Anthropic Unveils Updated Opus 4.7 Model

21:00Caroline Hyde:Mythos found vulnerabilities in every single operating system and in every single web browser. And so we wanted to build this small cohort first to basically learn from what they found in a very contained and controlled manner. But you're right. Our intention is definitely to expand this out in a very intentional way. Typically, it hasn't been expanded to UK financial institutions yet. No, but I think that is in the very near term, like in the next week. Weeks away? In the next week. In the next week. OK, and these are top UK financial institutions. Yeah, we've been, I mean, as you would expect, the engagement that I've had from CEOs in the last week in the UK has been significant.

21:36Caroline Hyde:Customers firstly want to say that they appreciate our very thoughtful approach to the way in which we have released Mythos. But secondly, of course, they want to understand the opportunity to be considered to gain access to that model in a controlled way. And so we've been having a lot of conversations with CEOs about the reason why, firstly, we did Project Glasswing and the way that we thought about that intentionally. And then secondly, being very clear and to understand exactly why they want to get access to Mythos and then working in partnership with those customers to think about the next kind of phase two and three and four.

22:14Caroline Hyde:Does the system of release from Frontier Labs need to change? Some will be looking at this and thinking Anthropic has made this decision to limit the release of a model that can prove very dangerous. There's the upside, but there's also clearly the dangers that you've articulated and that the team have articulated. It's come down to decision-making at Anthropic as to whether or not and how to release this. That has to change, doesn't it? I think where I would position it is that this model in particular, we saw a significant leap in cyber. And as a result of that, we were very concerned about mass release and made the decision not to do that.

22:50Caroline Hyde:And obviously, I've already articulated our kind of approach with Project Glasswing. I think labs have to take a responsibility for thinking about safeguards, for thinking about safe and responsible AI as it gets into the hands of the enterprise. That was Anthropix head of EMEA North, Pip White. Let's dive a little deeper into concerns Anthropix Mythos has raised, even within the company. Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Margie Murphy has been looking at exactly that in today's Big Take. This is an important body of work, timely, and packed with detail about first the origins of Mythos, why they started with the cybersecurity capability.

23:32Caroline Hyde:It's not the only capability. Take us inside that report and what we need to know. yeah so we were really keen to understand how anthropic came to this decision this really unusual unprecedented decision to not only hold back um you know what would be the the latest update to claude and be you know a great revenue spinner but also open it up to its competitors to use. And so to do that, we spoke with Nicholas Carlini, who in the cybersecurity world is known as being a kind of security researcher genius, and learned that he'd actually realized back in during testing a previous model that Anthropics Opus could actually figure out ways to potentially exploit exploit flaws in in tons of software so they they were kind of aware that there might be some issues with cyber security with the newer MIFOS model so they were keeping their eye on that as they were training the model and and testing and then around February when they released it for internal review which means that all the anthropic employees are allowed to sort of play around, find glitches, feedback.

24:49Nicholas realized that there was not only could he get help from Mythos to exploit these flaws, Mythos could just go and do it completely on its own. So that was a step up. And that's when they raised the flags to the executive team. And the executive team kind of had to sit around and say, how do we deal with this? can we release this? Should we put guardrails in? And isn't it interesting that they are implementing more safeguards when it comes to Opus 4.7 that's just been released, talking about being able to detect and block prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses. They've learned from Mythos already on what they are allowing us to have.

25:29But Margie, push us as to whether it is as powerful quickly as many make it out to be, because there is some quandary. Right. Look, I think a good question is, it was actually Heather Adkins, who's head of security engineering at Google, and where they have, you know, through Gemini, they have a big sleep LLM that they've released that does the same thing. It finds bugs. It helps companies know if they have vulnerabilities they need to fix. But they put guardrails in place so that it can't kind of run wild and exploit things. Anthropic has come to the decision to release in a limited way something that can go and do quite scary things so people can find them.

26:10So I think, you know, what it's found is quite incredible. Other models probably can do the same. It's a decision about putting the guardrails in place. Great context, always. And you've got a Q &A on all of this tomorrow. You've got to tune in to Margie Murphy. We appreciate it. And Bloomberg's journalists are going to be, therefore, answering those questions for you on Anthropics Mythos. I think it's 1.30 p.m. New York time. Check it out on the terminal or on the website. Time now for Talking Tech. First up, Tesla's Cybertruck has been struggling to drum up consumer interest, but it's getting a boost from inside Elon Musk's empire.

