It’s Monday, October 26th: Anthropic filed its S-1 for what could be the biggest IPO ever, and Block built a voice model that learned to talk from human conversation alone.
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10:10 AM PT · Rissa Cao, Co-Founder & CEO at Fish Audio. She’s fresh off a $52M seed and Drama 3, Fish’s most controllable TTS model yet, and Fish hit about $21M ARR and 8M users in year one. She’s live right after we dig into that story below.
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1️⃣ GOING PUBLIC: Anthropic Just Filed for What Could Be the Biggest IPO Ever
Image from Anthropic’s S-1 Filing.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, filed its S-1 to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under ticker ANT, making it the first frontier AI lab to open its books to the public.
The S-1 shows $16.3B in revenue for the first half of 2026, up from $1.1B a year earlier, against an $80.7B net loss. Most of that loss comes from the rising value of its convertible bonds, not the cost of running Claude.
Compute is the giant line item. Anthropic spent roughly $9B on compute and infrastructure in H1, up from $2.3B a year earlier, and says it could spend $750B more in the coming years. Cloud marketplaces account for 48% of revenue.
Governance is unusual. Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust holds its Class T shares and can elect a majority of the board, so Anthropic will be a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules, and public shareholders won’t get every standard protection.
Pricing is still open. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the deal, marketing reportedly starts Nov 9, and the float is targeted for the week of Nov 16 at a valuation that would match or beat SpaceX’s $1.8T.
Whatever price ANT clears in mid-November becomes the benchmark every AI lab behind it gets measured against, including how the market values revenue that still runs on enormous compute bills. Watch how investors price the trust-controlled structure, because it tests whether Wall Street will pay a premium for a lab that keeps safety governance out of shareholders’ hands.
2️⃣ SPEECH ONLY: Block's Dessa Learned to Talk Without Reading a Word
Image from Block.
Block, Jack Dorsey's payments company, unveiled Dessa, a voice model trained only on recorded human conversation that listens and talks at the same time and runs locally on a high-end MacBook.
Block announced Dessa as a "true speech-to-speech model," trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," with no text and no pretrained models. The Dessa team says it learned language from "hundreds of times fewer words" than LLMs, on one NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack.
It runs faster than real time on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. Because it is full duplex, it says "yeah" and "got it" while you talk and picks up sarcasm, laughter and sighs. Team lead Ragavan Thurairatnam called it "a GPT3 moment for speech."
The demos are uneven. The Verge noted Dessa mistook one speaker for someone named "Ronaldo," though in a side-by-side clip against OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 voice model, Dessa came across as more natural. Block's site also plays a chat about Christopher Nolan's films.
Dessa is not public. Block has a waitlist and is giving early access to "a small group of AI safety researchers," arguing that voice AI is still "nearly deaf to the emotion in our voices." Jack Dorsey wrote that "voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence."
Teams building voice agents for support, ordering or scheduling should pay attention, since Square already uses voice AI for ordering and a model that runs on a laptop could cut the cloud cost of every call. Watch what the safety researchers report about deception risk before Block opens access more widely.
🔐 Navigating the Security Dark Age: A Fireside Chat with Cognition
Today, October 26 | 10:30 AM PT | Virtual
Critical vulnerabilities in PHP, Node.js, and Linux are exposing a new reality: AI is changing the cybersecurity threat landscape.
Join Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer at Cognition and former CSO at Facebook and Yahoo, for a 45-minute fireside chat on how organizations can stay ahead of emerging threats.
Learn how to reduce your attack surface, automate vulnerability patching, and use AI agents like Devin to secure production systems.
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🧑💻 About the Editors
About Noah Frank
Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI and the workforce. His work and body of research explores the economics of emerging technology and organizational strategy. Outside of AIC, Noah heads research for Centaurian AI.
About Joy Dong
Joy is a news editor, writer, and entrepreneur at the intersection of AI and blockchain. Whether she is demystifying complex systems in her newsletter, TEA, or building streamlined solutions through her automation agency, Ownly, Joy’s mission is to make emerging tech accessible and actionable for everyone.
About Lindsay Gross
Lindsay is an AI engineer, researcher, and writer focused on how AI systems behave in practice and what it takes to make them safe. Her work sits at the intersection of AI safety, governance, and product design, and at AIC she writes about the questions that matter most as these systems scale.