TheChek News Flow

Anthropic is merging its front end for Claude chat and Cowork, making it less confusing for people to decide which tab to use for different tasks.

The unified interface lets users access chat, Cowork, and Artifacts (Claude’s interactive workspace feature) within one window. Claude Design, which was introduced in April for website and prototype design, also works anywhere within Claude.

Before this rollout, the company said customers often struggled to choose the right tab for the right task. With the new design, Claude automatically routes requests without having to switch tabs or windows. The idea is to remove confusion about which feature to pick and use just one front end to route work to different parts of the app.

Hopefully, OpenAI also takes a cue from this rollout and fixes ChatGPT’s interface across the platforms.

Anthropic is also adding dedicated features for making presentations and documents. Users can ask the AI assistant to create, edit, and present slides, and it can also download the generated presentation as a PDF or PowerPoint.

Similarly, with the Docs feature, users can work alongside Claude to create sections, ask questions, and comment on completed parts. Users can share generated documents or slides with a link and edit them on their phone.

Users can also ask Claude to start creating a document on desktop, and they can check the progress of the task using the mobile app.

These features are rolling out to Claude’s Pro and Max plans first, on the web, desktop, and mobile over the coming weeks. The company plans to extend them to the free and team tiers later.

The update comes in the wake of an upgrade of Cowork’s memory layer, which helps Claude remember user context across chats.

Any collaboration between the two tech giants would extend a nascent thaw after decades of frosty relations

Apple has been working on plans for an enterprise server using its own chips that could incorporate networking equipment from Nvidia, people familiar with the project said, as the Mac maker looks to capitalize on surging interest in its computers for AI.

Apple has been developing the server with plans to sell it to AI developers, other businesses and governments, the people said. The product under consideration would come in two versions—a smaller one with two of Apple’s planned M8 Ultra chips clustered together and a bigger one with four M8 Ultra chips. The M-series Ultra chips are Apple’s highest-performance chips and power products including the Mac Studio.

Apple has considered connecting the M8 chips in the server using an Nvidia set of products called NVLink Fusion, which includes switches, chiplets and software that help chips communicate with each other in data centers, the people said. Any such move would expand on a nascent warming in what have long been frosty relations between the two tech giants.

NVLink was originally designed to connect Nvidia chips together for fast communication so that multiple chips could operate as one, but the company has opened it up for other companies to tie their chips together even if they aren’t from Nvidia. Some Apple staffers on the project believe the Nvidia equipment may offer the best connectivity technology, the people said.

The Apple product isn’t currently expected to hit the market until 2029, and could still be cancelled or proceed without the Nvidia technology. But Apple’s new chief executive, John Ternus, who took over earlier this month, was a backer of the project at its inception around a year ago when he headed Apple’s hardware engineering, and saw an opportunity for Apple’s chips in the booming environment for AI compute, said some of the people.

Apple and Nvidia have had chilly ties stretching back decades. The partnership began in 2001 when Apple equipped its Macs with Nvidia graphics processors to improve graphics capabilities. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, at the time, called it a “great relationship.”

But tensions rose behind the scenes, stemming from business disputes that originated around the same time over issues including Jobs’s belief that Nvidia products contained technology copied from the Jobs-founded animation studio Pixar, The Information previously reported.

Now the relationship is showing signs of improving. As part of its recent overhaul of Siri, Apple is running part of the new AI on Nvidia chips inside data centers at Google, its partner for the overhaul, The Information previously reported. Since then, Apple and Nvidia have been in conversations about Nvidia’s technology and other areas it could help Apple catch up in AI, such as Nvidia’s open-source AI models, said people familiar with the relationship.

The planned AI servers would help Apple feed a market hungry for its hardware. Over the past year, Apple has encountered an unexpected surge in demand for its Mac mini and Mac Studio–boxlike computers lacking a keyboard, mouse and display–among AI developers, as The Information has previously reported. Large AI labs have snatched up tens of thousands of the computers, and other companies have started deploying them in their operations. Dragonfruit AI, for example, is using them to power security camera analysis for retailers, and a startup called Mount Thor is building a cloud-computing business using already available Apple hardware.

This demand has led to an extreme shortage of these Mac computers. Mac was the fastest growing product segment in Apple’s most recently reported quarter, with sales surging nearly 29% to $10.4 billion.

But Macs are still overwhelmingly consumer products, lacking some features that enterprises demand, such as remote management software.

Apple already builds its own servers for Private Cloud Compute, its internal system for processing heavy-duty AI tasks that are too big to run locally on iPhones and Macs. For most of its current servers, Apple is still using internally developed connectivity technology, but it is too slow and expensive to use at large scale, the people said.

