Plus: The accelerating pace of U.S. tariff refunds.
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Thursday, August 6, 2026
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Anthropic is building an in-house team to design its own AI chips for Claude

Anthropic has begun assembling a team of software and hardware engineers to design custom chips for its Claude AI models. The goal is to run the technology faster and scale down costs for its customers. Anthropic offered no indication of when its chip efforts might bear fruit. The company also didn't clarify whether it plans to handle manufacturing on its own.

According to industry sources cited by Reuters, the price tag for developing an advanced AI chip can approach half a billion dollars, driven by the need for specialized engineering talent and the high cost of achieving reliable, defect-free fabrication.

Anthropic isn't the first AI company to pursue its own chip. In June, OpenAI unveiled its Broadcom-built Jalapeño chip, designed for inference workloads. Alphabet's TPU chips serve as the foundation for Google DeepMind's AI systems, and Meta has separately been working to bring its own MTIA accelerators to bear on AI workloads.

Anthropic has already pursued a range of deals to access AI computing hardware, including arrangements with AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD. Last month, The Information reported that Anthropic was scouting Samsung as a potential manufacturing partner for custom chips.

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Here's what you need to know

S&P 500 rode a fifth straight day of gains to a new all-time high. Better-than-expected corporate results and hopes that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen are lifting investor sentiment. Nvidia stock rose nearly 4% after Elon Musk said SpaceX would use the company's chips exclusively.
Paramount will go to trial in March 2027 over its Warner Bros. merger. The delay means the company will have to pay Warner Bros. shareholders an extra $7 million daily ticking fee starting Oct. 1. A multi-state coalition is contesting the $81 billion deal on anticompetitive grounds.
White House exempts open-weight AI models from security reviews. The Trump administration will reportedly focus on frontier systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google that carry cybersecurity risks. Models released as open weights give anyone the ability to run and adapt them locally.
OpenAI settled claims it favored foreign workers for $3.2 million. The Justice Department alleged that the company violated the Immigration and Nationality Act by steering jobs toward workers with temporary employment visas. OpenAI is dedicating $2 million to workers the department says were harmed.
Google's longtime chief scientist leaves to launch an AI startup. Jeff Dean is co-founding Discovery Loop to automate scientific and engineering research with three others from Google. Dean spent 27 years with the company and founded deep-learning research organization Google Brain in 2011.

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Washington has refunded $100 billion in tariffs. Importers are still waiting

The Trump administration has refunded approximately $100 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court declared illegal in February, working through around 60% of the $166 billion that U.S. Customs and Border Protection collected on imports.

The pace of payouts has been accelerating in recent months. The Treasury paid out $49.2 billion in customs refunds in June alone, more than double the roughly $22 billion disbursed in May. Combined, those two months accounted for about 42% of the total then owed as CBP expanded the categories of imports eligible for claims through its portal.

At the same time, the administration has been pursuing alternative legal avenues to restore the tariff structure, an approach that has drawn its own wave of litigation.

The scale of remaining work is substantial. The number of affected parties stretches to more than 330,000 importers across upward of 53 million entries. Nearly 20,000 refunds totaling approximately $1.6 billion are also in limbo because importers have not provided the required bank account information.

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