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IBL News | New York

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude.ai chatbot, introduced this month Claude for Financial Services, a solution for financial professionals to analyze markets, conduct research, and make investment decisions.

The so-called Financial Analysis Solution unifies users’ financial data—from market feeds to internal data stored in platforms like Databricks and Snowflake—into a single interface. It allows access to critical data sources with direct hyperlinks to source materials.

It also comes with pre-built MCP connectors to access financial data providers and enterprise platforms.

Developers can build custom applications via the company’s API.

Anthropic said it includes the company’s Claude 4 models, Claude Code, and Claude for Enterprise with expanded usage limits, implementation support, and other features.

“Claude provides the complete platform for financial AI—from immediate deployment to custom development,” Anthropic said in a release.

According to Anthropic, these real-time financial data providers include:

• Box enables secure document management and data room analysis.
• Daloopa supplies high-quality fundamentals and KPIs from all public filings, disclosures and presentations.
• FactSet provides comprehensive equity prices, fundamentals, and consensus estimates.
• Morningstar contributes valuation data and research analytics.
• Palantir builds AI-driven platforms that help governments and enterprises integrate, analyze, and act on large-scale data to make critical operational decisions.
• PitchBook delivers industry-leading private capital market data and research, empowering users to source investment and fundraising opportunities, conduct due diligence and benchmark performance, faster and with greater confidence.
• S&P Global enables access to Capital IQ Financials, earnings call transcripts, and more–essentially your entire research workflow.
• Databricks offers unified analytics for big data and AI workloads.
• Snowflake provides an easy, connected, and trusted data and AI platform that allows global enterprises to unlock value across all of their data – including structured, unstructured, and semi-structured.

The solution is available on AWS Marketplace for streamlined procurement and consolidated billing, while Google Cloud Marketplace availability is coming soon.

> Mike Dion: The 3 Best Ways to Use Claude For Finance

IBL News | New York

OpenAI debuted ChatGPT Agent yesterday, joining the hyped trend of agents —tools that autonomously complete multi-step tasks and workflows.

This new agent, still in beta, can perform tasks, following users’ instructions, on its own OpenAI virtual computer by intelligently navigating websites, filtering results, requesting secure logins when needed, running code, conducting analysis, and even delivering editable slideshows and spreadsheets that summarize its findings.

Some examples of handled requests provided by OpenAI include:

• “Look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news.”
• “Plan and buy ingredients to make a Japanese breakfast for four.”
• “Analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.”

IBL News | New York

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the U.S. (representing 1.8 million members), will create a National Academy for AI Instruction, with $23 million in funding from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

This training hub for educators is planned to open this fall in the union’s headquarters in New York City. It will offer hands-on workshops for teachers on how to use AI tools for instructional tasks safely and ethically.

The initiative is expected to reach approximately 400,000 educators, that is, roughly one in ten US teachers, by 2030.

This academy was inspired by other unions, such as the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, which has established high-tech training centers in collaboration with industry partners.

Microsoft will provide $12.5 million over the next five years. OpenAI will contribute $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources. Anthropic will add $500,000 for the first year of the effort.

In February, California State University, the largest university system in the U.S., announced that it would provide ChatGPT to approximately 460,000 students.

This spring, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest U.S. school district, began rolling out Google’s Gemini AI for 100,000 high schoolers.

The Trump administration has called on the industry to provide AI education. (IBL News: Sixty-Eight Organizations Support Trump’s Pledge to Educate K-12 Students on AI).

Some experts have warned that tech firms can use AI deals with schools and the teachers’ union as marketing opportunities to make students lifetime chatbot customers.

“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” said to The New York Times Dr. Griffey, a vice president of University Council-A.F.T. Local 1474, a union representing University of California librarians and lecturers.

This month, approximately 200 New York City teachers received a glimpse of what the new national training effort might look like, as reported by The New York Times. A presenter from Microsoft showed an explainer video featuring Minecraft, the popular game owned by Microsoft.

Additionally, teachers attempted to generate emails and lesson plans using Khanmigo, an AI tool designed for schools, for which Microsoft has provided support. They then experimented with Microsoft Copilot for similar tasks.

On its side, OpenAI has launched programs like OpenAI Academy, ChatGPT for Education, and the OpenAI forum. The company is also co-sponsoring the AFT AI Symposium on July 24 in Washington, DC.

IBL News | New York

The approved Trump administration domestic policy bill will expand taxes on endowments that universities often use for financial aid (typically about 5%), cap the federal amount students can borrow for graduate programs, and allow students in short-term work training programs in community colleges to become eligible for Pell Grants.

Also, the bill would “make college less affordable,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Meanwhile, republicans said that the bill — dubbed “The Big, Beautiful Bill — imposes accountability on a sector that has failed to police itself.

More heavily taxed university endowments fulfill a Trump campaign promise to target the nation’s wealthiest schools, like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. To date, this campaign has resulted in reduced research grants and made it more difficult for international students to enroll.

Universities like Harvard and Princeton, which have endowments of $2 million or more per student, would face an 8 percent tax on investment income. It’s a smaller amount than the 21 percent proposed initially in the House bill or the 35 percent that Vice President JD Vance suggested in 2023 as a senator.

The student loan changes are expected to save the government over $300 billion in a decade, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate. “By reducing borrowing availability, we break the cycle of debt, making higher education more accessible for all Americans,” the Trump administration said in a statement.

The bill places restrictions on how much money graduate students can borrow from the federal government to pay for school.

Students won’t be able to take out more than $100,000 for a master’s degree and over $200,000 for doctoral, medical, or professional degrees.

Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities trying to “become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,” said Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education and former manager at Coursera, in an interview with The New York Times [in the picture above].

At the same time, it’s running a marketing campaign targeting students and courting them as future customers — essentially as rivals like Google and Microsoft have been doing for years, pushing their computers and software into schools.

The startup envisions students graduating with their AI assistants and utilizing them throughout their careers in the workplace, like they do with their school-issued Gmail accounts.

On their side, Elon Musk’s xAI and Google have been offering free AI services for college students during the exam period.

Overall, OpenAI aims to embed its AI technology within universities by providing students with AI assistants to help tutor and guide them from orientation through graduation, featuring tools such as chatbots, practice job interview tools, voice model tools, and tools to quiz aloud ahead of a test.

Meanwhile, faculty members can build custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials, such as lecture notes, slides, videos, and quizzes, into ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s sales pitch has been named “AI-native universities.”

Three of its clients are the University of Maryland, California State University (with 460,000 students across its 23 campuses), and Duke University (through a platform called DukeGPT).

Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms Inc. has finalized a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI — taking a 49% stake — and recruited the company’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, 28, to join its AI team for producing data models.

Scale offers data services to help companies, including Meta and OpenAI, train and improve their AI systems. It also builds custom AI applications for businesses and governments. The startup generated approximately $870 million in revenue in 2024 and is expected to reach $2 billion in revenue by the end of this year. Its new interim CEO will be Jason Droege.

Zuckerberg was frustrated with Meta’s progress following the rollout in April of the company’s latest large language model, Llama 4. Not wanting to be left behind, the CEO of Meta took a more hands-on approach, making the recruitment of AI experts and scientists a top priority.

He has been offering lucrative pay packages to attract top researchers from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and startup Sesame AI Inc. He has been following a playbook similar to Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Google, with arrangements designed to avoid the regulatory scrutiny that comes with significant acquisitions.

Alphabet’s Google, the largest customer of Scale AI, announced it would cut ties with Scale after rival Meta bought a 49% stake in the AI data-labeling startup.

Google was paying Scale approximately $200 million this year for the human-labeled training data, which is crucial for developing technology, including the sophisticated AI models that power Gemini, its ChatGPT competitor, one of the sources said.

Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

Google announced its AI Futures Fund this month. The fund will invest in startups from seed to late-stage using AI tools developed by DeepMind, the company’s R&D lab.

Google’s support will also include early access to Google AI models from DeepMind, working with experts from DeepMind and Google Labs, and Cloud credits. Some startups will also have the opportunity to receive direct investment from Google.

“When we come across companies that align with the fund’s thesis, we may choose to invest,” said a Google representative.

AI Futures Fund already has some case studies, such as the meme-making platform Viggle and the webtoon app Toonsutra.

Over the past few months, Google has committed to supporting the next generation of AI talent and scientific breakthroughs.

• In November 2024, Google.org, the company’s charitable wing, announced a $20 million cash commitment to researchers and scientists working in AI.

• In September, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company was creating a $120 million Global AI Opportunity fund to help bring AI education and training to more places worldwide.

• Google.org also launched a $20 million generative AI accelerator program to cut checks to nonprofits developing AI tech.

• Google for Startups Founders Fund supports founders from an array of industries and backgrounds building companies, including AI companies.

IBL News | New York

Harvard University’s President Alan M. Garber will take a voluntary 25% pay cut for the fiscal year 2026, which runs from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026, on a salary not disclosed, but presumably upward of $1 million. Several other Harvard’s top officials are making voluntary cuts on their own.

Garber’s pay cut is a gesture to share the financial strain that has hit faculty and staff since the Trump administration froze nearly $3 billion in funding.

Over 80 faculty members — from several schools and academic units — have pledged to donate 10 percent of their salaries for up to a year to support the University if it continues to resist the Trump administration.

In 2020, as provost, Garber took a similar 25% cut in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, President Lawrence S. Bacow and several deans accepted temporary reductions as Harvard confronted a projected $750 million revenue shortfall.

Garber’s decision also mirrors similar moves from leaders of other schools. Brown University President Christina H. Paxson announced last month that she and two other senior administrators would take a 10 percent salary cut in fiscal year 2026.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced it would cut another $450 million in federal grants and contracts from Harvard. The Federal Government alleged Harvard had failed to check race-based discrimination and antisemitism. Earlier this month, it pledged to no longer award grants or contracts to the University.

The cut, which covers grants awarded by eight unspecified federal agencies, is in addition to the $2.2 billion funding cut announced last month.

Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, filed in April, remains in its early stages. Oral arguments are scheduled to begin on July 21, and the legal battle will be drawn out for months.

IBL News | New York

President Trump doubled down on his announcement last month and said he would remove the university’s tax-exempt status on Friday, adding, “It’s what they deserve.”

The Trump administration has frozen more than $2 billion of Harvard’s federal funding, and the university has sued.

If the tax-exempt revocation is confirmed, Harvard would have to pay federal income taxes on its revenue, and donations could be lost if donors can’t claim tax deductions on their gifts.

Philanthropic contributions account for about 45 percent of Harvard’s annual operating revenues.

Harvard University, the nation’s oldest and richest university (with an endowment of $53 billion), signaled Friday that it would resist President Trump’s renewed offensive, a move for which it said there was “no legal basis.”

“Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission,” the statement said. “It would result in diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programs, and lost opportunities for innovation. More broadly, the unlawful use of this instrument would have grave consequences for the future of higher education in America.”

Despite Mr. Trump’s assertion online and Harvard’s sharp response, it was not immediately clear Friday whether the I.R.S. was moving forward with revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status. This change could typically occur only after a lengthy process, as the federal law prohibits the president from directing the I.R.S. to conduct tax investigations.

In recent weeks, Harvard has taken a confrontational posture toward the Trump administration, rejecting a roster of Federal government demands.

Those demands include that Harvard submit reports to Washington, alter its admissions and hiring policies, and bring in an outsider to examine “those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.”

A Harvard commentator explained how the endowment of the institution works. “Increasing the tax on Harvard’s endowment — or worse, stripping our tax-exempt status entirely — would utterly cripple this University.”