Welcome to Runtime! Today: Anthropic's long-awaited S-1 statement answered some questions and raised others, how old GPUs could breathe new life into databases, and more.
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First up: Goin' public
It's a little surreal to step back and take a look at what has happened to Anthropic over just the last year. For the first stage of the AI boom it was the AMD to OpenAI's Intel until the release of Claude Opus 4.5 last November, which made it clear that coding agents would be the first killer app of the AI era and paved the way for enterprise agents in general.
In the months following that release, Anthropic saw enterprise revenue surge, made substantial gains within software development circles, fought with the US government, created a gated cybersecurity market through Project Glasswing's too-dangerous-to-release models, stumbled midyear as OpenAI pivoted to the enterprise and open models started to get really good, and closed out October with the release of its S-1 statement ahead of an IPO some time in the next several weeks. There was something in that statement for both its supporters and detractors to chew on.
Edward Targett
Yael Bizouati-Kennedy
Optimists can point to Anthropic's much-better-than-expected operating margins, while pessimists can gawk at the details of the spending commitments it has made to hyperscalers and neoclouds. One key missing detail is Anthropic's performance during the third quarter of 2026, when "tokenomics" emerged after everyone realized that throwing money at AI tokens was doing very little to improve performance or efficiency.
The company will likely update its prospectus with that information soon given that the earliest public company earnings reports only began to trickle out last week, but it will go a long way toward assessing whether Anthropic is a rocket ship or desperate to cash out before it's too late. Enterprise AI feels like it's here to stay at this point, but it's far from clear who will emerge as the winner by the end of the decade.
The rest of The Stack
Doubling down: Online casino operators have a lot of unique requirements when they're looking for an enterprise infrastructure provider, and Continent 8 has found the best way to serve them is to build and manage its own network and server infrastructure. The company operates what it said is one of the 15 largest peering networks in the world after early attempts to run gambling services on the public internet went bust.
Edward Targett
Gas pedals under: As companies like Anthropic vow to spend billions on state-of-the-art GPUs to train and serve their models, older GPUs could serve a wide variety of purposes for more run-of-the-mill applications. Earlier this year Microsoft introduced Fabric Data Warehouse, which taps into GPU capacity where it makes sense to accelerate database workloads by an impressive amount.
Mary Branscombe
All quiet on the PHP front: Last week's frenzy of activity around two critical PHP flaws does not appear to have produced any successful exploits, although there's still a long way to go. Over the weekend Sophos and Palo Alto Networks actually retracted reports that hackers had exploited vulnerable sites, although some researchers are seeing attempts to break through.
The Stack
Checkout line: Tesco does not appear to be waiting around to see how its lawsuit against Broadcom and VMware plays out, posting a job listing for a software engineer to help it migrate to the open source Proxmox platform. If all goes well, the successful candidate will have delivered "safe and predictable migration from VMware to Proxmox, successful validation of required store configurations, reduced legacy dependencies and effective operational handover," it said in the listing.
Edward Targett
Back to business: It's easy to fall in love with the shiny new tech thing as the answer to all your business worries. However, business considerations should drive technology adoption, not the other way around, according to Carne Group CDO Siobhán Noble.
Joe Fay
Stack ranking — Enterprise moves
Lelah Manz is the new CEO of Harper, joining the developer platform company after two decades in tech leadership roles at Akamai.
Laura Beaulieu is the new chief marketing officer at Ironscales, joining the email security company after leadership roles at GrowthLoops and Holistiplan.
We're also reading:
No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector: A new report from Apollo Management made the rounds over the weekend, suggesting that Anthropic has a long way to go.
Salesforce – Part Two: We missed Part One, but former Slack engineer Johnny Rodgers' account of the integration process (or lack thereof) following Salesforce's $27 billion of Slack is worth a read.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
