If one thing became clear at the HumanX conference in San Francisco this week, where 6,500 executives, founders and investors gathered to talk about artificial intelligence, it’s that OpenAI no longer dominates the conversation in their industry. For now, at least, that distinction belongs to Anthropic.

Anthropic’s viral coding agent, Claude Code, was the tool on everyone’s lips, even as many attendees acknowledged that OpenAI, Cursor and Google are offering strong alternatives. 

Despite its spat with the Pentagon that went public last month and quickly made its way to the courtroom, Anthropic has only gained momentum. The Department of Defense blacklisted Claude, but after opposing rulings in two courts, Anthropic can keep working with other federal agencies while the cases play out.

Anthropic’s early strength in the enterprise has positioned it to benefit from the soaring popularity of AI coding agents, which are used to generate, edit and review code. So while OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Anthropic may be best set up to win contracts from the biggest spenders.

CNBC spoke with 19 executives and investors at HumanX, some of whom asked not to be named in order to speak freely. Here are the top three takeaways. 

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI. The startup is valued at $380 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world. 

Cisco President Jeetu Patel said roughly 85% of his company’s engineering workforce, or about 18,000 employees, are using AI, but the path to getting there was unlike what he’d anticipated. Patel said Cisco initially learned it i needed to prioritize adoption over outcomes, and to trust that model capabilities will continue to improve. 

The fragile two-week ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran has massive implications for energy and financial markets across the globe. But the vast majority of execs and investors who spoke to CNBC at HumanX this week said they’re not yet experiencing any direct business impact from the latest conflict in the Middle East. 

In AI, a model is considered open weight if its parameters, or the elements that improve its outputs and predictions during training, are publicly available. As of April, Chinese open-weight models, including GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.5 and Qwen3.5, dominate industry benchmarks.

American companies are swarming to China’s models. Cursor built its Composer 2 model using Kimi 2.5. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC in October that his company’s chatbot was largely dependent on Alibaba’s Qwen.

Given the importance the U.S. AI industry is placing on beating China when it comes to innovation, there’s a big emphasis domestically on closing the gap in open weight. Two investors told CNBC they’re dedicating a lot of their time and resources to that effort, and a third said it’s one of the key problems for the industry to solve right now. 

Glean’s Jain said having multiple options is critical.

“The trend that we see is that enterprises today, they’re very wary of depending on one or two providers for all of their AI,” Jain said. “They don’t want to work with just one model company, because they know that innovation is happening across many and also in open source. You want to have a choice.”

WATCH: OpenAI slams Anthropic in memo to shareholders

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has confidentially filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, sources told CNBC’s David Faber, bringing Elon Musk’s rocket company one step closer to what’s expected to be a record public offering.

Bloomberg was first to report on SpaceX’s confidential filing, citing people familiar with the matter, and adding that the company could seek a valuation of $1.75 trillion, with a listing around June.

Founded by Musk in 2002 to develop and operate reusable rockets, SpaceX has turned into NASA’s biggest launch partner after the agency ended its space shuttle program in 2011. The company merged with Musk’s xAI in February, creating a combined entity that he valued at the time at $1.25 trillion.

When SpaceX eventually lists, Musk will become the first person to helm two separate trillion-dollar publicly traded companies. Musk is the world’s richest person, with a net worth of close to $840 billion, according to Forbes. Tesla, which Musk has counted on for the vast majority of his liquid wealth, has a market cap of around $1.4 trillion.

A confidential filing allows companies to submit their financials to the SEC for regulatory review before revealing them to the public and prospective investors. SpaceX will have to release a public filing at least 15 days before its IPO road show.

While SpaceX still has numerous hurdles to clear to reach the public market, the offering — assuming it does happen — will be packed with superlatives. With the company reportedly looking to raise up to $75 billion, it would be more than three times the size of the biggest U.S. IPO to date. China’s Alibaba raised $22 billion in 2014, putting it ahead of Visa, which raised close to $18 billion in 2008.

SpaceX has received over $24.4 billion from its work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which researches federal spending and government contracts. That includes contracts from NASA, the Air Force and Space Force, among others agencies.

Reena Aggarwal, a professor of finance at Georgetown and an IPO expert, said that even with all hype around Musk and SpaceX, the company still needs a receptive public market. Stocks have been volatile of late due largely to the U.S.-Iran war and spiking oil prices. The Nasdaq is coming off its steepest weekly drop in nearly a year.

“You can have a great company, with great fundamentals and a lot of investor interest — and an IPO can still flop if the markets have turned south, if there’s too much volatility in the market,” Aggarwal said. Hopefully the current geopolitical situations will have cooled down by June and there will be less uncertainty.”

WATCH: SpaceX has filed confidentially for IPO

This report is from this week’s The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Nvidia’s yearly showcase event — dubbed the ‘Super Bowl of AI’ by some — kicked off at the start of the week to much fanfare across the tech sector. The event sees tens of thousands of attendees gather in California to get the latest on the world’s most valuable company’s plans for the future.

Didn’t manage to snag a ticket? No problem. I caught up with CNBC’s Katie Tarasov, who was on the ground at the event, to get a sense of what went down.

Katie: I’m always watching for the biggest hardware announcements because it’s Nvidia chips that are filling AI data centers and powering almost every major company’s AI ambitions. We saw two big new chip announcements during CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote on Monday.

First was an entirely new type of chip called a Language Processing Unit, or LPU. It’s the first chip Nvidia’s unveiling using technology it acquired from chip startup Groq in December. That $20 billion deal was Nvidia’s biggest purchase ever. While Nvidia’s star graphics processing units have thousands of cores that perform many operations simultaneously, the Groq 3 LPU is built with a single core optimized for speeding up those GPUs.

The other big chip announcement was the unveiling of a rack filled entirely with Nvidia’s newest Vera central processing units, or CPUs. I wrote a piece last week explaining how the CPU is having a renaissance as Nvidia sees it as a coming bottleneck for agentic AI, which requires more data transfer and general-purpose compute typically handled by the CPU.

Overall, I was personally blown away by the crowds and hype on the showroom floor — it was unrecognizable from my first GTC in 2019. I last sat down with Huang for a lengthy interview in 2022, and it was a fascinating conversation that’s informed much of my chip reporting since.

Katie: This is a difficult question to answer. Not even Huang’s expectations of $1 trillion in Blackwell and Vera Rubin purchase orders by 2027 moved the needle. It seems like Wall Street’s expectations are so high, it’s almost impossible for Nvidia to impress.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has charged associates of an unidentified U.S. server maker with illegally diverting billions of dollars in Nvidia-powered servers to China.

Chipmaker Micron reported it had tripled revenue and sailed past analysts’ estimates in its latest quarterly results on Wednesday, but champagne and party poppers were not the order of the day.

The progress of Chinese tech companies across the entire stack is “remarkable,” OpenAI’s Sam Altman told CNBC, pointing to “many fields” including AI.

Altman’s comments come as China races against the U.S. to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) — where AI matches human capabilities — and roll out the technology across society.

Chinese progress is “amazingly fast,” he said. In some areas Chinese tech companies are near the frontier, while in others they lag behind, Altman added.

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