Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. The two faces behind AI’s biggest rivalry are finally in the same room — but this time it's a federal courtroom, with Elon Musk on the witness stand and Sam Altman watching from the gallery.
Musk's $130B trial against OpenAI kicked off on Tuesday, with four weeks of testimony, hundreds of pages of private emails set to spill into the public record, major AI names on the stand, and a lot more drama still to come.
In today’s AI rundown:
Elon Musk’s $130B trial against OpenAI kicks off
Google finalizes Pentagon deal despite protests
Automate any manual task with Codex
Talkie is an AI that thinks it's 1930
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
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The Rundown: Elon Musk just took the stand in federal court as opening statements began in his $130B lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing CEO Sam Altman of "stealing a charity" — while OAI's lawyer told the jury Musk sued because he "didn't get his way."
The details:
Musk's suit seeks $130B in damages, the ouster of Altman and Brockman from the board, and a forced unwind of OpenAI's recent for-profit conversion.
Musk said in his testimony that "if a verdict comes out that it's OK to loot a charity, the entire foundation of charitable giving in America will be damaged”.
OAI’s legal team called Musk’s suit “sour grapes,” saying Musk didn’t like the success the company saw after his departure.
Microsoft’s legal team said Musk didn’t object to OAI’s structure until after its success as xAI’s competitor, and said it “knew nothing” of Altman’s 2023 firing.
Why it matters: This is just Day 1 of one of the most contentious court cases the tech world has seen, and the details are going to be juicy. With high-profile AI characters set to testify and with hundreds of pages of private messages about to spill into the public record, the next four weeks are going to be hard to look away from.
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The Rundown: Google signed a classified AI deal with the Pentagon, opening its models to "any lawful government purpose," the same week that 600+ staffers wrote an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, calling to reject the use of AI for military purposes.
The details:
More than 600 Google employees sent Pichai a letter on Monday asking him to “refuse to make our AI systems available for classified workloads.”
The Information reported that the contract opens Google's AI to “any lawful government purpose”, with no legal right to veto how the Pentagon uses it.
Google's no-weapons pledge was scrubbed from its AI principles in 2025, after it was implemented in 2018 following successful staff protests.
Why it matters: The Pentagon drama might still feel fresh in the OAI-vs-Anthropic rivalry, but it’s not discouraging another top AI lab from making a similar deal. Google’s now wading into a messy territory from a PR and internal perspective, and time will tell if the same backlash we saw with ChatGPT now comes to Gemini’s doorstep.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to let OpenAI’s Codex click through any annoying, repetitive work using Computer Use on Mac or Windows.
Step-by-step:
Open Codex, go to Plugins, find and enable the Computer Use plugin, and then start a new task
Open the permissions menu and switch from Default permissions to Full access. Confirm any prompts
Give a real task, like: “Open Chrome and debug the UI of this web page http://localhost:3000/. Click through, reproduce the bug I describe, then tell me what you think is causing it. If not sure, ask before making changes”
Pro tip: Codex can automate repetitive workflows in local apps, too. Try it for Photoshop exports, Premiere cleanup, file renaming, or any other tool.
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AI RESEARCH
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The Rundown: Researchers Nick Levine, David Duvenaud (fmr. Anthropic), and Alec Radford (fmr. OpenAI) demoed Talkie, a 13B ‘vintage’ AI model trained only on text from before 1931, built to test how AI thinks when its worldview predates the internet.
The details:
Talkie was trained on 260B tokens of pre-1931 books, newspapers, journals, patents, and case law, all now in the US public domain.
To teach talkie to chat without modern data, the team pulled instructions from etiquette manuals and cookbooks, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 grading the answers.
The coding language Python didn’t exist in 1930, but Talkie wrote working code by flipping a plus sign to a minus sign in an example, proving it can generalize.
AI benchmarks get poisoned when models train on their own test data — talkie sidesteps that, with a GPT-3-level version coming next.
Why it matters: Today's frontier models all sound vaguely similar because they all read roughly the same modern web. Talkie is definitely cut from a different cloth — but the Python coding anecdote is a fascinating part of the experiment that shows what kind of learning and reasoning is potentially going on beneath the original training data.
QUICK HITS
📊 Replit Slides - Create polished, stunning slides in seconds with AI
🤖 Nemotron 3 Nano Omni - NVIDIA's open AI combining vision, audio, text
🌎 Echo-2 - SpAItial’s new SOTA text-to-3D world model
⚙️ Workflows - Mistral's enterprise tool for chaining AI agents
OpenAI announced that GPT-5.5, Codex, and Managed Agents are now available via Amazon Bedrock, coming a day after its new contract restructure with Microsoft.
NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, a new open model that can handle vision, audio, and text at 9x the speed of rival open multimodal models.
The WSJ reported that OAI fell short of its targets for revenue and user growth, with CFO Sarah Friar questioning its massive spending — with OAI calling it “ludicrous.”
Anthropic added new connectors for a broader range of creative workflows, including apps like Blender, Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk Fusion, SketchUp, and more.
Xiaomi open-sourced MiMo-V2.5-Pro, which ties Kimi K2.6 on Artificial Analysis’ leaderboard, featuring a 1M context window and strong efficiency for agentic tasks.
SpAItial launched Echo-2, a new SOTA world model that turns text or photos into explorable 3D worlds, claiming to beat World Labs' Marble 1.1 across benchmarks.
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 Alan C. in Ontario, Canada:
"I used AI to resolve what looked like a furnace failure during a cold night without calling a technician. After installing a Google Nest Thermostat about a year ago, my system started making a loud ‘revving’ noise and flashing error codes (2 and 7) that pointed to pressure switch or hardware faults.
I photographed the control board and wiring and uploaded them to Google Gemini. It identified the furnace, traced the issue to thermostat power stealing, and flagged a wiring phasing error. It then guided a simple ‘G-to-C’ wire conversion to provide stable power, along with steps to clear lockouts and verify readings.
Within an hour, the noise stopped, error codes cleared, and the system stabilized to normal operation. It saved me about $300 HVAC tech service call, and I avoided a night in the cold."
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI and Microsoft’s new open relationship
Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked
Read our last Robotics newsletter: The Chinese robot ban is coming
Today’s AI tool guide: Automate any manual task with Codex
RSVP to workshop Thursday @ 2PM EST: Codex for non-technical operators
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
