The Month AI Woke Up

Today on the AI Daily Brief, the month AI woke up, before that in the headlines, the latest

on Anthropic versus the US government.

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions

in AI.

Alright friends, quick announcements before we dive in.

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One of the things we've been talking about a lot is our claw camp and our enterprise

claw programs.

Clock camp is an always free self-directed program, enterprise claw is an upcoming paid training

program led by NewFar Gaspar.

Registration is open for that right now, and we'll close at the end of the week you can

find out more at EnterpriseClaw.ai, or again just from AI Daily Brief.ai.

Now with that out of the way, let's catch up with Anthropic.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in

around five minutes.

I said over the weekend as we were covering the Anthropic Pentagon story that we were

probably going to have quite a few updates on this one in the weeks to come, and indeed

that is certainly the case.

The conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon slash White House slash Trump slash

Hegseth took on a new light over the weekend as the US and Israel launched preemptive strikes

on Iran.

Now while some thought that maybe this made that 501PM deadline on Friday not arbitrary,

and instead driven by the Pentagon's need for an approved and operational AI system in

place ahead of the Saturday operation, but as per Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic's

technology ended up being used in the strikes despite being declared a supply chain risk

hours earlier, sources that the claw was used to analyze intelligence, help select targets,

and carry out battlefield simulations.

To be clear, there are no suggestions that clawed piloted fully autonomous weapons, but

the Pentagon has confirmed that this was the first time that autonomous Lucas Kamikaze

drones were deployed in an active mission.

They're used highlights that autonomous weaponry is part of modern warfare already and

doesn't require the use of frontier LLMs.

Additionally, despite open AI signing a new deal on Friday, that company's models were

not used in the attack.

Katrina Mulligan, open AI's head of national security partnerships, said that that wouldn't

have been possible as the models haven't yet been approved for use in classified settings.

Deal DR, in spite of some of the chatter, it doesn't actually appear that the Pentagon

hot swap AI models on the Friday night before an operation.

As the president said on Friday, there's a six month phase out period where Anthropics

tech will remain in military use.

Still for some, all of this makes the way that it played out even more confusing in

contradictory.

Democrat Congressman Seth Molten wrote, Friday, the Pentagon claims Anthropic is a national

security risk and should be blacklisted.

Saturday, the Pentagon still uses Anthropics clawed during its strikes on Iran.

Either, they use tech that is a net-sec risk during military action or they lied in the

first place.

So that might be what's going on in the actual deployed world of military operations.

But what's happening in the world of consumer sentiment is very different.

Anthropics saw their downloads spike over the weekend, driving clawed to number one on

the app charts, overtaking ChatGPT for the first time.

Claude was outside the top 100 free apps at the end of January and spent most of last

month outside of the top 20, taking advantage of their surge in popularity, Anthropic

promoted the ability to easily migrate memory from ChatGPT for those making the switch.

Now as a side story, this is something that people are paying a lot of attention to.

The signal account on Twitter writes, this is incredibly fascinating because we initially

thought that memory is a moat, but if it is just a file you can take with you.

I suspect people aren't going to do this at scale, but very interesting to see this

play out and stress-tested.

Now to be clear, this isn't some super sophisticated feature.

It's basically a big ol' prompt that Claude gives you that you paste into whatever LLM

you're using and take the results and paste it back to Claude.

And being that it is not going to be perfect, it is not going to have all the context, even

if it gets you started.

In any case, on Saturday, Sam Altman hosted an AMA on X to answer public questions about

their new contract with the Department of War.

One of Almond's big points was that the threat of labeling Anthropic as a play chain

risk is bad for the entire industry.

He wrote, we said to the DOW before and after.

We said that part of the reason we were willing to do this quickly was in the hopes of de-escalation.

I feel competitive with Anthropic for sure, but successfully building safe superintelligence

and widely sharing the benefits is way more important than any company competition.

I believe they would do something to try to help us in the face of great injustice if

they could.