Partners have asked Apple for access to these Private Cloud Compute servers, but Apple has turned down their requests, The Information previously reported. For the future server product being developed, Apple has to secure enough components years in advance in preparation to sell to external customers, said the people.

An Apple foray into servers would mean new competition for Nvidia. Although Nvidia dominates the market for AI servers, it also is increasingly positioning itself for a world with more chip competition. NVLink Fusion, announced last year, is a key element of how Nvidia aims to partner with customers that sell competing server chips. Networking equipment can amount to 10% to 15% of AI data center hardware costs, and such gear accounted for a fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue in the April quarter, when Nvidia last reported networking revenue.

“We would always rather sell something than nothing,” Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, said in an interview. Harris declined to comment on whether Apple is an NVLink Fusion customer, but said that “Apple has always been a great customer and partner of ours.”

Harris’s hope is that every company making a competing AI server chip uses some element of NVLink Fusion. He said Nvidia has had “extensive conversations with a broad mix of customers and partners” around NVLink Fusion use.

Last month, Amazon’s cloud division announced it would be expanding its use of NVLink Fusion for its next-generation AI servers.

With the server product it’s working on, Apple sees a particular opportunity to make inroads in the market for AI inference, or the running of AI models, especially among companies and other customers that want to run models on their own servers rather than on public clouds.

A new server product would mark a re-entry into the server business for Apple. Between 2002 and 2011, it sold a server product called Xserve, which were powered by chips from IBM and, later, Intel. But the product failed due largely to Apple’s indifference to the enterprise market and lack of support for customers, said people who worked on the project.

Enterprise customers have never been a major focus for Apple. It doesn’t have an engineering team focused on that type of customer and has no developer relations dedicated to enterprise, Todd Dailey, a former enterprise marketing manager for Apple’s AI products, previously told The Information.

But Apple has been recently making efforts to change that. On June 23, it held an event called “Business at the Park,” where it hosted a number of large corporations, as well as AI players to talk up its hardware capabilities for running AI.

One investor in the AI hardware business said networking technology is the biggest missing piece for Apple’s ambitions to be a big AI server business. It’s possible that Apple has considered relying on Nvidia’s networking hardware now, as a temporary solution, while it develops its own products, he said.

If Apple wants to make future enterprise servers competitive, it will likely have to hire more people for teams focused on those kinds of customers. It will also have to provide software tools for AI developers to better take advantage of the hardware, similar to Nvidia’s CUDA framework.

Apple already offers a tool for efficiently running AI models on Apple hardware called MLX, but the team behind it is small and its leader, Awni Hannun, departed earlier this year for Anthropic.

And the hardware market is advancing quickly. OpenAI plans to deploy its custom AI chip, Jalapeno, starting later this year, and Nvidia is quickly evolving its hardware to capture the AI inference market and to better serve privacy-sensitive customers who don’t want to use the public cloud.

The Ozempic maker is partnering with the artificial-intelligence firm to speed up drug development

Novo Nordisk NOVO.B -1.20%decrease; down pointing triangle, the Danish drugmaker behind blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, is partnering with Anthropic to use artificial intelligence for drug research.

Novo said Wednesday it would use Anthropic’s science-specific platform, known as Claude Science, to help speed up the discovery and development of new medicines and strengthen the pharmaceutical company’s software development.

The partnership is the latest by a slate of major drugmakers, including Eli Lilly, Merck and Roche, that are placing big bets that AI can help them discover and produce medicines more quickly.

“AI can help us increase productivity in R&D and compress the path from research to marketed product. But beyond this, AI tools can also offer completely new scientific opportunities and aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics,” Novo Chief Executive Mike Doustdar said.

AI promises to help drug researchers solve some of the most intractable issues in biology, using its powers to find new ways to fight serious diseases. Yet despite the investments, companies’ bets on the technology haven’t paid off to date.

While some AI-discovered candidates are being tested in humans, AI has yet to produce an approved drug. So far, some industry officials say, the sector has seen the biggest direct benefits of AI in automating routine work, like synthesizing research, analyzing large datasets and designing human studies.

“You can leverage AI on both sides, on creating more sales, being faster, finding more patients, and on the other side, becoming more efficient and being able, therefore, to do more with less,” Ipsen CEO David Lowe told The Wall Street Journal last month.

Companies are also finding it useful in identifying patients with conditions who could participate in drug studies.

Other companies have found it particularly useful in identifying patients with genetically-driven rare diseases that might appear in large scans of electronic health records, said Bill Coyle, the region managing principal for Europe for global consulting and technology firm ZS.

