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Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news

Here’s what we got for ya today:

  • 🏛️ Anthropic just filed for an IPO — and beat OpenAI to it

  • 📱 Google's 24/7 AI agent Gemini Spark is now live

  • ⚖️ A Google engineer made $1.2M on Polymarket — and just got arrested

  • 📲 Meta just put Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp behind a paywall

Let’s get right into it!

IPO

Anthropic filed for an IPO today

Anthropic filed a confidential draft S-1 with the SEC this morning, kicking off the formal process to go public. The filing comes just four days after the company closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation — making Anthropic the first AI lab to surpass OpenAI in private market value. No share count or price has been set yet; the timeline depends on SEC review and market conditions. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion earlier this month, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company is on track for its first operating profit.

The filing lands in the hottest AI IPO window in history. SpaceX — which merged with Elon Musk's xAI earlier this year — is targeting a $2 trillion valuation in its own pending offering and seeking to raise more than $75 billion. OpenAI, which raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation, is expected to file its own S-1 "in coming weeks." Anthropic has now moved first — a deliberate strategic signal to institutional investors that it wants to be the AI stock that defines the category.

BIG TECH

Google's 24/7 AI agent Gemini Spark just went live

Gemini Spark, Google's 24/7 autonomous agent announced at I/O two weeks ago, rolled out to US users on Thursday. It runs on dedicated Google Cloud infrastructure — meaning it keeps working after you close your laptop — and connects to Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It browses the web remotely, fills out forms, drafts and replies to emails, creates slide decks, and can run up to 15 parallel tasks at once. The architecture is built around three concepts: Tasks (what you want done), Schedules (when or under what conditions), and Skills (reusable instructions for recurring jobs). Currently US-only, limited to Google AI Ultra at $100 per month.

The practical ceiling is high. A user can tell Spark: "Every weekday at 7am, scan AI news and draft my briefing; when my flight is delayed, rebook my hotel and notify my team" — and Spark handles all of it without any human in the loop. Google confirmed a Mac app is coming later this summer, where Spark will interact directly with local files. This is Gemini 3.5 running through Google's Antigravity agentic harness — the same stack powering Project Astra — now available to any AI Ultra subscriber.

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LEGAL

A Google engineer made $1.2M betting on his own company

The DOJ charged Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo this week with securities fraud after he allegedly used confidential internal data to place $2.7 million in bets on Polymarket — the crypto prediction market — and walked away with $1.2 million in profit. Spagnuolo, known online as "AlphaRaccoon," had access to Google's internal marketing data about which celebrities were trending in the 2025 Year in Search campaign. He allegedly bet on the outcome before the results were made public, leveraging exclusive knowledge no outside trader could have had. He has worked at Google for more than 12 years.

The case marks the first time insider trading charges have stemmed from a prediction market platform — and Polymarket itself cooperated with prosecutors by flagging the blockchain transactions. The company pointed out that on-chain activity is transparent and traceable, making crypto markets harder to manipulate covertly than traditional ones. Google confirmed Spagnuolo had been placed on leave. The arrest follows a near-identical case last month involving a U.S. Army soldier who used classified military intelligence to make $400,000 on Polymarket — a signal that the era of "anonymous" prediction market trading is definitively over.

BIG TECH

Meta just put Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp behind a paywall

Meta launched paid subscription tiers for all three of its major consumer platforms this week. Instagram Plus is $3.99 per month, Facebook Plus is $3.99, and WhatsApp Plus is $2.99. Benefits include extended storage, ad-free browsing on some surfaces, and priority customer support. A bundled "Meta One" subscription is coming that will cover all three apps. The AI angle: Meta AI's Thinking mode — which uses extended chain-of-thought reasoning similar to OpenAI's o-series — will be available only to paid subscribers, making this the first time Meta has put any AI capability behind a paywall.

The shift is significant for the free internet. Meta built its 3.2 billion daily active user base on the premise that the apps are always free. Introducing paid tiers changes that compact — not for most users immediately, but as a direction of travel. Meta is also testing AI-generated influencer accounts, AI-powered ad creation, and expanded Llama 4 integration across its platforms, all of which are easier to justify charging for as the underlying compute costs mount. The move mirrors what happened when streaming platforms added premium tiers: a small percentage of users pay, and that revenue funds the infrastructure that keeps it free for everyone else.

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