Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. The U.S. government just told an AI company to remove the safeguards keeping its model from being used in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance… Or potentially be forced to legally comply.
The Pentagon's ultimatum to Anthropic is a scary one, and how it plays out could set the precedent for how the most powerful AI systems on the planet end up being used by governments, with some dystopian potential outcomes.
Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 2 PM EST! Join and stack your AI wins with repeatable system for finding automation opportunities. RSVP here.
In today’s AI rundown:
Pentagon hits Claude with ultimatum over guardrails
New AI learns any computer task by watching videos
Translate videos into any language with AI
Cowork gets agentic tools across departments
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
ANTHROPIC & THE PENTAGON
Image source: Full Metal Jacket / The Rundown
The Rundown: The Pentagon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just delivered a Friday ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: remove Claude's military safeguards, or face contract termination, government blacklisting, and forced compliance.
The details:
Amodei has refused to budge on two Claude uses — autonomous weapons without a human in the loop, and bulk surveillance of American citizens.
Axios reports Hegseth gave three choices: Agree, kill the $200M deal with a supply chain risk label, or be forced to comply via the Defense Production Act.
Claude was the first model inside the Pentagon's classified networks, with xAI’s Grok now landing a deal after agreeing to “all lawful purposes” use cases.
The Pentagon is also reportedly fast-tracking OpenAI and Google for classified access, giving it additional options if Anthropic walks.
Why it matters: AI is becoming a pillar of military power, but strong-arming labs into dropping safety limits sets a bleak precedent. If ‘wartime’ legal threats are enough to strip guardrails, the question of who will actually draw the line on dystopian AI uses like autonomous weapons and surveillance quickly gets a very unsettling answer.
TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE
The Rundown: Slackbot is a context-aware AI agent built directly into Slack — understanding your conversations, files, and workflows to deliver what you need, right when you need it, with zero setup.
Watch this 2-minute demo to see how Slackbot:
Makes your entire workspace searchable (docs, convos, apps)
Enhances every teammate with role-specific automations
Learns your project and preferences over time for even smarter outputs
Synthesizes what you need instantly, respecting permissions and using only what you can already see
STANDARD INTELLIGENCE
Image source: Standard Intelligence
The Rundown: Standard Intelligence introduced FDM-1, a ‘computer action’ model that learns to operate computers by watching video — already showing it can do CAD modeling, find software bugs, and drive a real car through San Francisco.
The details:
FDM-1 is trained on 11M hours of screen footage, 550,000x (!) the largest open dataset, with an AI that reverse-engineers what actions produced each frame.
The model can watch and follow along with nearly two hours of continuous screen activity at once, processing 50x the visual context of existing models.
FDM-1 Demos range from building gears in Blender to driving a real car via arrow keys and live data feeds with under an hour of training data.
Why it matters: Language models learned how we write from the internet's text, and FDM-1 is now trying to learn how we work and operate from the internet's video. By enabling much more of the world’s video to be ingested as training data with better retention, the ceiling for what computer-use agents can do just jumped dramatically.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use HeyGen to translate your videos into any language. If you’re running paid or organic video content to an international audience, this is a powerful, easy-to-use way to expand your reach across the globe.
Step-by-step:
First, do some research in your Meta/Google ads accounts for your top 3 non-English markets
We’re using a free HeyGen account, which allows three translations. Keep your video under 3 minutes — a single-speaker talking head format works best
Click Translate in HeyGen and upload the clip or provide a YT/Google Drive link. Next, choose the required language without changing the default settings
In 5–10 minutes, your video will be ready for you to download or share via link
Pro tip: If the quality looks low, a paid plan will allow you to export in the original quality.
PRESENTED BY LAMBDA
The Rundown: Enterprises stuck on large, closed models are paying more for less control. Lambda and Oumi have partnered to change that — delivering end-to-end custom model development and deployment in hours with better accuracy, lower latency, and stronger privacy built in.
Their platform delivers:
Automated test set creation, evaluation, and fine-tuning end-to-end
Deployment on secure, single-tenant production infrastructure
Proven results, with 70% cost savings and 20% quality gains in one healthcare deployment
ANTHROPIC
Image source: Anthropic
The Rundown: Anthropic released a major update to its Cowork agentic platform with new department-specific AI agents, private plugin stores, and new connectors for Gmail, DocuSign, and more — escalating the enterprise agent war with OAI's Frontier.
The details:
New pre-built agents cover 10 departments out of the gate, ranging from HR and engineering to banking, equity research, and wealth management.
New connectors include Google Workspace, DocuSign, FactSet, and Harvey — with added plugins for partners like Slack by Salesforce, S&P Global, and LSEG.
Companies can build private agent stores and push custom AI agents to specific teams, with admin controls to limit and assign access.
A new research preview also allows Claude to hop between Excel and PowerPoint, crunching data in one and building a full deck in the other.
Why it matters: Cowork spooked SaaS stocks at launch as a mere research preview, and now it ships with agents for 10 departments and connectors to the tools those teams already use. Anthropic is bolting on a new sector with every update — and if this pace holds, the entire knowledge economy starts to look like one big Claude wrapper.
QUICK HITS
💼 Claude Cowork - Anthropic's agentic platform, with new team plugins
🤖 Custom Agents - Notion's always-on AI agents for automating workflows
🎨 Seedream 5.0 Lite - ByteDance's upgraded AI image model
🎆 Reve v1.5 - Reve’s new text-to-image model with 4k resolution outputs
Explore the future of AI-driven dev at Sonar Summit. Register here for the free, virtual event on March 3rd.*
Anthropic launched Remote Control for Claude Code, letting users easily hand off running terminal tasks to their phone or browser.
Google Labs acquired AI music platform ProducerAI, plugging it into DeepMind’s Lyria 3 model to let creators generate full tracks and custom instruments from text prompts.
Inception Labs launched Mercury 2, a diffusion-based reasoning model clocking over 1,000 tokens/sec, tripling the speed of its closest competitor in the same price tier.
Meta and chipmaker AMD announced a new multi-year deal for up to 6GW of GPUs, the tech giant’s biggest move yet to break free from Nvidia-only infrastructure.
OpenAI hired Arvind KC as its new Chief People Officer, tapping a veteran of Roblox, Google, Palantir, and Meta to help continue scaling the AI giant.
*Sponsored Listing
COMMUNITY
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Today’s workflow comes from reader Adam P. in England:
"We're two part-timers, plus me, a founder of 30 years. We were losing ground to bigger competitors with big marketing teams. Our SEO had stalled, business was flat.
We fed our web data and competitor information into AI. It ran SWOT comparisons, highlighted content gaps, and showed where we were being outranked. We used it to restructure our website and tighten our CRM workflows. Traffic is now growing again. Enquiries are stronger. We’re back in expansion mode."
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: Anthropic calls out China’s AI copycats
Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple goes big on ‘Made in America’
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Figure’s 24/7 humanoid staff
Today’s AI tool guide: Translate your videos into any language with AI
RSVP to today’s workshop @ 2PM EST: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 3
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
