🧑‍💻 Claude Code sparks ‘selfware’ era

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Claude Code is having its “ChatGPT moment” — and it is not just developers being attentive.

From CEOs scrapping engineering hires to hobbyists constructing custom apps, Anthropic’s tool is fueling a wave of “selfware” that puts software creation within the hands of anyone.

P.S. — The Rundown is hiring for several latest roles across marketing, community, social, and more! Learn more and apply here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Claude Code’s virality rattles software stocks

• Ex-OpenAI policy lead’s latest AI safety nonprofit

• Optimize prompting with this Markdown strategy

• Anthropic’s first Economic Index of 2026

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

📉 Claude Code’s virality rattles software stocks

The Rundown: Anthropic’s Claude Code is having its “ChatGPT moment” amongst each developers and hobbyists, with the viral excitement fueling a selloff in traditional software stocks and investors fearing a brand new era of AI-built ‘selfware.’

The small print:

• A Morgan Stanley SaaS index is down 15% YTD, with stocks from major software firms like Intuit, Adobe, and Salesforce dropping double digits.

• Vercel’s CTO used Claude to complete a year-long project in per week; one other CEO scrapped plans to rent engineers after the tool made him ‘5x more productive’.

• Others went viral for constructing apps entirely with Claude Code, from custom MRI viewers to handling self-sustaining tomato growth.

• One financial analyst said investors have largely abandoned software stocks no matter valuation amid existential AI fears.

Why it matters: Software stocks have held sky-high valuations because of predictable recurring revenue, logic that suddenly breaks down when AI can construct custom tools on demand. Whether that is the actual starting of a “selfware” era or simply a hype-fueled blip, traditional SaaS faces major disruption from tools that turn everyone right into a builder.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🧠 Tinkering with prompts can only get you to this point

The Rundown: Most firms get stuck tinkering with prompts and wonder why their agents fail to deliver dependable results. This guide from You.com breaks down the evolution of agent management, revealing the five stages for constructing a successful AI agent and why most organizations haven’t gotten there yet.

On this guide, you’ll learn:

• Why prompts alone aren’t enough and the way context and metadata unlock reliable agent automation

• 4 essential ways to calculate ROI, plus when and how one can use each metric

• Real-world challenges at each stage of agent management and how one can avoid them

For those who’re able to transcend the prompt, that is the playbook for you.

AI SAFETY

🔍 Ex-OpenAI policy lead’s latest AI safety nonprofit

The Rundown: Former OpenAI policy lead Miles Brundage just launched AVERI, a brand new nonprofit pushing for independent third-party audits of frontier AI models as an alternative of letting labs self-certify their very own safety claims.

The small print:

• Brundage left in October 2024 during OAI’s cut of its ‘AGI Readiness’ team, saying no frontier labs were ready on the protection front for advanced systems.

• AVERI will concentrate on establishing audit standards and policies quite than conducting evaluations itself, acting as a ‘think tank’ over an actual auditor.

• The institute received donations from employees at leading AI labs — people Brundage says “know where the bodies are buried.”

• The org published a framework of “AI Assurance Levels” — starting from today’s self-testing (Level 1) to treaty-grade international verification (Level 4).

Why it matters: “Where the bodies are buried” is an ominous quote, however the AI industry has largely relied on self-reported safety testing so far — with trust placed on whatever labs decide to publish. AVERI’s insider-backed push for external scrutiny could mark the start of a shift toward real third-party accountability.

AI TRAINING

📈 Optimize prompting with this Markdown strategy

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn how one can extract any accomplished AI task into reusable markdown instructions — making precious tasks portable and repeatable across any AI tool.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a Notebook in NotebookLM and complete your task (e.g., upload email to create variations), specifying word count, tone, rules, goal, brand details

2. Prompt: “Take the duty and extract the context into instructions for AI in markdown format. The goal is to drop these into any AI with different variables and receive polished output with one prompt.”

3. Create a brand new project in NotebookLM and paste the markdown instructions as text — now you’ve got turned hours of prompting into a flexible project template

4. Start a brand new chat with custom input variables to attain the identical outputs as your original chat

Pro tip: After creating markdown instructions, save them to a database like Notion.

PRESENTED BY UNWRAP

⚡ Powerful insights for powerful brands

The Rundown: Unwrap aggregates all of your customer feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social, sales calls, etc.) right into a single AI-powered view, helping product, support, and CX teams at Southwest Airlines, Stripe, lululemon, and DoorDash turn every customer signal into actionable insights.

With Unwrap, you get:

• All customer feedback auto-categorized right into a single view

• Natural language queries to explore feedback immediately

• Real-time alerts, custom reporting, and clear sentiment tracking

Grab time directly with the team to speak through how Unwrap can automate your customer feedback evaluation.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Anthropic’s first Economic Index of 2026

The Rundown: Anthropic published its fourth Economic Index, providing a deep dive into 2M Claude chats — revealing that almost all AI usage still looks more like collaboration than substitute, with humans in the motive force’s seat for nearly all of tasks.

The small print:

• AI handles around 1/4 of tasks in almost 50% of all jobs, up from 36% last yr, but full role substitute is going on at under 10% of firms.

• Tasks requiring high-school skills are sped up 9x faster with AI, and 12x for college-level tasks, with Claude’s gains increasing for difficult use cases.

• Claude’s ability to handle longer tasks continues to rise, with Anthropic’s data showing a 50% success rate for tasks so long as 19 hours.

• Coding tasks still dominate Claude usage, though augmentation (learning, feedback, iteration) overtook pure automation-related tasks.

Why it matters: Productivity gains are happening fast, however the panic of AI completely taking up jobs doesn’t match the information (yet). The difficulty is for junior employees — if AI handles the grunt work normally used to coach and supply experience, a complete generation of young talent may be stuck in a totally latest economic reality.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 GLM-4.7 Flash – Z AI’s fast, efficient variant of its SOTA open-source model

• 🗣️ TranslateGemma – Google’s latest family of open-source translation models

• ⚙️ Claude Code – Anthropic’s deep-context AI coding assistant

• 🗣️ Scribe V2 – ElevenLabs’ SOTA transcription model

📰 Every thing else in AI today

Z AI released GLM-4.7-Flash, a 30B, speed and efficiency-focused variant of its powerful open-source model that leads its size class across a series of benchmarks.

Business insights firm Gartner projected that worldwide AI spending will reach $2.52T in 2026, a 44% jump driven largely by massive infrastructure buildouts.

South Korea is currently holding an AI competition to raise the country’s top homegrown AI models, with LG, SK, and startup Upstage remaining in contention.

Anthropic published research showing AI can slip into playing other characters during long chats, and introduced a fix that halved harmful responses.

xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori announced that he left the corporate, coming on the heels of a revealing viral interview detailing the startup’s inner workings.

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 Prateek M. in India:

“I recently went on a visit… and was on the lookout for a brand new technique to remember our moments. After I got here across music/song creation AI tools, I spotted a song can be an ideal technique to cherish those memories. I went to ChatGPT and explained our trip. I uploaded each the inputs (lyrics & music description) onto Suno and… got the proper trip song!”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Ads are officially coming to ChatGPT

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Wikipedia inks deals with Amazon, Meta

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: 1X now has a world model

• Today’s AI tool guide: Optimize prompting with this Markdown strategy

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: AI Foundations Bootcamp pt. 3

See you soon,

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