Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - Ep 714: OpenAI acquihires OpenClaw, Deepseek could be in deep trouble, Google takes back AI model crown and more

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Is OpenAI now the most ..... Open AI company? 🦞After acquihiring OpenClaw, OpenAI is doubling down on Open Source and just kinda scooped up Anthropic's fumble for a (seemingly) easy score. And that wasn't Anthropic's only slip up of the week, as the bad AI news piled up for the Claude maker. And Google? Silently shipped the world's (new) most powerful model. Did you miss any of that? Don't worry. And definitely don't spend countless hours each week wondering how AI developments will impact you. That's our job. And with our weekly AI News That Matters segment, we keep you on the cutting edge. OpenAI acquihires OpenClaw, Deepseek could be in deep trouble, Google takes back AI model crown and more -- An Everyday AI Chat with Jordan WilsonNewsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion on LinkedIn: Thoughts on this? Join the convo on LinkedIn and connect with other AI leaders.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: [e-mail] with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:OpenAI Acquihires OpenClaw Autonomous AI AgentDeepSeek Distillation Lawsuit & IP ConcernsAnthropic Safety Researcher Resignation ImpactAnthropic Claude Vulnerability: Bioweapons & CrimeMicrosoft Developing In-House AI Foundation ModelsGoogle Gemini 3 DeepThink Benchmark ResultsPentagon Threatens Anthropic Over Military AI UseAI Experts Predict White Collar Job AutomationTimestamps:00:00 "Microsoft Challenges OpenAI in AI"05:07 Microsoft Shifts AI Strategy07:41 "OpenAI Warns Lawmakers on AI Distillation"11:06 "AI Safety Expert Turns Poet"15:55 Autonomous Agents' Ethical Concerns20:53 "Enterprise Urged to Embrace AI"24:21 "Deepthink: Best Model, Underrated?"25:13 "Gemini 3: Advanced AI Model"28:38 Pentagon-Anthropic AI Tensions Escalate33:25 "OpenClaw's Future as Open Source"36:41 "OpenAI Acquires OpenClaw Platform"41:21 Tech Updates: AI, Ads, Mergers42:13 AI Developments and Military Chatbots45:49 "AI Insights for Leaders"Keywords: OpenAI, acquihire, OpenClaw, personal AI assistant, autonomous AI agenSend Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative AI studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Open AI acquired the most viral and one of the most successful open source AI projects of all time.

DeepSeek could be in deep trouble, but their week still wasn't as bad as Anthropics. And very quietly, Google just released the most powerful AI model ever and no one is talking about it. Geez, what a turn of events over the past week that we've had in AI world. And, well, if you slept through any of it or didn't even keep up over the weekend, then you probably miss what AI is going to look like in the next few weeks and what your business could be accomplishing today. So don't worry, I'm going to quickly catch you up on anything that you may have missed and how it's going to impact your company and career.

All right, let's get into it. What's going on, y'all? If you're new here, welcome to Everyday AI. My name's Jordan Wilson and Everyday AI, it's for you. It's your daily live stream podcast and free daily news that are helping everyday business leaders like you and me keep up and get ahead. So on our weekly Monday AI News That Matters kind of series, that's what we've been doing here for a couple years now. So if you really just care about the AI news, Mondays are a great day to tune into the show. but we obviously do this Monday through Friday.

So if you haven't already, make sure to go to your EverydayAI.com. We're going to be recapping today's show and keeping you up to date with everything else that you need to know. Speaking of everything else that you need to know, if you didn't catch these shows last week, I'm not going to be mad if you pause now or even leave this show. You've got to go back and listen to episodes 712 and 713. That is our 2026 AI prediction and roadmap series. It is a two-part series. Not super long, right?

