Anthropic filed to go public as businesses begin questioning whether the benefits of AI justify the growing costs.

Why it matters: Companies are Anthropic's biggest customer. If they dial down their AI spend, that could weaken the AI lab's revenue just as it prepares to IPO.

Driving the news: Hours after Anthropic filed its pre-IPO paperwork, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that corporate concern over AI costs is "the most fair criticism of AI so far."

• Bain published a survey of nearly 1,000 companies showing that after investing in AI, "the value didn't arrive," with 40% of surveyed companies reporting AI cost savings below 10%.
• An early Anthropic investor tells Axios that companies are waking up to how much they're spending on Claude. That's a risk worth monitoring, the investor said.
• This comes after an AI consultant told Axios that a CFO client accidentally spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month.

Between the lines: Even AI executives are acknowledging their technology has a cost problem.

• "The risk of enterprises switching to cheaper models is existential and, frankly, escalating," Matt Rogers, co-founder and CEO of Mill, who also worked on the original iPhone, told Axios via email.
• "Some open source LLMs [large language models] are as good without the price tag," he added.

Threat level: Corporate pushback on AI spend would be a challenge for every AI lab, but Anthropic could feel it more given its exposure to enterprise customers.

• In April, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in business customers for the first time, per Ramp data.
• Business revenue has been Anthropic's greatest strength, given these customers pay more than everyday people.
• It could become Anthropic's Achilles heel if businesses start to rebel against AI costs.

Reality check: Anthropic is on track for nearly $50 billion in annual revenue per its latest funding round, and its first profitable quarter ever according to the Wall Street Journal.

• Anthropic keeps beating its own growth metrics, while competitor OpenAI is reportedly missing internal revenue targets.
• It's also the fastest-growing company in modern American history.
• But the AI race is far from over: "You can't make a three- or five-year bet in this space ... someone can jump over everybody else by coming up with the next great thing," Michael Levine, CFO of Fireblocks, told Axios.

The bottom line: AI labs are looking to go public right as their biggest customers are figuring out how to define their relationship with AI.

Knowledge workers now make up roughly one-fifth of OpenAI's Codex users and are growing more than three times as fast as developers, according to a new OpenAI report shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: AI has made it easier to crank out documents, emails, decks and dashboards, and OpenAI is now betting agents can help workers make sense of them.

The big picture: Previous waves of workplace software encouraged workers to produce huge volumes of files and messages, but those "workplace artifacts" largely remain siloed inside different software programs.

• The report argues that Codex can round up the important context from all of those artifacts no matter where they are.

By the numbers: Codex now has more than 5 million weekly active users, up more than six times since OpenAI launched the desktop app in February, the company says.

• The fastest-growing tasks among knowledge workers are data analysis, up 110% week over week; research, up 37%; and knowledge artifacts — reports, memos, docs, contracts, multimedia assets, PDFs and spreadsheets — up 36%.
• More than 60% of users now run more than one Codex task at the same time at some point during the day, up from less than half in mid-April.

Case in point: Codex can connect to your email, calendar, documents, spreadsheets, design apps and messaging apps like Slack and Teams.

• It only takes one click to set up a daily automation that can send a morning brief that includes what's on your calendar, important unread emails, and anything else that Codex thinks needs your attention.

Catch up quick: Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork were the first agentic tools to attract non-coders at scale.

• Anthropic released Claude Code as a command-line tool in February 2025, followed shortly thereafter by Codex.
• Anthropic was first with a consumer-facing web release in October 2025, and both released native desktop agent apps this year.

The other side: A growing number of power users say agentic tools are leaving them mentally fried, as they try to supervise several fast-moving AI workstreams at once.

Keep reading.

Editor's note: This item has been corrected to show Codex's growth rate is 6x (not 5x), and to clarify the timeline of when various Anthropic and OpenAI tools were released.

Alphabet said yesterday it plans to raise up to $80 billion in equity to help fund its AI ambitions, which includes a $10 billion investment from Berkshire Hathaway via a private deal.

Why it matters: One of the world's biggest companies, which has had historically high cash flow, is seeking more cash to stay in the AI race.

Driving the news: Alphabet said the proceeds will support "capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute" amid "unprecedented customer demand." The financing includes:

• $30 billion in underwritten public offerings, split between mandatory convertible preferred stock and common stock.
• $40 billion through an at-the-market stock offering program expected to begin in Q3.
• $10 billion from Berkshire Hathaway via a private deal, adding to a stake the company has been building since Q3 2025.

Zoom out: This comes after Alphabet has already sought out additional funds by issuing corporate debt, becoming the first company in modern history to issue a 100-year bond.

• Alphabet and the four other major hyperscalers are set to spend over $750 billion this year, which could expand to $4 trillion by 2030 according to Morgan Stanley.

The bottom line: The Big Tech companies have to invest in AI for fear that it will replace them.

• The bet is an expensive one, but as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said himself: "The risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing."

• Hackers accessed high-profile Instagram accounts just by asking Meta's AI tool. (404 Media)
• How AI shapes inflation and productivity will be a defining question for the Fed under the leadership of Kevin Warsh. (Axios)
• New research suggests general-purpose AI models are poorly suited to sensitive questions of faith. (Axios)

Harvard Business Review found for the second year in a row that therapy and companionship is the top AI use case.

• "Algorithms we don't understand are increasingly managing and influencing our most intimate relationships. Is this healthy?"

Why it matters: In at least a quarter of use cases, users are outsourcing their thinking to AI.

• Will we pay for cognitive workouts someday the same way we pay for Pilates now?