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# The Anthropic Situation, Specifically, Capital Keeps Moving, Power, Policy, and Awkward Pivots
- URL: https://adjacent.media/scan/2026-06-18-am/
- Published: 2026-06-18T10:06:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-18T10:06:17.000Z
- Description: The dominant thread today is Anthropic’s increasingly strange relationship with the Trump administration — simultaneously being asked to do the impossible and benefiting commercially from the friction.
- Author: Jonathan Greene
- Tags: #scan-am, #scan

The dominant thread today is Anthropic's increasingly strange relationship with the Trump administration — simultaneously being asked to do the impossible and benefiting commercially from the friction. Elsewhere, AI capital keeps flowing in odd directions: Kazakhstan, Cambridge materials science, world models, and a new Qwen-pedigreed lab none of us had heard about last week.

> **$70B+** — Xiaohongshu's target Hong Kong IPO valuation, up sharply from $50B in recent private secondary trades — and a signal of how much appetite remains for Chinese consumer tech listings outside the mainland. *(Wall Street Journal)*

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### Connected World

#### [The White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks — That May Not Be Possible](https://www.wired.com/story/the-white-house-wants-anthropic-to-block-all-jailbreaks-that-may-not-be-possible?ref=adjacent.media)

Weeks after Trump's frontier AI executive order, the administration has reportedly told Anthropic to eliminate jailbreaks entirely — a technical bar that AI safety researchers consider unsolvable with current architectures. *(WIRED)*

#### [Anthropic's Latest Feud With the Trump Admin May Actually Help It, Sales Data Suggests](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/anthropics-latest-feud-with-the-trump-admin-may-actually-help-it-sales-data-suggests/?ref=adjacent.media)

Being cast as the responsible adult in the room is, apparently, good for enterprise sales — the conflict may be functioning as free positioning against OpenAI. *(TechCrunch)*

#### [A Profile of Anthropic Researcher Nicholas Carlini](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-mythos-safety-nicholas-carlini-20bceaa3?st=gj26io&reflink=desktopwebshare%5Fpermalink&ref=adjacent.media) (paywall)

The researcher who flagged the Mythos jailbreak threat in March is now briefing the White House directly — the human face of a policy standoff that's anything but abstract. *(Wall Street Journal)*

#### [Anthropic Pauses Token-Based Billing for Its Claude Agent SDK](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/anthropic-pauses-token-based-billing-for-its-claude-agent-sdk/?ref=adjacent.media)

"Nothing changes for now" is an unusual thing to say when you just reversed an already-announced billing change — suggests the pushback from power users was louder than expected. *(Ars Technica)*

### Connected World

#### [World Models Startup Odyssey Raised $310M From Amazon at a $1.45B Valuation](https://www.ft.com/content/1e0365db-a363-4d73-9960-23d25420e9f5?ref=adjacent.media) (paywall)

AWS gets a preferred cloud partner, Odyssey gets Trainium chips and a unicorn stamp — the Amazon model of funding its own ecosystem accelerates. *(Financial Times)*

#### [Jeff Bezos Is Investing in CuspAI as Part of a $400M Round at a $2.6B Valuation](https://www.ft.com/content/4c479227-567c-435e-a4d3-795dd957b347?ref=adjacent.media) (paywall)

Generative AI applied to material sciences is a quieter bet than the usual LLM races, which is partly why a $2.6B valuation for a Cambridge lab is worth attention. *(Financial Times)*

#### [Kazakhstan Signs $10B Accords With Firebird on Nvidia-Related Computing Projects](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-15/kazakhstan-firebird-ink-10-billion-ai-deal-with-nvidia-support?ref=adjacent.media) (paywall)

"Data Center Valley" is ambitious branding for a landlocked Central Asian nation, but the Nvidia connection gives it more credibility than it might otherwise deserve. *(Bloomberg)*

> “Even basic things are so hard to do in an incumbent bank.” — *Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, on why big banks can't replicate what Mercury just shipped with its AI money agent. (Sources/Alex Heath)*

### Connected World

#### [Mercury Put an AI Agent on Your Money](https://open.substack.com/pub/sourcesnews/p/mercury-ai-agent-your-money)

Mercury is positioning its AI-native banking layer as a structural advantage over incumbents — the CEO's confidence here is either well-founded or the kind of thing that ages badly. *(Sources)*

#### [US Holds Off Blacklisting DeepSeek and 100+ Chinese Firms](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-holds-off-blacklisting-chinas-deepseek-more-than-100-firms-deemed-security-2026-06-17/?ref=adjacent.media)

The Entity List hasn't been updated since October — the longest gap in over a decade — which tells you something about how scrambled US-China tech policy is right now. *(Reuters)*

#### [Illinois Governor Signs Budget Taxing Social Media Giants, Digital Ads, and Crypto Markets](https://chicago.suntimes.com/springfield/2026/06/16/pritzker-signs-illinois-budget-trump-social-media-tax?ref=adjacent.media)

The lawsuits are already forming in the wings, but Illinois just handed every other state a policy template to either copy or warn against. *(Chicago Sun-Times)*

#### [Trump Admin Tries to Block Clean Air Act Lawsuit Over xAI's Gas Turbines](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/trump-admin-helps-xai-fight-pollution-lawsuit-says-military-needs-grok-for-war/?ref=adjacent.media)

The administration's argument that the military needs Grok for warfighting is the sentence that will live in legal history regardless of how this case resolves. *(Ars Technica)*

#### [PayPal Plans to Close Its 10-Year-Old Ventures Arm](https://fortune.com/2026/06/16/paypal-ventures-wind-down-corporate-restructuring-enrique-lores/?ref=adjacent.media)

New CEO Enrique Lores is cutting the parts of PayPal that looked like a big company trying to act like a startup — the question is whether what's left can actually compete. *(Fortune)*

### Connected World

#### [SFPD Launches Drone Pilot Program in SoMa — Drones Arrive Before Cops Do](https://sfist.com/2026/06/16/sfpd-launches-pilot-program-in-soma-that-will-see-drones-arrive-at-crime-scenes-before-cops-do/?ref=adjacent.media)

San Francisco is testing "Drone as First Responder" this fall in SoMa — either a genuinely useful public safety tool or a preview of a dystopian short film, depending on your priors. *(SFist)*