Cloudflare beat Wall Street’s revenue and earnings estimates on Wednesday, announced it would cut 1,100 employees because artificial intelligence agents now do their work, and watched its stock fall 24 per cent on Thursday. The sequence is becoming the template for the technology industry in 2026: record revenue, record layoffs, record doubt about what comes next.

First-quarter revenue was 639.8 million dollars, up 34 per cent year over year, beating the consensus estimate of 622 million. Adjusted earnings per share were 25 cents against expectations of 23 cents. Free cash flow was 84.1 million dollars. The company added a record number of customers paying more than five million dollars per year and saw a 73 per cent year-over-year increase in deals worth more than a million. By every traditional metric, the quarter was strong.

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Then the company said it was eliminating one in five jobs.

The model

CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder Michelle Zatlyn announced in a blog post that Cloudflare is transitioning to what they called an “agentic AI-first operating model.” The company said its internal use of AI had increased more than 600 per cent in three months. Staff across engineering, human resources, finance, and marketing are running thousands of AI agent sessions per day. The framing was not that AI would assist employees. It was that AI has made certain categories of employee unnecessary.

Prince was specific about which roles are disappearing. “A lot of the support roles” behind customer-facing and engineering staff “are not going to be the roles that drive companies going forward,” he said. The language distinguished between people who build the product, people who sell the product, and people who support the people who build and sell the product. The third group is being replaced.

GitHub froze new Copilot sign-ups last month because agentic AI workflows were generating costs that exceeded what users paid, a signal that the economics of AI tools are not yet stable. Cloudflare’s bet is that the instability is temporary and that the productivity gains from running thousands of AI agent sessions per day will more than offset the cost of eliminating 1,100 human roles and paying 140 to 150 million dollars in restructuring charges.

The numbers

The financial results that accompanied the layoff announcement were not the results of a company in distress. Cloudflare now has 4,416 customers paying more than 100,000 dollars per year. It estimates that approximately 80 per cent of leading AI companies use its products. Its Workers developer platform, which runs code at the edge of Cloudflare’s network across data centres in 330 cities, is positioned as infrastructure for the AI agent economy the company says is replacing the roles it just eliminated.

Full-year revenue guidance was 2.805 to 2.813 billion dollars, narrowly beating the consensus estimate of 2.8 billion. Full-year adjusted earnings guidance was 1.19 to 1.20 dollars per share, ahead of the 1.14 expected. Prince called AI “the biggest tailwind we’ve ever seen in Cloudflare’s history” and said the re-platforming of the internet around AI agents represents the company’s largest growth opportunity.

The stock market disagreed, or at least disagreed with the timing. Shares fell 24 per cent on Thursday, erasing billions in market capitalisation. The sell-off reflected not the earnings, which were strong, but the uncertainty about whether a company that just fired 20 per cent of its workforce can execute a business model transition while maintaining the growth trajectory investors had priced in.

The cuts

The 1,100 affected employees will receive base pay through the end of 2026, continued healthcare coverage through year end in the United States, and equity vesting extended to 15 August 2026. The restructuring is expected to be substantially complete by the end of the third quarter. Prince said, “Today is a hard day.”

The company’s headcount will fall from approximately 5,156 to around 4,000. The restructuring charges of 140 to 150 million dollars break down to 105 to 110 million in cash severance and benefits and 35 to 40 million in non-cash equity-related expenses. The savings are projected at a pace that Cloudflare expects to reinvest into the AI infrastructure and hiring it says will drive the next phase of growth.

Cloudflare framed the cuts as structural rather than cyclical. This is not a company reducing headcount because revenue is declining. Revenue grew 34 per cent. This is a company reducing headcount because it believes the work those employees performed is now performed by software. The distinction matters because it implies the jobs are not coming back.

The pattern

Meta and Microsoft between them cut 23,000 jobs while simultaneously increasing AI spending by tens of billions of dollars. Oracle eliminated up to 30,000 positions to fund AI data centres. Atlassian cut 1,600 in the name of AI adaptation. The tech sector has recorded more than 73,000 job cuts across 95 companies in the first four months of 2026, with projections that the full-year total will exceed the 124,000 eliminated in all of 2025.

Cloudflare’s announcement is notable because it was the most explicit in attributing the layoffs to AI replacing human work rather than AI requiring capital reallocation. Meta’s Zuckerberg said the layoffs were about freeing capital for AI infrastructure. Cloudflare’s Prince said the layoffs were about AI doing the work. The difference is between “we need your salary to buy GPUs” and “we no longer need you because the GPUs are doing your job.”