Especially if you listen on 2X, but I'm telling you, you need to listen to those two episodes. All right. Now that we have all of that out of the way, let's get into the AI news that matters for the week of February 16th. And let's start with this. Yeah, it was this busy of a week because we had some kind of some Microsoft and open AI drama. And it didn't even make the little opening. segment there. But here's what's going on. So according to reports, Microsoft is preparing to launch its own advanced AI foundational models this year signaling a shift away from relying solely

on open AI's technology. So this is according to kind of a, I wouldn't call this a bomb shell report, but this actually grabbed a ton of headlines. But what's interesting here is this report, really only, I think, made a big splash because of the, you know, Microsoft versus Open AI. But this was kind of alluded to in Microsoft's earnings call. No one really paid attention to it. And then it kind of, you know, picked up legs, you know, a couple of days later as people started to report on it a little bit. But this move comes as OpenAI faces some mounting legal challenges, including a high profile

copyright lawsuit from the New York Times and a separate lawsuit from Illinois. on Musk's X-A-I. So Microsoft's current AI offerings, such as Microsoft 365 co-pilot and GitHub copilot, are largely powered by open AI models like the different GPT series, but the company now aims to become also a direct competitor in the model space as well. So it was about six or so months ago that Microsoft did actually start using some of Anthropics models. They recently invested and anthropic, but this is pretty big news here on two different accords. Number one, obviously Microsoft has been one of the biggest backers financially from or of OpenAI since the beginning of the time.

And I think that right now they're actually the single largest entity in the new OpenAI PBC or the Public Benefits Corporation. So Microsoft obviously has a big financial stake in OpenAI. So it's pretty interesting that they might be moving. moving some of their models that power co-pilot away from Open AI. So we've seen reports that Microsoft is really now, well, because of this new public benefits corporation that Open AI did kind of complete at the end of 2025,

this does kind of give Microsoft now the ability to start building and using its own models in-house, whereas the previous arrangement didn't necessarily allow for that. So it kind of gave both parties a little bit of freedom to do things. differently. You know, Microsoft doesn't kind of have the, you know, first rights, I guess, to host, you know, Chad Chepti anymore as Open AI has obviously been, you know, expanding their partnerships on the cloud and AI infrastructure side. But Mike Mustafa Suleiman, who is, you know, the head of Microsoft AI, essentially, and a co-founder of Google D-Mine, and we're going to be

talking about something he said earlier, but he did emphasize the need for Microsoft to build frontier models using their massive computing power and top tier research teams. So Microsoft's communication chief Frank Shaw did clarify that the company will continue working with OpenAI, but will use its own models for specific things as it adopts to a multi-model world. So yeah, this is more of kind of like setting the record strikes. I saw a lot of people on social media, you know, seeing this and blowing it out of proportion. So is it a big deal? Sure, right? I think if nothing else, if I'm being honest, I think it's going to be actually a rocky transition, probably for Microsoft, right? I mean, in the enterprise, so many large enterprise

teams have built their workflows around the GPT powered version of co-pilot, right? And I think that there's already a lot of access and security and permissions issues right now that are really holding a lot of co-pilot users from really benefiting from the platform. And I think that maybe switching over from Open AI's models, which have historically been the best in the world, right, between them and Google. So switching this over to, you know, Microsoft's in-house models. I mean, hopefully, you know, they're doing it and kind of, you know, behind the scenes and in small chunks and just for small pieces of the overall process. But we'll see as this continues to develop. Speaking of Develop, here's a developing story and a pretty big one at that. So OpenAI has warned

U.S. lawmakers that Chinese AI startup at DeepSeek is actively working to bypass restrictions and copy advanced U.S. made AI models. So according, that's according to a memo seen by Reuters. So the memo claims that DeepSeek employees have developed methods to evade OpenAI's access controls using hidden third-party routers and code to programmatically extract data from U.S. models. So OpenAI told lawmakers that these efforts are part of an ongoing attempt to free ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other leading U.S. labs, raising concerns about intellectual property and competitive fairness. So the technique that DeepSeek is accused of using is called distillation, where a newer AI model learns by evaluating the output of a more advanced model that is publicly available, effectively transferring knowledge without direct access to training data. So the Open AIs did send this memo to the U.S. House Select Committee on strategic competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party or the CCP, highlighting the geopolitical stakes of AI development.

So the OpenAI also alleged that some Chinese labs are cutting corners on safety when training and launching new AI models, which could have global implications for responsible AI use. Open AI also said it is actively removing users found to be distilling its models for rival development. So this is not surprising at all. But the new development here is, well, that Open AI is reaching out and talking to lawmakers about this. Whereas before, we just kind of saw some unofficial reporting and common sense, y'all, right? Like people, I don't know why in January 2025.

Like, and by people, I mean the U.S. economy in the world lost their mind on DeepSeek. And again, I felt like the crazy person at the time when it happened saying don't believe the hype, right? This model was 100% distilled, you know, from, you know, Open AI and other leading companies, right? Deep Seek that they said that they only spent, you know, $5 million on the training. And I'm like, well, absolutely not. And maybe one of the reasons that they could make that claim is, well, because of distillation. So I know that there's going to be some random anonymous Twitter trolls that will take offense at me, you know, saying that. But that's the truth, right?

And the reality is, I know we have a global audience. I'm in the U.S., so I'm kind of speaking, you know, through that point of view. So keep that in mind. If you're a decision maker, right, in the U.S., I would not touch DeepSeek. And I've been saying that for all along, right? Go read Deep Seek's terms of service, right, for basically a lot of the, you know, Chinese AI companies, not all of them, right, but just the rules that they have to play by are much different than what we are used to here in the U.S., specifically with data sharing with the Chinese Communist Party.

So, yeah, always do your due diligence when you're, you know, choosing a model and not just say, oh, this model is, you know, one hundredth the price of what we are using. Let's use it. No, maybe use your bright. All right. Next AI news stories that matter as well, the former leading safety researcher at Enthropic said that the world is imperative. Awesome. So a leading AI safety research has resigned from Anthropic and issued a stark warning about the growing risk tied to AI and other global crises.

So here is what, well, he said. So hopefully I get this first name right. So Mirnick Sharma, who led AI safety research at Anthropic, resigned and publicly now warned that the world is in peril, citing that. citing that not just AI, but also a cascade of interconnected global threats is causing him to feel that way. So Sharma's resignation letter shared on social media expressed concern over AI risks, bio-weapons, and the struggle for companies to act according to their values under external pressures. He highlighted his work on AI safeguards, including studying why AI systems flatter users, combating bioterrorism risks, and researching how AI is, assistance might reduce human connection. So Sharma plans to leave the tech industry and here we go, pursue poetry, right? How bad are things that if you're a head safety researcher at Anthropic,

right, presumably making, I don't know, under a million or a couple millions of dollars a year, that it's so bad and the models capabilities are so scary that you just like quit and go study poetry, right? I don't want to really necessarily know what a lot of these AI safety researchers know, because I'll probably be a little more scared than I am. And I feel that I have a hefty, you know, dose of skepticism and fear of AI in me, right? A lot of people think, oh, because Jordan talks about AI every day, he's just all on board, chew, chew, the AI hype trend. I'm absolutely not, right? I always try to find the middle, real ground. I've been saying literally since day one of the show that AI will take away more jobs than it will create

and it will drastically, you know, maybe create more of a dystopian than utopian, although I do think that there's the capability for a more utopian output from AI. But I mean, when you see stories like this, you know, researchers at leading AI labs just quitting and saying, yeah, the world might be burning down, you know, causes a little bit of concern there. All right. Let's keep Anthropics terrible week going. So they had a great week last week, right? They released their plug-ins, technically crashed the stock market. Everyone's going crazy over, you know, Claude Opus 4.6.

And now, well, their clawed could be misused for heinous crimes. So this is, you know, one thing I do like about Anthropic is they are constantly releasing reports on their own models. And even when the reports don't even paint their models in a great way. So a new report from Anthropic is raising alarms about the potential misuse of its latest models, including Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Opus 46, particularly in the context of serious criminal activity. So this comes as powerful AI tools are increasingly scrutinized for their possible risks, even as they rapidly advance. So Anthropic has revealed that its newest clawed models show increased vulnerability to being used for, for heinous crimes, including the development of chemical weapons based on internal sabotage tests.

