OpenAI is "deeply unfocused," says one of its own early investors. And that's only one of many threads pulling at the company this week.

Paul and Mike dig into OpenAI's reorg, IPO drama, and valuation pushback, Stanford's 2026 AI Index, the real implications of AI agents in the enterprise, Tim Cook's Apple exit, Anthropic's White House thaw, the Dwarkesh-Jensen Huang debate, Claude Design's launch, and rapid-fire updates across Claude Opus 4.7, Cerebras, Harvey Agents, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

AI Pulse Survey: Fill out this weeks AI Pulse Survey here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:41 — The 2026 AI Index Report

00:19:10 — OpenAI Shifts and Shakeups

00:34:27 — The Business Implications of Agents

00:50:56 — Apple’s Tim Cook Stepping Down

00:54:11 — Anthropic Launches Claude Design, Targets Canva and Figma

01:01:26 — Anthropic's Possible Reconciliation with the White House

01:06:02 — Dwarkesh vs. Jensen

01:15:08 — Gen AI Traffic Share

01:17:36 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:25:20 — AI Academy Spotlight: AI for Manufacturing

01:30:05 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

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An Anthropic AI model powerful enough to trigger emergency government briefings. A source code leak. A $122 billion OpenAI funding round. A Ronan Farrow exposé. Physical attacks on Sam Altman. Paul and Mike are back with two weeks of AI news and the analysis you need to make sense of it all.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:44 — Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing

00:32:03 — Claude Code Leak + Anthropic Subscription Shakeup

00:42:35 — Major OpenAI Updates

00:59:30 — AI for Writers Summit

01:01:41 — Mercor Breach

01:06:25 — Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Bases Go Viral

01:10:20 — AI and Jobs Update

01:19:34 — AI and Politics Update

01:25:32 — HubSpot Shifts to Outcome-Based AI Pricing

01:30:51 — SmarterX AI Use Case Spotlight

01:36:25 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:40:23 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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150+ stories distilled into 10 trends: ranked, contextualized, and ready to make your head spin.

In this special episode, Paul and Mike distill 150+ topics from 12 weekly episodes into 10 ranked trends. From the nonstop model release frenzy and OpenClaw's rise to AI-driven layoffs going mainstream and a cultural "vibe shift" around AGI, this episode is your fastest path to catching up on everything that mattered in the last three months.

We will be back with regular weekly news episodes April 14th.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:14 — The Model Release Frenzy

00:11:20 — Big AI Becomes Big Lobbying

00:16:15 — Anthropic vs. the U.S. Government

00:22:37 — The Rise of OpenClaw

00:28:32 — Enterprise AI Adoption: The People Problem

00:36:22 — SaaSpocalypse

00:43:11 — Labs Pivot to AI Agents

00:50:58 — AI-Driven Layoffs Go Mainstream

00:55:54 — We’re Seeing More Move 37 Moments

01:02:38 — The Vibe Shift

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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Five companies are about to decide the future of the economy, geopolitics, and your career… and two of them have been locked in a deeply personal feud since 2016.

This week, Paul and Mike dig into a Wall Street Journal investigation tracing the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry back to broken promises and a San Francisco group house, explore what Anthropic's accidentally leaked "Mythos" model means for cybersecurity and the next leap in AI capability, react to Uber's CEO admitting AI will replace 70-80% of human work, and unpack nearly $300M in political money now flowing into AI deregulation. Plus: agent security risks, Apple's Siri overhaul, a new SmarterX use case spotlight, and an AI Academy deep dive on AI for Sales. 

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:15 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:05:30 — OpenAI vs. Anthropic

00:26:02 — Details Leak on Anthropic’s New Hyper-Powerful Model

00:35:34 — Brutally Honest CEO Perspectives on AI

00:48:29 — Anthropic Granted Preliminary Injunction in Fight Against the Pentagon

00:51:06 — This Week in AI Politics

00:56:55 — AI Agent Nightmares

01:02:15 — Apple's AI Reboot

01:05:21 — SmarterX Use Case Spotlight

01:17:53 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:22:59 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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Not a single company leader Paul has spoken with is fully prepared for what AI is about to do to their workforce. In this AI Answers episode, Paul and Cathy work through 15 real questions from a recent Scaling AI class, covering everything from the AI divide inside companies to why most AI strategies fail before they start.

