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Human In the Loop · EP 07

Cursor's $0.50 Coding Model and Anthropic's $900B Round

Podcast Episode45 minMay 25, 2026
PodcastAIIndustry
In this episode

On May 18, 2026, Cursor shipped Composer 2.5: a coding agent that ties Claude Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Multilingual and edges it on CursorBench v3.1, at $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output — roughly one tenth the per-token price of Opus. The base model is Moonshot AI's open Kimi K2.5; 85% of the compute went into Cursor's own post-training pipeline. The same week, Anthropic is closing a $30B round at a $900B valuation, annualized revenue is going from $9B at end of 2025 to over $30B in April 2026, and Andrej Karpathy announced he's joining Anthropic's pre-training team.

If frontier coding got commoditized in seven days, what exactly is anyone paying premium for? That's the cold open. From there, Oscar and Matt filter the week's AI noise — Karpathy to Anthropic, Google I/O 2026, Gemini Spark, Antigravity 2.0, Hark's $700M Series A — debate the tools they actually adopted, and close with two hot takes you won't hear anywhere else.

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