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Hunterbrook Global has been valued at $100mn after a recent fundraising, as the novel US newsroom-cum-hedge fund revealed to investors that it planned to move into litigation.

The new capital, raised by the parent company that oversees the hedge fund Hunterbrook Capital and the news outlet Hunterbrook Media, has come from investors, including the Ford Foundation and venture capital firm Floating Point, according to a person familiar with the fundraise.

Hunterbrook was launched in 2023 by investor Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz and writer Sam Koppelman, creating a newsroom that would gather exclusive information and a hedge fund that would trade off it.

The recent fundraise doubled Hunterbrook’s valuation from its 2023 seed round and is separate from the $100mn raised last year for the investment fund run by Hunterbrook Capital.

The new funds will be invested in building its newsroom further, according to a person close to the situation. Hunterbrook declined to comment.

Hunterbrook also revealed to investors in a letter that it planned to further exploit its news gathering by launching a litigation business that would partner with law firms on cases enabled by the newsroom’s reporting. The business is being led by led by media lawyer and litigator Joe Slaughter.

The fund, which started trading in April 2024, gets exclusive early access to the newsroom’s potentially market-moving stories, enabling it to trade on the scoops. Meanwhile, profits made from the fund are ploughed back into the newsroom to continue to build its expertise.

Hunterbrook initially envisaged that it would short stocks in instances where its newsroom exposed scandals, but this approach has been sidelined in an “irascible bull market”, according to the investor letter.

The letter also details how Hunterbrook is generating a sizeable portion of its returns by taking long positions in businesses its journalists have investigated and found to be sound.

Hunterbrook’s fund generated a 31 per cent return in the second quarter of 2025 and a 16 per cent return year to date.

“This won’t be the norm, though we’ll always aspire to it. But it also wasn’t a normal quarter to achieve these results, either,” the letter says. “The fund navigated the crash in April, the violent recovery into May, its unlikely continuation to new all-time highs in June, and kaleidoscopic skirmishes with misinformation along the way.”

The fund is closed to new investors but existing partners, including Horwitz and Koppelman, recently added to their holdings, according to the letter.

Hunterbrook’s investments in the period have included Core Scientific, a data centre infrastructure provider that is being acquired by CoreWeave for $9bn, as well as Evolv Technologies, Carpenter Technology and Rocket Companies.

The letter also pointed to one “untradable scoop”: on Saturday June 21, when markets were closed, Hunterbrook Media broke the news that B-2 stealth bombers had launched from an Air Force base in Missouri, indicating the US would imminently join Israel’s bombardment of Iran.

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Dutch pension funds are set to put pressure on European government bond markets later this year as they start to sell around €125bn of long-dated bonds because of a substantial reform of the retirement sector. 

Between 2025 and 2028 the €1.5tn Dutch pension industry is transitioning from a system in which final payouts to pensioners are guaranteed to a defined contribution framework, in which employers are only tied to the amount they put in. That will mean holding much less long-term sovereign debt to back their long-term promises and freeing up more funds to invest in higher-returning assets such as equities and credit.

While a handful have already switched, Dutch funds managing close to half of the total assets that need to be transferred are set to convert in January next year, with managers expected to prepare portfolios in the run-up. Strategists at Dutch bank Rabobank expect €127bn of long-term sovereign debt will be sold over the course of the transition.

The sale is the latest example of declining demand for long-term debt among pension funds which, coupled with record levels of sovereign borrowing, has helped push up bond yields around the world.

“Everyone is worried about the European long end” of the bond market, said Pooja Kumra, a rates strategist at TD Securities, adding that sales may come “very quickly at the end of the year . . . but pre-emptive trades could be punitive if there are more delays”.

PFZW, the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands with €259bn of assets for healthcare and welfare workers, told the Financial Times it was on track to switch to the new system on January 1, 2026. ABP, the nation’s largest, plans to transition the following year.

