Anthropic’s Claude involves Excel

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Every AI company wants to beat spreadsheets, and Anthropic just made a bet on where the true money lives: finance.

With Claude’s recent Excel integration shipping alongside a slew of connectors and finance-specific Skills, AI’s Wall Street ambitions just gained a strong recent analyst.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Anthropic brings Claude directly into Excel

• Odyssey-2 turns AI video into real-time interaction

• Create a Claude Skill to design YouTube thumbnails

• OpenAI’s GPT-5 to higher handle mental health crises

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI RESEARCH

📊 Anthropic brings Claude directly into Excel

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude for Excel in beta, letting users interact with the AI assistant through a sidebar that may read, analyze, and modify spreadsheets, alongside recent connectors and Skills for the financial industry.

The small print:

• The mixing allows Claude to elucidate spreadsheets, fix formulas, populate templates with recent data, or construct recent workbooks from scratch.

• Seven recent connectors link Claude to financial platforms like Aiera for earnings call transcripts, LSEG for live market data, and Moody’s for credit rankings.

• Anthropic also debuted several recent finance-specific Agent Skills, including constructing money flow models, company evaluation, coverage reports, and more.

• Claude for Excel and the brand new Skills are rolling out as a research preview to Max, Enterprise, and Teams subscribers before a broader release.

Why it matters: AI for spreadsheets has been a hot topic over the previous few months, with ChatGPT, Copilot, and now Claude all pushing solutions. While the others have been more agent-focused, Claude’s native Excel access and financial connectors may bring recent reliability to an area still waiting for a real AI breakthrough.

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ODYSSEY

🎥 Odyssey-2 turns AI video into real-time interaction

The Rundown: Odyssey just launched Odyssey-2, a brand new interactive video model that generates streaming AI footage at 20 frames per second, allowing users to shape and control multi-minute videos through text prompts as they explore the scene.

The small print:

• Unlike other video models that take minutes to supply short clips, Odyssey-2 streams footage immediately, with recent frames appearing every 50 milliseconds.

• The system generates video segments without planning, with each recent frame based on what has already happened and what users prompt in real-time.

• Users can direct the video’s evolution through natural language prompts while it plays via a chat box, with the AI constantly adapting to every input.

• The model learns physics and dynamics from video data, enabling it to simulate realistic behaviors like waves moving across water or light shifting on surfaces.

Why it matters: Odyssey-2 feels very different from interactions with other AI video platforms on the market, closer to a hybrid world generator than a Veo or Sora. While the standard is probably not as impressive as other models, the real-time, open-ended exploration seems like an idea with a ton of potential for brand spanking new content experiences.

AI TRAINING

🤩 Create a Claude Skill to design YouTube thumbnails

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to construct a custom Claude Skill that mechanically generates branded YouTube thumbnails by analyzing top-performing videos and applying your brand guidelines.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Claude Settings → Capabilities, enable “Code execution & file creation”, then scroll to Skills section, toggle on “skill-creator” and click on “Try in Chat”

2. Start chat, upload your logo, prompt: “Create a skill that generates high CTR thumbnails. It should analyze YouTube video links, generate thumbnails using the PIL library with a logo within the top-right corner. Use Black, White, Blue colours”

3. Download the generated ZIP file, go to Profile → Settings → Capabilities → Upload Skill, drop the ZIP to put in your Thumbnail Generator Skill

4. Start recent chat, prompt: “Generate YouTube thumbnail for ‘AI Productivity Tools 2025’. Listed below are the highest videos: [paste URLs]. Create a high-CTR thumbnail with logo top-right using brand colours”

5. Refine output with follow-ups like “Use Roboto font” or “Make text bolder with Sans Serif” until you get the proper thumbnail

Pro tip: Use this approach to create other productivity Skills, similar to a presentation generation Skill for automated slide decks or an email marketing campaign Skill.

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OPENAI

🧠 OpenAI’s GPT-5 to higher handle mental health crises

The Rundown: OpenAI just rolled out major updates to GPT-5 designed to higher recognize and reply to users experiencing mental health emergencies, after consulting with over 170 mental health professionals across dozens of nations.

The small print:

• The updated model significantly reduces problematic responses, with clinicians rating GPT-5 as 91% compliant with mental health protocols vs. 77% for 4o.

• OpenAI said it trained GPT-5 to specific empathy without reinforcing delusional beliefs, also fixing a problem where safeguards degraded during long chats.

• OAI said roughly 0.07% of its 800M weekly energetic users show signs of potential psychosis or mania, translating to hundreds of thousands of concerning conversations.

• The updates come amid mounting legal pressure, including lawsuits from families and warnings from state officials about protecting vulnerable users.

Why it matters: The quantity of mental health chats being fielded by AI is staggering, and is a difficult situation for OAI to moderate, with some cases likely benefiting from the tool and others resulting in even worse spirals. While it’s clear positive steps are being taken, it’s a segment of AI use with out a clear-cut ‘correct’ path forward.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🔐 Incogni – Remove your personal data from the net so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off for annual plans*

• 💼 Claude for Excel – Anthropic’s recent research preview for AI in spreadsheets

• 💭 Odyssey 2 – Fast and interactive AI video generation

• 🏗️ Mistral AI Studio – Recent platform for going from AI prototypes to production

*Sponsored Listing

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

MiniMax released M2, an AI that ranks because the strongest open model (and #4 on Artificial Evaluation’ Intelligence Index), excelling in agentic, tool use, and STEM tasks.

Qualcomm unveiled its AI200 chip for data centers that goals to compete with Nvidia, with Saudi AI startup Humain revealed as the primary customer for the brand new accelerators.

AMD and the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1B partnership to construct two supercomputers to speed up research in areas like energy, medicine, and security.

AI hiring startup Mercor raised $350M in funding at a $10B valuation, benefiting from a pivot to data-labeling following Meta’s acquisition of a stake in competitor Scale AI.

Expense management platforms report that AI-faked receipts now account for as much as 14% of fraudulent submissions, with corporations detecting over $1M in falsified invoices.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Christopher S. in Houston, TX:

“I recently got here across a sales development agent. As an independent business loan broker, prospecting and lead nurturing take 60% of my time. This SDR, without charge for now, prospects, researches, emails, and follows up with 150 recent contacts a day. My pipeline of applications has grown from 5-10 to over 45-50 a month, and the SDR found and helped me close my first and second multimillion-dollar loans.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The ‘Meta-fication’ of OpenAI

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple may strike space take care of Musk

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Nike’s robotic sneaker

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create a Claude Skill that designs YT thumbnails

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM Thursday: Construct pro PPTs with Claude Skills

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown