Anthropic files IPO, NVIDIA launches Vera Rubin and RTX Spark laptops

Anthropic kicked off the week by confidentially filing a draft S-1 with the SEC for a proposed IPO, marking the first frontier-lab to go public. Simultaneously, the company shipped Claude Opus 4.8 at the same $5/$25 per million token pricing, claiming a 4x reduction in code flaws. New Dynamic Workflows and Effort Control features target agent users. NVIDIA countered with a flurry of announcements at GTC Taipei: Cosmos 3 foundation models for physical AI (vision reasoning, world generation, action prediction) now live on HuggingFace; Vera Rubin production ramped with 150 Taiwan-based partners across 350+ factories; and the RTX Spark laptop delivering 1 petaflop of AI compute via a MediaTek partnership—plus a DGX Station deskside supercomputer for enterprise agent deployment.

Google officially retired Gemini 2.0 Flash today, urging migration to 2.5 Flash. On the regulatory front, California's SB 867 banning AI companion chatbots in children's toys cleared the Senate and moves to the Assembly. In contrast, Illinois' POWER Act requiring data centers to generate renewable energy and report water usage stalled in committee, while Democratic lawmakers push to pause $983 million in tax credits for 27 facilities. The week highlighted the accelerating pace of AI labs and hardware makers versus the fragmented, slower-moving state-level policy response.