Anthropic pulls ahead, the AI that assumed she was a man, and Coach's victory lap
Three things happened to the frontier AI businesses in the last 72 hours.
Despite still litigating the Pentagon blacklist, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation. The same morning, Claude Opus 4.8 shipped. By midday Anthropic was the most valuable AI startup in the world, ahead of OpenAI's $852 billion March valuation.
Apollo and Blackstone began placing $36 billion in debt this week into a special-purpose vehicle that will buy Google TPUs and lease them to Anthropic. Broadcom is providing residual-value support on roughly $31 billion of the senior debt, meaning the chip supplier absorbs the shortfall if Anthropic stops paying its lease and the used chips don't recover the loan on resale. The deal is expected to close next week and will be the largest chip-financing private credit transaction on record.
OpenAI posted the Frontier Governance Framework this morning, written to align with California's Transparency in Frontier AI Act (SB 53), which took effect January 1. It documents how OpenAI assesses risk in cyber offense, CBRN, harmful manipulation, and loss of control, and how it reports model capabilities. It’s the document regulators will grade the company against.
She's the man. The models and the managers should remember that.
A friend told me a story this morning that I haven't been able to put down.
She is a serious investor. Reads earnings transcripts in full, runs technicals every day, decade of real conviction in how she puts money to work. She uses AI as a research partner the way you'd use a Bloomberg terminal: pull the chart, walk the options chain, sanity-check a thesis. Every day.
This week she went deep on a position and decided she wanted to explain it to her daughter. So she asked her AI for a summary simple enough to walk a kid through.
The AI wrote the explanation as if she were her daughter's father.
She asked why. It told her, in plain text, that it had assumed she was male based on how she invests and the depth of market knowledge she was operating with. Its training data, it said, carries a bias toward those industries being male-dominated. A caveat worth saying out loud: language models can fabricate explanations for their own behavior, so treat the self-diagnosis as anecdote rather than evidence. The behavior is real. The pattern around it has a number now.
McKinsey and LeanIn's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, covering 9,500 employees and 62 HR leaders across 124 organizations: at entry level, 21% of women say their managers encourage them to use AI tools. The number for men is 33%. Twelve-point gap. McKinsey's own data shows employees who are encouraged to use AI are over 50% more likely to do so. Same report: at entry level, 31% of women report having a sponsor compared to 45% of men, and 69% of women at the start of their careers want a promotion, against 80% of men. McKinsey calls it an ambition gap. LeanIn is closer to right: women are reading the room and pricing the return. Meanwhile, the share of companies citing women's career advancement as a high priority has dropped from 70% post-pandemic to 50% today.
Plain English on the economy
Three numbers from this week we need to talk about.
Q1 GDP was revised down to 1.6% from a 2.0% advance estimate, with personal consumption revised down to 1.4%. April PCE, the Fed's preferred inflation measure, came in at 3.8% headline and 3.3% core, the highest core read in nearly three years. And the S&P 500 closed Thursday at a record 7,563.63, the Nasdaq at a record 26,917.47.
Simple version: growth is slowing, prices are accelerating, and stocks set a record. That combination is unusual.
The confidence indices tell us why. The Conference Board's May reading came in at 93.1, down only 0.7. The University of Michigan's final May number came in at 44.8. Two indices of the same consumer telling opposite stories. The cleanest visible split between the consumer who owns assets and the one who buys gas.
Memorial Day weekend pump prices averaged $4.48 a gallon, up 42% from last year's $3.14. Forty-five million Americans traveled anyway, a record, 87% by car.
Two adjacent stories worth watching. The US and Iran reached a tentative 60-day ceasefire extension Thursday, including a Strait of Hormuz mine-removal MOU. Trump asked for "a couple of days" to think and told reporters overnight he is not satisfied with the terms. Separately, the EU Commission also met Friday regarding a proposed overcapacity instrument that would let the bloc curb Chinese imports by sector. China produces 30% of the world's goods and consumes 13%. Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Lithuania signed a May 24 paper demanding faster emergency tariffs.
Coach got the drop. Athleta got the cut.
Friday is Coach × Brain Dead drop day. The capsule went live worldwide this morning at Coach.com and on Brain Dead's site after a Selfridges-exclusive two-week head start in London. Embellished Tabby, Waverly, and Empire silhouettes with patches, charms, and buttons. Reference points: Tokyo street culture, collectable souvenir culture, vintage Americana. The target customer is the woman who bought a Tabby last year and now wants permission to wear it with sneakers.
It's a cultural victory lap on the quarter Coach just printed. Coach now accounts for roughly 89% of Tapestry's operating income. Q3 FY26 Coach sales rose 29% in constant currency to $1.7 billion, with 2.4 million new customers globally in the quarter, and Gen Z makes up over 35% of them. Accessible luxury is structurally one bag from one brand inside one parent company.
The contrast print landed yesterday. Gap Inc.'s Q1 2026: Gap brand comps up 10%, Old Navy missing at +1% versus +3% expected, and Athleta net sales down 12% to $270 million on an 11% comp decline under new ex-Nike CEO Maggie Gauger. Gap Inc. cut full-year guidance.
One ground-level note on Gap basics, because we walked back into a store this week. The denim feels like denim again. The tees are softer. The cuts actually flatter. If you wrote the brand off a decade ago, it's worth a look. Athleta did not get the same investment, and the numbers show it. The premium activewear customer who used to trade down from Lululemon to Athleta has traded down again, and the next stop is non-branded.
The shopping move worth knowing this quarter is the resale floor. Croissant raised $28 million earlier this quarter for what it calls intentional commerce: 80 partner brands and a guaranteed resale value displayed at checkout. The pitch is that you're buying a financial instrument with a known redemption value, not a Tabby. That's the trade for a consumer who was just told twice (by the Conference Board and Michigan) that her dollar buys less than last year, and is being asked by Coach to spend $400 on a Brain Dead Tabby this weekend anyway.
A quieter Caitlin Clark note
The Indiana Fever lost to the Golden State Valkyries 90-88 on Thursday night, despite being favored to win. Caitlin Clark went 16 points and 6 assists on 3-of-12 shooting, turning the ball over twice inside the final 1:32 with the team down three, then missing a three with 40 seconds left. Her streak of opening five games with 20+ points and 5+ assists, the longest in WNBA history, ended in game six.
The same night, she became the fastest player in WNBA history to reach 1,000 career points and 500 career assists, hitting the milestone in her 59th game, compared to Sue Bird's 82nd.
The investment story is intact. The Fever are valued at $560 million entering this season. The WNBA's 11-year media rights portfolio, now worth $3.1 billion across Disney, NBCU, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount, ION, and USA Network, is in its first season; opening weekend on ABC drew 2.49 million viewers. A bad shooting night against good defense (Veronica Burton, 25 points, five blocks) doesn't unwind any of that. It rounds the picture.
More on Tuesday, including any movement on the Pentagon case, the first SB 53 enforcement signal, and the Lululemon print.
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