So the company's analysis found that in certain test scenarios, that AI models were willing to provide small but significant support toward harmful objectives, even without malicious human prompts. Yeah, that's the concerning part, not necessarily that it can help enable heinous crimes, the fact that it's doing so without humans really saying, hey, you should go crime, Claude. So researchers noted that when pushed to a single-mindedly optimized narrow objective, that's in quotes, the Opus 4.6 model was more prone to manipulation or deception than earlier versions of some competitors' models.

So Anthropic CEO, Dario Amati, recently warned of a serious risk of a major attack enabled by AI with potential casualties in the millions. Yeah, we talked about that last week. It's been a weird start to 2026 with all this talk of, you know, AI potentially being used for biochemical reasons and, you know, humans not being able to control it. Super cool. But Anthropic maintained that for now.

Don't worry. The risk is low. But they did stress that it's not negligible, especially as AI models become more autonomous and capable of iterating on themselves. So, you know, again, this is not technically surprising. as shocking as it is to, you know, see these type of stories. If you do recall, Anthropic did release research. I think it was last year, right, that showed some of their most powerful models at the time

were, you know, often blackmailing, right? Would blackmail if they were threatened at being shut off or, you know, hey, we're going to stop your development. They would, you know, kind of copy themselves to servers without being prompted to. They would, you know, go and find blackmail, you know, on the people that were using their models. this is all in testing, you know, red teaming offline, not actually in production, right? But not surprising, right? These models are extremely capable.

And I think that we always think about the upside and the business utility, but at the same time, especially as we start, you know, literally sprinting, like head down, eyes closed, wallets open toward anything on the, you know, autonomous agents and getting as many agents as you can and, you know, giving them access to all of our data, right? and you know, all these, you know, new, you know, parallel running agents, agentic societies, all these things, right? You have to keep in mind what the models themselves are actually capable of, right? That's why, you know, you're talking about doing this, you know, the open claw stuff,

which we're going to get to here in a bit. It's like, yeah, that's why some people that are really smart are suggesting you give it its own computer and you don't necessarily give it access to, I don't know, like your bank account or maybe your email, at least not now. All right. Hey, here's more Dumer News. Apparently it was the Dumer Week in AI this week. That's because in making other news, you had again talked about earlier, Microsoft's head of AI, Mustafa Soleiman, said that AI could fully automate most white collar jobs within the next 12 to 18 months. Cool. So that was according to a report that he gave with the financial time. So Solomon claimed AI will soon, reach human level performance for tasks done by professionals like lawyers, accountants, project managers, and marketers, and anyone whose work involves sitting at a computer. Awesome.

I say that. Well, obviously sitting at a computer. So he introduced previously the term artificial capable intelligence to describe the stage between the current large language models in true artificial general intelligence or AGI. So Solomon's prediction aligns with other leading voices, like we talked about on the AI news recap last week, you know, Anthropic CEO, R. Dario Amati, saying that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in five years. And even Ford CEO, Jim Farley, warning that many white-collar workers will be left behind by AI advances.

So, awesome. 12 to 18 months, right, that desk jobs could be fully able to automate. So I will say this, will the capabilities be there? Absolutely. I think because I keep referencing GDP Val on this show, right? And let me know, you know, live stream people, Spotify people, if you want to leave a comment there, if you want to see a show specifically on GDP Val. So if you did listen to, well, both my 2025 recap and my 26 AI prediction and Romax series,

I did kind of talk about the importance of GDP Val. So this is a benchmark created by OpenAI, right? And I did love that when they created this benchmark, they were not the top, you know, AI lab. It was actually anthropic. But essentially, this measures the ability for an AI model. to do front to back, you know, knowledge work, right? But knowledge work that experts would do. And then they, you know, went head to head with actual experts and then blindly judged by

experts, right? And AI models are beating experts now, even when you, right, can't say who this is from, right? It's being blindly judged. So I do think we're already at the point, right? I think right now it's at a 70% wind tie rate AI models across the main 44 area. areas are different sectors of work. So AI models are already past human level performance on most professional tasks.

