Quick pulse for Wednesday, October 21. Short takes, with credit to where each one came from.
Anthropic puts 5% of itself in a public fund#
Anthropic announced on Sunday that it is putting 5% of its shares into a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. Stockholders still have to approve it. The board can add up to 2% more for every 50% rise in the company’s value above a baseline it hasn’t named yet.
Add the co-founders’ old pledge to give away 80% of their equity and an employee donation match that about half the staff use. Anthropic says that puts roughly 20% of the company toward the public good. At the up to $2 trillion valuation floated for its November IPO, 5% would be worth up to $100B.
What the money is for is still open. Anthropic says the fund could make big donations to nonprofits or “direct distributions to specific populations,” and names workers hit by AI as one example. It’s a wholly owned LLC, not a charity, so Anthropic keeps control. Its shares can’t fund lobbying or political giving. The board, the recipients and the valuation milestones come “in the coming months.”
The timing follows Jack Clark’s IMF lecture in Bangkok the day before. He said the evidence points to a “singularity,” and that one internal Anthropic model has US GDP reaching about $44 trillion by 2030 under certain conditions, up from just over $30 trillion today. The pushback came fast. Elon Musk replied: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.” David Sacks wrote: “You’ve put 20% of your equity in an LLC. Whether it serves the public good remains to be seen.”
Video: IMF, “Per Jacobsson Foundation Lecture: Inside the Event Horizon,” with Anthropic’s Jack Clark.
OpenAI races the IPO clock#
OpenAI wants its money in before Anthropic’s numbers go public. Reuters reports it is rushing a round of about $30B that could value it at more than $1.4 trillion, with SoftBank and Abu Dhabi’s MGX in talks to join. Anthropic is expected to list in mid-November.
The pitch: $50B in annualized revenue, heading to $70B by year-end, per one person Reuters spoke to. Anthropic’s revenue run rate was about $65B by July. The two count revenue differently, and OpenAI wants to set its price before investors can compare filings side by side. OpenAI was last valued at $852B in March.
At the same time, The Information reports that Sam Altman walked staff through three possible endgames for superintelligence at an all-hands last week. One: an international agency modeled on the IAEA, which he appeared to favor. Two: the “Demis plan,” where the big labs merge into one CERN-like body that supplies models to partner countries. Three: the “Eliezer plan,” where one lab reaches self-improving AI and uses that power to “melt everyone else’s GPUs.” His verdict on that one: “Obviously I think that one’s terrible.” He also told staff OpenAI can’t afford to lose ground right now, and that it has to pick a path within a year. All of this comes secondhand, via people who heard the remarks.
Citrini’s crypto basket skips BTC and ETH#
Citrini Research, the macro shop behind the AI doomsday report, published “Breaking The Wall” on Oct 8. Its thesis: stocks, credit and Treasuries keep moving onchain, AI agents that never sleep need markets that never close, and the fees land with whoever runs the venues. The reported basket has 15 tokens and 0% in BTC or ETH, per Milk Road and screenshots circulated by BlockBeats and ChainCatcher.
Source: Citrini Research, “Breaking The Wall” (Oct 8, 2026), weights as reported by BlockBeats and ChainCatcher; buckets per Milk Road.
Trading venues take the biggest slice. Derive and Lighter get 10% each, ahead of Hyperliquid at 7%. Regulators are part of the case: on Sept 17 the SEC gave tokenized stock venues a five-year exemption from registering as an exchange.
John Gillen of Milk Road PRO owned 7 of the 15 before the report came out. He still sees a hole in the logic. Solana DEXs logged 208M trades in one September week, against about 190M on the NYSE. But the whole chain collected just $28.1M in fees over the last 30 days, so activity doesn’t automatically reach token holders. He keeps about 73% of his own book in BTC and ETH. His line on Citrini: “the worst case of ‘doesn’t have enough Bitcoin’ I have seen in days.”
For anyone trading onchain equities, the takeaway is the same as Gillen’s. Pick the venues where the fees end up with token holders.
Cheap agent models keep closing in#
Two Chinese labs shipped cheap agent models in three days. DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash-1017, which DeepSeek calls a “minor update,” jumped from 31.2 to 42.3 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and from 20.3 to 29.1 on ProgramBench. On its own table it beats Claude Opus 5 on DeepSWE (77.0 vs 74.0) and Agents’ Last Exam (35.4 vs 28.6). Opus 5 still leads on Humanity’s Last Exam (56.3 vs 42.6) and Terminal-Bench (51.8). The weights are MIT-licensed.
MiniMax followed on Oct 19 with M3.1 Flash at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output. It scores 29.6 on Agents’ Last Exam, and MiniMax’s own chart puts a full run at about $111, against more than $1,000 for the rivals it compares with. It was the anonymous “Space Bunny” model on OpenRouter. MiniMax says the weights come Oct 23.
These are the labs’ own numbers on setups they picked, and the two tables don’t even agree on Opus 5’s Agents’ Last Exam score. Still, if you run agents all day, “good enough” keeps getting cheaper.
Also noted#
A certificate authority got popped. The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CAs were generated with weak randomness, so anyone could rebuild them and forge HTTPS certificates. Chrome blocked them on Oct 17, and Chrome removes the emSign ECC Root CA - G3 root on Oct 27. Geoffrey Huntley patched his whole NixOS fleet with one prompt, then had the agent leave itself a note in AGENTS.md to undo the workaround once upstream catches up. Separately, the Milk Road Macro Index fell from -0.93 to -1.51, deeper into risk-off. The VIX closed the week at 19.99. John Gillen reads the sell-off as hedge funds cutting leverage in AI and memory stocks, which they hold far more of than crypto.
-Q
Sources#
Anthropic: Investing in the public benefit · Anthropic on X · Elon Musk reply · David Sacks reply · CNBC on Jack Clark at the IMF · IMF: Inside the Event Horizon · Superintelligence: Anthropic’s step toward universal high income · Reuters via Business Standard: OpenAI’s fundraising · The Information: Altman’s three endgames · The Decoder on Altman’s endgames · Superintelligence: Altman’s three endgames · Citrini Research: Breaking The Wall · Milk Road: Citrini’s portfolio skips BTC & ETH · BlockBeats: Citrini basket weights · ChainCatcher: Citrini basket weights · SEC: tokenized stock innovation exemption · Bitcoin.com: Solana DEX trades top NYSE · DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 model card · MiniMax: M3.1 Flash · The Diary of AI: M3.1 Flash vs DeepSeek tables · Google: compromised eMudhra intermediates · eMudhra incident site · Geoffrey Huntley: patch the planet · Milk Road: The market is sick. The economy isn’t (yet?)