The human cost of the AI layoff wave is accumulating at a pace that the industry’s growth metrics do not capture. Google is turning Chrome into an agentic AI workplace tool, embedding AI capabilities directly into the browser that millions of knowledge workers use daily. ServiceNow projects 30 billion dollars in revenue by 2030, with a third of that coming from AI. The companies building the AI tools and the companies deploying them are both growing. The people whose work the tools replicate are not.

The tension

Cloudflare’s position is coherent but uncomfortable. The company reported its strongest quarter, told investors the AI opportunity is transformational, cut a fifth of its workforce to pursue it, and then saw a quarter of its market value disappear because investors were not sure the transformation would work. The 600 per cent increase in AI usage over three months is either evidence that the transition is already delivering results or evidence that the company is moving faster than it can manage.

Prince’s statement that certain support roles “are not going to be the roles that drive companies going forward” is a prediction about the entire industry, not just Cloudflare. If he is right, the 1,100 people losing their jobs at Cloudflare are early casualties of a restructuring that will reach every technology company and eventually every company that employs people to do work that AI agents can approximate. If he is wrong, Cloudflare just fired 20 per cent of its workforce during its best quarter, and the 24 per cent stock drop is the market’s way of saying so.

The earnings beat. The layoffs are real. The stock is down. The AI agents are running. The question Cloudflare cannot yet answer, and that no company in its position has answered, is whether a 600 per cent increase in AI usage produces a proportional increase in the value of the work, or whether it produces a proportional increase in the confidence that the work is being done without anyone checking whether it is being done well.

Dario Amodei is not the kind of CEO who talks loosely about numbers. The Anthropic co-founder and chief executive, a former VP of research at OpenAI with a PhD in computational neuroscience from Princeton, has built a reputation for measured public statements — particularly around the financial performance of a company that, until recently, disclosed almost nothing about its business.

So when Amodei took the stage at Anthropic’s Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday and offered a genuinely striking piece of financial candor, the room paid attention.

“We tried to plan very well for a world of 10x growth per year,” Amodei said during a fireside chat with Anthropic’s chief product officer, Ami Vora. “And yet we saw 80x. And so that is the reason we have had difficulties with compute.”

Anthropic had planned for tenfold growth. But revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, a rate Amodei described as “just crazy” and “too hard to handle.”

The number demands context. Annualized growth rates can overstate sustained performance — a single strong quarter, extrapolated across a full year, can paint a picture that doesn’t hold. Amodei knows this. But the underlying trajectory is not a mirage. Anthropic has crossed a $30 billion annualized revenue run rate, up sharply from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, and that growth is being driven largely by enterprise demand. The company’s revenue trajectory has been relentless: $87 million run rate in January 2024, $1 billion by December 2024, $9 billion by end of 2025, $14 billion in February 2026, $19 billion in March, and $30 billion in April.

For context: Salesforce took about 20 years to reach $30 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic did it in under three years from a standing start.

Claude Code became the fastest-growing product in enterprise software history

The growth story at Anthropic is, to a remarkable degree, a single-product story. Claude Code, the company’s agentic AI coding tool launched publicly in mid-2025, has become the fastest-growing product in the company’s history — and, by several measures, one of the fastest-growing software products ever built.

Claude Code hit $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of launch, and the growth hasn’t slowed down. By February 2026, the product was generating over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue. The company also said Claude Code’s weekly active users had doubled since January 1 and that business subscriptions had quadrupled since the start of 2026.

The mechanics of the product are straightforward. Claude Code is not a chatbot that suggests snippets. It reads a codebase, plans a sequence of actions, executes them using real development tools, evaluates the result, and adjusts its approach. The developer sets the objective and retains control over what gets committed, but the execution loop runs independently. The average developer using Claude Code now spends 20 hours per week working with the tool.

At Anthropic itself, the majority of code is now written by Claude Code. Engineers focus on architecture, product thinking, and continuous orchestration: managing multiple agents in parallel, giving direction, and making the decisions that shape what gets built.

That last point may be the most revealing detail Amodei disclosed at the conference: this is the first year Anthropic’s own internal pull requests have inflected upward due to Claude’s work on the company’s own codebase. The tool that Anthropic sells to developers is now a material contributor to Anthropic’s own engineering output. That creates a feedback loop that is almost impossible for competitors without a comparable product to replicate — the company is using its own product to build the next version of its own product.

The enterprise numbers tell the same story. The company now counts over 1,000 enterprise customers spending more than $1 million per year on Claude services, a figure that has doubled since February. Much of this increase has been fueled by a wave of corporate customers including Uber and Netflix.

Amodei framed the adoption curve in economic terms. “Software engineers are the ones who are fastest to adopt new technology,” he said on stage. “It’s a foreshadowing of how things are going to work across the economy, and how the economy is going to be transformed by AI.”