26:45SpaceX made up about 18 % of U.S. registrations in the fourth quarter, of just over 7 ,000 for the truck sold. Plus, SpaceX is reportedly lining up tours of its Texas and California facilities for prospective anchor investors, according to sources. SpaceX is aiming to showcase its operations to big-ticket backers like Sovereign Wealth Funds and has already filed confidentially for an IPO. And an early bet on SpaceX could deliver a huge payoff for Alphabet. A new filing shows Google held a 6.1 % stake in the rocket maker at the end of 2025, with roughly$1.22 billion if SpaceX hits a$2 trillion valuation in its IPO end.

27:25welcome back to bloomberg tech where we're both in new york and it's such a joy to have ed here to discuss what's been tech on a tear look let's back up again on the day we're at a record high we've been up for 12 straight days that is the longest winning streak for the tech benchmark since 2017 so at four tenths percent in fact we're sort of managing to be near or at session highs just coming off of them a little bit right i guess we made the point that's not a vacuum

27:49Caroline Hyde:That's where the war in the Middle East, energy prices going crazy, full conviction on tech. I mean, extraordinary. And conviction, because look at TSMC and look at these other numbers. We're getting fundamentals from Netflix, for example, after the bell. Yeah, so Netflix is a first read since walking away from Warner Brothers' story, and it's top-line growth and bottom-line growth. And Netflix will probably want to keep it to that, right? Because everyone's really focused on engagement right now, which prior to them walking away, I don't know that the engagement data was that good. Highest this December 2025.

28:18TSMC is interesting, isn't it? Down, maybe weakening a bit, but it moved ahead of its numbers. Its numbers are stellar. The desire to buy chips just shows the bottlenecks in AI and Compute right now.

28:28Caroline Hyde:Yeah, and going into earnings prints, and TSMC seems to report some kind of earnings every week, you know, there's a high bar. And I think we have that maintained for the rest of earnings. There's a lot going on in the world of AI infrastructure. The massive build-out of the infrastructure is hitting a political wall just months before the midterm elections. Bloomberg's Mark Niquette joins us now to share more about the high stakes balancing act between industrial progress and political survival. I mean, in the last week alone, Mark, we've talked about this in the context of energy prices and zip codes where data centers are getting billed outright.

29:04Caroline Hyde:For the president, that is an issue amongst the electorate. Now, going into the midterms, there is a NIMBY consideration. There are all sorts of things about how real everyday Americans read the build-out in AI infrastructure and whether they care. What are you reporting? Well, we've been tracking sort of the political impact of the growing opposition to data centers we're seeing at the local level, primarily because of rising electricity prices. We saw a big impact in the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey last year, last November, and a sense that this was becoming more of a political liability for politicians if they didn't address the rising electricity prices, in particular because of data centers and data center demand.

29:55Caroline Hyde:And what we sought out to explore was the reaction that we've seen at the federal and state level to this backlash by having the politicians ask the developers to sort of bring or buy their own power. The idea is data center developers would build their own on-site generation or have purchase agreements that account for their energy usage. This could be a way to address the concerns that voters have about electricity demand from data centers. I mean, the news just keeps on coming. Maine just this week has become the first state that's sort to put a moratorium on the build out of AI data centers.

30:40It's still got to be signed off by the governor. But I was speaking with a business owner in Maine just saying the relief that we just get a pause so we can understand what regulation is needed. So does it need more for the electorate than just Microsoft paying its way for its power?

30:55Caroline Hyde:I think so. Our story today sort of explored this issue. Does having a project sort of bring its own power or buy its own power alleviate any of the concerns that residents have about data centers? And the answer seems to be no, in the sense that there's still a lot of opposition to data centers because folks don't want to live next to them or they're concerned about pollution, either noise or emissions from the power sources that are being generated to power the data centers. and just overall concerns about AI and folks opposed to the advancement of artificial intelligence. So what we have today sort of explore the idea that if the politicians' outreach to get data centers to bring their own power was going to alleviate opposition to data centers, it probably won't, or at least it's not going to alleviate all of the opposition.

31:58Mark McKeat, great reporting. We urge people to go and read that story. And look, that's about domestic tensions in the U.S., but it's not just happening here in the U.S. Over in Europe, there are tensions flaring about the environmental footprint of AI in Spain in particular. It's actually still positioning itself as the AI capital of Europe, a$90 billion infrastructure push there. Lumo's Clara Hanans-Lizaraga is here with us to detail where you went in Spain. You discussed with families, with farmers, who suddenly had this sense of urgency to sell their land to AWS, for example. Go from there.