Topics include job displacement and underemployment, why enterprises handed AI to IT and get stuck, the automation-vs-augmentation spectrum by seniority level, what knowledge work looks like in three years, and why showing a skeptical CEO results beats showing them prompts every time.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:09 — Is Amazon slowing its AI rollout a sign of maturity?

00:08:58 — Are large enterprises structurally disadvantaged in the AI era?

00:12:14 — Who owns the AI adoption and data readiness problem?

00:14:56 — Is there a growing AI divide between power users and everyone else?

00:21:16 — What AI take do most people disagree with?

00:22:47 — Can companies automate too much too fast?

00:26:19 — Does automation eventually take over or do we land in the middle?

00:28:24 — What does the average knowledge worker's job look like in three years?

00:35:02 — What are companies still getting wrong about AI strategy?

00:36:27 — How should leaders should decide what matters versus what’s noise?

00:40:21 —  What separates AI councils that drive progress from ones that don't?

00:41:47 — Where is governance necessary and where does it get in the way?

00:45:17 — Should you show leadership the AI system or the results?

00:47:19 — What's the no-brainer AI use case most companies still haven't tried?

00:49:36 — Why do people wait to be told how to use AI instead of experimenting?

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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Claude Code didn't just change one company's trajectory, it triggered a chain reaction across every major AI lab. In this episode, Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down how OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Microsoft are all scrambling to catch up in the agent and enterprise race, and why the next three to six months could look radically different from anything we've seen. 

In rapid fire: Microsoft shakes up Copilot leadership, a Meta AI agent goes rogue and causes a security breach, the Anthropic-Pentagon legal battle intensifies, Google DeepMind proposes 10 traits for measuring AGI, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:04 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:05:50 — AI Labs Refocus on Agents and Enterprise

00:29:07 — New Polling on AI and Trump National AI Framework

00:45:46 — Company Transformation with AI (Offsite Recap)

00:59:52 — Nadella Takes Over Microsoft Copilot

01:06:06 — Meta's Rogue AI Agent

01:10:01 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Continues

01:14:42 — DeepMind’s New AGI Scorecard

01:18:40  — What 81,000 People Want from AI

01:26:01 — AI Academy Spotlight

01:30:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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Billable hours are in the past, human creativity gets its strongest case yet, and Paul explains what happens when ten AI agents start collaborating like a marketing team. Paul and Cathy tackle 16 real questions on career pivots into AI, the risks of over-reliance on productivity gains, enterprise training personalization, labor replacement pricing, whether AI actually reasons, and what leaders should do with the time AI is giving back.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:05 — How do you transition into AI without a coding background?

00:06:03 — What are the best AI skills to learn while job searching?

00:08:56 — Should consultants bill for time spent experimenting with AI?

00:11:44 — How do we make sure AI productivity isn't quietly weakening our thinking?

00:14:17 — What's the best reframe for creatives who see AI as a threat?

00:19:04 — How do you wrangle a Wild West AI free-for-all at your company?

00:20:45 — How do you personalize AI training at the enterprise level?

00:23:41 — How do you get legal stakeholders to enable AI adoption instead of blocking it?

00:28:06 — How will AI adoption pick up in traditional industries like manufacturing?

00:31:24 — Can companies behind on digitalisation leapfrog ahead with AI?

00:34:33 — Will AI companies eventually price based on the labor they replace?

00:37:55 — What is a swarm of agents and why does it matter?

00:43:34 — Do reasoning models actually reason or just predict the next word?

00:46:54 — Should AI companies be regulated to preserve diversity of thought?

00:49:34 — If AI can solve advanced math, why can't it solve technological unemployment?

00:52:40 — How do we make sure AI gives us time back instead of just more work?

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud: 

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/  

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Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits to block the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation and the back-and-forth on X between the Pentagon CTO and AI policy experts is revealing what this fight is really about. Paul and Mike unpack the politics, the implications, and why a deal is inevitable.

Then: 86,000 people took the NYT's AI writing quiz and most preferred the machine. Paul shares his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it? Plus Atlassian's 1,600 AI-driven layoffs, Amazon's AI-caused outages, McKinsey's chatbot getting hacked in two hours, and more.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:11 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:48 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3

00:30:02 — New York Times Releases Controversial "AI Writing Quality" Quiz

00:46:18 — Atlassian Layoffs and Job Loss Dashboard

00:58:49 — Adobe CEO Stepping Down

01:07:14 — Amazon AI-Related Outages and Engineering Struggles

01:14:28 — McKinsey AI Chatbot Hacked

01:19:49 — AI Politics Update

01:24:06 — Grammarly AI "Expert Review" Controversy

01:30:51 — Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch Agent

01:34:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.