Anthropic’s 80x growth created a compute crisis it couldn’t solve alone

Hypergrowth creates its own category of problem. When demand outstrips supply by an order of magnitude, the constraint is not go-to-market strategy or product-market fit. The constraint is physics.

The company is growing so fast that its infrastructure has struggled to keep up, forcing Anthropic into what may be the most unexpected partnership in the current AI cycle. Amodei’s comments came hours after Anthropic announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at his company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. As part of the agreement, Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity — over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators.

The deal is remarkable for several reasons. Musk has been, until very recently, one of Anthropic’s most vocal critics. He has said Anthropic is “doomed to become the opposite of its name” and wrote in February that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.” But on Wednesday, Musk changed his tune, saying he spent a lot of time with senior members of the Anthropic team over the past week and that he was “impressed.” “Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector,” Musk wrote.

The strategic logic on both sides is clear. xAI’s Colossus 1 ended up with capacity that Grok’s user base never grew into, while Anthropic needs compute immediately. Anthropic has been signing deals with Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft for more compute capacity, but most of that isn’t expected to come online until late 2026 or early 2027. The SpaceX deal gives Anthropic a significant boost now — the key word being “now.”

As one industry watcher summarized the alignment: “Elon’s enemy is Sam. Dario’s enemy is Sam. Enemy of my enemy is a compute partner.”

Last month, Anthropic said demand for Claude has led to “inevitable strain on our infrastructure,” which has impacted “reliability and performance” for its users, particularly during peak hours. The company admitted in a postmortem from late April that three bugs had affected Claude Code since March 4, and that internal tests hadn’t caught them, leading to several weeks of degraded performance. Amodei said at the Code with Claude conference that the company is “working as quickly as possible to provide more” capacity and will “pass that compute on to you as soon as we can.”

A near-trillion-dollar valuation makes Anthropic’s IPO the most anticipated debut in years

The growth figures arrive at a moment when Anthropic’s valuation is itself becoming one of the defining financial stories of the AI era.

Anthropic has begun weighing a fresh funding round that would value the company at more than $900 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, potentially leapfrogging its longtime rival OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup. The velocity of the escalation is difficult to overstate. From $61.5 billion in March 2025, to $183 billion by its Series F in September, to $380 billion in February, to, if the current discussions proceed, more than $900 billion in May. Anthropic’s shares were already trading at an implied $1 trillion valuation on secondary markets earlier this month.

Instead of cashing out, many existing investors are waiting to potentially exit during Anthropic’s anticipated IPO later this year. The company is raising what is likely to be its last private round before going public to fund its massive computing needs. Bloomberg has reported that the company is weighing an IPO as early as October 2026, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley already in early discussions.

Anthropic is also building out infrastructure on longer time horizons. Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, securing up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity for training and deploying Claude models. Anthropic also secured 5 gigawatts of computing capacity as part of a separate deal with Google and Broadcom that will start to come online next year. The total commitment is staggering — tens of gigawatts of compute across three separate hardware ecosystems: Amazon’s Trainium chips, Google’s TPUs via Broadcom, and Nvidia GPUs through SpaceX and Microsoft Azure.

For perspective: Anthropic’s $30 billion run rate exceeds the trailing twelve-month revenues of all but approximately 130 S&P 500 companies. A company that was essentially pre-revenue in early 2024 now out-earns most of the Fortune 500.

That comparison comes with caveats. Private-market revenue run rate is not the same thing as audited GAAP revenue, gross margin, free cash flow, or public float. OpenAI has internally argued that Anthropic’s $30 billion figure is overstated by roughly $8 billion, pointing to questions about whether revenues from AWS and Google Cloud should be reported at gross value or net of the partner’s cut. The accounting question will ultimately be resolved when both companies file IPO prospectuses — but even on a net basis, Anthropic’s growth rate is unlike anything in enterprise software history.

Dario Amodei’s vision for AI extends far beyond coding — and he’s given himself a deadline

The financial story — 80x growth, a near-trillion-dollar valuation, a scramble to secure enough GPUs to meet demand — is dramatic on its own terms. But Amodei used his time on stage to place it inside a larger thesis about where AI is headed.

He described a progression from single agents to multiple agents to what he called whole organizational intelligence — from “a team of smart people in a room” to “a country of geniuses in the data center.” The framing is deliberately expansive. What Anthropic is selling today is a coding tool. What Amodei is describing is a future in which entire categories of knowledge work are performed by fleets of AI agents operating in parallel, supervised by humans who define objectives and review outputs.

He reiterated a prediction he made roughly a year ago: that 2026 would see the first billion-dollar company run entirely by a single person. “Hasn’t quite happened yet,” he said. “But we’ve got seven more months.”