We should all care very much about the precedent.

Open AI later published a blog post containing details of their contract with the Department,

including full text of the sections dealing with AI red lines.

Regarding autonomous weapons, the contract states, the AI systems will not be used to independently

direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or department policy requires

human control.

According to Domestic Surveillance, the contract laid out a series of applicable laws and directives

adding, the AI system shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. person's

private information as consistent with these authorities.

Now many pointed out that this language does not prevent open AI's technology to be

used for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance as long as the Pentagon deems that

used to be lawful.

Self-professed AI security hawk Peter Wildeford posted, open AI is trying to claim simultaneously

that A, their contract with the Pentagon allows for all lawful purposes, and B, also that

their red lines are fully protected.

The way open AI bridges this is by saying the protections live in this deployment architecture

and safety stack rather than in the contract language.

But if this contract says all lawful purposes and your safety stack prevents a lawful purpose,

you're in breach of contract.

The Pentagon can just say, we both know your model can do this, you should remove that safeguard,

and then open AI would have to comply or be sued.

Both Sam Altman and Natseck lead Katrina Mulligan responded to this particular point.

Mulligan said,

A lot of the concerns about the government's all lawful use language seem to stem from

mistrust that the government will follow the laws.

At the same time, people believe that anthropic took an important stand by insisting on contract

language around their red lines.

We cannot have it both ways.

We cannot say that the government cannot be trusted to interpret laws and contracts the

right way, but also agree that anthropic policy red lines in a contract would have been

effective.

Setting out open AI's approach she continued, led the democratic process decide on the

legality and proper use question.

Now, somewhat overshadowed by the conflict with the Pentagon, open AI finalized the

largest startup fundraising round in history on Friday morning.

The round ultimately totaled $110 billion, valuing open AI at an $840 billion post-money

valuation.

The valuation positions open AI as the most valuable startup ever, and the 15th most valuable

company in the world.

They are now worth slightly more than JP Morgan Chase.

Notably, the round remains open and open AI expects another 10 billion from financial

entities, including UAE investment fund MGX by the end of March.

The 110 billion is entirely from three corporate strategic partners.

In video and soft bank invested 30 billion each, details were a little scant on this front,

but open AI mentioned the Nvidia strategic partnership includes additional chip supplies,

but the largest investor was Amazon, who put 50 billion into the round.

This investment is split between 15 billion do at the end of March, and a further 35 billion

contingent on open AI going public or hitting unspecified milestones.

YouTube is reporting rumored that these milestones included achieving AGI.

I don't know why these companies keep putting a term as nebulous as AGI as a condition on

their contracts.

It's just going to make lawyers reach later.

Now, overall, the Amazon strategic partnership is wide ranging.

Open AI will expand their server rental deal with AWS from the previously announced 38

billion over seven years to 138 billion over eight years.

As part of the agreement, open AI has also committed to use Amazon's Tranium 3 and

forthcoming Tranium 4 chips.

In AI, and Amazon will also jointly develop AI models to power Amazon's consumer apps.

The Amazon deal also has some interesting implications for Microsoft, who notably did

not make a further investment as part of this round.

Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive right to serve so-called stateless versions

of open AI's models, and the revenue sharing agreement also remains in place, so Microsoft

will take a cut of revenue generated through AWS.

Amazon will be the exclusive provider of open AI's Frontier AI agent management tool,

aside from the first party deployment, however, the open AI branded version of the tool

will be hosted on Azure.

Alongside the fundraising numbers, we also now learned that Chatchee PT has 900 million

weekly active users.

The last reported figure was 800 million in October, and reports suggested that stagnating

user growth had been part of the trigger for Sam Altman's code read in December.

The announcement underscored that subscriber growth is also strong now reaching 50 million.

Rights open AI?

Subscriber momentum accelerated meaningfully to start the year, with January and February

on track to be the largest month of new subscribers in our history.

