Good morning, {{ first_name | 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 started as a contract dispute has quickly turned into the biggest AI policy issue the industry has faced yet.
In today’s AI rundown:
OAI lands Pentagon deal as Trump boots Anthropic
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Use Claude Cowork + Obsidian to triple your output
OpenAI hits $730B valuation with $110B mega-round
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI, ANTHROPIC, & THE PENTAGON
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon, just hours after President Trump ordered to cut ties with Anthropic over safeguards on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, with OpenAI claiming its contract carries the same red lines.
The details:
Anthropic was the first AI lab on the Pentagon's classified network, but held firm on not using AI for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.
OAI signed its own deal hours later, citing similar red lines to Anthropic — though the Pentagon reportedly still used Claude in Iran strikes post-ban.
Consumer backlash landed fast, with Claude shooting to No. 1 on Apple's App Store and a “Cancel ChatGPT” movement spreading across X and Reddit.
Why it matters: Whether OAI's red lines actually match Anthropic's or just look the part on paper is the question to watch. Claude’s surge and ChatGPT cancellation backlash show the user reaction, but a favorable relationship with the government over a top competitor might be worth more long-term than the lost consumer revenue.
TOGETHER WITH BLAND AI
The Rundown: Bland AI automates phone calls for over 250+ enterprise customers. No phone trees. No hold music. No call centers. Just faster, better customer conversations.
Here are some of the outcomes they've driven for businesses:
MyPlanAdvocate added $40M/yr by automating their inbound lead qualification
Idaho Finance saved $750k/yr by replacing their IVR with AI Voice Agents
And Needle saves $1M/yr by automating outbound calls
Book a demo today to see how you can get similar results for your business.
THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE
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 daily lives.
Adrian, Developer: My best friend from high school got married last weekend, and as the groomsmen, we wanted to create a gift 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 first frame— and then stitched several clips into one final video.
The result was amazing: the groom was deeply touched, and we all shared a heartfelt moment watching it together on the wedding day, reliving our memories in a way that felt both timeless and new.
Zach, AI Writer: My fantasy baseball auction draft is around the corner, and I decided to try Claude Cowork for the planning and research efforts this year. I uploaded my league’s settings, the players being kept across the league, and my own rambling of strategies and thoughts on my current players.
Claude then performed a deep analysis of my current options and their projected values, provided strong recs on who I should prioritize, and gave me a detailed list of draft targets around the league, perfectly tailored to my needs and league format — also scouring the web for tons of articles that saved me the tedious manual searching.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll learn a simple system to plan and manage your workdays by setting up the Obsidian notes app so that Claude automatically creates daily plans for you — helping you triple your output.
Step-by-step:
Get Obsidian, create a vault with daily-notes/, templates/, projects/ folders, and add my-workflow.md to root with your schedule, work, priorities, projects
Create daily-notes-template.md in templates/ with “Plan,” “Notes,”“End of Day” sections, and a project-template.md in projects/ with “Goals”, “Tasks,” “Notes”
In Claude Cowork, create a scheduled planning task with the prompt: “Read my vault. Check yesterday's note, my project files, and my-workflow.md. Create today's daily note with prioritized tasks. Flag anything overdue”
Create an EOD scheduled task with “Read today's daily note. Summarize what got done, what's carrying over. Update project files with any completed tasks”
Pro tip: Ask Claude to interview you about each project upfront to create clear goals and deadlines in your project files.
PRESENTED BY IBM
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 how IBM can help your organization.
In this paper, you’ll learn how to:
Identify sovereignty risks across your data, cloud, and AI stack
Implement controls that maintain operational independence
Strengthen resilience with hybrid, open, sovereign-ready architectures
OPENAI
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
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 details:
The funding is nearly 3X OAI's own record $40B raise from last March, with the valuation jumping from $500B in October to $730B.
Amazon's $50B comes with a deep strategic deal, including a $100B AWS expansion, adoption of Trainium chips, and more.
Microsoft notably sat this raise out, though both companies insisted their partnership "remains strong and central" in a joint statement.
OAI revealed that ChatGPT now tops 900M weekly users and 50M+ paying subscribers, while weekly Codex usage has tripled since January to 1.6M.
Why it matters: OAI just raised more in a round than most tech companies are worth — though much of the cash flows back to Amazon and Nvidia as compute purchases, continuing the circular investments that have defined the AI boom. With an IPO on the horizon and Anthropic at $380B, the race to go public is gaining even more steam.
QUICK HITS
🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Connect your entire organization to the true voice of the customer with AI-driven insights from customer feedback*
🤖 Hermes-Agent - AI agent with memory, cross-platform messaging
🎥 Flow - Google’s AI filmmaking tool, revamped into a new unified workspace
💻 Perplexity Computer - Multi-model agent system for long-running tasks
*Sponsored Listing
Block laid off over 4,000 of its 10,000 employees, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly citing AI as the reason — sending shares up more than 20% from the move.
OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy said programming is becoming “basically unrecognizable", calling recent shifts the end of the era of typing code.
Imbue open-sourced Darwinian Evolver, a tool that uses LLM evolution to automatically optimize code and prompts — scoring a SOTA 95% on ARC-AGI-2.
Amazon’s David Luan announced he is leaving the company to pursue a new venture, 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 up to 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 people may be frustrated by Apple’s AI strategy. Yet, Apple has changed my life with its AI efforts. I have lived my entire life with no eyesight, thus I rely on the Voice-Over screen reader for every task on my iPhone and Mac. I have always wanted to be my own screen-reader voice, as it would externally affirm I am reading things from my own perspective.
With the introduction of Personal Voice in iOS 17 and the subsequent ability for Voice-Over and the Speech Central AI Voice Reader to use it starting with IOS18, my dream has come true! I am thankful for banking my voice and being able to enjoy my books, articles, browsing the web, and reading this wonderful AI newsletter.”
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: The new top banana in AI image generation
Read our last Tech newsletter: Netflix exits $83B Warner Bros. deal
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree’s most powerful robot dog yet
Today’s AI tool guide: Use Claude Cowork + Obsidian to triple your output
RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI coding bootcamp pt. 1
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
