• Anthropic has its answer to AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
• Claude Duet, built on Anthropic's flagship model, has entered the personal agent frenzy.
• Karan Ahuja, a recent departee from Meta, led Claude Duet's development.

Anthropic is joining the personal AI agent craze.

The company announced the new app Claude Duet on Wednesday, billed as a "proactive agent" that can run in the background, surface tasks to a user, and handle a variety of work. The tool is in research preview for now with a waitlist, meaning it won't immediately compete for the larger market with other new agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

Still, the announcement ramps up the pressure on those companies — Anthropic says it built Duet around its flagship Opus 5.5 model, which was released in late September and has already become one of the industry's most popular. Recent model breakthroughs have made AI better at handling work on its own, spurring a rush to build these "always-on" personal agents.

"It can have the discernment and judgment around when to be proactive, when to act on your behalf," said Mike Krieger, a co-lead of Anthropic's Labs team, said in a Duet launch video.

The tool, Anthropic says, will send users a brief each morning about what's happening on their connected apps, and message them when something needs attention. Like other companies' offerings, it runs outside a user's computer, sends notifications, and asks for approval on certain tasks.

Anthropic announced Duet on the day of Meta's earnings report and used the opportunity to mention a new poach from Mark Zuckerberg's company. Karan Ahuja led product management for Meta Superintelligence Labs until July, according to his LinkedIn, before starting at Anthropic in August and leading Duet's development.

He wrote on X that he's been using Duet to build Duet, and said the team "built it for professionals and small business owners juggling a lot at work and at home."

Ahuja also wrote that Anthropic is letting people into Duet from the waitlist "as quickly as possible."

The news didn't go unnoticed at Meta. Alexandr Wang, who heads Meta Superintelligence Labs, posted a meme about Duet's similarity to Muse.

Anthropic is fast approaching a giant initial public offering, which could value the company at as much as $2 trillion. Like other AI players, the company navigates a high-wire competition to win over users, secure computing power, build state-of-the-art models, and deliver AI-native products.

The data firm Apptopia estimates that Muse had more than 14 million installations as of Wednesday. It found that Claude users who installed the Muse app were using Claude more than before, though still for fewer minutes per day than they spent on the Meta product.

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• Harvard's endowment returned a five-year high of 27.1% in the 12 months to June 30, besting the S&P 500.
• The Ivy League college counted a $2.2 billion SpaceX stake as its top Q2 portfolio holding by far.
• Harvard's endowment grew to almost $68 billion after accounting for taxes, gifts, and distributions.

Harvard University delivered its best investment return in five years as its bet on SpaceX boosted its stock portfolio.

The elite college's endowment returned 27.1% in the fiscal year ended June 30, its annual financial report revealed on Thursday. That comfortably outpaced the benchmark S&P 500's 22.3% total return over the same period.

After accounting for taxes, distributions, and gifts, Harvard's endowment grew by $11 billion to nearly $68 billion.

Harvard Management Company's stake in Elon Musk's maker of Starship rockets, Starlink satellites, and AI chatbot Grok was worth $2.2 billion at the end of June, per its second-quarter portfolio disclosure.

SpaceX was its number-one holding, more than six times more valuable than its second-biggest position, a sub-$350 million stake in Taiwan Semiconductor.

Its next-largest positions — each worth over $150 million — were Cerebras, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Its 19 holdings at the end of June were together worth about $4.3 billion, more than double the portfolio's $1.8 billion value three months earlier.

Harvard said the strong performance of its endowment, which is nearly 400 years old and comprises about 15,000 individual funds, helped it weather the "abrupt termination of federal research grants" by the Trump administration.

It's worth noting that 13-F portfolio disclosures are a snapshot of a fund's US stock holdings on a certain date. They don't include foreign-listed stocks, non-stock assets like bonds or real estate, private investments, or stocks sold short.

Harvard said that as of June 30, 14% of its endowment was invested in public equities, 29% in hedge funds, 46% in private equity, 4% in real estate, and the balance elsewhere.

Harvard declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

SpaceX's valuation has whipsawed since the aerospace company went public on June 12. Its market capitalization topped $2.4 trillion on June 20, then tanked to $1.4 trillion by August 1, and has since rallied to around $2 trillion.

Musk's company posted a 92% year-on-year revenue jump for the quarter ended June, helping narrow its net loss from $1 billion to $541 million.

The world's richest man recently posted on X that he sees a path for SpaceX to be worth "orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy," implying its stock could rise at least 6,000-fold to $12 quadrillion over time.

He later clarified that wasn't a "statement of extreme confidence," but he believes the probability of achieving that valuation is "not zero." On October 14, he said he expects SpaceX to be worth more than $100 trillion in the next 10 years.

