In September, Baseten was worth $2.15B. This week: up to $13B.
Nine months later, nothing about the company had changed. The market did.
Meanwhile: the U.S. kept Anthropic’s best model switched off - and Anthropic’s CEO asked Washington to lead the world’s AI rules. Five days after Washington pulled his flagship.
A new model takes the lead every few weeks. The fight worth watching now is over who gets to run it, ship it, and shut it off.
Lead Story
A $13 Billion Bet That Open-Source AI Already Won
Baseten is closing a $1.5B round at up to a $13B valuation.
Their whole argument: most companies no longer need the most expensive model to get the job done.
CEO Tuhin Srivastava says open-source models are “getting very, very good” - good enough to mix with proprietary ones depending on the task.
Baseten doesn’t build models. It rents infrastructure from 20 cloud providers and runs AI on top, on your own data.
Customers like Cursor and OpenEvidence are already shifting over - one reportedly at 30% the cost of a proprietary alternative.
The valuation climbed fast: $2.15B in September, $5B in January, $13B now.
Investors are betting the money in AI flows to whoever runs models cheapest, as prices keep sliding. [Read More →]
Special Coverage
AI Found 18 Diagnoses Doctors Had Missed for Years
A June 18 study in NEJM AI took 376 rare-disease cases that specialists couldn’t crack and reran them through an OpenAI reasoning model.
It surfaced 18 new diagnoses - a 4.8% yield in cases that had stumped experts for years.
The model never diagnosed anyone. It produced evidence-linked leads, and physicians did the confirming.
One was Kyra. Her muscle weakness went unexplained for nearly 20 years - through a wheelchair and a ventilator.
The model traced it to an HSPB8 variant. A counselor called her a week before her 28th birthday.
“The bottleneck is time,” one researcher said. No specialist can keep 8,000 rare diseases in their head.
The doctors still made every call. The model just pointed them toward the cases worth a second look. [Read More →]
The Bigger Fight
The Lab Whose Model Got Banned Just Asked to Govern AI
At a closed-door G7 lunch on June 17, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis pushed for a U.S.-led AI rules coalition, with President Trump and top tech CEOs in the room.
Canada’s Mark Carney agreed the U.S. could lead it. Sam Altman floated a parallel testing forum. Nothing binding emerged.
Five days earlier, though, U.S. export controls had forced Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and restrict Mythos 5 worldwide.
So Amodei asked the same government that switched off his best product to lead the world’s AI order.
The labs have decided they’d rather help write the rules than fight them - even as the governments across the table keep showing they’ll act on their own, without warning. [Read More →] [ For more context→]
Special Feature
The Man Who Built the iPod Now Wants You to Use Less Tech
Tony Fadell - father of the iPod - spotted a New York subway ad for the iPod Shuffle selling zero screen time as the feature.
That is the appeal of “slowtech”: flip phones, wired headphones, and cameras that cannot post to Instagram.
The twist for AI is clear. The fastest tech in the world may win by helping people use less tech. [Read the full article →]
Also Read
Some Anthropic insiders never lost access. Dragos and Cisco kept Mythos Preview access via Project Glasswing (~200 vetted orgs) even through the public shutdown. [Read More]
The biggest talent move of the year. Noam Shazeer — “Attention Is All You Need” co-author and Gemini co-lead — left Google for OpenAI. [Read More]
Meta locks in the power. Meta signed deals for ~1.6 gigawatts of Crusoe compute across Texas and Missouri — enough to power a million-plus homes. [Read More]
ChatGPT gets better at health. 230M+ people a week ask it health questions; GPT-5.5 Instant now matches frontier models on health tests. [Read More]
Midjourney’s strangest launch. Midjourney Medical: a 60-second full-body scanner billed as “casual as a trip to the spa.” [Read More]
Top Tweet of the Week
Min Choi rounded up 10 AI-generated ASMR clips - no camera, no mic, just millions of views and replies arguing over whether they’re real.
Watch here:
Worth a Try AI Tools
Pixi - Drop an intelligent 3D character into a DM instead of texting. Built out of Andrew Ng’s AI Fund; works in iMessage today.
Why try it? The first fresh idea in messaging in a while that isn’t another chatbot. [See it in action →]
Apartments.com Ai - CoStar’s new voice and text apartment search. Just say “pet-friendly 2BR with in-unit laundry in Denver.” 50 languages, 3D tours.
Why try it? A clean look at AI quietly replacing the form-and-filter web. [Try it here →]
Before You Go
The market spent the week betting you’ll never need the best model. The government spent it deciding the best model was too dangerous to leave on.
Somewhere between “meh” and “national emergency” is where AI actually lives.
See you next week.