The AI Breakdown

This week on The AI Breakdown: OpenAI enlists McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini to push its Frontier agent platform into enterprises. The Pentagon issues an ultimatum to Anthropic over military use of Claude, threatening to designate the company a "supply chain risk." Claude Code hits $2.5 billion in annualised revenue while a new security tool wipes billions off cybersecurity stocks in a single session. The "SaaSpocalypse" deepens as nearly $1 trillion in software market value evaporates. Spotify reveals its best engineers haven't written a line of code since December. Plus: Google launches Gemini 3.1 Pro, India hosts a $200 billion AI summit, Perplexity ditches ads entirely, and OpenAI closes in on a $100 billion funding round at an $850 billion valuation.

700 million people now use AI every week. Are we keeping up with the risks?

Over 100 experts from 30+ countries just published the most comprehensive global assessment of AI risk ever produced. In this episode, I break down the International AI Safety Report 2026 — what AI can actually do today, the three categories of risk every business needs to understand, why some AI systems now behave differently when they know they're being tested, and the research that's changed how I think about my own AI use.

Read the full report: https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/

This week on The AI Breakdown, Anthropic just raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation, making it the second-largest private funding round in tech history. Meanwhile, OpenAI dropped GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, their first model running on Cerebras hardware instead of NVIDIA, pushing past 1,000 tokens per second and redefining what "fast" means for AI-assisted coding.

But the story of the week might be the one that got less attention: researchers caught an infostealer exfiltrating the entire identity of an OpenClaw AI agent - tokens, cryptographic keys, behavioural guidelines, and private memory files. It's a stark preview of what happens when agents become high-value targets.

Beyond the headlines, we dig into Claude Cowork landing on Windows, Google quietly shipping Gemini-powered audio summaries in Docs, Zoom pushing deeper into agentic workflows, Microsoft wiring up new Copilot connectors, Slack's rebuilt Slackbot, and Oracle Health rolling out AI clinical note-drafting across the NHS. Plus, OpenAI hired the founder of OpenClaw, and what that tells us about the race to own the agent layer.

This week on The AI Breakdown, we talk about OpenAI’s Frontier launch, an enterprise platform designed to help organisations build, deploy, and govern AI agents across real workflows.

Anthropic fires back with Claude Opus 4.6, including a one million token context window in beta and new agent teams designed to split complex work across multiple cooperating agents, with a clear push beyond coding into everyday knowledge work like documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

We then zoom out to the money and the infrastructure. Google is introducing a Workspace add on called AI Expanded Access from March 1, 2026, signalling the shift toward paid higher tier usage. Cerebras just closed a one billion dollar Series H at about a twenty three billion valuation, as demand for compute fuels a new wave of AI hardware competition.

Finally, Super Bowl LX made AI advertising feel like a cultural inflection point. Anthropic used its spot to promise Claude will remain ad free, while OpenAI ran a Codex ad built around the idea that you can just build things now. iSpot data reported by AdWeek says 23 percent of Super Bowl commercials featured AI, and Axios covered X rolling out BrandRanx to track ad conversation in real time as the game unfolded. 

And with the echoes of the Dot Com Super Bowl and the Crypto Bowl still fresh in marketers minds, it raises the question, will the Super Bowl burst the AI bubble?

In this week’s AI Weekly Briefing, I break down the biggest developments in artificial intelligence from the past seven days, from viral open-source AI agents like OpenClaw, to major enterprise moves as Snowflake deepens its partnership with OpenAI.

You’ll also hear how Amazon Ads is adopting the Model Context Protocol to make agent-driven workflows more practical, why cybersecurity firms like Malwarebytes are exploring AI-native threat checking, and what ElevenLabs’ latest voice advances mean for media, accessibility, and deepfake risk.

Plus: a cautionary tale from Moltbook’s security breach, a look at xAI’s Grok Imagine pushing generative video to mass scale, and why multi-agent coding tools could reshape the way developers build software.