People use Chatchee PT to learn, write, plan, and build.

As usage scales, the product improves in ways people feel immediately, faster responses,

higher reliability, stronger safety, and more consistent performance.

Open AI also shared that they now have more than 9 million paying business users across

startups, enterprises, and governments, and in addition, weekly codecs users have tripled

since the beginning of the year to reach 1.6 million.

Now that might be the perfect segue to talk about the big changes that ended up characterizing

February, so with that, we will close the headlines and move on to the main episode.

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.

As part of my collaboration with KPMG each month at the beginning of the month, we do a

little bit of a recap of the previous month that preceded it.

For the listeners who are somewhat less regular and don't have time to catch every show, it's

meant to serve as a quick simple recap of the key themes.

Meanwhile for those of you who are here every day, it's to put a fine point on any changes

that the previous month represented.

Despite the incredible amount of attention around it, not every month in AI is huge.

However, February of 2026 was.

This was the month that crystallized for a number of different groups that, to quote

one of the viral pieces from the month, something big is happening.

And in fact, one of the things that made the month so interesting was the extent to which

the broad recognition that something had changed and that something big was indeed happening

was the way that that realization cascaded across all sorts of different groups.

Let's talk about the AI Insiders first.

This is basically the people like you guys, the enfranchised, highly engaged, probably

using vibe coding tools type of AI users who actually pay attention to when new models

launch and when new capabilities they have.

This is the group for whom basically the period from the holiday break at the end of

last year up until now has been a steady realization and embracing of the idea that

the generation of models that came around last November represented something meaningfully

different than those that came before.

The core and first manifestation of this was of course around software engineering and

one of the people who's been in the eye of the storm and communicating what so many

others have felt is former open AI founder Andre Carpathy.

About a week ago he tweeted, it's hard to communicate how much programming has changed

due to AI in the last two months.

Gradually and over time in the progress as usual way, but specifically this last December

he then goes on to explain exactly what happened effectively he says coding agents basically

didn't work before December and they basically do now as he puts it the models have significantly

higher quality long term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks

well passed enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Programming he writes is becoming unrecognizable the era where you type code into an editor

is done he says and instead we are now in the era of spinning up AI agents telling them

what to do in natural language and then managing their work.

The biggest prize he says is about orchestration how many of these agents can you have going

at once in a way that actually adds up to something real.

He concludes this is nowhere near business as usual time and software.

And I think this does a pretty good job of summarizing what has shifted in short agents

that could actually do work whom you give not a plan but just a goal and let them come

up with the plan are now for many of these most enfranchised users the primary way that

they get value out of AI.

And what's more in February this was given a name and a face and an icon in what was first

named cloud bot for a very short time named molt bot and ultimately finalized as open

claw open claw has been so far the biggest clearest manifestation of the change in autonomy

ambition.

Open claw created a process by which users could give those powerful new generation of models

access to their systems and let them actually do meaningful work on their behalf.

It started with simple personal assistant type things indeed the open claw homepage

still says cleans your inbox sends emails manages your calendar checks you in for your flights

but that is 100% not where it stayed.

Almost immediately people were using open claw for much more extensive and much more ambitious

autonomous or semi autonomous work.

I did a show around mid month about the 10 agent team that I built which included one

developer agent two researchers five project managers one chief of staff and a partridge

in a pear tree.

Because of open claw Mac minis and for some even Mac studios became the hot new visualization

of the new era of AI and again what's super important to point out is that despite open

claw being very meaningfully not for beginners something that indeed requires a ton of technical

work and frankly beating your head against the wall as you sort through just legions of

different problems despite all of that it was not just developers who were excited about

it it was all sorts of different types of people.

I have no better evidence for this than the response to claw camp which is the self directed

program I put together that basically took the process that I had gone through to figure

out how to build both my first agent and then the agent team and turn it into a sequence

that other people could follow.