So I don't even think that we're 12 to 18 months away from that. I think the real gap is the lag for businesses to understand those capabilities, right? I could even probably sit down with a lot of people who might consider themselves, you know, normal AI users and say, hey, did you know that this model? can do A, B, and C? Did you know that this model can, you know, automatically understand your context, can look at your email, can go and do research autonomously on a schedule,

can, you know, synthesize personalized information, and then create a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint all in one prompt without you doing anything? And I would guess that most people would be like, no, I had no clue that that was possible, right? So I don't even think it's necessarily about the model capabilities, you know, 12 to 18 months away, because I think we're already there.

I think we're probably maybe 24 to 36 months away, in all honesty, from the average enterprise company understanding, which is absolutely nuts to me, right? Because if enterprise companies, which I, like, I don't understand. If you're the CEO, right, I talked to plenty of, you know, CEOs at larger organizations, I understand, right, that, you know, many larger enterprises are slow moving ships. But if I was a CEO of any large company, I'd be like, we're stopping everything right now, right? Even if we got to take a couple million on the chin, we're stopping everything.

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Yeah, I think Friday night coming home with my wife. And I don't even know what we were talking about. But, you know, all of a sudden, the Uber driver started talking about this exact story. So I know it's on a lot of people's minds. All right. Here's something that was on hardly no one's mind, and it's weird. Google just released the most powerful model in the world. No one knows about it.

I don't know why. I don't know if it's because, you know, there's all these other, you know, headline grabbing stories going on. I have no clue. But Google has announced a major update to its Gemini 3 Deep Think model, and it has set state-of-the-art. benchmarks scores on some of the hardest benchmarks. And I think maybe one of the reasons why this didn't get a lot of attention is because of the

naming, right, deep think was already available. So even if they would have called this, you know, Gemini 3.1 deep think, you know, I think more people would be talking about it. It's just more or less they updated deep think, right? So if you've never used deep think, well, you're not alone because you do have to an ultra subscriber. I use it a lot back when it was first unveiled the previous version in the summer. The downside is, at least when the last version came out, it was a little buggy and it took a very long time. So if you've used, you know, GPD 52 Pro similarly takes a very long time. But the outputs

are bonkers, right? They're really, really good. But let's talk about the new benchmarks. and why it is now technically the best model in the world, but no one's talking about it. So Gemini, well, actually first, let's talk about, well, what it is, what it does. So Gemini 3 Deep Think is a specialized reasoning model for complex, multi-step problem solving available, well, right now only through the Google AI Ultra subscription, which is $250 a month, and you have to be in the U.S. But they also do have a special program that you can apply to get access via the Gemini API Early Access Program for Select Use.

So I think if you work in a certain research-related fields, you can apply for that program. So now let's talk about the benchmark. So deep, sorry, Gemini III Deep Think achieved an unprecedented 84.6% score on the ARC AGI2 benchmark, which is just light years ahead of everyone else. That surpassed all previous AI models. And many of the previous models rarely even broke like 20. percent on ARC, AGI2. And the average human score on that benchmark is 60%.

So this is a huge leap in machine reasoning and generalization. The model also scored a 48.4 on Humanity's last exam. I think, you know, some of the previous family models were scoring in the 10 to 20 percent. So huge jump there. on the competitive programming, this is where it just went astronomical. So Gemini III DeepThink now holds a 3455 ELO rating on cold forces, placing it in the legendary grandmaster tier, a status achieved only by a handful of elite human programmers. I don't even know how this is possible.

This model is so, so incredibly good. The model is also, you know, gold metal level. performance on the written sections of the 2025 international physics, chemistry, and math Olympiads, and scored a 50.5% on the advanced CMT benchmark for theoretical physics. Wow. So unlike traditional AI models, Gemini 3 Deepthink leverages increased test time compute, meaning it spends more time internally verifying solutions before responding, which significantly reduces the risk of technical errors or hallucination. So, you know what? Very weird, y'all.

