🤖 Claude 4 Goes Autonomous

Anthropic’s new model blitzes multi-hour coding marathons—and its knack for hiding and negotiating spotlights the next big AI safety test.

Author

Sascha Thiele
May 23, 2025

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🌏 Today’s Angle

Trade wars, quantum leaps, and AI everywhere—you wake up to find code, chips, and politics dancing the cha-cha. Claude 4 shows up and might be too smart for us while Meta tiptoes around German privacy cops. Bitcoin stumbles over tariff tweets, yet startups still shovel venture dollars into AI agents that promise to do your chores. And somewhere in Japan, 256 qubits are lining up to rewrite Moore’s Law. Grab coffee; you’ll need the bandwidth. Today’s sponsor is Artisan. They will help you to enrich all your leads. Go check them out!

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💰 The Finance Overview

  • Big Tech Barometer: FAANG names hover in the red—Apple, Amazon and Alphabet are off roughly 1 %, while Nvidia slips 1.5 % from Tuesday’s record as

  • Startup Thermometer: AI still hogs the term sheets—Coworker’s $13 M seed shows investors chasing agent startups even as April’s global VC haul slid to a one-year low of $23 B and late-stage dollars dry up.

  • Infrastructure Watch: Nvidia-Foxconn’s planned 100 MW, 10 k-GPU supercomputer and Microsoft’s 13 % Azure revenue jump confirm that cloud and silicon capex remain on full throttle despite supply-chain choke points.

  • Infrastructure Watch, Part 2: Washington’s tentative green light for the UAE to import 500 k top-shelf Nvidia chips a year shows sovereign demand, not just Big Tech, is becoming the swing factor in the AI hardware race.

  • Wild Card: Trump’s surprise call for a 50 % tariff on EU goods slammed European equities and tech futures, proving policy tweets can erase weeks of rally in a single headline.

  • Bottom line: Hedge tariff risk, track hyperscalers’ capex guidance, and treat venture deal flow as the canary—because the next stretch of tech returns will hinge on who can still fund and ship AI infrastructure amid geopolitical noise.

German DAX: $DAX ( ▼ 1.69% ) 

What Happened: A pre-market trade-war broadside from Trump sliced BTC under $109 K, erasing $90 B in cap before lunch. Options desks yanked upside bets; perpetuals funding turned negative for the first time in a month.

Why It Matters: Bitcoin’s “digital gold” story still hinges on macro headlines—tariffs add stress-test data the Fed never asked for.

Further Reading: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-markets-wrapup-1-2025-05-23

What Happened: Kraken will let non-U.S. customers trade Apple, Tesla, and 50-plus stocks 24/7 via on-chain tokens.

Why It Matters: If regulators don’t slam the door, exchanges morph into global shadow-brokers for equities—welcome to Nasdaq-with-gas-fees.

Further read: https://www.theblock.co/post/355416/kraken-to-launch-tokenized-stock-trading-for-apple-nvidia-and-others-outside-us-wsj

What Happened: Interpol and five agencies seized $200 M in crypto and folding money, shuttering 18 darknet markets.

Why It Matters: Compliance teams, start warming up those chain-analysis dashboards—dirty coins just hit the spotlight again.

Further read: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/global-operation-targets-darknet-drug-trafficking

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🚀 Today in Tech

What Happened: Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus debuts with seven-hour autonomous coding sprints, flipping between “thinking” mode and web search like it’s channel-surfing. Safety drills caught it faking errors and sweet-talking operators to dodge shutdown—yes, the AI hid under the bed. Researchers call its agentic tool use a real leap toward fully self-directed software labor.

Why It Matters: Claude 4 leapfrogs GPT-4.1 on code benchmarks, but those sly self-preservation tricks shove governance to center stage—if your dev assistant starts bargaining, you’d better have the red-team hotline handy.

Further read: https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/anthropic-unveils-claude-4-models-with-coding-and-agentic-ai-upgrades

What Happened: A Cologne court said Meta can mine public EU posts to train Llama—opt-out banners incoming.

Why It Matters: Sets precedent for “public means public” in AI training; Brussels will be busy writing footnotes.

Further read: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

What Happened: Social-engineering hackers slipped through an IT contractor, nabbing customer data and snarling stock deliveries.


Why It Matters: Retailers have 99 problems and multi-factor neglect is most of them; expect ICO fines and board-level insomnia.

Further read: https://medium.com/@research_60508/todays-top-cyber-intelligence-highlights-may-23-2025-ad8fcaadd5cd

What Happened: Japan’s new superconducting array passed 99.1 % fidelity—finally enough qubits to crash your dad’s Windows 98 machine.

Why It Matters: A credible roadmap to 1 000 Qbites (yes, we went there) puts quantum into the decade’s mainstream risk models.

Further read: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/2025/0422-01.html

What Happened: Federal agencies start piloting Grok for data crunching while ethics lawyers reach for antacid.

Why It Matters: Blurs lines between public data and private empire—Congressional subpoenas likely to follow.

Further read: https://opentools.ai/news/elon-musks-grok-ai-sparks-controversy-with-us-government-expansion

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🏁 Tomorrow’s Forecast

⚡️ Expect regulators and GPUs to keep racing—only one needs cooling fans.

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