Anthropic enters the frontier AI fight

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI world’s holiday gifts are coming early this season, with Gemini 3, GPT-5.1 Pro, and now Claude Opus 4.5 all launching in per week.

With Anthropic crashing the frontier party with Opus’ recent record-breaking coding benchmarks, the revolving door cycle of competition for the world’s top model continues to spin faster than ever.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Anthropic climbs AI ranks with Claude Opus 4.5

• OpenAI’s recent shopping feature in ChatGPT

• Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

• U.S. ‘Genesis Mission’ for AI science breakthroughs

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🤖 Anthropic climbs AI ranks with Claude Opus 4.5

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.5, the corporate’s recent flagship model that competes with Gemini 3 and GPT-5.1 for top performance across the board, particularly excelling on coding and agentic benchmarks.

The small print:

• Opus is the primary to interrupt 80% on the SWE-Bench Verified coding benchmark, also setting recent highs for tool use, reasoning, and problem-solving.

• The model matches or beats Google’s Gemini 3 across a variety of benchmarks, with Anthropic also calling it the “most robustly aligned model” safety-wise.

• Anthropic designed Opus to orchestrate teams of smaller Haiku models, positioning the flagship model as a central coordinator for multi-agent systems.

• Opus 4.5’s pricing also notably is available in at a 66% reduction from Opus 4.1, while also showing massive efficiency gains over Anthropic’s other models.

• Anthropic also rolled out updates, including unlimited chat lengths, Claude Code in desktop, and expanded access to Claude for Chrome & Excel.

Why it matters: Opus 4.5 arrives in a packed week for frontier AI, landing just days after GPT 5.1 Pro and Gemini 3 hit the market and marking the following step up within the frontier AI model race. The worth reduction can also be an enormous move for Anthropic, which has often been criticized for Claude’s costs in comparison with the market.

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OPENAI

🛒 OpenAI’s recent shopping feature in ChatGPT

The Rundown: OpenAI rolled out Shopping Research, a dedicated interactive shopping assistant inside ChatGPT that builds personalized buyer guides by scanning trusted retail sources and asking targeted questions on preferences.

The small print:

• The feature runs on a version of GPT-5 mini, fine-tuned specifically for product discovery and trained to prioritize organic reviews over promotional content.

• Users describe what they need, answer quiz-style questions on budget and preferences, then receive curated guides with 10-15 options in minutes.

• OpenAI said the feature excels in electronics, beauty, home goods, and outdoor gear, and can soon integrate Quick Checkout for direct transactions.

• It is on the market across all ChatGPT tiers with “nearly unlimited usage” available through the vacations.

Why it matters: OpenAI continues to push for ChatGPT to change into the house base for the complete purchase cycle, from search to payment. While we haven’t seen ads or the teased vendor revenue streams yet, the cogs are moving into place for OpenAI to challenge Google in a large disruption to traditional online shopping.

AI TRAINING

💻 Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn methods to vibe code a customized software tool without writing code — constructing an EPUB book reader that segments uploads into chapters for one-click copying into LLMs for deeper learning.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Bolt.recent, log in with Google or GitHub, and begin prompting using natural language — no coding needed

2. Describe the tool you would like: “Vibe code an app where I can upload an EPUB file, and it divides it into chapters so I can one-click copy all of the text of that chapter and paste it into ChatGPT”

3. Test the primary output by uploading an EPUB file, evaluate what works and what doesn’t, then iterate with prompts like “These chapters are inaccurate”

4. Copy a parsed chapter into ChatGPT for deep reading: the LLM summarizes every paragraph and preserves nuances that standard PDF/EPUB uploads miss

Hot Tip: We’re all going to be constructing micro-tools for ourselves. By utilizing Bolt, Cursor, or Replit, this process becomes fast, custom, and code-free.

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U.S. GOVERNMENT & AI

🧪 U.S. ‘Genesis Mission’ for AI science breakthroughs

The Rundown: U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the DOE to construct a unified AI platform, aiming to compress scientific discovery timelines from years to days for “challenges of national importance,” like biotech and energy.

The small print:

• The initiative mobilizes 17 federal research facilities and their supercomputing infrastructure to coach AI models on many years of presidency scientific data.

• The platform will enable AI agents to automate experiments, test hypotheses, and generate predictive models across chemistry, biology, and engineering.

• The White House called it the biggest coordination of research assets for the reason that Apollo program moon missions of the Nineteen Sixties.

Why it matters: The geopolitical AI race continues to scale, with the U.S. treating it with the identical urgency it once reserved for world-altering technological moments just like the moon missions. Given the private sector’s intertwining with government AI efforts, it’s likely we’ll see some familiar labs and more eye-popping deals as a part of the hassle.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Claude 4.5 Opus – Anthropic’s recent benchmark-topping frontier model

• 🍌 Nano Banana Pro – Google’s recent image AI with improved text rendering

• 🤖 GPT 5.1 Pro – OpenAI’s powerful recent model for Pro users

• 🧪 Edison Evaluation – Edison’s next-gen scientific evaluation agent

📰 Every part else in AI today

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and designer Jony Ive revealed that the team has selected the design for the approaching AI device, saying it could arrive in “lower than two years.”

Microsoft released Fara-7B, an open-weight AI model that’s compact enough to run directly on laptops and may autonomously navigate web sites and complete tasks.

OpenAI’s Sora is being blocked from using the term ‘Cameo’ for its personalization feature after Cameo filed a lawsuit and a judge issued a restraining order this week.

Amazon plans to take a position as much as $50B starting in 2026 to construct AI and supercomputing data centers for U.S. federal agencies, including defense and intelligence operations.

Exa introduced Exa 2.1, the newest version of its agentic search API that brings recent accuracy, speed, and quality improvements.

Artificial Evaluation launched CritPt, a difficult recent graduate-level physics benchmark — with Gemini 3 Pro taking the highest spot despite solving lower than 10% of the issues.

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 Caitlin F. in Atlanta, GA:

“I’m focused on how businesses use AI to enhance operations and truly impact the underside line. One use case takes a call transcript with a prospect, runs it through an assessment of client fit and scalability readiness, and refers to a previous proposal structure to craft a brand new custom scope. We reflect their pain of their language and our solutions in our terminology. Your complete process end-to-end is now 3 minutes.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI braces for ‘rough vibes’

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Ozempic’s next trick — slow aging

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Figure sued over ‘skull-crushing’ force

• Today’s AI tool guide: Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

• Watch our last workshop: The Human-First Agentic Content Workflow

See you soon,

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