Yesterday in AI: 26 April 2026 — $65B Week Crowns Anthropic the Most-Backed AI Lab

Google's $40B pledge on April 24, stacked atop Amazon's $25B from April 20, gives Anthropic more new capital than any AI lab has raised in a single week — while Claude Managed Agents gains persistent memory and the Claude Code skills economy crosses 25,000 stars.

By OMC Editorial on 2026-04-27

Google confirmed a $40 billion commitment to Anthropic on April 24 — three days after Amazon pledged $25 billion — giving the Claude maker $65 billion in new capital from its two cloud partners in a single week, more than any AI lab has raised in history. Big Tech's $65B Week for Anthropic Amazon announced on April 20 that it would invest $5 billion in Anthropic immediately, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones, valuing the company at $380 billion. On April 24, Google confirmed an initial $10 billion injection at a $350 billion valuation, with up to $30 billion additional subject to performance targets. Together, the two pledges exceed OpenAI's entire funding history and land in the same week. Both deals reinforce existing cloud arrangements: Amazon secures preferred AWS inference rights while Anthropic commits to spending over $100 billion on AWS infrastructure over the next decade; Google deepens Vertex AI access. The diverging valuations $380B vs $350B signal different milestone structures, but the message is the same: Big Tech is picking sides. Sources: Bloomberghttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/google-plans-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-anthropic · CNBC Googlehttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-anthropic-as-search-giant-spreads-its-ai-bets.html · CNBC Amazonhttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/20/amazon-invest-up-to-25-billion-in-anthropic-part-of-ai-infrastructure.html Claude Managed Agents Gets Persistent Memory On April 23, Anthropic shipped persistent memory for Claude Managed Agents in public beta, available under the existing managed-agents-2026-04-01 API header. Memory lets an agent session store and retrieve context across separate runs without developers re-injecting prior conversation history at every call. It completes the core feature set that launched April 8: sandboxed cloud execution, built-in web search $10 per 1,000 queries, and now cross-session recall. The target use cases