Ep 7: Cursor's $0.50 Model + Anthropic's $900B

Cursor shipped a coding model that matches Claude Opus 4.7 at one tenth the price. The same week, Anthropic is raising $30B at a $900B valuation. We make the call.

Human In the Loop is a weekly podcast where two builders cut through the AI hype cycle. No hype, no doomerism, no surface-level recaps.

SIGNAL OR NOISE

We run through the week's biggest AI headlines and call each one:

- Cursor Composer 2.5, top-three coding agent at $0.50 / $2.50 per million tokens

- Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team

- Anthropic's $30B round at a $900B valuation

- Google I/O 2026: Gemini Spark agent and Antigravity 2.0

- Hark's $700M Series A, noise until something ships

STACK CHECK

Three dev tools we actually adopted in the last 30 days. What they replace, what they cost, would we keep using them:

1. Matt Pocock's `skills` repo, Skill Handoff (a real replacement for `/compact`)

2. Convex (convex.dev), TypeScript-native backend built for agentic workflows

3. Google Antigravity 2.0 + CLI + Managed Agents API

HOT TAKES

Oscar: Cursor Composer 2.5 just proved the open base model thesis. Coding-as-a-service is falling off a price cliff.

Matt: Karpathy joining Anthropic is worth more than the $900B valuation. Talent is the only moat the market still underprices.

Key links:

- Cursor Composer 2.5: https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5

- Karpathy at Anthropic: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/openai-co-founder-andrej-karpathy-joins-anthropics-pre-training-team/

- Anthropic $900B round: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-12/anthropic-in-talks-to-raise-30-billion-at-900-billion-valuation

- Antigravity 2.0: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-launches-antigravity-2-0-with-an-updated-desktop-app-and-cli-tool-at-io-2026/

Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer & Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder, Operator). New episodes every week.