Musk's desperate $20B funding frenzy

Monday’s AI Report

• 1. 💰 Musk's desperate $20B funding frenzy
• 2. 🧑‍💻 Create and launch web apps with Hostinger
• 3. 🚨 Uproar as Anthropic issues code takedown
• 4. 🛡️ Adobe and LinkedIn partnership protects creators
• 5. 🤖 Find out what AI can do for your business with Upscaile
• 6. ⚙️ Trending AI Tools
• 7. 🏗️ Practical AI Applications
• 8. 📑 Recommended Resources

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Musk's desperate $20B funding frenzy

🚨 Our Report 

Elon Musk-owned xAI Holdings—which was created after Musk merged his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), with his AI start-up, xAI, in March—is reportedly in talks with investors to raise $20B in funding, valuing the company at over $120B.

🔓 Key Points

• Although talks are still in their early stages, if successful, it will become the second-largest start-up funding round the world’s ever seen, following OpenAI’s mammoth $40B round last month.

• Reportedly, Musk plans to use the funding to pay off the colossal liability he acquired when he took over X: Currently, he’s paying $200M p/m in servicing fees, and over $1.3B p/y in interest.

• It’s expected that previous Musk backers—including Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund—will contribute to the funding round, and institutional investors like Fidelity and BlackRock are also likely to be interested.

🔐 Relevance 

Another major funding round of this size just highlights the continuing investor appetite for AI start-ups, and if successful, could also further solidify Musk’s political position as a ‘special government employee’ inside the White House, after recently announcing he was stepping down as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, says AI will generate 90% of all code within six months. Within a year – maybe all of it.

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🚨 Our Report

Anthropic has issued a takedown notice (called a DMCA) against a developer for exploiting copyright laws after they reverse-engineered its agentic AI coding tool, Claude Code, and uploaded the source code to GitHub—a central hub that developers use to store, share, and collaborate on projects—asking them to delete the code.

🔓 Key Points

• Claude Code competes with OpenAI’s Codex CLI—both allow developers to use AI to complete coding tasks and were released around the same time—but Claude Code is renowned for having tighter restrictions.

• OpenAI made Codex CLI open-source for developers to modify and use the code for commercial purposes, whereas Claude Code restricts how developers can modify the code without permission from Anthropic. 

• Anthropic has also “obfuscated” the source code, meaning the code isn’t strictly available for modification, which they say is because the model is still in beta, and they want to safeguard the model's security.

🔐 Relevance

The takedown notice has sparked debate among the developer community, as many feel Anthropics' actions have stunted an environment of collaboration, which is necessary to foster a culture of innovation and is “counterintuitive in a field that thrives on shared knowledge and improvement,” and as a result are more likely to turn to OpenAI’s Codex CLI—OpenAI has already incorporated many developer suggestions into the tools codebase, following its release—while others understand that there are significant concerns over privacy and ethical coding, and making AI model code open-source could detrimentally impact this.

• Adobe and LinkedIn have announced a partnership that will combine their identity verification and content validation tools into one shared platform, under a new "Verified on LinkedIn" program.

• ‘Verified on LinkedIn’ will allow users to “use the verifications they've completed on LinkedIn to show who they are across the different online platforms they use, boosting trust, confidence, and credibility."

• This will allow content creators to protect their work as it will automatically verify their identity, images, and photos across platforms, with a ‘Verified on LinkedIn’ badge.

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