32:31What have you learned from being on the ground as to how people feel about these data centers? Thank you. Hi. So I traveled to Adarron. I spoke to locals, to farmers. And the sense I got is, you know, some people are in favor of the data centers, but some people are very directly affected because these infrastructure needs land. And that means either expropriating people or pushing them out of land. They've been leasing for generations. So for a lot of the locals, there is a sense that there's very little in it for them and that most of the benefits of this push are going to go elsewhere.

33:10Caroline Hyde:We're talking about the region near Barcelona, northeast Spain, and the pitch from the Spanish government and from municipalities and from industry is this is the model of how it should be to build out data centers. What is their pitch for how they think this will benefit the region economically? And what's the real terms build out that's happening on the ground? yeah so the the local government um argues that alaron will become the virginia of europe um they expect to it will create many tens of thousands of jobs um and it's been so successful that actually the the companies are investing there such as amazon and Microsoft, they're now pushing this idea that the framework that's in place there should be an example for the rest of the EU.

34:10Nationwide, though, the central government is more reluctant. There is a different political party and the government in Madrid is more keen to regulate and set some limits to, you know, who gets to plug into the grid and who gets to build. And there's the tension, that PIGA framework, basically an ability to fast track the ability to start building these data centers for Microsoft or AWS with less regulation because it's needed for the economy. But you sort of point out in the story that actually maybe it's not that necessary for this part of the economy. There's people who've got pretty wide, broad reach of jobs.

34:49and I'm interested as to whether regulation will come in and what more broadly you'll see from companies responding to this because they say PIGA should be used more broadly and it's necessary. Yes, so regulation is expected at EU level. I believe the commission is set to present a proposal in the first quarter of this year so it should be happening soon. In terms of Spain alone There is a law that came out in March that will set the, so the granting of the permits will be tied to meeting certain sustainability and efficiency criteria. But those new measures will only apply to the future projects, not to the already existing ones.

35:36Caroline Hyde:Bloomberg's Clara Hernan-Slizaraga, who joins us as a correspondent from Spain. Thank you so much.

35:47We want to bring you some breaking news on the war in Iran. President Trump posting on Truth Social saying a 10-day ceasefire has been agreed to with Lebanon and Israel. The markets react. Optimism there. We're still higher. We were higher throughout the day, Ed. But many had wondered how this would progress given Hezbollah had, well, not wanted to down their own tolls or arms.

36:07Caroline Hyde:Yep. And, you know, that's the market reaction in equities. There's some reaction elsewhere, but in the post, President Trump saying that he spoke with both Netanyahu and the leaders of Lebanon directly. We will continue to monitor it as well as the market impact. Let's go to private markets. OpenAI has rolled out its new GPT 5.4 cyber model to select users, doubling down on security as competition with Anthropic heats up. The focus on cyber comes as trust and governance continue to kind of slow down AI adoption in different sectors at scale. So what does this next phase of the AIS race mean for startups?

36:44Caroline Hyde:But it's investors too. Joining us now is Eric Abrescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, a backer of OpenAI at the Series C stage. This is really interesting right now. You know, defense technology generally is still a main focus of investors like yourself everywhere. But the relationship between the technology sector and the arms of government, the Pentagon, we're rethinking it a bit. What's your latest thinking on that? Well, look, I think we've always known that these models were going to get increasingly powerful. And we need to work together across the private and the public sectors to make sure that we keep people safe.

37:23Because whatever, you know, power we build into models and try to use responsibly, there are others in the world, unfortunately, that will use maliciously. And so it's important that folks have open dialogue. we're constantly sharing and collaborating and figuring out the best way to shore up defenses for those who need and deserve it to make sure we can always stay one step ahead of those who are meaning to do harm. It's so fascinating to have you on in particular because of your experience of, you know, when you were being purchased, your own company, Bitnami was being purchased by VMware. You think about what the experience you had at GitHub.

38:00But for me, it's the fact that you're on the board of Linux Foundation since all the way back to 2016. Look, our Margie Murphy, our cyber report is really talking about how Mythos has been a concern for the very underpinning of the internet, Erica. How much are these models giving you pause over at that foundation or more broadly an opportunity for some of the cyber companies that you back? Look, I'm a techno optimist, right? And I think that AI can do wonders for open source, which to your point is the underpinnings to the internet. Using these models can help us find vulnerabilities that we didn't know were there.

