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AI Daily Brief — 28 February 2026

The Saturday after the biggest Friday: OpenAI‘s $110B raise close, Anthropic‘s federal cease-use designation and OpenAI‘s Pentagon partnership all settle into weekend digests. February 2026 wraps as the largest startup-funding month on record — $189B globally, with AI absorbing about 90%. Anthropic’s contractor partnerships are described as “in jeopardy” as the legal team prepares an injunction.

Top stories

  • Anthropic legal-track activates. FedScoop reports Anthropic’s contractor partnerships are “in jeopardy” under the supply-chain-risk designation; a legal challenge is being prepared, with a preliminary injunction expected within the following month. via FedScoop
  • Claude Code reaches $2.5B ARR. By end of February, Anthropic’s Claude Code hits a $2.5B annualised run rate — more than doubling since the start of 2026 — with 29M daily installs inside Visual Studio Code. Context for what’s at stake in the Anthropic-Pentagon dispute. via Manaknight Digital

February 2026 wrap

The month’s funding ledger: OpenAI $110B (largest VC round ever), Anthropic $30B (third-largest), Waymo $16B, ElevenLabs $500M at $11B, Cerebras $1B at $23B, Bedrock Robotics $270M, Runway $315M at $5.3B, Goodfire $150M at $1.25B, Fundamental $255M at $1.4B, SambaNova $350M. Frontier model ledger: Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok Imagine 1.0, Grok 4.20 Beta, Doubao-Seed-2.0, Qwen 3.5, GLM-5, MiniMax M2.5, Voxtral TTS family. Policy ledger: International AI Safety Report 2026 (Feb 3), NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative (Feb 17), New Delhi Declaration (Feb 19-21, 88 → 91 countries), Anthropic-Pentagon dispute (Feb 24-27).

Quiet corners

No first-party model shipping Saturday from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, xAI, Microsoft AI, Mistral or Thinking Machines Lab.

By the numbers

  • February 2026 venture funding: $189B global · ~90% to AI
  • Top-3 February rounds: OpenAI $110B · Anthropic $30B · Waymo $16B
  • Claude Code: $2.5B ARR · 29M daily VS Code installs · doubled since 1 January

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from publicly reported announcements on 28 February 2026.