OpenAI steps into Anthropic’s Pentagon void

Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. Early last week, the Pentagon called Claude best-in-class for military intelligence. By Friday, the Trump administration had booted Anthropic and labeled it a ‘supply chain risk’ on par with Chinese tech giants.

With OpenAI signing its own government deal, consumers angrily switching services, and the military still using Claude in weekend strikes on Iran, what began as a contract dispute has quickly was the most important AI policy issue the industry has faced yet.

In today’s AI rundown:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

The Rundown: OpenAI signed a cope with the Pentagon, just hours after President Trump ordered to chop ties with Anthropic over safeguards on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, with OpenAI claiming its contract carries the identical red lines.

The main points:

Why it matters: Whether OAI’s red lines actually match Anthropic’s or simply look the part on paper is the query to observe. Claude’s surge and ChatGPT cancellation backlash show the user response, but a good relationship with the federal government over a top competitor is likely to be price more long-term than the lost consumer revenue.

The Rundown: Bland AI automates phone calls for over 250+ enterprise customers. No phone trees. No hold music. No call centers. Just faster, higher customer conversations.

Listed below are a number of the outcomes they’ve driven for businesses:

Book a demo today to see how you possibly can get similar results for your enterprise.

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

Adrian, Developer: My best friend from highschool got married last weekend, and because the groomsmen, we desired to create a present that felt personal and nostalgic. We collected our old photos together and used Seedance to animate them—bringing each still image to life from the primary frame— after which stitched several clips into one final video.

The result was amazing: the groom was deeply touched, and all of us shared a heartfelt moment watching it together on the marriage day, reliving our memories in a way that felt each timeless and latest.

Zach, AI Author: My fantasy baseball auction draft is across the corner, and I made a decision to try Claude Cowork for the planning and research efforts this 12 months. I uploaded my league’s settings, the players being kept across the league, and my very own rambling of strategies and thoughts on my current players.

Claude then performed a deep evaluation of my current options and their projected values, provided strong recs on who I should prioritize, and gave me an in depth list of draft targets across the league, perfectly tailored to my needs and league format — also scouring the net for tons of articles that saved me the tedious manual searching.

The Rundown: On this guide, you’ll learn a straightforward system to plan and manage your workdays by establishing the Obsidian notes app in order that Claude mechanically creates day by day plans for you — helping you triple your output.

Step-by-step:

Pro tip: Ask Claude to interview you about each project upfront to create clear goals and deadlines in your project files.

The Rundown: For executives, digital sovereignty is about who truly controls the intelligence behind their business — their data, their models, and their operations. Dive deeper into why sovereignty is becoming a top C-suite priority and the way IBM will help your organization.

On this paper, you’ll learn how you can:

Read the white paper.

The Rundown: OpenAI raised $110B at a $730B valuation, with Amazon leading at $50B alongside $30B each from Nvidia and SoftBank — kicking off an Amazon deal that marks a notable infrastructure pivot away from OAI’s Microsoft-only era.

The main points:

Why it matters: OAI just raised more in a round than most tech firms are price — though much of the money flows back to Amazon and Nvidia as compute purchases, continuing the circular investments which have defined the AI boom. With an IPO on the horizon and Anthropic at $380B, the race to go public is gaining much more steam.

QUICK HITS

Block laid off over 4,000 of its 10,000 employees, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly citing AI as the rationale — sending shares up greater than 20% from the move.

OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy said programming is becoming “mainly unrecognizable”, calling recent shifts the tip of the era of typing code.

Imbue open-sourced Darwinian Evolver, a tool that uses LLM evolution to mechanically optimize code and prompts — scoring a SOTA 95% on ARC-AGI-2.

Amazon’s David Luan announced he’s leaving the corporate to pursue a brand new enterprise, departing after leading Amazon’s Nova Act browser agent and SF AI lab.

Perplexity open-sourced the embedding AI models powering its search results, outperforming Google and Alibaba rivals while cutting storage needs by as much as 32x.

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 Elizabeth. in Colorado:

“Understandably, many individuals could also be frustrated by Apple’s AI strategy. Yet, Apple has modified my life with its AI efforts. I actually have lived my entire life with no eyesight, thus I depend on the Voice-Over screen reader for each task on my iPhone and Mac. I actually have at all times desired to be my very own screen-reader voice, as it could externally affirm I’m reading things from my very own perspective.

With the introduction of Personal Voice in iOS 17 and the following ability for Voice-Over and the Speech Central AI Voice Reader to make use of it starting with IOS18, my dream has come true! I’m thankful for banking my voice and having the ability to enjoy my books, articles, browsing the net, and reading this excellent AI newsletter.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

See you soon,