Monday, August 17, 2026

Anthropic's unreleased Claude improves Riemann hypothesis bound

An unreleased research version of Claude increased the proven lower bound for the fraction of Riemann zeta zeros satisfying the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%. It tested 650 ideas across 60 sub-agents, with results validated by Anthropic mathematicians and formalized in Lean.

Databricks closes $5B round at $190B valuation

Databricks closed $5 billion in financing at a $190 billion valuation. CEO Ali Ghodsi said the capital will go toward Genie, Lakebase, and Unity AI Gateway, with the company benefiting from the agentic AI wave.

Gravis Robotics raises $200M from SoftBank for autonomous construction

SoftBank is investing $200M in Gravis Robotics' Series A — claimed the largest in construction robotics history. The ETH Zurich spinout retrofits excavators with its Gravis Rack autonomous control kit and uses synthetic training to bridge the sim-to-real gap.

Bedrock Robotics deploys autonomous excavators on live construction sites

Bedrock Robotics has deployed fully autonomous, retrofitted excavators on active infrastructure projects in Texas and Nevada, including a water treatment facility with Sundt Construction and a 1.2M cubic yard site with Zachry Construction. Backed by $350M in VC, the startup targets labor shortages as 40% of the construction workforce nears retirement.

Meta turns toward open source again with new model release