Technology Sector

Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has been appointed to Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, the independent governance structure that advises the AI startup and shapes its board. Bernanke, who steered the Fed through the 2008 financial crisis and won the Nobel Prize in economics, will help Anthropic assess how AI reshapes the economy. This move signals that Anthropic—valued at $965 billion and preparing for a potential IPO this year—is building credibility with heavyweight institutional voices ahead of going public.

OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna on Thursday, with CEO Sam Altman touting a 54% efficiency gain in token usage (think: the AI uses fewer computational steps to solve coding problems, cutting customer costs). The rollout followed collaboration with Commerce Secretary Lutnick and other administration officials—OpenAI and the U.S. government jointly tested safety before broad release. The company is also in early talks about giving the government a 5% equity stake, signaling alignment between Silicon Valley's AI leaders and Washington's national security interests.

Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1, its most powerful coding-focused AI model yet, priced aggressively at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per output tokens—well below OpenAI and Anthropic's rates. AI Chief Alexandr Wang emphasized the model works seamlessly with popular developer tools and comes with $20 free credits to lower friction. Meta is training a more powerful model called Watermelon and plans to open-source a Muse variant, betting that developer adoption will eventually funnel traffic to its advertising and cloud ambitions.