Anthropic's Claude comes to Excel

PLUS: Create a Claude Skill that designs YouTube thumbnails

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Every AI company wants to conquer spreadsheets, and Anthropic just made a bet on where the real money lives: finance.

With Claude's new Excel integration shipping alongside a slew of connectors and finance-specific Skills, AI’s Wall Street ambitions just gained a powerful new analyst.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic brings Claude directly into Excel

  • Odyssey-2 turns AI video into real-time interaction

  • Create a Claude Skill to design YouTube thumbnails

  • OpenAI’s GPT-5 to better handle mental health crises

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI RESEARCH

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude for Excel in beta, letting users interact with the AI assistant through a sidebar that can read, analyze, and modify spreadsheets, alongside new connectors and Skills for the financial industry.

The details:

  • The integration allows Claude to explain spreadsheets, fix formulas, populate templates with new data, or build new workbooks from scratch.

  • Seven new connectors link Claude to financial platforms like Aiera for earnings call transcripts, LSEG for live market data, and Moody's for credit ratings.

  • Anthropic also debuted several new finance-specific Agent Skills, including building cash flow models, company analysis, coverage reports, and more.

  • Claude for Excel and the new Skills are rolling out as a research preview to Max, Enterprise, and Teams subscribers before a broader release.

Why it matters: AI for spreadsheets has been a hot topic over the last few months, with ChatGPT, Copilot, and now Claude all pushing solutions. While the others have been more agent-focused, Claude’s native Excel access and financial connectors may bring new reliability to an area still waiting for a true AI breakthrough.

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ODYSSEY

Image source: Odyssey

The Rundown: Odyssey just launched Odyssey-2, a new interactive video model that generates streaming AI footage at 20 frames per second, allowing users to shape and control multi-minute videos through text prompts as they explore the scene.

The details:

  • Unlike other video models that take minutes to produce short clips, Odyssey-2 streams footage immediately, with new frames appearing every 50 milliseconds.

  • The system generates video segments without planning, with each new frame based on what has already happened and what users prompt in real-time.

  • Users can direct the video's evolution through natural language prompts while it plays via a chat box, with the AI continuously adapting to each input.

  • The model learns physics and dynamics from video data, enabling it to simulate realistic behaviors like waves moving across water or light shifting on surfaces.

Why it matters: Odyssey-2 feels very different from interactions with other AI video platforms out there, closer to a hybrid world generator than a Veo or Sora. While the quality may not be as impressive as other models, the real-time, open-ended exploration feels like a concept with a ton of potential for new content experiences.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a custom Claude Skill that automatically generates branded YouTube thumbnails by analyzing top-performing videos and applying your brand guidelines.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Claude Settings → Capabilities, enable "Code execution & file creation", then scroll to Skills section, toggle on "skill-creator" and click "Try in Chat"

  2. Start chat, upload your logo, prompt: "Create a skill that generates high CTR thumbnails. It should analyze YouTube video links, generate thumbnails using the PIL library with a logo in the top-right corner. Use Black, White, Blue colors"

  3. Download the generated ZIP file, go to Profile → Settings → Capabilities → Upload Skill, drop the ZIP to install your Thumbnail Generator Skill

  4. Start new chat, prompt: "Generate YouTube thumbnail for 'AI Productivity Tools 2025'. Here are the top videos: [paste URLs]. Create a high-CTR thumbnail with logo top-right using brand colors"

  5. Refine output with follow-ups like "Use Roboto font" or "Make text bolder with Sans Serif" until you get the perfect thumbnail

Pro tip: Use this approach to create other productivity Skills, such as a presentation generation Skill for automated slide decks or an email marketing campaign Skill.

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OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just rolled out major updates to GPT-5 designed to better recognize and respond to users experiencing mental health emergencies, after consulting with over 170 mental health professionals across dozens of countries.

The details:

  • The updated model significantly reduces problematic responses, with clinicians rating GPT-5 as 91% compliant with mental health protocols vs. 77% for 4o.

  • OpenAI said it trained GPT-5 to express empathy without reinforcing delusional beliefs, also fixing an issue where safeguards degraded during long chats.

  • OAI said roughly 0.07% of its 800M weekly active users show signs of potential psychosis or mania, translating to millions of concerning conversations.

  • The updates come amid mounting legal pressure, including lawsuits from families and warnings from state officials about protecting vulnerable users.

Why it matters: The amount of mental health chats being fielded by AI is staggering, and is a difficult situation for OAI to moderate, with some cases likely benefiting from the tool and others leading to even worse spirals. While it’s clear positive steps are being taken, it’s a segment of AI use without a clear-cut ‘correct’ path forward.

QUICK HITS

  • 🔐 Incogni - Remove your personal data from the web so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off for annual plans*

  • 💼 Claude for Excel - Anthropic’s new research preview for AI in spreadsheets

  • 💭 Odyssey 2 - Instant and interactive AI video generation

  • 🏗️ Mistral AI Studio - New platform for going from AI prototypes to production

*Sponsored Listing

MiniMax released M2, an AI that ranks as the strongest open model (and #4 on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index), excelling in agentic, tool use, and STEM tasks.

Qualcomm unveiled its AI200 chip for data centers that aims to compete with Nvidia, with Saudi AI startup Humain revealed as the first customer for the new accelerators.

AMD and the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1B partnership to build two supercomputers to accelerate research in areas like energy, medicine, and security.

AI hiring startup Mercor raised $350M in funding at a $10B valuation, benefiting from a pivot to data-labeling following Meta's acquisition of a stake in competitor Scale AI.

Expense management platforms report that AI-faked receipts now account for up to 14% of fraudulent submissions, with companies detecting over $1M in falsified invoices.

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 Christopher S. in Houston, TX:

"I recently came across a sales development agent. As an independent business loan broker, prospecting and lead nurturing take 60% of my time. This SDR, at no cost for now, prospects, researches, emails, and follows up with 150 new contacts a day. My pipeline of applications has grown from 5-10 to over 45-50 a month, and the SDR found and helped me close my first and second multimillion-dollar loans."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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