OpenAI's e-commerce takeover

PLUS: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Your next online purchase might not happen on Amazon or a brand website, but mid-conversation with ChatGPT.

With OpenAI rolling out its new Instant Checkout with support for millions of merchants, AI is about to become the new one-stop storefront for the internet.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI brings direct purchasing to ChatGPT

  • Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5

  • Create talking head videos using your voice

  • OpenAI’s TikTok-style app for Sora 2

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just rolled out direct purchasing inside ChatGPT for U.S. users, letting shoppers complete transactions without leaving the conversation interface through a new feature called Instant Checkout.

The details:

  • The company partnered with Stripe to create the system, initially supporting Etsy sellers with availability for over 1M Shopify merchants coming soon.

  • Users can click a "Buy" button after ChatGPT suggests products, then review order details and pay in chat.

  • OAI open-sourced the underlying Agentic Commerce Protocol, enabling any retailer to integrate it — with Stripe merchants needing minimal code changes.

  • The company collects fees from merchants on completed sales, but the product rankings stay organic, still determined by relevance.

Why it matters: We’ll be curious to see if OAI eventually incorporates ads into the flow, but Instant Checkout and the ACP feel like an inflection point for the shift to the era of agentic AI commerce. The structure is also an interesting new revenue stream for the AI giant, and could seriously add up as shopping shifts to ChatGPT.

TOGETHER WITH TURING

The Rundown: While data factories churn out quantity, leading AI labs need partners who co-own research goals and engineer the complex human-AI loops that push models from promising to state-of-the-art. Turing specializes in closing capability gaps through custom research acceleration.

Turing's research-focused approach includes:

  • Co-owned experimental outcomes, not just data delivery, and vendor neutrality

  • Quality-by-design workflows with transparent data lineage and auditable results

  • Custom RL environments and SFT/RLHF/DPO pipelines designed for your benchmarks

Partner with the research accelerator that understands what frontier AI labs actually need.

ANTHROPIC

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude Sonnet 4.5, calling it the “best coding model in the world” and showcasing top-tier performance on development benchmarks while maintaining the same API pricing as its predecessor.

The details:

  • Sonnet 4.5 achieves SOTA results on real-world software development (SWE-bench verified), and a nearly 20% upgrade from Opus 4.1 on computer use.

  • Testing showed Sonnet 4.5 coding autonomously for 30+ hours to deliver 11,000 lines of code, a massive jump from GPT-5-Codex’s 7+ hour sessions.

  • Anthropic rolled out new updates, including Claude Code checkpoints, memory and context editing in API, and a Claude Agent SDK for agent building.

  • The company also released "Imagine with Claude" as a 5-day research preview for Max users, showcasing real-time software generation.

Why it matters: OAI’s Codex stole some of Claude Code’s thunder this summer, but the release of a new top coding model and platform upgrades could give Anthropic a renewed edge. A 30+ hour agentic session is also a wild achievement, and points to a future of long-horizon tasks that unlock unfathomable new capabilities.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create professional talking avatar presentations by generating a headshot with Google Gemini and animating it with your voice using Wan Video — no filming required.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Gemini and upload a photo with the prompt: "Give me a professional headshot of this person as a talking head, facing the camera, wearing [outfit], with [background]. Close-up shot, professional lighting, high resolution"

  2. Visit create.wan.video, create a new project, and change media type from Video → Avatar

  3. Upload your Gemini headshot and add audio by recording 10-15 seconds of your script or typing up to 300 words to use Wan's built-in voices

  4. Hit Generate to sync lip movements with your audio, then click "Send to Timeline" and add segments using the "+" button to build your complete video

Pro tip: Write your script before you start and split it into short sections with natural pauses. This makes each clip flow smoothly, making it sound like a real presenter.

PRESENTED BY INVISIBLE

The Rundown: The AI industry is openly split on whether evaluations even matter — with some shipping “on vibes” and others insisting evals are the only way to measure progress. Invisible’s new brief cuts through the noise, showing why “benchmaxxing” distorts reality and what to measure instead.

Inside, you’ll learn:

  • Evaluations explained: the missing step between AI pilots and ROI

  • A practical framework for custom evaluations aligned to your use cases

  • How to construct inputs, catch faulty training data, and run behavioral and safety checks

  • A client case that reduced harmful behaviors by 97% with 4k rows, not 100k

OPENAI

Image source: Sora

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly developing a standalone social platform powered by its upcoming Sora 2 video model, designed to mimic TikTok's vertical scrolling feed but exclusively featuring AI-generated content instead of user uploads.

The details:

  • The platform will limit clips to 10 seconds and include identity verification, allowing users to authorize their likeness for video generations.

  • The WSJ said OAI will allow copyrighted material in videos unless rights holders actively request exclusion, though public figures will require consent.

  • The app incorporates remix functionality and algorithmic recommendations similar to For You pages, with notifications sent when a user’s likeness is used.

  • The news comes just days after Meta revealed Vibes, an entirely AI video feed within the Meta AI app.

Why it matters: Sora 2 seems imminent, but it will require some big upgrades to bring the model up to the level of rivals. Both OAI and Meta are heading down the AI social feed route — and given the negative reactions to the Vibes launch, these types of apps are likely to be associated with the slop-ification of the web until proven otherwise.

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*

  • 🚀 Claude 4.5 Sonnet - Anthropic’s new top-performing coding model

  • 🧾 Instant Checkout - Shop mid-conversation with ChatGPT’s

  • ❤️ Loveable AI & Cloud - Add AI app functionalities with a built-in backend

*Sponsored Listing

DeepSeek launched V3.2-Exp, a model with a new "sparse attention" mechanism that cuts API costs by over 50% while matching its predecessor's performance.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 legislation, requiring transparency from AI giants with a computing cluster consortium and whistleblower protections.

OpenAI rolled out a new safety routing system that switches to GPT-5-thinking during sensitive conversations, alongside the launch of new parental controls.

Quantum computing expert Scott Aaronson published a new paper that he revealed had a key technical step come from GPT-5-Thinking.

Lovable launched Lovable Cloud and AI, enabling users to build full-stack apps through prompts with integrated backend services and Gemini-powered AI features.

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 Tauseef M. in Bangalore, India:

"In my daily practice as a clinician, I use AI ChatGPT & Perplexity to quickly interpret clinical data, review the latest guidelines, and create tailored lifestyle and treatment plans. This enhances my decision-making, improves efficiency, and allows me to focus more on meaningful patient interactions."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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

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