Anthropic Prices Below the Hype, and a Court Order Nobody Followed

Anthropic set its IPO price range at $70 to $78 a share on November 10, targeting a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion, a full trillion below the $2 trillion figure some reports floated just weeks ago. The offering could raise as much as $90.4 billion once you count the $26 billion that Google, Nvidia and five other strategic partners are putting in directly at the IPO price. Trading is expected to start around November 18-19 on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, right as a broader AI stock selloff has wiped billions off Nvidia and other AI-linked names this week. The company's revenue run rate hit about $81 billion by late October, up sharply from roughly $71 billion a month earlier, the kind of growth that usually argues for a bigger number, not a smaller one. Buried in the amended filing is a line worth sitting with: Anthropic says recursive self-improvement, AI helping build more capable successor models, could pose a considerable safety risk if it sharply speeds up progress, and that its own systems may be imminently close to that threshold. A company admitting that in its own IPO paperwork, while asking investors for less than the market expected, is choosing to look credible over looking impressive. That's the right call in a market this nervous.

The Delhi High Court ordered six AI-generated videos of Chief Minister Rekha Gupta removed 'forthwith' on November 6, after AAP's posts showed her as a liquor vendor, hawker and delivery agent under a fictional scheme called 'Har Har Rekha, Ghar Ghar Theka.' By November 10, MediaNama found the Facebook video gone but all five flagged X posts still live, one of them with over 512,000 views. Here's the part that stings: India already has a faster route for this. IT Amendment Rules in force since February require platforms to act on flagged synthetic media within two to three hours, yet the order never invokes them, and nobody has explained why a sitting Chief Minister needed a court case for something the rules already promise to handle in an afternoon. Justice Manoj Jain leaned on an earlier Delhi HC ruling involving Raghav Chadha to draw a line between satire and defamation, though MediaNama's own founder argues political satire doesn't stop being satire just because it looks convincing. Either way, the rules and the ruling say the same thing: take it down. Four days on, X hadn't.

Every big sale season, the same trick shows up: a product's 'original price' quietly climbs right before the discount badge appears, so a modest markdown reads like a huge one. Amazon's in-app Price History feature is built to catch that. Open any product page, tap Price History, and you get up to 365 days of what the item has actually sold for, not what today's banner claims. Don't want to dig through the page? Just ask Rufus, Amazon's built-in AI assistant, 'has this price dropped before,' and it tells you directly. It isn't bulletproof. Some sellers still rotate listings or tweak variants to dodge a clean price trail, so a chart with no real history isn't proof either way. But for most products, it turns 'biggest sale of the year' from a slogan into a number you can check before you add to cart.

Spotify's audiobooks land in India on November 12 through Audiobooks+, an add-on for Premium Family and Duo subscribers that unlocks 15 hours of listening a month from a catalog of more than 350,000 titles in 120-plus languages. It's part of a bigger global push, Spotify is expanding audiobooks from 22 markets to more than 180 by the end of the year, but the company hasn't said what the add-on will actually cost in India. Fifteen hours sounds generous until you remember most audiobooks run eight to fifteen hours themselves, so that cap is roughly one book a month for an average listener. Audible has had an answer sitting in India since 2018: Rs 199 a month, one credit to buy and keep an audiobook forever, plus unlimited streaming of its Originals and Audible Plus catalog with no credit needed. One is a rental cap with an unknown price tag. The other is a flat fee you already know, with a book that's actually yours at the end of it. Until Spotify names a number, there isn't really a contest.

There is no law in India that says when the police can crack open your phone. Not a statute, not a published rule, nothing that specifies what can be copied off the device, how long the data sits in a file somewhere, or who gets to read it. The Internet Freedom Foundation dug this up through an RTI request: Home Minister Amit Shah personally signed off on a one-time exemption from Make in India procurement rules so the National Investigation Agency could buy a Cellebrite Premium Tool, a three-year licence running about Rs 4.98 crore, awarded to a company called Nextechno Gen. The tool's own specification calls for brute-forcing passcodes across most Android and iPhone models and pulling a device's entire file system, including protected areas like Samsung's Secure Folder. Cellebrite's tools have shown up in Serbia, Jordan, Kenya and Russia, used against journalists and activists, according to researchers who've tracked them. Fifteen separate Cellebrite-related tenders appear across Indian agencies this year alone, from the Serious Fraud Investigation Office to state forensic departments. And then there's Dhruv Rathee, detained by Delhi Police on October 10 ahead of a protest, his phone and his parents' phones taken. He says officers may have tried to image his iPhone. Unverified, by IFF's own account. What isn't unverified is that the tool exists, the money's been spent, and nobody can point you to the rule that's supposed to govern any of it.