Welcome, humans.
ChatGPT users are losing it on Reddit right now. Apparently GPT-5.2 has gone full unsolicited therapist. Ask it about an Excel formula? "Let's slow this down. You're not crazy for feeling this way." Ask about a cake browning too quickly? It decides you're panicking. One user asked about life insurance and got: "Sorry you're going through this." Sir, I am not dying. I'm just organizing paperwork.
Top comment on r/OpenAI: "Chat PTSD." Which... yeah, honestly, same energy.
Meanwhile, Sam Altman announced that Codex weekly users tripled since January, from roughly ~1M to 3M if our calculations are correct. Funny thing about Codex: as a model, you give it an assignment, and it mostly buggers off and goes and does stuff. No therapy speak required.
Guess that makes Codex the strong, silent type… Dad? Is that you??
Speaking of numbers going up: The Neuron just crossed 650,000+ daily subscribers, and our podcast is approaching 30,000 combined subs across Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. WOW!
Thank you for being here. Seriously. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Now, if you’re a reader AND a builder in this space, we have a few Q1 advertising slots still available in both the newsletter and the podcast.
So if you want to get your AI-adjacent product or service in front of the most AI-hungry audience in the game, click the button below and our partnerships rep Mindy will get you booked faster than SeeDance 2.0 can take down Hollywood.
P.S: That’s pretty fast. Have you SEEN some of these new SeeDance demos? People are fixing their childhood trauma be them 80s kids or 90s kids, or in the case of the below, creating entirely new traumas! Point is, SeeDance is scary good…
“I just wanted to feel it more” had me DECEASED. You can probably skip the rest after that one
Here’s what happened in AI today:
The Pentagon threatened to pull a $200M contract with Anthropic over Claude's military usage restrictions.
Sam Altman said OpenAI Codex tripled its weekly users since January, growing from ~1M to ~3M.
A new study found AI agents fail at 97.5% of real-world freelance jobs
Alibaba released Qwen 3.5, their new Claude and GPT killer model.
The Pentagon Wants to Drop Anthropic. That Might Be the Best Ad Anthropic's Ever Gotten.
Here's a sentence you don't hear every day: the U.S. military is threatening to punish an AI company for being too ethical.
Axios reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is "close" to cutting ties with Anthropic and designating it a "supply chain risk," a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Chinese tech firms. The reason? Anthropic won't give the Pentagon blanket permission to use Claude for "all lawful purposes."
Anthropic's two red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans and no weapons that fire without a human involved.
The Pentagon's response, per a senior official: "We are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."
Here's what makes this wild:
Claude is the only AI model currently running on the military's classified systems.
It was used during the Maduro raid in January.
Pentagon officials openly praise its capabilities.
The contract in question is worth up to $200M, a fraction of Anthropic's $14B annual revenue.
But the real threat is the "supply chain risk" label, which would force every company doing business with the Pentagon to certify they don't use Claude (this would potentially knock Claude out of Microsoft Copilot, for example).
That's a big deal when 8 of the 10 biggest U.S. companies already use it.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, Google, and xAI have all agreed to remove their safeguards for military use on unclassified systems. Anthropic is the only one holding out.
The Reddit reaction was immediate and almost unanimously pro-Anthropic:
Top comment on r/ClaudeAI: "This is a selling point. Make it an ad."
Multiple users said they were upgrading their subscriptions specifically to support the company.
One defense contractor pointed out that many companies would rather drop their government contracts than rip Claude out of their workflows. The compliance costs alone aren't worth it.
The irony is hard to miss: if any other model were as good, the Pentagon would just switch. The fact that they're threatening punishment instead of walking away is maybe the strongest endorsement Claude has ever received.
As one Redditor put it: "This article is basically a billboard for Anthropic. 'We're so good the Pentagon can't replace us even when they want to.'"
Elsewhere, the timeline is turning against Anthropic: developers have been prioritizing Codex over Opus after Anthropic made a series of unforced errors:
First suing instead of wooing (well, threatening to sue) the creator of OpenClaw over its previous name, Clawdbot, then losing out on hiring him.
