Anthropic blocks xAI’s Claude access

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Nothing says “your AI model is great” quite like a competitor secretly using it for their very own development.

Anthropic just cut off xAI’s Claude access after discovering Musk’s lab was using the rival models for its own development — each a testament to Claude’s coding dominance and a reminder that the AI wars are getting increasingly territorial.

P.S. We’re sorry today’s newsletter is later than usual — we had a temporary technical issue over the weekend, but every little thing is back to normal now. Thanks on your patience!

In today’s AI rundown:

• Anthropic blocks xAI from using Claude

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

• Google’s latest open standard for AI shopping

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC & XAI

🚫 Anthropic blocks xAI from using Claude

The Rundown: Anthropic reportedly cut off xAI’s access to Claude models last week after discovering Elon Musk’s AI lab had been using the rival system through Cursor to hurry up internal development, in line with tech journalist Kylie Robison.

The small print:

• xAI cofounder Tony Wu confirmed the block in a Wednesday internal memo, telling staff their Claude access via Cursor was not working.

• Anthropic’s terms explicitly ban customers from leveraging its models to construct or train competing AI systems, a policy xAI apparently violated.

• Wu reportedly framed the setback as motivation, saying xAI will take “successful on productivity” but will speed up work by itself coding tools.

• The move mirrors past enforcement actions, with Anthropic previously revoking OpenAI’s API access and limiting Windsurf over competitive concerns.

Why it matters: xAI’s internal Claude usage is a testament to the massive moment Opus and Claude Code are currently having within the industry’s coding scene. It’s also unsurprising to see things getting territorial — and with coding assistants now essential for AI development itself, rival model use will proceed to be a messy battleground.

TOGETHER WITH CONCIERGE

👋 Your brand’s AI answer engine

The Rundown: Today’s buyers use AI day-after-day to reply their questions, and haven’t any patience for a scavenger hunt in your website. Concierge is a custom Perplexity-style answer engine, trained on your organization’s content, that lives in your website and delivers accurate, personalized responses to ultra-specific questions.

Modern brands use Concierge to:

• Handle any buyer query (regardless of how technical) with advanced RAG in your content & media

• Control and visibility over every conversation, with guardrails and sentiment evaluation

• Construct trust with website visitors before they’re willing to commit to a demo

Use Concierge to show every query into a possibility.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature through which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and each day lives.

Zach, AI Author: Nano Banana Pro has been a step change each for staying true to prompts and likewise with the ability to take its own creative liberties. The power to speak through prompt brainstorming, image edits, and even providing context directly from our newsletter has made for some highly personalized latest creative paths.

Jason, Developer: I even have been using Grok in my Tesla, and it’s a fun technique to navigate and find latest places to try around me. You possibly can ask it to map multiple locations now, and ask it things like “after my first destination, I need to get coffee from an area place, not a sequence”. It’s given some unique, interesting options I never would’ve explored otherwise.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: My father works in the development industry and is simply able to put in writing in Chinese; nonetheless, all of his clients require quotations in English. I taught him tips on how to use ChatGPT’s voice and image for translating from Chinese to English, and for drafting skilled construction quotations directly through the platform.

AI TRAINING

🛠️ Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use Google Labs’ free AI tools to construct marketing content for your online business. There are dozens of neglected tools to assist tackle whatever your use case is, but we’ve pulled our favourite three so that you can try.

Step-by-step:

1. Navigate to labs.google/experiments to see a full list of tools.

2. First is Pomelli. Copy your brand’s website URL and paste it into Pomelli. After ~5 minutes and also you’ll get bespoke ad campaigns with image and video assets.

3. Next, use Flow. Create start and end frames via Create Image, add them to Frames to Video with a prompt, then stitch clips using the scene builder.

4. Finally, go to ImageFX for image iteration. Use the suggested styles to shine up your prompting skills and take a look at locking the “seed” to maintain outputs consistent.

Pro tip: Click the dropdown beside ImageFX and choose MusicFX for generating music.

PRESENTED BY MONGODB

🚀 The AI-ready database

The Rundown: MongoDB Atlas is the developer-friendly database used to construct and scale gen AI and LLM-powered apps, while not having a separate vector database.

What makes Atlas ideal for AI:

• Native vector search that eliminates costly multi-system architectures

• 125+ cloud regions across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

• A developer-friendly backend built for AI/ML apps and advice engines

Start constructing today.

GOOGLE & AI RETAIL

🛍️ Google’s latest open standard for AI shopping

The Rundown: Google just introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, a brand new open-source framework designed to let AI agents handle your entire shopping journey — built alongside major retailers like Shopify, Walmart, Goal, and Etsy.

The small print:

• UCP creates shared infrastructure for AI systems to administer product discovery, checkout, and post-purchase support across different platforms and agents.

• Google is adding native checkout to AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, letting users complete purchases mid-conversation via Google Pay.

• A brand new Business Agent puts branded assistants directly in Search, with the flexibility to personalize interactions, provide offers, and access customer insights.

• Over 20 corporations endorsed UCP at launch, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Macy’s, Best Buy, and American Express.

Why it matters: Google’s UCP joins a growing stack of AI commerce protocols, but they’re all designed to be interoperable slightly than competing head-to-head. The actual shift will occur behind the scenes for users, while brands being optimized for agentic shopping will likely be as necessary as web sites within the early days of e-commerce.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ☎️ Bland AI – Automate your businesses phone calls with AI*

• 🎨 Midjourney – Niji V7 model with improved anime, text rendering, & more

• 💬 Scribe v2 – ElevenLabs’ latest SOTA transcription model

• 🏆 NousCoder-14B – Nous Research’s olympiad programming model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 All the pieces else in AI today

OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro solved three Erdos problems using Harmonic’s Aristotle, with mathematician Tererence Tao and others breaking latest ground on the unsolved proofs.

Epoch AI released latest data finding that global AI compute capability is doubling every 7 months, with Nvidia chips accounting for over 60% of production since 2022.

Alibaba’s Qwen head Justin Lin said Chinese AI corporations have a sub 20% probability of overtaking frontier models in 3-5 years, citing resource gaps against U.S. rivals.

ElevenLabs launched Scribe v2, a brand new SOTA transcription model that the corporate claims achieves the bottom error rate on industry benchmarks.

Meta announced nuclear energy deals with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo for as much as 6.6 GW by 2035, making it considered one of the most important corporate nuclear purchasers in U.S. history.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Healthcare, a brand new HIPAA-compliant platform now rolling out to major hospitals for clinical and administrative workflows.

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 Elaine X. in Toronto, Canada:

“Recently, scam emails in my Gmail inbox increased — hard to dam and never-ending to delete. As a substitute of always cleansing my inbox, I used Gemini to guide me step-by-step in constructing an automatic workflow in n8n.

Every latest email now triggers the workflow, where Gemini analyzes the content using a strict prompt to discover scams and advertorial-style emails. Messages flagged as spam are filtered out before reaching my inbox.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Gmail’s Gemini glow-up

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Lego’s iconic brick just got a brain

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Hyundai mass-producing Atlas robots

• Today’s AI tool guide: Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: AI Foundations Boot Camp Pt. 2

See you soon,

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