Anthropic is having a month.

The AI lab finished May by surpassing OpenAI in market share of business spending for the first time, Ramp just revealed. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation (also besting OpenAI) at the end of May, then waltzed into June by filing confidential paperwork for an IPO, reportedly on the strength of its first-ever profitable quarter.

Then on Friday, the Trump administration renewed its war on the model maker by sending a letter demanding it ban non-Americans, including Anthropic’s employees, from accessing its state-of-the-art models: the limited-release Mythos 5 and the more guarded version of Mythos released to the public three days earlier, called Fable 5.

This essentially forced Anthropic to pull its latest all-powerful model from the market altogether.

Although the White House invoked an obscure export control directive when ordering the ban, the exact cause remains unclear. The chatter was that hackers easily bypassed Fable 5’s guardrails, which were intended to prevent access to Mythos’ capabilities. That model is so good at finding security flaws in software code that Anthropic itself marketed it as dangerous and restricted its public release.

This new drama comes after Anthropic famously refused to allow the government to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. As a result, in March, the Trump administration declared the company a supply-chain risk.

That didn’t deter Anthropic’s sales to businesses. Quite the opposite, Ramp’s data shows. Ironically, this latest feud with the Trump administration, which also appears to validate the hubbub over Mythos’ mythological power, may help rather than hurt Anthropic, according to Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian. Kharazian is the person who compiled the business-spending AI data.

“If anything, it’ll probably boost them,” Kharazian told TechCrunch. “Anthropic’s best month on record, as far as business adoption, was the month that the Department of Defense labeled them a supply-chain risk. There’s a lot of aura that comes with your model specifically being named too dangerous to use.”

Ramp’s data isn’t granular enough for us to see how much of a financial hit the company will take by pulling Mythos and Fable 5 off the market.

Still the data, from more than 70,000 businesses that use its platform, shows that customers heavily use Anthropic’s Opus models and that business use has been growing.

For instance, Ramp reported that Anthropic’s share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose 2.5 percentage points in May to 41%. This compares to OpenAI, which commanded 39.5% of AI subscriptions by its customers, essentially flat from the prior month. (OpenAI still greatly leads Anthropic in overall consumer usage, according to new data from Sensor Tower.)

Beyond subscriptions, the vast majority of what companies spend money on is API calls to the model, which cover token use for activities like coding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has a strong reputation as a powerful AI coding tool.

Ramp can’t always see from the spending data which models most businesses are using. When it can see the model details — in about one-third of transactions — businesses are mostly spending on various flavors of Claude Opus, particularly the later versions. Opus is the model that preceded Mythos and is still openly available.

In fact, in late May, Anthropic released a new version, Opus 4.8.

Mythos had not been on the market for that long, having been released to limited users as of April. And Fable 5 was shut down after a few days.

While we can’t predict how this latest drama with the White House will impact Anthropic’s ability to go public as it hoped to (public-market investors tend to be wary of companies embroiled in controversies with the government), the numbers indicate that Anthropic’s available models are more popular with businesses than ever before.

Spotify has spent the past year quietly removing tens of thousands of fake podcasts that were allegedly being used to promote illegal online pharmacies and scam websites. Now, a new congressional report is raising questions about how the scheme was able to flourish on one of the world’s largest audio platforms in the first place.

According to the Wired report, bad actors created thousands of fake podcasts that were never intended to attract real listeners. Instead, they were designed to manipulate Spotify’s search rankings and boost the visibility of websites selling prescription drugs without prescriptions, including opioids, stimulants, and benzodiazepines.

Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes, over 3,000 podcast shows, and took action against roughly 3,500 accounts connected to the operation. The takedown came after sustained scrutiny from lawmakers and media investigations that highlighted the scale of the problem.

The report was led by Senator Maggie Hassan, who criticized Spotify for not moving quickly enough and for failing to report the activity to law enforcement despite links to websites involved in illegal drug sales.

The podcasts were never really podcasts

One of the more surprising details is that most of the content wasn’t created to be consumed.

Spotify told investigators that many of the fake podcasts functioned primarily as search-engine spam. The operators reportedly stuffed podcast titles, descriptions, and cover art with links directing users to online pharmacy websites and scam operations. The goal was to exploit Spotify’s authority in search engines and improve the ranking of those external sites.

In fact, Spotify said 94% of the removed episodes received zero plays, while 99% attracted fewer than 10 streams. However, some episodes did find an audience. A handful reportedly generated thousands of listens and included instructions for purchasing drugs such as modafinil using cryptocurrency.

The report also found similar content appearing across other podcast platforms, highlighting how easy it has become to distribute large amounts of low-quality content across multiple services at once.

AI is making the spam problem even bigger

Researchers and lawmakers believe artificial intelligence is making these operations easier to run.

The report points to AI-generated podcasts featuring synthetic voices and automatically generated content designed to mimic legitimate shows. Spotify told investigators it currently has AI moderation systems for music spam but does not specifically prohibit AI-generated podcasts. The company also acknowledged that it is not particularly well-positioned to identify AI-created podcast content.

Spotify says it uses automated detection tools, human reviewers, and external moderation services to identify rule-breaking content. However, the congressional report argues that the scale of the fake podcast operation demonstrates significant gaps in those defenses.

The incident highlights a growing challenge facing internet platforms. As AI makes it cheaper and faster to create content at scale, spam campaigns no longer need websites alone. They can exploit trusted platforms, search algorithms, and recommendation systems to reach users in ways that are increasingly difficult to detect.

For Spotify, the controversy is a reminder that content moderation challenges are no longer limited to social networks. Even podcast platforms are becoming targets for sophisticated spam operations designed to game search rankings and funnel users toward illegal or potentially dangerous services.

Amazon Prime Day is back, it is four days long again, and, for the first time in Prime Day’s history, it’s kicking off in June rather than July. 

So, if you spent last summer waiting until mid-July to buy that thing at a discounted price, you now have about two fewer weeks to make up your mind.

When is Prime Day 2026 sale?

Prime Day 2026 runs through June 23–26, kicking off at 12:01 a.m. PDT on June 23. That brings it roughly two weeks ahead of the Prime Day 2025 sale, which ran July 8–11. 

Amazon has not explained the shift, but I think there’s a reasonable explanation here. Moving to late June positions the event squarely ahead of the back-to-school shopping season, rather than overlapping with it. 

The change, in my opinion, could benefit both buyers and sellers. What’s even more interesting is that you don’t have to wait until June 23 as early deals are already live across Amazon’s devices, books, Audible, Prime Video, groceries, and items sold by small businesses. 

What deals are available right now before Prime Day starts?

If you’re a Prime member, you can save up to 65% on select Kindle, Echo, Ring, Fire TV, Blink, and eero devices right now. In fact, Amazon Haul has deals starting at $1, which, if you ask me, add up quite fast to your cart’s bill. 

Books are up to 65% off in print and up to 80% off on Kindle for the e-reading enthusiasts. You can read more about the early Prime deals here. Apart from these, you should also get deals on products from other brands that the e-commerce platform would either unveil a few days ahead of the event or during the event. 

Prime members in other regions like Australia, Brazil, India, and Japan will get their version of Prime Day later this summer. The event otherwise covers 23 countries including the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and others.