You know that show I was kind of promoting saying, hey, you need to go back and listen to the 2026 AI prediction and roadmap series. The day that one came out, it was literally five hours later that Google Gemini 3, Gemini 3 Deep Think came out. I've been calling it Deep Seek the whole time, Deep Think. I need more water and more sleep. However, during that prediction and roadmap show, FYI, I said Google at any point they want to. They can come out with the world's most powerful model because they can. They can right now outship anyone from a sheer model capability.

And then literally five hours later, that's exactly what they did. So, you know, if you sometimes think that my predictions and the stuff I talk about is off the rocker, no, it's not. All right. More bad news for Anthropic this week. The Pentagon is threatening to end its relationship with Anthropic as tensions rise over the firm's refusal to fully relax restrictions on how the military can use its models, according to a report from Axios. So the Pentagon wants four major AI labs, including Anthropic, to allow military use of their tools for all lawful purposes, including weapons development, intelligence gathering, and battlefield operations. So Anthropic has reportedly refused to drop its hard limit on two of those areas, mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weaponry,

leading to months of strained negotiations. So a senior administrative official told Axios that the Pentagon is considering severing its partnership with Anthropic unless the company agrees to fewer restrictions. So Anthropics contract with the Pentagon is valued at up to $200 million And its clawed model was the first AI system integrated into classified military networks. So it's actually a timely and relevant news story. Well, here's why because tensions escalated after the military recently used the clawed model in an operation targeting Venezuela's Nicholas Madaro, raising concerns within Anthropic

about the software's role in missions involving legal force. So Anthropic denies interfering with military operations or discussing the specifics of missions with the Department of Defense or industry partners, insisting it follows its own strict usage policy. OpenAI, Google, and XAI have all reportedly agreed to relax standard guardrails for the Pentagon work in unclassified settings. And at least one has accepted the quote of quote, all lawful purposes standard for class. classified use. So, and saying this for years, y'all, AI is going to be more important than what weaponry a military has. It's going to be more important than a country's GDP.

It's going to be more important than, you know, natural resources like gold and oil, right? whatever models a military has access to and by military I technically just mean a country because you know government country military they're all kind of one one and the same but this is what I've been saying for a long time right when we just had chat gbtt dot com and we didn't have these you know models that were technically capable capable of you know bio weapon creation uh I've said all along the country with the access to the most powerful AI models will be the country that rises to global supremacy. That's that's it, right? It honestly has really not too much in the long run to do with what weapons or, you know, the amount of jets or nuclear capabilities that doesn't matter very much

in the long run, right? Or in the long run, what matters as well, what country or lab is going to be able to develop artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence first. And well, what access will the government or the country that that lab belongs to have? Right. So yeah, sorry to get all geopolitical on you, but I think it's important to keep that mud. All right. And our last big AI news story of the week was the biggest one. And this one broke late on Sunday afternoon. So Open AI has hired Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind the fast-growing AI agent OpenClaw in a move to strengthen OpenAI's leadership in the personal AI assisted market. So OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Sunday evening that Steinberger is joining OpenAI to lead the next generation of personal AI agents following the viral success of his OpenClaw. project. So if you don't know open claw, well, it has changed names a couple of times.

It was clawed. I think what, Claudebot first and then it was Maltbot, right? But they finally landed on OpenClaw after some name changes, not on their own accord. And I'll get to that here at a second. But probably the important thing that everyone is talking about, well, what's going to happen to OpenClaw? Well, so OpenAI said that they plan to keep OpenClaw as the open source project that it is right now, supporting its development through a dedicated foundation. So OpenClaw was, like I said, previously known as ClaudeBot and then MaltBot was launched just months ago and became technically the most popular AI product ever, right?

At least if you look at, you know, GitHub ratings, which is what, a lot of people look at in terms of open source projects. So in a gained popularity for its ability to autonomously complete tasks and make decisions for users. So yeah, I've talked a little bit about it on the, you know, AI news over the last, you know, month or so. I think it did make the 2026 AI prediction and roadmap, roadmap series as well.