Harvard is one of several shareholders to reveal a sizable stake in SpaceX. Google parent Alphabet reported a roughly 4% stake valued at $94 billion as of the end of June. Longtime Musk associate Peter Thiel disclosed a 3.2% position worth $73 billion held by his Founders Fund and related entities. AI chipmaker Nvidia has a $21 billion stake.

India’s largest initial public offering (IPO) opens October 21, and investors in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong are being asked a simple question: What is a Jio customer’s monthly bill worth? Jio Platforms, the Reliance-owned mobile carrier with some 524 million India-based customers, is selling 270 million new shares at 1,065 to 1,119 rupees each […]

The post Jio’s IPO seeks a tech multiple for old-school mobile business appeared first on Asia Times.

Cerca de duas centenas de enfermeiros do IPO de Coimbra têm em falta o pagamento de retroativos referentes ao período entre 2018 e 2021. Já admitiram avançar com ações judiciais.

© Nuno Veiga/LUSA

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near US$2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company […]

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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has applied to register her voice as an EU trademark, seeking an additional legal tool against artificial-intelligence systems capable of cloning politicians’ voices and producing convincing fake recordings.

Giorgia Meloni has applied to register her voice with the European Union Intellectual Property Office as governments and public figures look for new ways to counter increasingly convincing AI-generated deepfakes.

The Italian prime minister submitted a short audio recording in which she says “Io sono Giorgia Meloni” — “I am Giorgia Meloni” — to the EUIPO on Monday.

The four-second recording forms part of an application for a sound trademark intended to strengthen legal protection against unauthorised use of her voice.

The application filed with the EU intellectual-property system is currently listed as under examination. It is linked to categories including downloadable multimedia material, cultural activities and the organisation of political events.

Registration would not give Meloni ownership over every recording or imitation of her voice, nor would it automatically prevent AI systems from reproducing it.

It could, however, provide another legal basis for challenging certain commercial or misleading uses where the protected sound mark is employed without authorisation.

The distinction between a trademark and copyright is important in this case. Meloni has applied to protect a sound identifier through EU trademark law rather than to establish general copyright ownership over the natural characteristics of her voice.

Her application comes as voice-cloning technology becomes increasingly accessible.

Modern generative-AI systems can create convincing synthetic speech from relatively small samples of recorded audio. The technology is used legitimately for dubbing, accessibility and media production, but it can also be used for fraud, impersonation and political disinformation.

Meloni herself has previously been targeted by manipulated images and other deepfake material. She has also taken legal action in Italy over sexually explicit deepfake images created using her likeness.

The problem has acquired additional importance for politicians because synthetic recordings can be produced and circulated rapidly during election campaigns.

A false recording no longer requires sophisticated audio-editing equipment or extensive access to the target. Public figures provide large quantities of clean audio through speeches, television appearances, podcasts and social-media video — precisely the material needed to train voice-cloning systems.

The EU has already begun imposing specific transparency requirements on synthetic content.

EU Today reported in August that new provisions under the EU AI Act require certain AI-generated or manipulated audio, images and video to be marked in machine-readable form and impose disclosure obligations for deepfake material.

Those rules address transparency rather than ownership.

Trademark law potentially offers a different route by allowing an individual or organisation to claim rights over a specific sound used as a commercial or identifying mark.

Sound trademarks are not new. Companies have long registered jingles, tones and other distinctive audio signatures. What is unusual in Meloni’s application is the attempt by a serving head of government to use the system partly as protection against AI impersonation.

The phrase chosen for the application is itself closely associated with Meloni’s political identity.

“Io sono Giorgia” became widely recognised following a 2019 speech in which she described herself as a woman, mother, Italian and Christian. The phrase subsequently became the basis of online remixes before being adopted as the title of her autobiography.

Other performers have also sought stronger protection for their voices as generative AI improves.

Italian singer Giusy Ferreri has filed a similar application, while actors and musicians internationally have pressed governments and technology companies to prevent unauthorised voice cloning.

Meloni’s filing is unlikely on its own to settle the broader legal question of whether an individual can effectively control AI reproductions of his or her voice.

It does, however, illustrate how existing intellectual-property law is being tested against technology that can reproduce personal characteristics that were previously difficult to copy convincingly.

The EUIPO must now determine whether Meloni’s application satisfies the requirements for registration. Until that process is completed, the filing remains an application rather than an approved EU trademark.

Just weeks before its scheduled November IPO, Anthropic is facing growing attention over the potential dangers of its technology. The resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon on September 8, who wrote on X that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” preceded the company’s threat report on September 10. According […]

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The IPO, which represents a 15% stake in the company valued at approximately Rs1.86 billion, will see public subscription open September 3-4, 2026.

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