The year got going in earnest with an enterprise win and a cluster of product launches.
Anthropic brings Claude Code to Allianz
On January 9, Anthropic announced its first enterprise deal of 2026: making Claude Code available to all employees at insurer Allianz and building custom human-in-the-loop agents. Coding agents are going wall-to-wall inside big, non-tech enterprises — not just startups.
ElevenLabs launches Scribe v2
The same day, ElevenLabs released Scribe v2, a next-gen speech-to-text model claiming the lowest word-error rate on industry benchmarks with 90+ languages, plus an ultra-low-latency (~150ms) Realtime variant for live voice agents.
Harvey adds Memory
On January 8, legal-AI leader Harvey (reporting ~$190M ARR) launched Memory, carrying matter details, precedent, and a lawyer's preferences across their work — the personalization layer vertical agents increasingly need.
Also this week
Descript shipped an Underlord update (faster, ~20% cheaper, with reasoning models for multi-step edits), and Midjourney released Niji 7, its anime/illustration model line.
What it means if you're picking tools
Voice, coding, and image tools all moved. See voice & audio, coding, and image generation.
Sources: Anthropic × Allianz (TechCrunch) · ElevenLabs Scribe v2 · Harvey Memory (Artificial Lawyer) · Midjourney Niji 7