The Super Bowl ads that general audiences ranked in the bottom 3% for likeability, but that drove an 11% user bump among the people who got the joke.
Losing developer trust over a series of non-dev friendly moves re: using Claude Code in other tools (and just generally being the “premium priced” AI model).
What can we say; I guess Anthropic is the we don’t need you after all AI company. We’ll see if that strategy works out for them…
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Prompt Tip of the Day
Claude can now convert your Word docs into Excel sheets and extract data from messy PDFs, but here's the trick: define your output structure first.
Instead of "extract the data," try: "Convert this document into an Excel spreadsheet with these exact columns: [X, Y, Z]. If a field is missing or unreadable, write 'N/A' instead of guessing."
That "instead of guessing" line is key. Without it, AI tools will confidently make up data from low-quality scans. Give it a blueprint and permission to say "I don't know."
Want more tips like this? Check out our Prompt Tip of the Day Digest for February.
Treats to Try
Manus Agents lets you run full multi-step tasks — research, slides, videos, images — right from Telegram by sending a text, voice note, or photo, with long-term memory of your style and connections to Gmail, Calendar, and Notion.
Qwen 3.5 is Alibaba's free, open-weights model that matches GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5 — it only fires 17B of its 397B parameters per query (like a 512-office building that only staffs 11 rooms per task), so you can run it locally on a Mac, and it handles text, images, and video across 201 languages with up to 1M tokens of context — quantized versions available via Unsloth.
Lunair creates professional animated videos from text prompts.
asdPrompt lets you select, copy, and act on any AI response using keyboard shortcuts only.
Kimi Claw runs 24/7 browser agents with 5,000+ community skills and 40GB storage.
Technical but sick: microGPT is a browser visualization of Karpathy's 243-line pure Python GPT implementation.
Around the Horn
Microsoft's AI chief predicted AI will achieve human-level performance on most professional tasks within 18 months. We wrote about that and compared it to a real world study of AI completing actual tasks at only 2.5% here.
NPR's David Greene sued Google, alleging NotebookLM's male podcast voice was cloned from his without permission.
AI demand triggered a global memory chip crisis; Western Digital sold out its entire 2026 hard drive supply already.
Perplexity Finance now shows you a stock's earnings beat / miss history over 16 quarters in one graph, so you can spot trends without opening a spreadsheet.
The Verge reviewed Casio's Moflin, which is a furry AI pet that evolves one of 4 million unique personalities based on how you pet, talk to, and care for it ($429). It's a Tamagotchi for adults who can afford rent.
Corey wrote about NVIDIA’s new Blackwell Ultra chips, which supposedly cut inference costs by up to 35x as coding agents drive record compute demand.
NEW: Want more? Check out our new Around the Horn Digest for February here (really loving putting these togethers; so much interesting stuff happening!)
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Tuesday Tool Tip
Claude's most powerful feature used to require a terminal. You know, that scary black screen with the blinking cursor? Well, not anymore.
Claude Code Desktop puts Anthropic's agentic coding tool into a visual app with three tabs that do very different things:
Chat: Your normal Claude conversation (like on the web).
Code: An interactive coding assistant with direct access to your local files. You see exactly what it changes, approve or reject edits, and steer it in real time.
Cowork: An autonomous background agent that works on tasks in a cloud VM while you go do other stuff. Like having an intern who never checks Reddit.
The real power move? Parallel sessions. You can spin up multiple agents at once, each isolated in its own Git branch, so one fixes bugs while another writes documentation while a third refactors your codebase. Nothing interferes.
You don't even need to write code to use it. Point Claude at a project folder, type something like "find all the comments and fix them" or "add tests for the main function," and it maps out the changes visually with a diff view before touching anything. If you don't like something, reject it and tell Claude why. It adjusts.
Now available on Mac and Windows for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Start with a small project you know well; it's the fastest way to see what this thing can do.
P.S: Terminal users: relax. It runs the same engine, shares all your config, and you can use both simultaneously.
A Cat’s Commentary
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