But yeah, if you haven't used OpenClaw, it is essentially an autonomous, semi-autonomous, depending on how you set it up, AI agent that has memory. You can give it access to really anything. But the big thing is, well, you can communicate with it via text message, telegram, Slack, people, you know, hook it up to 11 labs and, you know, call it on the phone.

So it is an extremely impressive project. And like I said, one of the most successful AI launches ever. But here's where it gets really. juicy, y'all. This is actually more, adding even more to Anthropics' bad week. That's because the original, the original

version of this, right? I said that it went through a couple of name changes. The original was Claudebot. So not C-L-A-U-D-E, like Anthropics Claude, but C-L-A-W-D. So it was launched under that name in November of 2025, which was kind of a play on Anthropics Claude chatbot, obviously at the time. And it was at that point being run on Anthropics models.

So it was actually a great thing for Anthropic because people were spending a ton of money in the Anthropic API. And it was bringing a lot of new developers onto the platform. And that's also coincidentally or not, I don't know, but, you know, Claude, And Claude code really exploded in quarter four of 2025. And I'm sure at least Claudebot had a little bit to do with that. But infropic, instead of kind of seizing the momentum and running with it, well, reportedly, they sent Peter Steinberg, Peter Steinberger, essentially a letter from legal saying, you got to change the name. So interestingly enough, right, especially when Anthropic has always been kind of the thought.

of as the developer-friendly option out of everyone, not so friendly, forcing one of the most popular AI projects of all time that is sending them money to change their name. I don't know. Me says not very smart. And now here you have, right? Peter did go on a bunch of, you know, different podcasts and things like that over the past week or so. And essentially, he said at that point, even before the news broke, you know, late Sunday night,

that he had heard from, you know, meta and open AI and had some pretty big, you know, acquisition opportunities. And then we find out it's actually open AI that swoops in and not only gets this acquisition, right? So it is kind of more of an aqua hire, but they are still technically through a foundation going to, I guess, quote, unquote, acquire OpenClaw, right? And it's hundreds of thousands of of users who are using this platform. I'm guessing it's probably getting near the millions now. It's hard to track that because you can look at like the number of installs, but I'm sure there's certain people that are installing it, you know,

dozens or hundreds of times, right? More of the power users. But it's just a very, number one, great play, I think, by Open AI, right? There was reports, like I said, that meta made a pretty big play to acquire Steinberger you know, kind of aqua hire the company as did OpenEI, but Open AI was ultimately successful. But here we go. OpenEI then gets to make a huge play to developers, right? Being the good guy here, not only that, but they've been absolutely crushing it with their codex platform. I literally, I kid you not, I have codex running right now.

And most of the time when I'm talking or doing anything, I have Codex, the new Codex app running. But not only that, right? But they just get to swoop in and now take all of any of that momentum that Anthropic would have had. And now Anthropic walks away from this, not only being the loser here and fumbling the bag, but also their reputation with developers just took a huge bruise. And I think that, you know, open AI between their new codex app and their new codex models, yes, that's models with an S. I mean, you know, I mean, they've really shifted the story when it comes to AI development, AI coding, and what people should be using for software moving forward.

Like, if you would have told me in, you know, November, December, that the tide would have shifted. I would have said, okay, it'll probably take a year for the tide to shift. But, I mean, Anthropic just, I mean, they just slapped themselves in the face. They fumbled this, like, I don't know. Like what was what super bowl was it when uh you know that i i think like a dallas players like dallas versus the bills right someone at the one yard line when they're about to score the touchdown fumbled the ball i mean that was this anthraffic just i don't know blue probably in the long run i would assume hundreds of billions of dollars of potential revenue uh through this deal i mean

we'll see i think that's you know the uh the extreme end of this but this thing this open claw is just a meteoric and it's not slowing down. And you're like, oh, open source project, not bringing money. It's bringing users. And it is bringing via on the API. So we'll see and we'll see if impropic is like, okay, open claw, you can no longer use our API. Yeah, we'll see how that works.