38:35It can help them patch vulnerabilities more quickly. So I think it's great for the world. And as you mentioned, we do have a number of cyber investments, one of which is called Jetstream, that is focused on AI governance and visibility. It'll allow enterprises to understand what's happening in their organization, create a dynamic graph of AI activity across the system and put in place controls to secure it. And so, I think there's a lot of opportunity both on the open source side of things to bring AI to improve open source, as well as a lot in private companies to deliver tools to enterprises to get them ready for what's to come as AI continues to proliferate.

39:22Caroline Hyde:So you're the investor and you have a conversation with the portfolio companies and they'll probably go to you, Erica, what do you think we should do? And the tension is this. Industry says these should be smaller open source models. That is the best way for everyone to work collectively in the cybersecurity context. Anthropic and OpenAI do limited access to what are much more powerful models. And they argue the limited access is a guardrail in and of itself. But it means that for researchers, bug bounty players, etc., it's closed to them. What is the right pathway forward? Look, I think we need to be responsible with the power of these new models coming online.

40:05And it reminds me of like responsible disclosure in cyber, right? When you find a zero day, you have to report it responsibly before you share your work with the world. I see a very similar pattern here, and I'm actually very supportive of what the model vendors are doing and trying to bring together the right folks, the Linux Foundation included in Project Glasswing, to make sure that people get an opportunity to see what these models can do, to put them to work, and to make sure that they're building up tools that can defend against them if they're used for malicious purposes. Again, I think you need a lot of different perspectives, organizations, and quite frankly, just brains around this problem to make sure that we're building the right controls to make sure that we can get all the value out of AI without sacrificing our defenses.

40:51Value out of AI. At this moment, Erica, how are other bets of yours, other portfolio companies managing to get the value? How are we seeing this being adopted within teams, embraced and pushed forward? Yeah, look, I think the best companies are adopting AI across the stack. Ramp has had a number of fantastic posts. They're completely changing their entire culture by enabling their company to build with AI across the stack. We have companies like Railway, for example, that run all of their go-to-market with AI. So it's not just about coding where, of course, we're seeing incredible acceleration in product shipping, evolution, new feature development, et cetera.

41:34But also the go-to-market teams are building their own tooling now with AI. I mean, I'm building my own tooling for my work in venture, right? And so I think the companies that get ahead are the ones who are going to drive AI usage throughout their organization across finance, HR, support, go to market, and not only code, which is obviously a huge opportunity in and of itself. Maybe have some bandwidth for some fun marketing, as we've all been liking the Lagora new ad of late. Mr. Jude Law, Erica Brescia, we thank you very much of Redpoint Ventures. Thank you. Great to have you. Coming up, the CEO of Slash joins to discuss his startup's newly minted unicorn status that aims to take on fintech rivals like Ram.

42:18We're just talking about them, like Brex. This is Blue Bag Tech.

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43:02Caroline Hyde:Go to public.com slash market and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash market. Ad paid for by Public Holdings. Brokered services by Public Investing, member FINRA SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, SEC Registered Advisor. Crypto services by ZeroHash. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. Deadlines move, plans change, and sometimes opportunities pop up out of nowhere. When you need branded gear fast, 4imprint is ready to deliver. 4imprint offers hundreds of promotional products in their 24-hour category.

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44:51Here today, roam tomorrow. Join now at Sinesta.com. Terms and conditions apply. Slash Financial has just raised$100 million from backers, including Ribbit Capital, Kozla Ventures. The startup offers banking financial services, along with features tailored to specific industries. Medical spas, construction firms, sneakers is where it started. Slash's co-founder and CEO, Victor Cadenas, joins us now. I wish we could just talk about Allbirds with you, and it's resurrection into an AI company, Victor. But I'm interested as to what the$100 million helps you do. You're going global. Where are you leaning into?

45:25Caroline Hyde:Absolutely. First of all, Caroline, thank you so much for having me on as a long time watcher of the show. It's such a privilege to get to participate for the first time. Thanks, mate. Succinctly, there's two things this funding enables us to do. Serve more markets and serve more geographies. Quite core to the Slash thesis and strategy, as you mentioned, is this idea that business owners deserve banking products hyper-tailored to the needs of their specific industries. Slash right now is valuable to businesses in over a dozen industries, but we want Slash to be a household name. We want to bring it to as many possible entrepreneurs in America and beyond.

