Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. The Pentagon may soon label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” in response to the corporate’s limits on how the military uses its AI.
The feud, which only appears to be escalating, highlights a deeper tension now shaping the AI era: who controls how frontier models are deployed in military operations — the labs that construct them, or the governments that use them?
In today’s AI rundown:
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Anthropic-Pentagon feud escalates over AI use
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OpenAI adds latest ‘Lockdown mode’ in ChatGPT
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Turn a YouTube thumbnail into 5 social posts
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Alibaba nears frontier with open-weight Qwen-3.5
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4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ANTHROPIC
‼ Anthropic-Pentagon feud escalates over AI use
Image source: Nano Banana / The Rundown
The Rundown: The Pentagon is reportedly “close” to cutting ties with Anthropic and designating the corporate a “supply chain risk” — a badge normally reserved for foreign adversaries — over its restrictions on how Claude is utilized by the military.
The small print:
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The designation of “supply chain risk,” if given, would force all U.S. defense contractors to chop ties with Anthropic — hitting the AI’s major business severely.
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Defense officials are demanding the best to make use of AI for “all lawful purposes,” while Anthropic is holding firm against granting broad permissions.
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The corporate is open to loosening restrictions but wants to make sure its AI will not be used for spying on Americans or constructing autonomous weapons, Axios reports.
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Claude is currently the one AI on the Pentagon’s classified systems, and was also reportedly used via Palantir to capture Nicolás Maduro in January.
Why it matters: Experts have long warned in regards to the unchecked use of AI in warfare, and this standoff marks a notable moment showing the growing friction between firms’ responsible-use guardrails and the military’s operational demands. Only time will tell which side shapes the foundations of AI in national security.
TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM
The Rundown: You.com’s Co-founders Richard Socher and Bryan McCann are among the many most-cited AI researchers on the earth. They simply released 35 predictions for 2026.
Three that stand out:
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The LLM revolution has been “mined out” as capital floods back to research
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“Reward engineering” becomes a job; prompts can’t handle what’s coming next
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Traditional coding can be passed by December — AI writes code and humans manage it
OPENAI
Image source: Reve / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced a “Lockdown Mode” in ChatGPT, alongside latest Elevated Risk labels, as a part of an effort to guard “highly security-conscious users” from threats like prompt injection (where AI is tricked into leaking data).
The small print:
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The Lockdown Mode is an optional setting that deterministically disables certain ChatGPT tools and capabilities that an attacker could exploit.
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Specific protections within the mode include limiting web browsing to cached content — ensuring no live network requests leave OpenAI’s environment.
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ChatGPT workspace admins can enable the mode, with the power to whitelist specific apps/actions that remain accessible even when the lockdown is lively.
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The corporate can be adding latest “Elevated Risk” labels that appear across ChatGPT, Atlas, and Codex to flag features that will introduce any level of risk.
Why it matters: As AI models go from easy chatbots to full-fledged agents able to browsing the online, connecting to apps, and executing complex tasks, the safety stakes are higher than ever. This update acknowledges that change and the indisputable fact that deterministic “hard blocks” could be the only strategy to address some AI risks.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: On this guide, you’ll construct a YouTube thumbnail from scratch in Canva, then use the AI resize feature to immediately duplicate it into every social media format, with AI handling the layout for every size.
Step-by-step:
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In Canva (you will have a Pro account), click the “Create” button and seek for “thumbnail.” Click the YouTube thumbnail project type
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Within the sidebar, pick a template that you just like. Update the text to match your video title and alter the colours should you want
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If there’s a cutout person in it, you possibly can take a selfie, drag it into Canva, then click the AI remove background button. Now, replace the placeholder cutout
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Finally, click the “Resize” in the highest left and choose all social placements you wish. Canva AI will create thumbnail layouts in the right dimensions for every
Pro tip: You may as well generate thumbnails using Nano Banana Pro, then recreate them in Canva.
PRESENTED BY SPEECHMATICS
The Rundown: Speechmatics’ Voice Agent API delivers partials in <250ms and finals around 250-300ms. Built real-time first, not batch models forced into streaming. That’s why you get unmatched accuracy at conversational latency.
What you get:
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55+ languages, accent-agnostic performance
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Native LiveKit, Pipecat, Vapi support
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Deploy cloud, on-prem, hybrid, on-device
Start constructing with $200 free credits.
ALIBABA
Image source: Qwen
The Rundown: Alibaba’s Qwen released Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open-weight vision language model featuring a “hybrid architecture” that delivers massive inference gains while rivaling proprietary giants like OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.
The small print:
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Qwen-3.5 uses a sparse MoE design, activating only 17B parameters out of 397B for every query, balancing high-level capabilities with low latency.
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The model is near frontier players across the board, and even surpasses them in domains like agentic search, doc recognition, and instruction following.
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Alibaba claims it’s 60% cheaper to make use of and a minimum of 8x higher at processing large workloads than its immediate predecessor, Qwen3-Max.
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The discharge is aimed toward handling continuous, multimodal reasoning required by agents, even though it doesn’t seem superb at running a vending machine yet.
Why it matters: Chinese labs are on a roll, and with Qwen3.5 combining near frontier performance, 60% lower costs, and open weights, the race is clearly shifting toward efficiency and scalability. If the momentum continues, the AI balance may hinge less on raw size and more on who can deliver powerful models at the bottom rate.
QUICK HITS
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👨💻 HeyGen – Turn ideas into videos in minutes, with no filming required. Use Code TRDAI20 for 20% off your first 3 months.
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🧠 Qwen3.5-397B-A17B – Alibaba’s open-weight vision language model
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🤖 Manus – AI agents, now accessible via Telegram with long-term memory
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✨ Seed 2.0 – ByteDance’s open-source models for general-purpose agents
Meta patented a social networking system that uses AI trained on a user’s interaction data to simulate their responses once they’re on a protracted break, and even deceased.
India kicked off its AI Impact Summit, hosting execs from global AI giants, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei confirmed India is now the second-largest marketplace for ChatGPT and Claude, with Amodei also announcing Anthropic’s Bengaluru office.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission is probing xAI’s Grok over concerns it may generate sexualized images of ladies and youngsters, after similar UK and EU motion.
SpaceX (and xAI) will reportedly compete within the Pentagon’s $100M contest to provide voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarming technology.
ElevenLabs launched its “ElevenLabs for Government” initiative to assist public sector agencies deploy secure, multilingual voice and chat AI.
COMMUNITY
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 Lisa G. in Australia:
“I volunteer for a wildlife shelter, which runs solely on donations…We wanted an app to administer our rescue team operations, so I built one with Base44’s web app creator. It manages rescue calls and tracks progress of the rescue status, volunteer task assignments, and maps to wildlife track locations.
It saves our team time as we previously used WhatsApp to record Rescues, which was really inefficient. I’m now constructing more apps for the shelter.”
How do you employ AI? Tell us here.
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Read our last AI newsletter: AI’s latest physics discovery
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Read our last Tech newsletter: Musk’s ‘self-growing’ Moon city
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Read our last Robotics newsletter: Apptronik’s $935M humanoid moment
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Today’s AI tool guide: Turn a YouTube thumbnail into 5 social posts
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RSVP to next workshop on Feb. 18: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt.2
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