing protection for individuals, families, businesses, and public institutions against losses arising from accidents, disasters, and other risks,” Mr. Gam-Ikon stated.

He added that the partnership is critical to reducing the high volume of uninsured vehicles on the roads, protecting commuters, curbing the use of counterfeit insurance certificates, and boosting public trust in regulatory institutions. These objectives, he emphasized, directly align with the provisions of the newly enacted Nigerian Insurance Industry Reform Act (NIIRA) 2025 and NAICOM’s mandate to deepen market penetration.

The commission highlighted the unique leverage the Nigeria Police Force possesses due to its daily interactions with motorists, business owners, and the public. By strictly enforcing compulsory insurance laws, police officers act as key drivers in reducing accident-related financial hardships and enhancing overall public safety.

During the technical sessions, participants received practical training on:

The core objectives and benefits of compulsory insurance lines.

Standardized digital and manual insurance policy verification procedures.

The foolproof identification of genuine insurance certificates.

The legal framework governing compliance under NIIRA 2025.

The program successfully strengthened the institutional bridge between NAICOM and the NPF, encouraging officers to act not just as law enforcers, but as grassroots advocates for insurance literacy.

Long-Term Commitment

Moving forward, NAICOM reaffirmed its commitment to sustaining close ties with law enforcement and relevant stakeholders to eliminate fake insurance vendors, improve nationwide compliance levels, and position the insurance sector as a meaningful contributor to Nigeria’s economic growth and social stability.

The Commission urged the officers of the FCT Command to champion this cause, fostering an environment where insurance is embraced not merely as a statutory obligation, but as an indispensable tool for safeguarding lives, investments, and livelihoods.

The post NIIRA 2025: NAICOM Engages Police to Curb Fake Insurance Certificates on Roads appeared first on Business Today NG.

News

Hot French startup ZML releases free product to speed inference across lots of AI chips

Published

7 minutes ago

July 8, 2026

Preport

The days of Nvidia’s unparalleled market dominance aren’t over, but challengers and choices are arising from all directions.

ZML, a hot French AI startup endorsed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, has released inference-performance software that allows a variety of open-source large language models to run on a variety of chips — including Nvidia’s, AMD’s, Google’s TPU, Apple Metal and Intel Arc.

With ZML/LLMD, the newly launched LLM inference server, the company’s ambition is to break existing silos and make different chips available for AI use cases at their maximum available speed, and sometimes faster, ZML founder Steeve Morin told TechCrunch.

As AI becomes integrated into our work and everyday lives, optimizing inference — aka, the processing of prompts — has been outpacing model training in importance, but often feels patchy behind the scenes, with software and architecture barriers that lead to vendor lock-in, Morin said.

The promise of achieving peak performance across a variety of chips is a technological feat, but it could also be a market disruptor, amid mounting fears over AI-related costs.

ZML hopes to provide enterprises and clouds with the option to use a mix of chips, some of which might be less costly or consume less energy. “The idea is to give people back the power to create their own system and achieve real efficiency gains that allow [AI] to be disseminated,” Morin said.

Such a software assist may help novel AI chipmakers, many of which happen to be from Europe, Morin observed, citing Axelera, Fractile, Kalray, OLIX, Q.ANT, SiPearl, SpiNNcloud, and VSORA. But more than their region of origin, what matters to him is that ZML can work with them on “things that haven’t been done before anywhere in the world.”

That doesn’t mean Morin is bearish on Nvidia. He’s not, in part because of its existing supply. He told TechCrunch that ZML has a good relationship with the AI chip giant, which has been gearing up for the rise of inference.

Inference has been an area of such intense investment, that the trend has been hailed the “inference gold rush.” So ZML has competition such as Baseten, recently valued at $13 billion; Inferact, from the creators of open source project vLLM; as well as RadixArk, the commercial company behind SGLang.

Both vLLM and SGLang partially compete with LLMD, but Morin’s ambitions for ZML cover a broader spectrum. “We have reached the point where we are co-designing silicon,” he said. He further credited ZML’s lean team of 20 people as the reason why the Paris-based startup has been able to move fast, with more releases in the plans.

It also helped that this small team is well funded for its size. Thanks to his track record as VP of engineering of Zenly, which Snapchat acquired for nine figures in 2017, Morin raised $20 million from venture firms including Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, >commit, AALVC, Drysdale Ventures, Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures, Kindred Capital, LocalGlobe, and Puzzle Ventures.

Unlike ZML’s first public project, the inference-focused ML framework released in 2024 and updated in March, ZML/LLMD is not open source. But it is launching as a free product with the goal of learning about usage. “I’d rather measure and [then generate revenue] where it is most effective without hindering my growth stupidly because I have been too greedy from the get-go,” Morin said.

It is too early to tell when ZML/LLMD might become a paid product, and what its adoption will look like. But the startup’s cap table confirms that other founders are paying attention, including Dagger and Docker founder Solomon Hykes, Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face, as well LeCun, now with AMI Labs. This also builds the case that Europe’s AI startups can now build from home. “I couldn’t do ZML anywhere but in Paris,” Morin said.

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