“You have known diagnoses, and could essentially find patterns in claims data, and create algorithms that you would then pull those out,” said Coyle.

Novo has entered into several partnerships with the aim of speeding up the discovery and development of new drugs through AI. Earlier this year, the Danish drugmaker said it would work with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and created an AI innovation hub with Amazon Web Services.

As part of the partnership with Anthropic, Novo will test Claude Science to help address scientific problems, it said. The drugmaker also plans to use Anthropic’s models to strengthen AI-driven software development, it added.

“We can shorten research timelines, improve outcomes, and discover medicines and treatments that significantly improve human life. That is exactly what our collaboration with Novo is built to achieve,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic.

A spokesman for Novo didn’t provide specifics on the terms of the deal or which drug-discovery programs they might target.

Jeff Koons is blowing up Hublot

The artist’s Balloon Dog watches have the bow-wow factor

Artist Jeff Koons is rhapsodising about the properties of titanium and polished sapphire crystal in his new limited-edition MP-14 Origin collaboration with Hublot. “A central tourbillon becomes the first pulse and everything else unfolds around it like a controlled expansion. It’s the idea of a Big Bang translated through engineered motion, material tension and the physics of light.” 

The Hublot x Jeff Koons collection also includes a series of timepieces inspired by the artist’s five monumental steel Balloon Dog (1994-2000) sculptures, one of which sold for $58.4mn at Christie’s New York in 2013 – a prelude to him breaking the record for the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction with Rabbit ($91.1mn) in 2019.

“It was joyful to be able to realise these watches,” he tells me, with the wide, untroubled smile that seems to be his factory setting. It’s not Koons’ first luxury collaboration. The artist has worked with Louis Vuitton on a series of bags and Stella McCartney on a capsule collection of ready-to-wear and accessories. Hublot feels like a natural match. Koons’ practice is at times more that of an industrial creative director than a sculptor: he builds meticulous models from which specialist workshops create mirror-polished pieces with a finish that erases any trace of the human hand. 

The Balloon Dog watches for Hublot have that unmistakably vibrant Koons presence: the balloon dog’s tail in coloured rubber at 10.30; the pumped-up crown and the inflated design

“It’s fantastic,” he says without a trace of false modesty. This is decidedly not a piece of wanton quick-fix gimmickry cobbled together to shift a few hundred watches in a difficult market. “These are limited editions that I’ve created,” he says, with a maker’s satisfaction. “I had choices: whether I wanted to do this, or whether I wanted to spend my time doing something else. And I was very, very happy to be involved in this endeavour.” 

Oura will struggle to justify pulse-racing $16bn valuation

The health technology company needs more than celebrity endorsements

What’s your score? Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow aren’t the only wearers of Oura smart rings to obsess over their daily sleep ratings. The Finnish-American wearables maker’s upcoming initial public offering is the latest sign of investor interest in so-called preventive healthcare. But to justify a mooted $16bn valuation, it will need endorsements of a more scientific kind.

The current wave of efforts to bind wearers ever more closely to devices, from connected glasses and wristbands to sensor-bearing socks, may bring in $1tn in cumulative sales between this year and 2032, estimates tech specialist Counterpoint Research. Smart rings account for $44bn, a fraction of the $300bn-plus each for watches and hearing devices such as earbuds and smart hearing aids.

As care costs soar, the health-related uses become more valuable. Continuous monitoring might flag a problem sooner than a patient’s next routine medical visit. Apple, Samsung and Google’s Fitbit unit have variously got the green light for functions detecting potential arrhythmia, sleep apnoea and hypertension among other conditions. Once a user has built up months or years of data in a particular device, they’re less likely to swap to a rival.

Oura’s business doesn’t rely on regulatory approvals for its data or functions, but it is bang in the space between health gadget and medical device. Multiple clinical studies are using its data while last year the 13-year-old company appointed its first chief medical officer. A partnership with Essence Healthcare enables eligible plan beneficiaries to get an Oura ring with a subscription — and for their data to be monitored by the US insurer’s doctors.

Being accepted into the medical orthodoxy could be financially transformative. But even then, the suggested valuation looks pulse-racingly high. Apple and Garmin, device makers par excellence, trade at about 20 times forward ebitda, according to LSEG. Even if Oura’s ebitda doubles this year, it would be trading at 80 times. Profit would need to double three years in a row to bring its valuation into line with its much larger peers.

