SAN FRANCISCO — The Trump administration lifted export restrictions on Anthropic's most capable AI models Monday, ending a months-long standoff that had blocked the company from deploying its frontier systems in certain markets. The timing was not incidental: Anthropic simultaneously disclosed a valuation of $965 billion — leapfrogging OpenAI — and confirmed that its next flagship model, internally called Mythos, is in the pipeline.
The regulatory reversal matters commercially. Export controls had functioned as a ceiling on Anthropic's addressable market, particularly in allied nations where enterprise demand for Claude-class models runs deep. Removing that ceiling, combined with a valuation that now approaches $1 trillion, repositions Anthropic from closely watched challenger to the industry's new benchmark number.
The figure lands with real-world consequences for anyone living in zip codes near the companies' offices. San Francisco's cost-of-living math was already brutal; the emergence of an AI compensation elite has broken it for much of the broader tech workforce. Engineers at established companies earning $180,000 report being priced out of neighborhoods where OpenAI and Anthropic staff — many holding equity now measured in life-changing sums — compete for the same housing stock. The dynamic is reminiscent of the 2012–2015 period when Google and Facebook compensation first stratified the Bay Area labor market, except the delta between AI-native and everyone-else pay is wider and compressing faster.
Elsewhere in the ecosystem, Bending Spoons, the Milan-based acquirer of distressed internet assets — AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite among them — is going public this week at a potential $19 billion valuation, offering a different theory of tech value creation: buy legacy brands cheaply, cut costs aggressively, monetize the remainder. It is, in structure if not in ambition, the ESW Capital playbook applied to consumer internet.
And in a footnote that says something about the current cultural moment: Neon acquired *Artificial*, a film centered on Sam Altman and OpenAI, after Amazon dropped it following the retailer's investment in Anthropic. The movie now has a distributor. The conflict-of-interest question now has an answer.
