Lumen Technologies transforms into AI networking leader with Anthropic and Yankees partnerships

Lumen Technologies, a company most people associate with old-school telecom, is quietly building the plumbing that AI companies need to function. The company has landed a partnership with Anthropic valued at approximately $13 billion to expand its fiber network across North America, completed an acquisition of cloud networking platform Alkira, and signed a deal with the New York Yankees. From phone lines to AI pipelines The Anthropic partnership, announced in late February 2026, is a contract to build high-capacity fiber network infrastructure across North America, designed to handle low-latency, high-bandwidth connections that AI workloads demand. “The transformation that we’re driving is really starting to take hold,” President and CFO Chris Stansbury said, pointing to Gartner recently naming Lumen the company “to beat” in enterprise wide area network and connectivity services for AI. That Gartner recognition, published on June 25, 2026, named Lumen as “the company to beat” in the enterprise WAN and connectivity services sector for AI. Stansbury framed the competitive landscape in blunt terms. Telecom carriers used to own the full stack, from physical networks to software layers ...