It is not an easy sequence it takes a lot of time and a lot of hard work and yet nearly

5500 people are doing it right now.

By the end of the month we were starting to see the manifestation of ideas that have

long lurked around the edges of AI as some exciting future potential but which were now

coming to the fore.

So the entrepreneur Ben Cera by himself built a company called pulsia which is an AI for

running autonomous AI companies basically you sign up for pulsia given an idea or just

ask it to surprise you where it'll go do some research and come up with a relevant

idea that seems related to you and then it will build a company around it pulsia gives

it access to everything from get hub to meta ads basically everything that you could

need to run an online business.

The company is up to an annual run rate of over $1.25 million in just a couple of weeks.

So if this whole increase in autonomy ambition was the key theme represented by open claw

wouldn't you think that all the big labs would be racing to catch up with that indeed

you would and indeed that's what happened at the beginning of the month open AI release

the codex app the latest in their push to catch up with and then eventually try to exceed

cloud code and by the middle of the month they made another huge move by hiring the

creator of open claw to build these types of systems inside the context of open AI.

Many thought that the whole situation surrounding open claw was a bit of a bobble for anthropic

given that it had originally been named clawed bot after anthropics clawed which instead

of embracing entropic asked for a name change which is what led to multiple and eventually

open claw.

Still pretty much everyone assumed that the type of features that open claw made available

were likely to come to cloud code pretty soon and sure enough over the last week and

half or so we saw first anthropic release remote control basically away where you can move

from a cloud code session on your computer to managing it from your phone while you're

on the go.

This being of course one of the main appeals of open claw the fact that you get to interact

with it through telegram or WhatsApp or another app on your phone and we also saw anthropic

release schedule tasks inside of not cloud code but co work also over the last week perplexity

announced perplexity computer now they've been working on this for the last couple of months

but it's very much playing in the same spaces open claw in that you give it a wildly ambitious

task to be built and it can just go figure out how to do it Microsoft announced copilot tasks

and we've also heard reports that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is actually using open claw and

encouraging his team to check it out and so on and so forth we also got notion custom agents

and basically I think you can assume that this clawification of AI in other words the move to

actual agentic AI is going to continue to proliferate across the industry.

Now as we transition to the next group that woke up it's important to note again that the people

who were cloud coding and open clawing weren't just the devs in preparation for a segment about

these new tools CNBC's dear tribosa went to try to build her own version of Monday.com with

cloud co work just to understand and share with her audience what's actually possible.

She figured it won't work but it would be a good way to show people the current state of the

technology. An hour later she writes I literally have my own Monday.com that's plugged into my

calendar in Gmail and surfaced to kids B day that was not anywhere on my radar and I need to get a

gift for finance and markets content creator Joe Wyzenthal was actually a couple weeks ahead of

everyone else starting to play around with cloud code in a big way back in January and in many

ways proceeding the realization that the rest of Wall Street would have coming into February

because if one group that woke up in February was the AI insiders the other group was Wall Street.

February was the month of the SaaS apocalypse and it actually started off at the end of January

when after Google shared the demo version of Genie 3 where you could create 60 second immersive

worlds a bunch of gaming industry publisher stocks fell but that would be just the very beginning.

But the big actual story of the SaaS apocalypse would end up being that basically every time

inthropic announced some new plugin for cloud code or co work a set of stocks that were

somewhere between directly and nominally related to that plugins focus would just absolutely

crater on February 10th Bloomberg wrote that Wall Street's new hot trade was dumping stocks that

were in AI's crosshairs and it was not just one category we saw this in games we saw this in

productivity software we saw it in finance we saw it in legal on February 10th the Wall Street

journal went so far as to call Wall Street hot new trade dumping stocks that in their words were

in AI's crosshairs and remember this is not just one category this is games legal software general

productivity software IBM seeing their worst single day drop in 25 years because anthropic

wrote a blog about its cobalt tool which had been announced months earlier all of this was the

