Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian. This week in tech, we’re discussing Anthropic’s meteoric rise, both theological and financial, and California’s unprecedented infusion of political cash from Silicon Valley.With stock market filing, Anthropic takes the lead over OpenAIAnthropic, the AI firm behind the Claude chatbot, announced on Monday it had filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market. The company announced the filing in a short, two-paragraph blogpost that did not give an exact timeline for the company to go public and did not reveal the number of shares that it would offer.The filing continues the company’s banner year, as well as pre-empts its rival OpenAI, which is expected to imminently file for its own IPO. It’s the second blow in the rivalry in just a week. Las week, Anthropic leapfrogged OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable startup when it announced it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn, eclipsing OpenAI’s $852bn valuation. Anthropic was valued at $380bn in February, but, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the company’s “mind-blowing” revenue growth, particularly thanks to its coding tool that has proved extremely popular with business clients, is poised to bring the company its first profitable quarter in June.Once a smaller player in the AI race, Anthropic’s rapid ascent over the past year has placed it neck-and-neck with OpenAI in terms of dominance over the industry. The filing is a triumph in that ascension. OpenAI, where Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once worked, has struggled to keep up. OpenAI also operates a coding product, Codex, which is not nearly as popular as Claude Code. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, a cybersecurity AI bot, made a major international splash in April with its ability to find bugs in widely used software. OpenAI’s similar product, released weeks later to little fanfare, looked like an also-ran.The reversal of fortune for ChatGPT’s maker is a remarkable loss of first-mover advantage, which may affect investor appetite. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all slated to debut on the stock market this year, inflating it by at least three trillion dollars, and the level of hype surrounding each company will determine its valuation. If OpenAI continues to lose ground to Anthropic, it seems likely that Sam Altman will become the veep to Amodei’s president.Silicon Valley and Hollywood