Paul Stenhouse: Anthropic announces $65 billion funding around, DuckDuckGo users spike as Google moves to replace search with AI

Move over ChatGPT, Claude is now the #1   Anthropic announced a new $65 billion funding round, bringing their valuation to $965 billion and making their company more valuable than OpenAI (valued at $852 billion in March). Now the race is on for the first AI company to grow to be worth $1 trillion.   I just can't stop thinking about the incredible wealth growth of their employees. We thought social media fuelled a new class of wealth, but this is next level.   It came the same day they launched Opus 4.8, which they say has better capabilities in agentic tasks, advanced coding, and comes with more of a focus on honesty and self-correction.     Search engine DuckDuckGo is embracing the AI backlash   Google announced it was going all in on AI for search. They're planning to retire the ten blue links and search will be "reimagined". In the promo video they show you being able to get alerts when your favourite bands are going on tour, or when an item you have your eye on drops in price. You can search multi-modal more easily – so using photos and text together to help explain your query.    But not everyone is onboard, with concerns that if everything happens inside Google, the open web and the websites will die.   DuckDuckGo —the privacy focused search engine— is offering a "No AI" search experience. Since Google's announcement they're seeing a 30% jump in users, but it’s worth remembering they have just a 2% market share.    LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.