ARR reporting season, Enterprise Seats and Ethical Lines

It looks like ARR reporting season for AI labs — and for the first time, their numbers can actually be compared.

OpenAI is locking in enterprise seats while still fighting for credibility with the open-source community. Anthropic is adopting public-market style disclosures — and pushing back on the U.S. Department of War, keeping restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

LBX25 Gains 20% in Three Months

While public markets have been volatile, the private market delivered another strong month. The LBX25 Index is up 6% since mid-January and 20% over the past three months.

Leaders were SpaceX (+218% in three months), Cerebras (+216%) and Anthropic (+80%). In all three cases, secondary momentum followed new primary rounds — and outperformed them. All three are now trading at roughly a 10% premium to their latest primary valuations.

AI Labs Are Starting to Look Comparable

This week major AI labs reported ARR: Anthropic, Cohere and Mistral.

We’re still waiting for OpenAI to update its ARR metric. But even using a projection, it all begin to look…comparable.

Valuation multiples fall into visible ranges instead of floating in narrative space. Even gross margin, once a black box for AI labs, is starting to function as a benchmark.

OpenAI Eyes $100B Round at $830B Valuation

OpenAI is finalizing initial investor commitments for a round that could raise up to $100 billion at an $830 billion valuation including the new capital.

SoftBank is expected to anchor the deal with a $30 billion investment, structured in three $10 billion tranches over the year. Amazon, OpenAI’s cloud provider, could commit as much as $50 billion. Nvidia, whose chips power OpenAI’s models, may invest up to $30 billion. Long-standing partner Microsoft is expected to participate with a commitment in the low billions.

OpenAI Pushes Lighter, Faster Codex — Powered by Cerebras

OpenAI released a lightweight version of its agentic coding model, Codex, just weeks after launching the latest full version. The new model, GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, is described as a smaller variant optimized for faster inference.

To support that speed, OpenAI is deploying dedicated chips from hardware partner Cerebras — signaling deeper vertical integration in its compute stack.

The Cerebras partnership was announced last month as a multi-year agreement reportedly worth more than $10 billion. At the time, OpenAI said the goal was simple: make its AI systems respond much faster. Spark is now being positioned as the first milestone in that strategy.

Codex Expands at Nvidia

OpenAI said its coding tool Codex will roll out company-wide at Nvidia, reaching roughly 30,000 engineers.

What this means for Nvidia’s existing partnership with Cursor remains unclear. Just last week, Cursor said its tools had driven a more than three-fold increase in committed code at Nvidia.

OpenClaw Founder May Join OpenAI

OpenAI is reportedly in advanced discussions to hire Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw. If finalized, Steinberger and his team would likely focus on building personal agents inside OpenAI.

As part of the talks, the companies are also discussing the creation of a foundation to steward the existing OpenClaw open-source project.

Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion valuation

Alongside the raise, the company leaned into public-market style reporting. It disclosed that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually on Claude grew 7x over the past year. Claude Code reached a run rate above $2.5 billion — more than double since the beginning of 2026 — and corporate subscriptions to Claude Code have quadrupled over the same period.

Defense Friction Over AI Use

The U.S. Department of War is reportedly considering ending its partnership with Anthropic amid a dispute over how Claude can be used by the military, according to Axios.

Defense officials have been pressing leading AI firms to permit use of their models for “all lawful purposes,” including weapons development, intelligence gathering and battlefield operations. Anthropic has pushed back, maintaining restrictions against applications such as mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Perplexity Steps Back From Ads

Perplexity is no longer offering ads. The AI search startup is pulling back just as OpenAI began introducing ads inside ChatGPT conversations earlier this month.

Perplexity said it worried advertising would erode user trust. As one executive put it, “the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything.” 

Anduril Targets $60B+ Valuation 

Defense tech startup Anduril is in talks to raise billions at a valuation of at least $60 billion including the new capital — roughly double its June round.

In the secondary market, investors are already pricing it higher, closer to $75 billion.

Fresh funding would support construction of its first major weapons manufacturing facility and continued development of an autonomous fighter jet. The company reportedly doubled revenue last year to around $2 billion, driven by Department of Defense and allied contracts, though it continues to burn cash.

Legal AI Heats Up: Legora, Harvey and the Vertical Race

Legora, the Swedish legal AI startup, is working on a $400 million round that could value it at up to $5 billion. Its last raise was $150 million at a $1.8 billion valuation in October 2025.

The move follows reports that U.S.-based Harvey is raising $200 million at an $11 billion valuation, up sharply from $8 billion in late 2025.

Law is full of high-value, repetitive work. Harvey has reportedly reached ~$190 million ARR, while Legora is said to be approaching ~$40 million this year.

Legal AI is becoming a live case study of market structure: foundation labs building horizontal tools (Anthropic’s Cowork), scaled vertical leaders like Harvey and Legora, and super-niche specialists such as Antidote and Sandstone.

Infrastructure, Agents and Applied AI Keep Raising

Grafana Labs, which helps companies monitor cloud and AI activity and spending, is finalizing a new round at roughly a $9 billion valuation, up from $6.6 billion in 2024. The talks follow strong ARR growth, which reached $400 million in September. Customers include fast-growing AI names such as Anthropic, Databricks and ClickHouse.

Temporal, which provides software to run AI agents, raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation in a Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Shield AI, the autonomous drone company, is reportedly in talks to raise at a $12 billion valuation. 

Stoke Space raised $350 million at a $3.17 billion pre-money valuation. 

World Labs, focused on 3D world models, secured $1 billion from investors including AMD, Autodesk, Fidelity, Nvidia and Sea.