45:57Caroline Hyde:Right now, we're living in a super interesting time in fintech history where for the first time ever, it's very easy and possible for an American fintech company like Slash to serve businesses all over the world. Stablecoins are this really enabling force that allow us to have a default global product. And we want Slash to reach business owners worldwide. And that's what this funding is going to go towards. So you're raising$100 million. But I think you guys would be at pains to say we're a really small team or a lean team is how you'd put it. you're at$300 million ARR, right? Which is something to note.

46:28Caroline Hyde:If that's the case, where does that$100 million go? Like, why do you need to deploy it? Absolutely. I think you're absolutely right. We have a very lean team. Our company's been profitable since May of last year. But in the age of AI, because it's so easy for anyone to build software, brand is more important than ever. And banking is very much a relationships game. There's three reasons customers come to Slash. The first of all is we have a phenomenal product. The second of all is we offer phenomenal rewards. And the third is we've brought the community bank model to fintech, all else being equal.

46:59Caroline Hyde:People like to bank and spend with an institution they have the best relationship with. So if we want to reach and deliver an amazing level of support to business owners all over America and all over the world, that's going to take a lot of people and a lot of investing in our brand. Victor, just go back to how lean the actual startup is. I think you've only got 68 or thereabouts employees before you start adding more to this go-to-market and marketing strategy. How much are you enabled by AI? How much are you thinking about keeping your cost base low? Entirely, this business, the way that we run it would not be possible if it were not for AI.

47:33Caroline Hyde:I think that's the thing that Ribbit, that Kosa, that Goodwater, all the investors that invested in this past round found most attractive about Slash. It's this idea that over 50 % of the engineering hours at our company are spent actually building internal software to help us be much more efficient. So a lot of these tasks that the legacy banks or fintechs that came before us have thrown copious headcount at are just agent automated away at Slash. Everything from parsing documents when somebody is applying for an application or processing disputes or responding to requests for information from a bank partner.

48:05Caroline Hyde:All these back-end tasks are agent automated away at Slash. So, Victor, kind of as your elevator pitch for Slash, who are the incumbents that you're trying to displace in helping us understand, like, if you were a customer of Slash, how it would work and what it is you offer? Absolutely. Well, Ed, I think a very underappreciated fact is that fintech, particularly B2B fintech in the U.S., is extremely underpenetrated. Less than 5 % of businesses in America, bankers spend with a fintech. The vast majority of them still use a legacy bank. And the reason our offer is resonating so much is quite simple.

48:38Caroline Hyde:We live in an age where machines can think, where cars can drive themselves. But as I mentioned, the vast majority of entrepreneurs are still banking with an institution that has an interface that was last updated in the year 2003. Core to the slash thesis is this idea that your bank account can do much more for you. It can be the place where you invoice your customers, where you reimburse your employees for out-of-pocket expenses, where you get insights around how to cut wasteful spend and much, much more. We have ambitions to become the most popular business banking platform in America, and we're going to do it by building a very powerful platform that puts a lot of money back in the pockets of our customers and gives them back a ton of time.

49:13Caroline Hyde:Victor Carlenia, CEO of Slash. It's great to have you on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. We're on IPO watch this week. It's not the reason I'm in New York, but we're here for it. Shares of Madison Air are indicated to open$30,$31 a share. The IPO pricing at$27 a share. We're waiting for trading to begin. It's a ventilation and filtration systems company, but it's seeing increasing demand for its services amid the boom in data center build out. Set to have, believe it or not, Caro, the biggest US IPO of the year so far. So far. Big asterisk. Two billion. But why don't CEO Jill Wyand? I mean, she's coming on the network later really to talk about the lead up, the U.S.

49:55industrial focus. And look, all of these companies suddenly de facto becoming AI companies because there's sheer scale of need for infrastructure right now.

50:03Caroline Hyde:So here's a data point for you that kind of explains where we are at in the world of AI. This will be the biggest U.S. industrial IPO for almost three decades. Wow. It shows you the transformation that these kind of legacy industries have had, HVAC being one example. But yeah, we'll keep an eye on it. Indicated to open$30,$31 a share IPO at 27. There's a few others too this week. Ed making HVAC sexy again. That's what he does. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. And I'm so pleased to be here for another day. Yeah, yeah. We've got a lot going on. It is a very busy week. Lots of news in the show.

50:36Caroline Hyde:Recap it on the podcast. You know where to find it. It's on iHeart, Spotify and Apple. and it's on the Bloomberg Terminal and on the Bloomberg platforms. From New York City this week, this is Bloomberg Tech.

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