Weekly Links: 'Input Companies', Frontier Models Over the Top, and Claude Cycles

This week, OpenAI launches extreme reasoning and a giant context window, Anthropic launches Claude Marketplace (a smart way to get a direct customer relationship with companies that use Claude under the hood), and AI Impersonation is getting very good.

On to the main stories:

• News Corp is essentially an AI ‘input company’, chief executive says, after US$150m deal with Meta. This is a hyperbolic headline, no matter how you view it. Newscorp's CEO seems to be positive about the opportunity that they can offer input signals to AI providers, but at $50M per year, it's hard to imagine this is anything close to a sustainable business model.
• Anthropic v's Dep War. It's been a wild week for Anthropic after being blacklisted by the US Department of War, reaching #1 in the Apple App Store, and having an outage. Anthropic says it is in productive discussions with the Department of War, and most commentators expect that, given the power of AI and the limited number of suppliers, there will be some kind of agreement. Where this leaves the debate around the use of AI for weapons is unclear, though. Anthropic's original stance likely aimed to raise debate, but it's not obvious that there will really be any move to legislation. Governments and militaries around the world seem likely to demand unrestricted access to the AI technology being developed within their own borders, and worry about the technology being developed elsewhere.
• Introducing ChatGPT for Excel and new financial data integrations. OpenAI is following Anthropic in the race to become "over-the-top tool users" for financial analysis. Having ChatGPT and Claude frontier models use office tools is a much bigger leap than it seems. The capability represents the start of a shift to AI being capable of a very wide swath of human knowledge work. The other question to ask is "Where is Microsoft in this?" It already seems clear that OpenAI and Claude are better at using Excel than Microsoft Copilot. If they become the default interface, then how long until Excel isn't needed anymore?
• How to turn Claude Code into your SEO command center. Not that most readers here will be working on their SEO, but I'm posting this to show another example of frontier models "going over the top" to use other tools. Anything with an API can be integrated, and it's possible to build up libraries of skills for certain types of analysis. This approach is likely to negate many of the "built-in" AI efforts SaaS providers are adding to their tools. In theory, they have an advantage since they know their own systems better. However, by using a remote agent, users can integrate multiple data sources and write their own functionality.
• Don Knuth wrote a paper thanking Claude for solving an open math problem. Donald Knuth is a legendary computer scientist, and many get introduced to him through his Art of Computer Programming texts. This week, he released a research paper (the actual paper is here), giving the proofs for a conjecture on Hamiltonian cycles (a Hamiltonian cycle in a graph is one that visits every vertex once and then returns to the starting vertex). Suprisingly for Knuth Anthropic's Claude was extremely helpful in finding the proof. Reading the paper, it is also clear that Knuth's own eye for detail and guidance was also key to solving the problem. A clear win for man + machine on this type of problem.

Finally, if you're using OpenClaw... or some other automated agent, consider installing PeonPing for better sound effects (Warcraft III soundeffects for your agents). Wishing you a great weekend.