Anthropic has filed to go public, and its S-1 lays out a future of "virtual collaborators," $40 trillion in knowledge work, and a valuation that could top Meta's. Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down the filing. They debate whether Fortune 500 companies can really become "self-driving" by 2030, and dig into Google DeepMind's new research on AGI, wages, and the meaning of work.

In rapid fire: Gemini 4 Carbon, Genie 4, and GPT-6.1 Terra; earnings from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon; Microsoft's 60,000-employee buyout offer; Amazon's anti-tokenmaxxing memo; and a new wave of AI security incidents.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:57 — Anthropic’s IPO Filing

00:27:42 — The Rise of the Self-Driving Company?

00:41:35 — Google DeepMind & OpenAI Say AI Could Transform the Meaning of Work

00:56:12 — Google Unveils Gemini 4 Carbon and Genie 4 as OpenAI Releases GPT-6.1 Terra

01:01:44 — Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Report Earnings

01:06:13 — Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees

01:12:15 — Amazon Refocuses Its AI Strategy on Frontier Models and Business Results

01:16:49 — AI Is Forcing a New Security Agenda

01:21:47 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:28:26 — AI Product and Funding Updates

--

How do you know where your organization actually stands with AI?

Join Paul Roetzer for Introduction to AI Score for Business Leaders on Friday, November 13 at noon ET. He’ll walk through AI Score by SmarterX, our new change management assessment built to make AI transformation more measurable and actionable. You’ll see how the free Business AI Score and Personal AI Score assessments reveal strengths and gaps, guide personalized learning plans, and shape your AI transformation roadmap. Register free for live and on-demand access at SmarterX.ai

--

This episode is also brought to you by the MAICON 2026 On-Demand Bundle. Couldn’t make it to Cleveland, or want to rewatch?

The MAICON 2026 On-Demand bundle gives you more than two dozen recorded main-stage and featured sessions (12+ hours) from this year’s Marketing AI Conference, ready to watch on your own schedule. Grab it at MAICON.AI

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AI found a 14-year-old flaw in the code behind an estimated 70% of websites, and within 12 hours of it leaking, Cloudflare saw millions of attempts to exploit it. In Episode 248, Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down this AI cybersecurity crisis: what happened, why it cascaded across banks, infrastructure, and medical records, and the steps you can take now.

They also cover Dario Amodei's defense of Anthropic's safety record, outside evaluators finding gaps in OpenAI's safeguards, Meta's Muse data exposure, and Anthropic's IPO filing at a valuation approaching $2 trillion, plus product and funding news in the rapid-fire round.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:17 — The AI Cybersecurity Crisis Is Here

00:29:55 — Dario Defends Anthropic’s Safety Record

00:45:50 — Outside Evaluators Find Gaps in OpenAI’s AI Safeguards

00:56:57 — Marketing AI Institute’s 10-Year Anniversary

01:05:28 — Meta’s Muse Agent Found to Expose User Data

01:11:35 — Anthropic Releases Its Own Personal Agent

01:14:59 — Inside Anthropic’s IPO

01:19:29 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:32:02 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy Day 2026.

AI keeps changing, how do you keep your people learning at the same pace? Join Paul Roetzer, Mike Kaput, and SmarterX head of learning Jessica Miller on Thursday, November 19 at 12pm ET for a first look at the next phase of AI Academy by SmarterX. Register at SmarterX.ai/AcademyDay

This episode is also brought to you by the MAICON 2026 On-Demand Bundle. Couldn’t make it to Cleveland, or want to rewatch?

The MAICON 2026 On-Demand bundle gives you more than two dozen recorded main-stage and featured sessions (12+ hours) from this year’s Marketing AI Conference, ready to watch on your own schedule. Grab it at MAICON.AI

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A safety lead who authored OpenAI's model reports left and told Ezra Klein the industry can't reliably safeguard the systems it's already shipping. Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput unpack that interview, OpenAI's fired safety researchers, and reporting that labs expect a catastrophic AI incident within a year.

