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Sunday, May 31, 2026

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May 31, 2026: Anthropic dominates the week with a record $65B Series H raise and a strategic $300M acquisition of Stainless SDK, reshaping AI infrastructure and developer tooling. xAI enters the coding agent race with Grok Build, Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max sets a new benchmark for Chinese AI models, and a critical SharePoint zero-day continues to expose thousands of servers. In MENA, Egypt's FRA licenses 16 fintech firms as the country's financial digitization accelerates.

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Anthropic closes $65B Series H to become the world's most valuable AI startup, while xAI enters the coding agent race with Grok Build and Egypt's FRA greenlights 16 fintech firms.

Funding TechCrunch

Anthropic Raises $65B Series H, Surpasses OpenAI at $965B Valuation

Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, making it the most valuable private AI company in the world and surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital.

DevTools xAI

xAI Launches Grok Build: The Coding Agent CLI Enters the Arena

xAI shipped Grok Build, a terminal-native coding agent that supports up to 8 parallel sub-agents, 256K context, and scored 70.8% on SWE-Bench Verified. It launched to all SuperGrok and X Premium+ subscribers on May 25.

AI Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max Scores Highest Ever for a Chinese AI Model

Alibaba launched Qwen3.7-Max at its Cloud Summit on May 20, scoring 56.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — the highest ever for a Chinese model. It features 1M token context, agent capabilities, and can control a robot dog through tool calls.

Security BleepingComputer

1,300+ SharePoint Servers Still Exposed to Actively Exploited Zero-Day

Over 1,300 Microsoft SharePoint servers remain unpatched against CVE-2026-32201, a spoofing zero-day confirmed as actively exploited in the wild since April. CISA had set a remediation deadline of April 28.

MENA Egypt Today

Egypt's FRA Licenses 16 Fintech Companies to Accelerate Financial Digitization

Egypt's Financial Regulatory Authority approved licenses for 16 fintech companies across non-banking financial sectors, including capital markets, insurance, and digital payments. FRA Chairman Mohamed Farid announced the approvals at the Caisec25 conference.

Business TechCrunch

Anthropic Acquires Stainless: The $300M Move to Control AI SDK Infrastructure

Anthropic acquired Stainless, the SDK generation startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Meta, for over $300M. The company immediately shut down hosted SDK products for competitors, forcing rivals to find alternative tooling.