To be more than a lifestyle gadget, Oura and rivals also need to overcome doctors’ concerns: a survey this year from the American Medical Association showed that four-fifths of doctors used wearables themselves, but raised professional issues including their legal liability and the cost of monitoring data. Still, with two-fifths of Oura’s new users being drawn in by word of mouth, wearables fans are already proving a persuasive bunch.

Turkish stocks slide in ‘fund run’ as investors withdraw $1bn

Index provider MSCI raises prospect of cutting Turkey from emerging market to frontier status amid accusations of ‘co-ordinated trading’ by fund managers

Turkish stocks fell sharply on Wednesday after one of the country’s biggest fund managers failed to meet investors’ redemption requests and authorities grappled with a speculative boom caused by what index provider MSCI has called “co-ordinated trading” on the local bourse.

The benchmark BIST 100 index fell more than 5 per cent, extending a more than 2 per cent drop on Tuesday, with retail investors withdrawing as much as $1bn from investment funds during the day, according to Fintables fund-flow data cited by Bloomberg.

The sell-off was triggered on Tuesday when Istanbul fund manager Pusula Portföy, which had $13bn under management at the end of August, said that some of its money market and investment funds could not meet redemption requests from their investors.

But analysts said the underlying problem was much broader. Over the past two years, they said, some local funds had bought shares in companies related to the funds through subsidiaries, often with tiny amounts of their shares available on public markets. Such concentrated buying drove up the companies’ stock prices, inflating the net asset value of funds that own them.

Spectacular reported returns then attracted new investors, providing fresh money with which to buy the same or related stocks.

Two prominent Pusula funds surged 164 per cent and 144 per cent respectively in the first seven months of 2026 alone. Another fund manager, Tera Portföy, the asset-management arm of Tera Group, made even more spectacular returns. Tera founder Emre Tezmen has said the group operated within regulations.

Now, however, the trade that propelled some Turkish funds to extraordinary heights may be going into reverse, as redemptions force funds to raise cash and falling share prices depress fund values, leading to more investor withdrawals.

“This is a self-inflicted, 1990s-style emerging-equity market crisis,” said Emre Akcakmak, a Dubai-based portfolio adviser at asset manager East Capital.

“The growth of these fund structures has long been among the best-flagged risks in the market, but the decisive regulatory response arrived only after the MSCI [warning],” he added. “What we’re seeing now is effectively a ‘fund run’, with investors redeeming due to liquidity fears.”

Tens of thousands of retail investors may be affected. At the end of August, Pusula had roughly 241,000 investment accounts while Tera Group, which is in the middle of takeover talks with Pusula, had over 500,000 accounts. Together, the two companies managed around $27bn at the end of August.

The market shakeout comes at a particularly awkward moment for Turkey, which is trying to re-establish its international economic credibility under a stabilisation programme led by finance minister Mehmet Şimşek, a former investment banker.

It could also throttle an important source of finance for Turkish companies as tight monetary policy aimed at bringing down inflation — currently running at 31.5 per cent a year — has kept borrowing costs exceptionally high.

As a result, many Turkish companies have turned to the equity market for finance. In the first eight months of 2026, 34 companies completed IPOs worth TL82.4bn ($1.7bn), compared with TL45.2bn in the whole of 2025.

 Şimşek himself has said he wants Turkey to shift away from bank finance to a greater reliance on capital markets. Non-residents held about $41bn of Turkish equities as of September 4, according to central bank data.

The problem gained international prominence in June, when MSCI warned that international investors had identified “recurring instances of possible co-ordinated trading behaviour” involving fund holdings affiliated with smaller listed companies.

Unless “tangible and credible progress” was evident by its November review, MSCI said it could launch a consultation on Turkey’s treatment in its indices — a process that could ultimately lead to a downgrade from emerging to frontier market status.

Turkish authorities have only recently become explicit about the risks. Şimşek said last November that the government knew “manipulation” was taking place and promised tougher regulation. Last week, justice minister Akın Gürlek said criminal market manipulation “should not go unanswered”.

Crucially, however, Gürlek added that authorities should also avoid “unnecessarily alarming” markets because so many Turkish citizens were invested in them.

This week, however, tougher rules — introduced by the capital markets board in late August — have forced funds to begin reducing concentrated positions. Ensuing redemptions have accelerated the process, meaning funds may be forced to crystallise losses, aggravating the market turmoil officials had sought to avoid.

Speaking on Wednesday as the stock market dropped, Şimşek told a television interviewer that “the non-bank financial sector needs additional regulation and supervision” — although he did not refer directly to Pusula or the market turmoil.

“This is perhaps Şimşek’s biggest test so far,” said Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at RBC BlueBay Asset Management and a longtime Turkey watcher. “But I have confidence in him.”