AI Briefing

OpenAI's own investors are starting to wonder if they overpaid. Some backers are quietly whispering that Anthropic at $380 billion might be the smarter bet than OpenAI at $852 billion, especially as Anthropic's revenue just tripled to $30 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI's ChatGPT ad experiment already crossed $100 million in barely six weeks, Nature published a humbling reminder that PhD scientists still demolish the best AI agents on complex tasks, and Shopify just handed AI agents the keys to run entire e-commerce stores.

01IndustryTechCrunch ↗

OpenAI's $852 Billion Valuation Faces Investor Revolt as Anthropic Closes the Revenue Gap

Some of OpenAI's own backers are openly questioning whether its record $852 billion valuation can be justified, according to the Financial Times. Anthropic's annualized revenue tripled from $9 billion to $30 billion in just four months, largely driven by coding tools, bringing it within striking distance of OpenAI's reported $25 billion earlier this year. One dual-backer told the FT that justifying OpenAI's latest round requires assuming an IPO valuation of at least $1.2 trillion, making Anthropic's $380 billion valuation look like the relative bargain. Secondary market data now shows demand for Anthropic shares outpacing OpenAI for the first time, while a prominent investor compared OpenAI to Netscape, the once-dominant browser that was eventually overtaken and absorbed.

02IndustryCNBC ↗

ChatGPT Ads Cross $100 Million in Annualized Revenue in Under Six Weeks

OpenAI's advertising pilot in ChatGPT surpassed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue less than two months after launching in the U.S., validating a controversial monetization strategy that rival Anthropic publicly mocked in a Super Bowl ad. The company is working with over 600 advertisers, nearly 80% of which are small and medium-sized businesses, and is projecting $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026 with an audacious target of $100 billion by 2030. But the early numbers come with caveats: only 20% of eligible free-tier users see ads daily, some advertisers have complained the rollout is too conservative, and agency executives say they haven't seen measurable business outcomes yet. The move signals a fundamental shift in how AI companies monetize, one that could reshape the economics of offering free AI tools at scale.

03ResearchNature ↗

Nature: Human Scientists Still Demolish the Best AI Agents on Complex Tasks

A major finding from Stanford's 2026 AI Index, highlighted by Nature, reveals that the best AI agents still perform only half as well as human specialists with PhDs on complex scientific tasks. Despite this, researchers have embraced AI at an extraordinary pace: natural-science publications mentioning AI grew almost 30-fold from 2010 to 2025, with over 80,000 such papers published last year alone. Stanford report lead Yolanda Gil noted there's limited evidence AI is actually improving scientific productivity, but added that scientists 'can't live without it' and 'if you took AI away from them, there would be a riot.' The disconnect between adoption enthusiasm and measured performance raises hard questions about whether the rush to integrate AI agents into scientific workflows is outpacing their actual capabilities.

04ProductShopify ↗

Shopify Open-Sources AI Toolkit, Letting Claude Code and Cursor Run Entire Stores

Shopify released its AI Toolkit on April 9, a free, open-source plugin system that connects Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, VS Code, and OpenAI Codex directly to the Shopify platform. The toolkit gives AI agents three capabilities: live access to Shopify documentation and API schemas, real-time code validation, and the ability to execute actual store operations through the CLI. That third capability is the game-changer: an AI agent can now read inventory, analyze sales funnels, write Liquid code to fix checkout bottlenecks, and deploy changes, all without a human touching the Shopify Admin dashboard. When a platform powering 5.6 million stores and $292 billion in annual GMV hands AI agents operational control, it signals where the entire e-commerce industry is heading.