Battle Lines, Billions, & Blacklists

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🤖 OpenAI: Four Big Moves in One Week

OpenAI announced a $110B raise at a $730B pre-money valuation, led by Amazon ($50B), SoftBank ($30B), and Nvidia ($30B). Once completed, it would be the largest private funding round in history. On the same day the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic, OpenAI signed a deal to provide its models for classified Pentagon use, agreeing to red lines against domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons targeting. The company also launched GPT-5.4, its most capable model to date, with native computer-use capabilities, a 1 million token context window, and a 33% reduction in errors compared to its predecessor. It is being positioned directly at enterprise and agentic workflows, competing head-on with Anthropic and Google. And separately, Reuters reported OpenAI is building an internal alternative to GitHub, which could eventually open to outside developers, putting it in direct competition with Microsoft. TechCrunch | GPT-5.4 | Reuters

⚡ Reflection AI: From $8B to $20B in Five Months

Nvidia-backed Reflection AI, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in talks to raise at a $20B+ valuation after closing at $8B just five months ago. The company is positioning itself as America's open-source alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic, building frontier models that developers can download and modify freely. Nvidia led the prior round with $800M. Seeking Alpha | TechCrunch

🛡️ Anthropic: Blacklisted, Then Back at the Table

Anthropic refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to Claude, pushing back on two specific uses: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The Trump administration responded by ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products and designating the company a national security supply chain risk. Within days, a group of former defense officials and policy experts wrote to Congress calling the move counterproductive, arguing it weakens U.S. competitive position. As of Thursday, Dario Amodei has reopened talks with the Pentagon. The Guardian | CNBC 

⚡ Strike: Cleared for New York

Strike received its BitLicense and Money Transmitter License from the New York Department of Financial Services on March 6, clearing the company to offer bitcoin trading, payments, and custody to New York residents. Jack Mallers' platform now lets users convert up to 100% of their direct-deposited wages into bitcoin, with conversion fees waived on deposits up to $20,000 per month. Customer balances are held one-to-one and are never lent or used for company operations. New York has historically been one of the hardest states for crypto companies to crack. Strike cracked it. CoinDesk | The Block

🐙 Kraken: First Crypto Company Inside the Fed

Kraken's banking unit became the first crypto-focused institution to receive a Federal Reserve master account, giving it direct access to Fedwire, the Fed's real-time payment network. Most crypto exchanges have relied on intermediary banks to move dollars. Kraken can now do it directly, cutting cost and complexity. Custodia Bank tried and failed to get the same access. Kraken got it. Coindesk

🧠 Neuralink: Austin Is Getting Bigger

Neuralink is spending $8.2M to expand its Del Valle, Texas facilities, adding 37,607 square feet of office and manufacturing space with work beginning this month. Active hiring spans neurosurgeons, brain interface engineers, manufacturing software, and a dedicated hippocampus team. This follows a $14.7M campus buildout in 2024 and continues the steady concentration of Musk operations in Austin. Yahoo Finance 

⚓ Saronic: Port Alpha Closing In on a Location

Cameron County, Texas is moving toward a formal vote on tax abatements for Saronic's proposed Port Alpha shipyard at the Port of Brownsville. The project is a $3.2B, four-phase development on 4,387 acres that would employ 10,000 people and manufacture autonomous vessels for the U.S. military. Saronic has not officially selected a location and is still evaluating other sites, but Brownsville is the leading candidate. A public hearing is scheduled for the end of March. Rio Grande Guardian | Valley Central

🔍 Perplexity: Locking In Infrastructure

Perplexity signed a multi-year deal with CoreWeave to run its AI inference workloads on Nvidia GB200 NVL72 clusters, the most advanced hardware available today. The agreement supports Perplexity's Sonar API and multi-cloud strategy as it scales. Coreweave

💻 PsiQuantum: New Leadership for Scale

PsiQuantum appointed Victor Peng, former president of AMD and CEO of Xilinx, as interim CEO on February 10. Co-founder Jeremy O'Brien moves to Executive Chairman. Peng oversaw Xilinx through its $49B acquisition by AMD and brings hardware scaling experience PsiQuantum needs as it targets utility-scale quantum deployments in Brisbane and Chicago this year. PsiQuantum | Business Chief

👀 Watch List

💳 Stripe: Turning AI Costs Into Margin

Stripe launched a preview billing tool on March 2 that lets AI startups track token usage, apply a markup percentage, and pass the full cost through to their customers automatically. A company paying OpenAI for tokens can now set a 30% markup and bill it directly, without building the infrastructure themselves. The feature works with Stripe's own AI gateway as well as third-party gateways from Vercel and OpenRouter. Currently available via waitlist. TechCrunch

🚇 Boring Company: Nashville Tunnel Rolls On Despite City Hall

The Boring Company's Music City Loop is moving forward in Nashville, connecting the Tennessee Capitol to Nashville International Airport through 10 miles of tunnels under state-owned roads. The Nashville Metro Council passed a resolution opposing the project 20-15, but the vote is nonbinding and carries no legal weight. The company does not need city approval. The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce came out against the resolution the same day, calling the project "an important step toward addressing our transportation challenges" and warning that opposition sends the wrong signal to businesses considering investing in the state. State legislators are actively moving bills to formalize oversight of underground transit projects statewide, creating a cleaner regulatory path for the Boring Company and projects like it. The project is happening. The Tennessean

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

I'm building [product] for [market]. Everyone says the TAM is huge. Help me calculate the actual addressable market by working backwards from:

How many people have this exact problem?

How many would pay to solve it?

How much would they actually pay?

What's my realistic capture rate?

Give me the honest number, not the pitch deck number.

📚 Content

✈️ The Sound of Fury

Anduril built a fighter jet. Not a drone. A fighter jet. The YFQ-44A Fury just completed weapons integration tests with the U.S. Air Force, carrying inert AIM-120 missiles, and it is the first uncrewed aircraft to carry the Fighter designation in Air Force history. Pirate Wires goes deep on how this happened, what Anduril's open autonomy architecture actually means, and why a production decision is expected by year end. If you want to understand where defense technology is actually going, this is the piece to read this week.

📓 Claude Curriculum

Anthropic quietly dropped a free AI curriculum this week, and it's legitimately useful. DataChaz broke it down in a thread worth saving. We are using Cowork more and more here at LFG.

💰 The Wealth Gap Has a Wealth Gap

Elon isn't competing with other billionaires anymore. He lapped them.

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