BUSINESS

This is the 2nd part of my analysis on Anthropic Claude and its system-wide prompt, focusing on the mental health directives. An AI Insider analysis and scoop.

After nearly two years of declines, alts have run out of sellers and steadied, while bitcoin has dropped hard, sliding back toward $63,600.

Weak volume and fading momentum kept XRP pinned near the bottom of its recent range, with the $1.05-$1.10 area emerging as the market’s key line in the sand.

The newly public company shed close to half of bitcoin’s entire market value in three sessions after announcing its first bond sale. Bitcoin, absorbing the same backdrop, fell less than 1%.

Micron Technology (MU), the largest U.S, memory chipmaker, announced a strategic agreement with Anthropic on Monday that bundles three things together: a technical collaboration on AI memory design, a new multiyear supply contract, and a stake Micron already holds in Anthropic’s funding round.The investment itself is not a recent development. What changed Monday is that Micron put it back in the spotlight, few days before an earnings report.Share of Micron climbed roughly 5% on Monday to a fresh all time high, according to a Seeking Alpha report. The stock is now valued at more than $1.2 trillion, according to Investing.com.Investors appear to be betting that closer ties to one of the largest buyers of AI memory gives Micron steadier demand in a market that has historically swung between shortage and oversupply.Micron’s equity stake predates Monday’s headlineAnthropic closed its Series H funding round on May 28, raising $65 billion at a $965 billion post money valuation, according to Anthropic’s official announcement.Micron joined that round as one of three strategic infrastructure partners, alongside Samsung and SK Hynix, the only companies that manufacture memory at the scale AI training requires.Amazon also contributed $5 billion to the round as part of previously committed hyperscaler capital, according to the same announcement.At the time, Micron’s involvement was one line in a much larger story about Anthropic’s valuation.Monday’s announcement reframes it as the foundation of a broader partnership that now includes shared technical research and a dedicated supply contract.For Micron, owning a piece of Anthropic means its upside is no longer limited to selling chips at a fixed price.That stake also cuts both ways. If Anthropic’s growth slows, Micron is exposed not just through smaller chip orders but through a paper loss on equity in a company that has not yet gone public.Reuters described Anthropic, in its report on the new agreement, as a company preparing for a future public listing, which would eventually give Micron a way to convert that stake into something liquid.

Micron took an equity stake in Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H round in May, then unveiled a supply and research agreement few days before Micron’s Q3 earnings.Bloomberg / Getty Images

The new agreement adds research and supply on top of that stakeBeyond the equity position, Micron and Anthropic agreed to study how memory and storage subsystems perform across AI training and inference workloads, according to Micron’s press release.The work centers on Micron’s high bandwidth memory, DRAM and solid state drives, the three product categories that determine how efficiently a data center can train and run large language models.The companies also signed a separate multiyear supply agreement covering Micron’s data center portfolio, though neither side disclosed pricing or volume terms.Micron has also been using Anthropic’s Claude models internally, deploying them for coding and other automated tasks across its engineering and manufacturing teams, according to the same release.That detail matters less for the stock than the supply contract does, but it shows the relationship runs in both directions.Related: JPMorgan drops blunt verdict on stock market rallyMemory is scarce enough that the timing favors MicronMicron’s high bandwidth memory capacity is sold out through the rest of 2026, according to an analysis by TradingKey.Chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra has told investors on recent earnings calls that AI servers and conventional servers are now competing for the same limited supply of DRAM and NAND chips, a shortage he expects to continue beyond this year.Research firm IDC has gone further, describing the current market not as a cyclical shortage but as what it called a “potentially permanent, strategic reallocation” of global silicon wafer capacity.That backdrop helps explain why analysts kept raising price targets into earnings. Bernstein SocGen Group and Wedbush both lifted their targets to $1,300 this month, while Rosenblatt raised its target to $1,200, according to Investing.com, citing firmer than expected memory pricing and tight supply through 2027.More Micron:Micron stock draws aggressive target reset from 5-star analystMicron gets aggressive stock price target from veteran analystMorgan Stanley makes bold new call on Micron stockMicron reports fiscal third quarter results on Wednesday, with Wall Street expecting $19.72 in earnings per share on roughly $34.4 billion in revenue, according to estimates by Wall St.Chip suppliers are starting to invest in the AI labs they sell toMicron is not the only memory maker that chose to become a stakeholder rather than just a vendor.Samsung and SK Hynix took the same path into Anthropic’s funding round, even though both compete directly with Micron for the same HBM customers, according to Anthropic’s announcement.That overlap shows how much memory suppliers now want exposure to AI lab growth itself, not just the orders that growth generates.For Micron, the bet is that Anthropic’s spending keeps growing faster than the cost of building the capacity to serve it.That is the same bet underlying the stock’s climb past $1.2 trillion in market value.Wednesday’s earnings will test that bet in the near term, but the larger shift, chip suppliers buying into the AI labs that buy from them, is likely to outlast any single earnings report.Related: White House latest verdict flips script on Anthropic

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A rotation out of this year’s best AI and chip stocks sank Asian markets, with South Korea’s Kospi down 6%, and crypto fell with them. Bitcoin is down more than 3% on the week.

The White House issued twin executive orders to accelerate U.S. development of large-scale quantum computers while simultaneously hardening defenses against such machines.

The Wolves’ decision to effectively salary-dump Julius Randle was a necessary evil brought about by the NBA’s current collective bargaining agreement.