Then: Anthropic's new data on its own AI-run workforce, a MAICON 2026 recap, fresh interpretability research, OpenAI's contested math-proof release, Google's Gemini Argon, and micro1's $1B plan to buy how businesses actually work.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:48 — AI-Pulse Survey

00:07:11 — OpenAI's Mounting Safety Concerns

00:25:09 — The AI Expectations Gap

00:47:24 — MAICON 2026 Recap

01:02:51 — Introducing The AI Transformation Blueprint and AI Score

01:08:48 — An Interpretability Breakthrough?

01:13:17 — OpenAI's Math Reckoning

01:18:31 — The Super Intelligence Rebrand

01:22:21 — Google Releases Gemini Argon (and “Gemini agent”)

01:26:57 — micro1 Is Buying Enterprise Data, Here's Why

01:31:53 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:38:08 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is supported by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine for frontier technology:

⁠“Scaling Out Superintelligence”⁠⁠ Vijoy Pandey, January 2026. The technical whitepaper detailing the Internet of Cognition architecture, three-layer stack, and cognition state protocols.

⁠⁠Internet of Cognition Interactive Demo⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Clickable walkthrough showing per-agent activity, intent, context, and collective reasoning across a multi-agent SRE system.

This episode is also brought to you by the MAICON 2026 On-Demand. Couldn’t make it to Cleveland, or want to rewatch?

The MAICON 2026 On-Demand bundle gives you more than two dozen recorded main-stage and featured sessions (12+ hours) from this year’s Marketing AI Conference, ready to watch on your own schedule. Grab it at MAICON.AI

Visit our website

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Looking for content and resources?

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When will we achieve AGI? Recorded live in the podcast studio at MAICON 2026, this AI Answers episode has Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput answering questions submitted from our audience.

They dig into what AGI means for everyday work, whether Claude and ChatGPT get more expensive after the IPOs, how to drive adoption when you're not the CEO, what to use now that GPTs are going away, and who owns the AI work you build at your job.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:03 What MAICON insight has challenged your thinking about where AI is headed?

00:07:46 How do you keep up with AI without burning out?

00:12:09 How do you go from following a demo to using AI in your own work?

00:15:21 How do you get AI adopted in the messy middle of an organization?

00:17:41 How do you build an AI roadmap you can stick to as models change?

00:22:09 Will Claude and ChatGPT get more expensive after the IPOs?

00:26:23 What can AI do versus what should AI do?

00:30:35 What does AGI actually look like for a regular person?

00:35:25 Can AI solve the unemployment it creates?

00:39:42 Can you take your AI work with you from job to job?

00:41:19 Do you have to readjust when you switch AI models at a new job?

00:44:08 What should you use now that GPTs are going away?

00:46:42 Closing thoughts and a look ahead to MAICON 2027

This week’s episode is brought to you by MAICON, our 7th annual Marketing AI Conference, happening in Cleveland, Oct. 14-16.

For more information on MAICON and to register for this year’s conference, visit www.MAICON.ai.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

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An OpenAI safety researcher resigned and published an essay arguing the company's safety culture can't keep up with its own release pace; the same week OpenAI fired three safety researchers and canceled a model release over internal test results.

Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput also break down OpenAI's DevDay and dots, the voluntary Super Intelligence Accord signed at the White House, Anthropic's pre-Thanksgiving IPO, Google's Gemini 4 Argon preview, an FTC probe into the major labs, and a real-time AI video model that fooled nearly half its testers.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:19 — OpenAI DevDay and Dots

00:20:04 — OpenAI’s Safety Crisis Deepens

00:28:51 — Trump Signs Super Intelligence Accord

00:54:19 — Anthropic Targets Pre-Thanksgiving IPO

00:59:02 — Google Previews Gemini 4

01:02:29 — AI Companies Face New Liability Pressure

01:07:07 — Anthropic and Pope Leo’s AI Encyclical

01:17:39 — Startup Claims First “Human Interaction” Model

01:22:47 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:28:22 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is supported by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine for frontier technology:

⁠“Scaling Out Superintelligence”⁠⁠ Vijoy Pandey, January 2026. The technical whitepaper detailing the Internet of Cognition architecture, three-layer stack, and cognition state protocols.