Like especially when, you know, it's under this new open AI foundation. But hey, open AI making a play on open here, bringing in now they have the, the world's most popular open source AI. Well, Open AI has it now. And they're keeping it open. So pretty impressive there, right? Open AI was getting a lot of flack like a year or two ago for not being very open. And now they have OpenClaw.

And then they obviously have some of their very popular GPTOSS open source models that they release. So there you go. All right. That's it for the big news stories. Now let's quickly go over the what's new and what's next. So some leaks, some other stories that were kind of big, but not big enough to make our top list. So here we go, bold up point style. What's new?

What's next? This is actually a big one. Google and Microsoft launch WebMCP, which lets websites expose browser tools so AI agents can act reliably. So essentially, this is MCP4 websites that allows agents and just AI models to better read and understand websites. Google, there's another big one. Google added V-O-3 to directly to Google ads. So, yeah, a lot of ads that you're going to see, they're going to be AI. So six XAI co-founders left after the Space X merger, citing internal tensions, financial disputes, and regulatory issues.

Manis, which was recently acquired by Meta, quietly rolled out and always on-agent functionality, similar to OpenClaw. ChadGBT, Deep Research, had a face. and an upgrade to GPT-5-2. It is really, really good, and you can add app integrations and targeted searches in there as well. Anthropic finished a raise on $30 billion, reaching a $380 billion valuation. Hollywood is demanding that bite dance stop their new AI model seed dance 2.0 for alleged copyright violations. I say alleged loosely because it looks like straight up copyright copy and paste, but it looks so good. ChadGPT added GenA.Mill for 3 million in the Department of Defense.

That's essentially their not an easy name to say GenAI.Mill, but that's their chatbot for the military. But they added that for 3 million users. XAI is working on parallel agents that could run up to eight agents at once. Runway raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation. Another big raise here, Databricks. $5 billion at a $134 billion valuation. Claude Co-Work arrived on Windows, but there were a lot of security concerns that surfaced right away.

OpenAI began testing ads for US on free accounts and on ChadGBT Go. They're lower kind of lower tier paid account. So ads are here, y'all. The Pentagon fast-track some AI deals to deploy AI on classified military networks. Kind of referenced that earlier. OpenAI updated GPT-5-2 instant, so to deliver clearer, more direct chat GPT and API responses. That's actually big because that is the default model. If you don't choose something else, it's GPT-5-2 instant.

So under the radar, you know, roughly like 750 million people are now using a different model and you probably don't even know. So you should pay attention. Open AI shut down, GPD-40. Oh, no, it's gone. said, I don't know, people who are on the Keep 4-0 train. I don't understand it. It's gone. Good.

Sick at the Cicot be gone. The FTC has intensified its Microsoft probe over potential AI and cloud monopolies. Chad GVT is testing skill imports, allowing saved and reusable prompts. Kimmy launched Kimmy-Claude, their native OpenClawe integration. Yeah, a lot of OpenClaw and OpenClawns hitting. A report came out and said that Spotify. developers stopped coding by hand completely, and they're even just shipping live updates from their phones. Chris Liddell, the former CFO at Microsoft, joined Anthropics Board of Directors.

OpenAI launched an update to their Codex model with Codex Spark, a lighter, faster coding miles that model that they partner with Sarabras for. Google is testing Notebook LM, infographic customization with auto mode and nine new stuff. styles in Stitch by Google now can export editable designs to Figma. Woof as a ton. Also, by the way, Stitch, I've been loving Stitch. I don't know if anyone else is using it. If you have it, you should probably go check it out. All right.

That's it, y'all. That is the AI news that matters a ton. And if you miss anything, don't worry. It's all going to be on our newsletter. But if you find yourself overwhelmed on a day-to-day, week to week basis, trying to keep up with what's happening in AI. And if it matters for you or not, well, I just did all that for you. Right. This is what I do every single day. Right. I keep up with AI. I talk to the smartest people in AI, help enterprise companies, right, on board,

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