This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.

It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey 

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A VC-backed startup just admitted its strategy is to clone incumbent software using Claude Code and sell it for 90% less. Entry-level marketing roles are vanishing as leaders realize they can generate entire campaigns in minutes. And agent swarms that function as out-of-the-box marketing teams could arrive by year's end.

Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput answer 15 questions from business leaders across marketing, sales, and customer success covering everything from AI's environmental impact to how to prove efficiency gains to skeptical teams.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:18 — How should a CMO get started with AI?

00:09:57 — What is the difference between an AI agent and a regular prompt?

00:12:47 — Will AI labs fix their environmental impact?

00:17:04 — How to convince skeptics that AI can help improve performance?

00:19:55 — How to deal with AI sycophancy when using it as a thought partner

00:22:06 — What efficiency gains are people seeing from generative AI in marketing?

00:25:42 — How to track and measure time saved by AI

00:27:47 — How to manage information and prompts across multiple AI platforms

00:33:59 — How to balance AI adoption with data privacy and security

00:36:17 — Which roles will be most disrupted by AI?

00:43:51 — Will AI sales calls just feel like spam robocalls?

00:46:29 — How to reinvest time saved by AI into growth and innovation

00:49:33 — When to buy software versus build it yourself with AI

00:54:35 — How to protect yourself from others using AI agents irresponsibly

00:55:58 — Why IT should not be the one driving AI adoption

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud: 

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/  

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The data is in, and it's harder to ignore. Anthropic's new "observed exposure" study reveals AI can handle 94% of knowledge work tasks in theory and the gap between theory and reality is narrowing fast. Paul and Mike unpack what that means for your career, your company, and the broader social contract around work.

This week: the Anthropic vs. Pentagon saga escalates, a Sequoia partner predicts AI will replace entire service industries (not just software), GPT-5.4 drops and outperforms professionals on economic benchmarks, a Polish mathematician has his "personal singularity" moment — plus rapid fire on AI journalism, OpenClaw security risks, AI copyright law, and Meta's smart glasses privacy scandal.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:32 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:00 — Anthropic vs. US Government Round 2

00:19:43 — Anthropic Analyzes AI Job Impact

00:35:30 — Services as the New Software

00:49:19 — Barriers to Enterprise AI Adoption

00:54:54 — GPT-5.4

01:00:55 — The Move 37 Moment for Math

01:05:39 — AI and Journalism Update

01:10:03 — NVIDIA CEO Calls OpenClaw “Most Important Software Release Ever”

01:13:35 — AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted

01:16:08 — Meta Sued Over Smartglasses Privacy Concerns

01:19:21 — Microsoft Copilot Cowork

This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.

This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.

It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey 

Visit our website

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Join our community:

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Episode 200 arrived in the midst of a very dramatic week in AI and we recorded it live with AI Academy Mastery members for the first time!

This week, Paul and Mike discuss an eventful 72 hours beginning with the Trump administration’s ultimatum to Anthropic. Eventually Anthropic refused, got blacklisted, and hours later OpenAI stepped in to take the deal. Paul and Mike unpack every twist, including why Peter Thiel's fingerprints on both sides make this even wilder.

Also: OpenAI's $110B funding round, Claude Code creator Boris Cherney on why coding is "effectively solved" (and what that means for your job), Block laying off 4,000 people and naming AI as the reason, and a doomer economic essay that actually moved Wall Street.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:30 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:08 — Anthropic vs. US Government

00:44:55 — OpenAI Funding, Amazon Partnership, Response to DoD

00:51:19 — Interview with the Head of Claude Code

00:59:38 — Block AI Job Cuts

01:04:41 — AI Doomer Essay from Citrini

01:10:54 — Politics of Data Centers

01:15:15 — Anthropic Fluency Index

01:18:29 — Anthropic Distillation Attacks

01:21:46 — NVIDIA Earnings

01:24:19 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

AI Academy is your gateway to personalized AI learning for professionals and teams. Discover our new on-demand courses, live classes, certifications, and a smarter way to master AI. Learn more here.

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