Rising bond yields are piling pressure on policymakers as Europe increases its borrowing to fund its defence and energy ambitions, led by Germany’s €1tn “whatever it takes” spending plan.

Long-dated Eurozone debt has been hit especially hard. Germany’s 30-year yield has climbed from below zero during the Covid pandemic to more than 3 per cent, close to its highest levels since the Eurozone debt crisis. The additional interest rate paid on France’s 30-year debt, compared with its two-year equivalent, has surged from zero two years ago to more than 2 percentage points.

Dutch pension funds, which are by far the largest in the Eurozone, have used interest rates swaps and government bonds across different time horizons, even over 50 years or more, to match the period over which they must make payouts to their youngest members. 

But as funds move to a system where they pay out based on returns, they are set to move towards riskier assets such as equities and credit, which they expect to generate higher returns for their members over the long term. 

“There will be a shift away from 50, 40 and 30-year bonds,” said Michiel Tukker, a European rates strategist at Dutch bank ING. “Now the question is . . . who will be the buyer?”

Some other traditional buyers have pulled back. Japanese investors, historically a cornerstone buyer of Eurozone sovereign debt, sold down their holdings at the end of last year at the fastest pace in a decade.

Rabobank estimates that, prior to the debt sales, Dutch pension funds owned around €457bn of government bonds, with the heaviest sales — an estimated combined €69bn — expected in German, French and Dutch sovereign debt. 

Some 19 per cent of all government debt in the Netherlands is owned by Dutch retirement funds, compared with an 8 per cent ownership of German Bunds, according to Rabobank, with the ownership ratio highest for bonds with a distant maturity date. 

Leading into the pension transition, Dutch funds have been increasing their use of hedging through bonds and swaps to protect their members’ benefits ratio from any interest rate shock or equity market tumble. 

“It gives a difficult dynamic, where on the one hand you are incentivised to increase your interest rate hedges going into the transition date, and then after that date you do the opposite trade as fast as possible because you don’t want to be the last one,” said Tukker.

The timing is still uncertain. A handful of pension funds have already delayed their transition date, including PME, a €60bn scheme for workers in the metal and tech industry. But hedge funds are positioning to profit from the transition, analysts said. 

“Everyone is trying to prey on this,” said Lyn Graham-Taylor, a senior rates strategist at Rabobank, adding that he was focused on trying to work out “how much are long-end rates going to steepen and how much is already in the price?”

Additional reporting by Ian Smith

Amazon is weighing another multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic to deepen a strategic alliance that the tech companies believe will provide an edge in the global competition to profit from artificial intelligence.

The Seattle-based cloud and ecommerce group has discussed plans to extend beyond the $8bn it has already ploughed into the San Francisco-based AI model builder, according to multiple people with knowledge of the talks.

A new deal would further a relationship that — according to interviews with more than a dozen Amazon and Anthropic executives, board members and investors — has become vital to both their futures.

The investment will ensure Amazon remains one of Anthropic’s largest shareholders, as it seeks to position ahead of Google which has also invested more than $3bn, while providing a bulwark against a similar multibillion dollar partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.

It would also deepen ties as the pair collaborate on one of the world’s largest data centre projects and team up on sales of Anthropic’s technology to Amazon’s cloud computing customers.

“We quickly realised that we had many shared goals that were fundamentally critical,” said Dan Grossman, vice-president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon. “The size of the [existing investment] represents our ambition.”

The strategy of close alignment comes with risks. Microsoft’s $14bn investment into OpenAI helped the duo take an early lead in the race to commercialise AI products, but that alliance is under strain because of the ChatGPT maker’s desire to move to a for-profit model.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI staff including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei who left over ethical and safety concerns. It was initially a cloud computing customer before Amazon made a $1.25bn investment in September 2023.

The Amazon deal ensured Anthropic had a “reliable source of compute and investment” at a time when Microsoft was locked into an agreement with OpenAI that would have precluded it from acting as a partner, according to one of the Seattle-based group’s executives.