perfect caustic environment for citrini research to drop their highly viral piece called the 2028

global intelligence crisis which basically articulated a theoretical doom loop scenario that led to

utter economic catastrophe despite that report producing a lot of good counter conversation as well

when in the middle of last week block announced that it was cutting 4,000 employees about 40%

of its overall staff many pointed to it as evidence of the exact sort of white collar carnage that

the citrini report was discussing now there has of course been a lot of debate about the extent to

which it might be the biggest case of AI washing we've seen so far but this is where the environment

is heading out of February and into March Wall Street is extremely jumpy when it comes to AI

and this time it's not because the size or circularity of infrastructure deals but because AI

might be too good then of course there's Washington not only was February the month Washington woke

up to AI but that the rest of us woke up to the complication of the relationship between Washington

and Silicon Valley when it comes to AI I just did an extended episode about this and we talked

about the latest in the headlines but of course the TLDR is that through a series of steps seemingly

going back to the Nicholas Maduro Venezuela raid there was a negotiation where anthropic wanted

specific red line carveouts around AI being used for autonomous weapons and for domestic master

valence with the White House instead wanting the standard to be any lawful uses now of course this

disagreement wasn't just about these specific uses it was much more about who gets to determine

for what and how AI is used it was the first manifestation of what was always an inevitable power

struggle even if it happened in a very ugly way indeed before the fight took its most dramatic turn

already members of congress like Tom Tillis were pretty disgusted around how the whole thing was

happening till it said why the hell are we having this discussion in public why isn't this

occurring in a boardroom or in the secretary's office I mean this is soft morik it of course only

got more so as president Trump and defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced that not only with the

US government not be working with anthropic but that they were going to be designating them a

supply chain risk arguing that that meant that other contractors of the US government would also

have to drop their relationships with anthropic which if it came to pass would have some pretty

serious and dramatic implications now this particular manifestation of the battle itself isn't even

done yet and again it is just the first in what will be a much bigger power struggle in the years

to come so those were the big things AI insiders woke up and changed their level of autonomy ambition

broader white collar workers got dragged along and started to use things like cloud code cloud

co-work and even open claw this spilled over into a recognition on wall street that as match

Schumer's post put it something big was happening which led to lots of chaos in the markets

and to cap it all off we have of course the absolute bun fight that is anthropic versus the

Pentagon in terms of other key details a couple things that are worth noting especially as we

keep an eye on what we expect in March first of all while we didn't get the much anticipated

deep seek for we did get seed dance 2.0 from bite dance which is a video generation model that had

many people in the AI industry asking whether it was the first example of China open-weight models

not only catching up with the US but actually exceeding it the big one to watch for coming up in

March is of course that deep seek event which people have been predicting as coming next week for

basically every week for the last four weeks anthropic added son at 4.6 to opus 4.6 making a

complete 4.6 suite and Google drop Gemini 3.1 pro one interesting note about Google's releases

is that they're very clearly flexing the opportunities around multimodal although exactly

how that's going to hit and what it's going to matter for especially as everyone is just talking

about code generation remains to be seen capping the month and models off was also another

Google model nano banana 2 which was actually more of a functional upgrade than anything else

making nano banana much faster and cheaper although also improving things like text handling

and text reasoning one final story from the month that I think does a good job of capturing

when meter finally shared where codex 5.3 and opus 4.6 were on their long horizon task study

both were high but opus 4.6 especially was basically off the charts at this point in other words

we are in uncharted territory where even the metric that became one of the most if not the most

important metric in some ways of showing a progress last year just can't keep up any longer

and with march now here we could be heading for something else huge my x-slash twitter today

is filled with rumors of gpt not 5.3 but 5.4 and a lot of breathless discussion about

how much better it is we'll see if that's actually true but no matter what 2026 is off to a

rollicking start and that is going to do it for today's ai daily brief i appreciate you listening

or watching as always thanks to kpmg for sponsoring the monthly recap and until next time peace