CNBC Daily Open: The flow of money in AI appears one-way at this point (www.cnbc.com)

Stocks slid for a fourth straight day as investors grew skittish about mega-cap tech names tied to AI, with the S&P 500 falling and bitcoin briefly dipping below $90,000. The biggest headline: Anthropic struck a deal with Microsoft (up to $5 billion) and Nvidia (up to $10 billion), valuing the OpenAI rival at roughly $350 billion and committing to buy compute from its new backers — a move that underscores a growing pattern of circular investment and commercial tie-ups in the AI stack. Meanwhile Google unveiled Gemini 3, its next-generation model (following Gemini 2.5 eight months ago), which Google says will require “less prompting” to deliver desired answers and will roll out in the coming weeks. Separately, U.S. senators asked for an investigation into World Liberty Finance, a Trump-linked crypto firm accused of selling tokens to illicit actors. Why it matters: the Anthropic financing highlights consolidation and vertical integration — cloud and chip vendors are not just suppliers but strategic investors, potentially locking in demand for GPU/compute capacity and reshaping competitive dynamics with players like OpenAI. Investor skepticism persists despite heavy capital flows into AI companies, as equity prices retrench amid earnings risk (notably for Nvidia) and macroheadwinds. Gemini 3’s “less prompting” claim suggests improvements in instruction-following and sample efficiency, which could reduce reliance on extensive prompt engineering and change cost profiles for deploying large models.