#200: Anthropic vs. the Pentagon, OpenAI's $110B Round, Interview with Claude Code’s Creator & Block’s AI-Driven Layoffs

**Mike Kaput** (0:00)
All these comments from the government, despite the bluster, despite the back and forth, despite the threats, they are just admitting they can't live without Claude, and frankly, I agree with them on that, because you'd have to pry Claude from my cold bedpans if you wanted to take it away.

**Paul Roetzer** (0:16)
Welcome to The Artificial Intelligence Show, the podcast that helps your business grow smarter by making AI approachable and actionable. My name is Paul Roetzer. I'm the founder and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'm your host. Each week, I'm joined by my co-host and SmarterX Chief Content Officer, Mike Kaput, as we break down all the AI news that matters and give you insights and perspectives that you can use to advance your company and your career. Join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all.
Welcome to Episode 200 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm your host, Paul Roetzer, along with my co-host, Mike Kaput. We are coming to you live on, well, we're recording this live on Monday, March 2nd. It is 930 a.m. Eastern Time. I will often timestamp the beginning of these. This week may be more important than others. Because our first main topic today is going to be all about Anthropic and their battle with the Department of War over the use of Claude for military applications and monitoring of US citizens. So it is a wild topic. It has been a fast-moving fluid topic all throughout the weekend. It is very possible that as we are recording this, some things are going to be happening. The unique, very unique thing today about Episode 200 is this is the first time we are recording one of these with a live audience. So we have invited our AI Academy Mastery members to join us for this recording. So normally it is just me and Mike hanging out, doing our thing. Today we are doing this through a Zoom webinar. So we actually have Mastery members joining us. There is a chat I am seeing out of the corner of my eye going. We are going to take questions from the Mastery members at the end. So we are grateful to all of our AI Mastery members and everybody who is joining us today from around the world. This is kind of a cool way to celebrate. We were trying to think what can we do for Episode 200 that would be fun and unique and we came up with the idea of let's just like invite some people to be here while we are doing it. So Mike and I are going to do our usual thing. We just happened to have some friends with us today to listen in and then we are going to take some questions from them afterwards. So yeah, anything else Mike on that end before I run us through the presented by and then dive into this?

**Mike Kaput** (2:36)
Now, okay, just business as usual.

**Paul Roetzer** (2:38)
Yeah, business as usual. All right, so today's episode is brought to us by AI Academy by SmarterX, which is where our Mastery members are coming from. AI Academy helps individuals and businesses accelerate their AI literacy and transformation through personalized learning journeys and an AI-powered learning platform. There are 13 professional certificate course series available on demand now, with more being added each month. As a matter of fact, we just added two more. We added AI for Financial Services for Industry and AI for Finance for Departments. We have AI Department Collection and an AI for Industries Collection. Those two new course series with certificates just went live in the last two weeks. Those are great. Go check them out, academy.smarterx.ai. You can learn all about Academy and the AI Mastery membership program. If you're new to the podcast, we start each week with a recap of the previous week's AI Pulse Survey. We ask these questions, you can go to smarterx.ai/pulse and participate in the survey each week. These are informal polls of our listeners of how they're feeling about topics we talk about on the podcast. So Mike, we asked last week, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Salman says most white collar tasks will be fully automated by AI within 12 to 18 months. How realistic do you find that timeline? So it looks like 53% said partially realistic. Some tasks will be, but most, not most, it's interesting. 33% said too aggressive, meaningful automation is 3 to 5 years out. And then 9% said very realistic. I'm already seeing it in my work. And I think, Mike, what I said at the time we talked about that was, I think the tech will be able to do that. I just don't think human friction and organizational resistance to change will allow it to happen. It was kind of my general take on that.