⁠⁠Internet of Cognition Interactive Demo⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Clickable walkthrough showing per-agent activity, intent, context, and collective reasoning across a multi-agent SRE system.

Visit our website

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Join our community:

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Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com, believes B2B commerce is becoming agent-to-agent. He joins Mike Kaput to explain Accio, Alibaba.com's agent platform, and how it collapses a 60-step sourcing process into hours. They cover the Model × Harness × Context formula, the Commerce Agent Bench benchmark, what had to change inside a 26-year-old company, and why the future of global trade runs on agents.

Part of the AI Transformations series.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:7:30 — Why Accio

00:8:49 — Inside Alibaba.com's AI transformation with Accio Work

00:15:12 — The pain points Accio was built to solve

00:19:32 — Real examples of entrepreneurs using Accio Work

00:24:15 — The technology powering the transformation

00:28:50 — How AI agents will reshape commerce at large

00:32:26 — What had to change inside the company

00:37:26 — The hardest parts of shipping agent-based products

00:40:47 — How Alibaba.com measures agent performance

This week’s episode is also brought to you by MAICON, our 6th annual Marketing AI Conference, happening in Cleveland, Oct. 13-15. The code POD100 saves $100 on all pass types.

For more information on MAICON and to register for this year’s conference, visit www.MAICON.ai.

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Three big model updates landed at once, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, Claude Opus 5.5, and Microsoft's redesigned Copilot, and the story isn't raw intelligence, it's reliability, efficiency, and a new "per-task pricing" mindset. Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down what that means for your work.

Then: Jensen Huang's case against the AI doomers from his Ezra Klein interview, a first look at AI Score by SmarterX, and a rapid-fire run through Meta Connect, Amazon blocking Muse, OpenAI's rogue-agent disclosures, and more.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:57 — GPT-6 Sol and Luna, Opus 5.5, and the New Microsoft Copilot

00:24:16 — Jensen Huang vs. the AI Doomers

00:41:57 — Introducing AI Score

00:53:12 — GPTs Are Being Retired

01:06:30 — Meta Connect 2026

01:12:39 — Amazon Blocks Muse

01:15:20 — OpenAI Discloses More Rogue Agent Incidents

01:20:00 — OpenAI Gets Vocal on AI Standards

01:22:59 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:26:36 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is supported by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine for frontier technology. 

Multi-agent AI is in every enterprise roadmap right now, but here's the problem we're all facing: agents can pass messages, but they can't think together. These systems silently underperform through cognitive failures —misreadings, unverified claims, and false consensus—that conventional monitoring can't detect. 

Outshift by Cisco is building the fix, the Internet of Cognition. An open source foundation for building multi-agent systems from design to production with shared context, shared memory, and guardrails to drive the results we actually expect from AI. 

Read the paper, experience the demo, grab the code from Outshift.com. That's Outshift.com

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One task at Baptist Health used to take about 10 hours a week. Now it takes roughly two minutes, and that's just one piece of a two-year AI transformation.

Christine Kotler, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer of Baptist Health South Florida, joins Mike Kaput to walk through how her marketing and communications team built an AI adoption model from the ground up: a structured learning curriculum, the peer-coaching "AI Sherpa" model, real use cases, and the honest friction of doing this inside a regulated healthcare organization.

