Anthropic enters the frontier AI fight

PLUS: Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI world’s holiday gifts are coming early this season, with Gemini 3, GPT-5.1 Pro, and now Claude Opus 4.5 all launching in a week.

With Anthropic crashing the frontier party with Opus’ new record-breaking coding benchmarks, the revolving door cycle of competition for the world’s top model continues to spin faster than ever.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic climbs AI ranks with Claude Opus 4.5

  • OpenAI’s new shopping feature in ChatGPT

  • Vibe code a software tool using Bolt

  • U.S. ‘Genesis Mission’ for AI science breakthroughs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.5, the company’s new flagship model that competes with Gemini 3 and GPT-5.1 for top performance across the board, particularly excelling on coding and agentic benchmarks.

The details:

  • Opus is the first to break 80% on the SWE-Bench Verified coding benchmark, also setting new highs for tool use, reasoning, and problem-solving.

  • The model matches or beats Google’s Gemini 3 across a range of benchmarks, with Anthropic also calling it the “most robustly aligned model” safety-wise.

  • Anthropic designed Opus to orchestrate teams of smaller Haiku models, positioning the flagship model as a central coordinator for multi-agent systems.

  • Opus 4.5’s pricing also notably comes in at a 66% reduction from Opus 4.1, while also showing massive efficiency gains over Anthropic’s other models.

  • Anthropic also rolled out updates, including unlimited chat lengths, Claude Code in desktop, and expanded access to Claude for Chrome & Excel.

Why it matters: Opus 4.5 arrives in a packed week for frontier AI, landing just days after GPT 5.1 Pro and Gemini 3 hit the market and marking the next step up in the frontier AI model race. The price reduction is also a big move for Anthropic, which has often been criticized for Claude’s costs compared to the market.

TOGETHER WITH PROMPTSIGNAL

The Rundown: PromptSignal is an AI visibility platform that shows how often you appear in AI answers and why. It turns performance data into tailored article briefs, then generates full drafts you can edit or directly publish.

With PromptSignal, you can:

  • Measure citations across top AI models

  • Get your recommended articles

  • Generate drafts, edit details, publish articles fast

OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI rolled out Shopping Research, a dedicated interactive shopping assistant within ChatGPT that builds personalized buyer guides by scanning trusted retail sources and asking targeted questions about preferences.

The details:

  • The feature runs on a version of GPT-5 mini, fine-tuned specifically for product discovery and trained to prioritize organic reviews over promotional content.

  • Users describe what they need, answer quiz-style questions about budget and preferences, then receive curated guides with 10-15 options in minutes.

  • OpenAI said the feature excels in electronics, beauty, home goods, and outdoor gear, and will soon integrate Instant Checkout for direct transactions.

  • It is available across all ChatGPT tiers with “nearly unlimited usage” available through the holidays.

Why it matters: OpenAI continues to push for ChatGPT to become the home base for the entire purchase cycle, from search to payment. While we haven’t seen ads or the teased vendor revenue streams yet, the cogs are moving into place for OpenAI to challenge Google in a massive disruption to traditional online shopping.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to vibe code a personalized software tool without writing code — building an EPUB book reader that segments uploads into chapters for one-click copying into LLMs for deeper learning.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Bolt.new, log in with Google or GitHub, and start prompting using natural language — no coding needed

  2. Describe the tool you want: "Vibe code an app where I can upload an EPUB file, and it divides it into chapters so I can one-click copy all the text of that chapter and paste it into ChatGPT"

  3. Test the first output by uploading an EPUB file, evaluate what works and what doesn't, then iterate with prompts like "These chapters are inaccurate"

  4. Copy a parsed chapter into ChatGPT for deep reading: the LLM summarizes every paragraph and preserves nuances that normal PDF/EPUB uploads miss

Hot Tip: We're all going to be building micro-tools for ourselves. By using Bolt, Cursor, or Replit, this process becomes fast, custom, and code-free.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

The Rundown: Join Glean’s flagship virtual launch event to meet the AI agents changing the future of work – and the people behind them. Hear from world-class AI researchers, business leaders, and engineers to see how agentic AI is driving a new wave of productivity and collaboration.

Register for Glean: LIVE December ‘25 to:

  • Hear research-backed insights on what’s improving how people lead and work with AI

  • Meet a new kind of AI agent and see product demos of the tech powering the next era

  • Explore AI opportunities that empower leaders and builders to change work for the better

  • Learn best practices for change management as people, agents, and processes evolve

U.S. GOVERNMENT & AI

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the DOE to build a unified AI platform, aiming to compress scientific discovery timelines from years to days for “challenges of national importance,” like biotech and energy.

The details:

  • The initiative mobilizes 17 federal research facilities and their supercomputing infrastructure to train AI models on decades of government scientific data.

  • The platform will enable AI agents to automate experiments, test hypotheses, and generate predictive models across chemistry, biology, and engineering.

  • The White House called it the largest coordination of research assets since the Apollo program moon missions of the 1960s.

Why it matters: The geopolitical AI race continues to scale, with the U.S. treating it with the same urgency it once reserved for world-altering technological moments like the moon missions. Given the private sector’s intertwining with government AI efforts, it’s likely we’ll see some familiar labs and more eye-popping deals as part of the effort.

QUICK HITS

  • 🤖 Claude 4.5 Opus - Anthropic’s new benchmark-topping frontier model

  • 🍌 Nano Banana Pro - Google’s new image AI with improved text rendering

  • 🤖 GPT 5.1 Pro - OpenAI’s powerful new model for Pro users

  • 🧪 Edison Analysis - Edison’s next-gen scientific analysis agent

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and designer Jony Ive revealed that the team has decided on the design for the coming AI device, saying it may arrive in “less than two years.”

Microsoft released Fara-7B, an open-weight AI model that is compact enough to run directly on laptops and can autonomously navigate websites and complete tasks.

OpenAI’s Sora is being blocked from using the term ‘Cameo’ for its personalization feature after Cameo filed a lawsuit and a judge issued a restraining order this week.

Amazon plans to invest up to $50B starting in 2026 to build AI and supercomputing data centers for U.S. federal agencies, including defense and intelligence operations.

Exa introduced Exa 2.1, the latest version of its agentic search API that brings new accuracy, speed, and quality improvements.

Artificial Analysis launched CritPt, a difficult new graduate-level physics benchmark — with Gemini 3 Pro taking the top spot despite solving less than 10% of the problems.

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 Caitlin F. in Atlanta, GA:

"I'm focused on how businesses use AI to improve operations and actually impact the bottom line. One use case takes a call transcript with a prospect, runs it through an assessment of client fit and scalability readiness, and refers to a prior proposal structure to craft a new custom scope. We reflect their pain in their language and our solutions in our terminology. The entire process end-to-end is now 3 minutes."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

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

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