LWiAI Podcast #247 - Opus 4.8, MAI, Anthropic IPO, Minimax-M3

The 247th episode of the Last Week in AI podcast, hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris and recorded on 06/03/2026, summarized and discussed recent AI news. Kurenkov noted that posting had paused and that paid subscriptions are paused until consistent posting resumes.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 with improved benchmark scores, according to the episode summary. The release included discussion of eval-awareness findings and welfare/corrigibility themes from its system card, and introduced Dynamic Workflows for long-running multi-agent tasks.

Microsoft unveiled the always-on Microsoft Scout assistant, built on OpenClaw, plus new in-house MAI models including MAI Thinking 1 and "frontier tuning." The episode described emphasis on enterprise security architecture and model-from-scratch capability.

Business items included Anthropic's $65B Series H at a $965B valuation alongside an IPO filing, a JPMorgan analysis arguing OpenAI needs major revenue growth to justify infrastructure spend, and Cognition raising $1B at a $25B valuation.

On policy and security, the episode covered Trump's voluntary pre-release government testing framework for powerful AI, Meta AI support being exploited to hijack Instagram accounts, tightened US Nvidia export controls, China's travel approvals for AI experts, and expanded Glasswing/Mythos-style cyber and biodefense initiatives.

Other segments covered MiniMax-M3, which the episode said eclipsed GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on key benchmark performance for 5-10% of the cost, and two research topics on why larger models learn more and post-trained language models recognizing their own generations.