Part of the AI Transformations series, presented by Google Cloud.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:00 — Why marketing & comms took the lead on generative AI

00:10:57 — How the transformation started to unfold 

00:14:23 — The AI Sherpas 

00:20:12 — The learning hub and building their own AI curriculum

00:22:14 — How AI is changing the marketing/comms team's work

00:28:28 — The people side of the transformation 

00:33:02 — Where transformation got messier or harder than expected

00:36:27 — How AI will reshape roles, workflows, and team structure 

00:40:08 — Advice for a leader stepping up to lead AI transformation

This episode is presented 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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AI-safety pacing became a political fight this week: Trump versus a bipartisan push, with data centers and the midterms in the middle. Paul and Mike go deeper on the part that matters more: the widening gap between the models labs keep and the ones you can use, Noam Brown's warning about it, and OpenAI's six new rogue-agent disclosures. Plus Paul's surprise book announcement and a full rapid-fire slate.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:04:29 — The AI Slowdown Gets (Very) Political

00:25:18 — AI Labs Could Keep the Best Models to Themselves

00:54:33 — The AI Transformation Blueprint

01:09:45 — OpenAI Discloses More Rogue Agent Incidents

01:14:03 — Claude Merges Chat and Cowork

01:17:53 — Meta Rolls Out Muse

01:20:36 — Apple Ships Siri AI

01:23:20 — OpenAI and Microsoft Face Copyright Revelations

01:27:18 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:32:59 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is supported by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine for frontier technology. Outshift by Cisco is an open source foundation for building multi-agent systems from design to production with shared context, shared memory, and guardrails to drive the results we actually expect from AI. Read the paper, experience the demo, grab the code from Outshift.com.

Visit our website

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David's Bridal was built around one thing for 75 years: the dress. In this AI Transformations episode, Elina Vilk (President & Chief Business Officer) and Mike Ball (Head of Product) join Mike Kaput to explain how the company is reinventing itself around the whole wedding journey, the "aisle to algorithm" strategy.

We get into Pearl Planner, the free AI wedding-planning companion now used by hundreds of thousands of couples with no marketing spend; Pearl Connect, the new vendor-side platform built on Google Cloud; the vision quiz and dynamic budgeting that make it work; and how David's own teams are adopting AI internally. Presented by Gemini Enterprise.

Part of the AI Transformations series, presented by Google Cloud.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:01 — How the AI transformation at David's Bridal began

00:06:36 — The early phases and turning points

00:10:53 — Inside Pearl Planner, the customer-facing assistant

00:13:59 — Using AI for timelines, budget, and vendors

00:19:24 — The models, tools, and platforms behind it

00:21:00 — Pearl Connect and the Google Cloud stack

00:25:46 — Early results from Pearl Planner and Pearl Connect

00:27:32 — How internal teams at David's Bridal use AI

00:33:29 — What's next for David's Bridal

This episode is presented 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/

Visit our website

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A former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher resigned with a warning that went viral, reigniting the "should we slow down?" debate. Then OpenAI said an internal model solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem - followed by a credit controversy with an NYU mathematician. 

Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput break down this week’s latest stories, plus new data suggesting an AI jobs boom, Anthropic's 2030 economic scenarios, Jensen Huang declaring AGI has arrived, and a run of "agents gone wild" security incidents.

AI-Pulse Survey: Fill out this week’s AI-Pulse Survey here.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:06:35 — Anthropic Researcher Sounds Red Alert on AI Safety

00:45:26 — OpenAI’s Math Breakthrough and Controversy

01:00:48 — AI Jobs Apocalypse Postponed?

01:08:53 — Anthropic Maps Economic Futures

01:15:00 — Jensen Declares AGI

01:18:10 — More AI Agent Security Incidents and Concerns

01:22:25 — AI Use Case Spotlight

01:30:02 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by Marketing AI Month. All month, the AI for Marketing Core series inside AI Academy is free (a $499 value): five expert-led sessions from Mike Kaput, the frameworks and tools the SmarterX team actually uses, and a professional certificate on completion. Enroll by September 30 (you don't have to finish by then - just enroll). 

The month closes with a live AMA on October 1, where Cathy puts your questions to Paul and Mike; anyone enrolled can attend. 

Enroll at SmarterX.ai/marketing. 

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