In June, Amazon outlined the scale of its first site for “Project Rainier”, a large-scale data centre programme that will help meet Anthropic’s computing demands. Filled with the cloud providers’ Trainium2 chips, the facilities in New Carlisle, Indiana will draw 2.2 gigawatts in power when completed, far surpassing the scale of Oracle’s ambitious 1.2GW campus for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas.

Amazon detailed at least $11bn in investment for a cluster of 16 data centres in Indiana last year, but plans for the site have since doubled.

Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, said it had worked “really closely” with Amazon to ensure that the Big Tech group’s Trainium2 chips were suitable for its models. “The ability to have Amazon, who is developing their own chips and has the knowhow and expertise, open to our requirements, is massive,” he said.

The two companies are already discussing plans for future sites attached to Project Rainier. “The goal is to always be way ahead of what your customers are going to need,” said David Brown, vice-president of compute at Amazon Web Services. “I call it the illusion of infinite capacity.”

While Amazon is developing its own in-house foundation models, it has sought closer ties to Anthropic than Google, which is focused on building its own powerful AI models called Gemini.

The “fair value” of Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is about $13.8bn, according to regulatory filings. Its backing came in the form of convertible notes, with only a portion turned into equity so far.

Both tech giants’ stakes are capped to keep them well below owning more than a third of Anthropic. They each have no voting rights, board seats or board observer seats. Google owns roughly 14 per cent, according to legal filings.

Anthropic’s most recent equity valuation is $61.5bn, set by investors in March, according to PitchBook.

Amazon has made other investments in AI companies, including Hugging Face and Scale AI, but Anthropic is its third-largest investment to date behind MGM Studios and Whole Food Markets.

Executives at the Seattle-based group are confident that the partnership with Anthropic would be more robust than Microsoft and OpenAI, as the start-up was structured as a public benefit corporation rather than a non-profit. Investors hold equity, unlike with OpenAI where they are beholden to a complex profit share agreement.

Anthropic has previously said that it is “not owned or dominated by a single tech giant” and has chosen to remain independent.

Yet, Amazon has manoeuvred itself to be named Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner.

The model builder counts on Amazon’s data centres and its specialised Trainium semiconductor chips to develop and deploy large language models. However, Anthropic also uses Google’s custom AI accelerator chip — a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) called Trillium.

Claude, meanwhile, is embedded in Amazon products such as its improved digital voice assistant Alexa+ and streaming service Prime Video.

One Anthropic investor said Amazon’s salespeople more clearly promoted the start-up’s Claude series of models to its cloud computing customers than search giant Google.

“Google pushes Gemini in every interaction, despite backing Anthropic. They will sell Gemini at every opportunity,” added the start-up’s investor. “Amazon’s default is to sell Claude.”

Google has previously said that more than 4,000 customers used Anthropic’s models on its cloud platform. The search giant declined to comment.

Atul Deo, director of Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI app development platform, said that the company was cautious about preferring a single AI partner. “Forcing something on customers is not a good strategy,” he said, noting that an alternative provider’s models could soon be in demand.

But Kate Jensen, Anthropic’s head of revenue, said that the two companies pitched to potential customers together. “We sit down and say, you’ve already trusted Amazon with your data,” she said. “You need the world’s best model.”

Anthropic has an annual revenue run rate of more than $4bn, according to people familiar with the matter, a sliver of the $107bn AWS generated in the 2024 fiscal year.

Amazon’s decision to invest in training its own AI models, however, remains a risk for Anthropic, which relies on the tech giant to provide a robust pipeline of corporate customers which are its main revenue source.

David Luan, a former OpenAI executive, is leading the cloud provider’s pursuit of artificial general intelligence — systems that surpass human abilities — and his team has built what the company describes as “dependable AI agents” that have benchmarked better than Anthropic’s equivalent.

“There are benefits and some drawbacks to the way the relationship is structured but at the end of the day Anthropic look to us to solve a lot of their problems,” added one Amazon executive.