The company has also been navigating political headwinds. The Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, blacklisting it from work with the military. The company has warned the designation could result in billions in lost revenue, with over one hundred enterprise customers reportedly expressing doubts about continuing their relationships.

And yet — as that scuffle makes its way through the legal system, Anthropic is only getting more popular. Amodei said this week he’s eventually hoping for “more normal” expansion.

There is a temptation, when covering a company growing at this rate, to let the numbers speak for themselves. They shouldn’t. Growth at 80x annualized is not a business plan — it’s an emergency. It means demand has outrun infrastructure, that customers want something the company cannot yet reliably deliver at scale, and that every week of constrained capacity is a week during which competitors can close the gap.

The investors funding Anthropic — including SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, Google, a16z, Lightspeed, and ICONIQ — are making a specific bet: that compute costs continue to fall per unit of intelligence, that revenue keeps compounding faster than burn, and that whoever owns the AI infrastructure layer in 2029 will generate returns that make the interim losses irrelevant.

Amodei’s candor at Code with Claude was not a victory lap. It was a diagnostic — an admission that his company is running faster than it can steer. He planned for a world of 10x growth and got 80x instead. Now he has seven months to prove that the infrastructure, the organization, and the vision can catch up to the demand. The country of geniuses in the data center is getting crowded. The question is whether anyone remembered to build enough rooms.

The attack on the Trellix source code repository disclosed last week has been claimed by the RansomHouse threat group, which leaked a small set of images as proof of the intrusion.

Yesterday, the threat actor published on their data leak site screenshots indicating access to the cybersecurity company’s appliance management system. However, BleepingComputer could not confirm the authenticity of the data.

Trellix is an international cybersecurity firm with global Fortune 100 customers. In 2025, the company had more than 53,000 customers in 185 countries and 3,500 employees.

The company confirmed the breach in a statement on May 1st and said that it was investigating the incident. “Trellix recently identified unauthorized access to a portion of our source code repository. Upon learning of this matter, we immediately began working with leading forensic experts to resolve it,” stated Trellix.

“We have also notified law enforcement. Based on our investigation to date, we have found no evidence that our source code release or distribution process was affected, or that our source code has been exploited.”

At the time, BleepingComputer’s request for details went unanswered, and the company did not disclose any information about the perpetrators.

Following a new request for comments after RansomHouse’s disclosure, Trellix told BleepingComputer that it was “aware of claims of responsibility for the attack and are looking into it.”

According to the threat actor, the intrusion occurred on April 17 and resulted in data encryption.

RansomHouse is a cybercrime group that launched in 2022 as a data-extortion operation, listing victims on a darkweb portal and leaking or selling data stolen from their corporate networks.

Over time, the threat actor added more advanced encryption utilities to their toolkit, such as ‘Mario,’ which performs a dual-encryption pass with two keys on target files, and ‘MrAgent,’ which automates the deployment of encryptors on VMware ESXi hypervisors.

A recent high-profile case involving RansomHouse was that of Japanese e-commerce giant Askul Corporation, from which the threat group stole 740,000 customer records, among other sensitive information.

Trellix’s investigation is still underway, and the company previously promised to share more details once they become available.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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While Google is helping Apple upgrade its AI, the search giant may have taken a little too much liking to the Apple Intelligence name. A new leak shared by Mysticleaks on Telegram seems to show “Gemini Intelligence” inside Google’s software running on what looks like a Pixel smartphone.

For now, it is best to take the leak with a grain of salt until there is something more concrete. But if the video is accurate, Google could be preparing the feature for the Pixel 11 series, which is expected to launch around August 2026.

Is Google really calling it Gemini Intelligence?

The irony is almost too rich. Apple Intelligence is Apple’s big bet on making Siri smarter, more personal, and actually useful in the AI age. And yet Apple has signed a multi-year partnership with Google to power next-gen Siri with Gemini models. So Google may simultaneously be fueling Apple Intelligence and launching Gemini Intelligence. That is either very efficient or very silly branding.

Google has already started expanding Gemini’s Personal Intelligence features. These allow Gemini to connect with apps like Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, and Search to answer questions with a user’s own context. Instead of asking a generic chatbot for help, users can ask for information tied to their emails, photos, saved details, and activity across Google services.

Why would Pixel 11 make sense?

Pixel phones have long been Google’s test bed for AI features, including call screening and AI-powered photo editing tools. If “Gemini Intelligence” is real, Pixel 11 would be the natural place to introduce it as a deeply integrated, phone-level AI layer. We just hope that the name gets a second pass. Assuming, of course, that there’s a name to pass on at all.

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