All of AI's New Models and Tools

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, all of AI's new models and tools, and before that in the headlines, one model that you're not getting apparently is OpenAI's forthcoming spud. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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OpenAI obviously could not let Anthropic have all the fun when it comes to models too powerful to release to the general public. On Thursday morning, Axios reported that OpenAI also plans a staggered rollout of their new model because, once again, of the cybersecurity risk. Now, this is just from one source, but it isn't all that surprising to see. Certainly it doesn't seem to be surprising to the denizens of AI Twitter, and some think that this is a forced response to Anthropic. Writes Daniel Mack, Breaking! OpenAI will not release Spud. The Information reported just a few weeks ago that it was set to be released, quote, in a few weeks. Greg Brockman talked about it on the Big Technology podcast. Dario forced their hand. Total Anthropic victory. Leo SynthwaveDD simply says, LOL. Dax from OpenCode writes, This was already a thing since at least GPT 5.3, but now we have to suffer a cycle of confusing mystery and go through this whole, well, it was BS last time, but maybe this time is different. We are all just caught between these two companies. I think Dan Shipper nails it when he writes, The new status symbol is making a model so powerful you can't release it. Here's something I haven't had to do often. Turns out that we actually got more on Spud almost immediately after I finished recording. Dan Shipper just tweeted, The Axios story floating around about OpenAI limiting the release of their newest model Spud isn't true. Just spoke to OpenAI and it appears the story conflated two things. They do have a cyber product they are testing with a trusted tester group, but this is not the same thing as Spud. The Axios story has now been updated. My friends, we are playing with a live ammunition here, but since I caught this in time to update, I wanted to make sure we did. Let's move on to our next story about Perplexity Computer. In our show about how every AI product is turning into every other AI product, we covered Perplexity's computer and the general open qualification of the AI world. Based on Perplexity's financial results, it seems to be working. Between the combination of shifting to usage-based pricing and the launch in February of Computer, the company's revenue effectively doubled in a single quarter. The Financial Times reported that the company has 100 million monthly active users, tens of thousands of enterprise clients, and 450 million in ARR. Chris Brown from Inspired Capital writes, Perplexity back in the race with a single product launch is like a baseball team batting around the order twice and putting up 10 runs in the sixth inning. Interestingly, one of the sub-themes that you can see a lot on Twitter slash X is that the finance space in particular seems to be really into Perplexity Computer. Geiger Capital writes, Perplexity launched their AI agent computer a month ago and their revenue has immediately gone parabolic. AI demand is still accelerating. Nobody is ready for the compute we need. Still others remain skeptical. Kyle Russell writes, I do not consider this back in the race. Insane product fit for self-driving computers pulling them up, but Cowork and GPT Super App will mug this. In more evidence of just how much these types of use cases are growing, GitHub appears to be straining under the pressure of the agentic coding wave. Now, as capabilities have increased, it has led to an explosion in the amount of code being written, and it appears that that is nowhere more obvious than in GitHub's metrics. Last year GitHub celebrated a huge expansion with Vibe coding allowing first-time coders to come online. GitHub saw 1 billion code commits throughout the year for the first time. This year GitHub is seeing 275 million commits per week, putting them on track for 14 billion commits by the end of the year at the current pace, and the numbers are still climbing. GitHub COO Kyle Daigle said, Since January every month, every week almost now has some new peak stat for the highest usage rate ever. And while Daigle attributed the change to both agents and humans, it's clear that AI-enhanced coding is behind the massive increase in throughput. Commits to public repos from Cloud Code have swelled 25x in the past six months, reaching 2.5 million last week. Now, unfortunately, the surge in the amount of code being pushed is revealing limits in GitHub's infrastructure. Outages are becoming more frequent and many are expressing issues with the platform. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger complained last week, I keep hitting quota limits from GitHub's API. This hasn't been designed with agents in mind. Kyle Daigle responded to these types of concerns, saying that GitHub is pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening their core features. For now, it is just one more piece of evidence around how things are changing and how quickly. Lastly today, Anthropic has lost the second round of their legal battle against the Pentagon as the case gets more convoluted. On Wednesday, a federal appeals court in DC denied Anthropic's application to suspend their supply chain risk designation pending a full hearing. The three-judge panel wrote in their order, In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government. On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how and through whom the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict. Now, the order did recognize the urgency of the case, and the court has scheduled oral arguments for mid-May. The court also acknowledged that Anthropic is likely to quote suffer some irreparable harm as a result of the case. Now you might recall that Anthropic was granted an injunction from a California court early in March. Importantly, there's actually two separate lawsuits going on, dealing with two separate legislative powers invoked by the government. The California injunction means that non-Pentagon government agencies don't need to cancel contracts with Anthropic. The new ruling deals with the Pentagon exclusively, and allows them to treat Anthropic as a supply chain risk. What's less clear is how military contractors in the private sector are supposed to deal with Anthropic, as both lawsuits deal with that issue to some extent. Roger Parlov, the senior editor at Lawfare, shared his view that, for the moment, government contractors can probably use Anthropics technology for anything but covered government contracts. He also noted that Anthropics models have already been restored to USAI.gov, the central platform served by the General Services Administration. Importantly, this was just a preliminary ruling that has a very high bar for success, so it was not necessarily a strong indication on how the case will ultimately resolve. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch called the ruling a resounding victory for military readiness. He wrote, Our position has been clear from the start. Our military needs full access to Anthropics models if its technology is integrated into our sensitive systems. Military authority and operational control belong to the commander-in-chief in Department of War, not a tech company. An Anthropics spokesperson, meanwhile, said, We're grateful the court recognized these issues need to be resolved quickly, and remain confident the courts will ultimately agree that these supply chain designations were unlawful. In understated fashion, Matt Shrewers, the chief executive of the Computer and Communications Industry Association commented, The DC Circuit's denial will prolong ambiguities regarding whether political considerations can drive federal procurement. Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, told the information he was unsurprised by the result, noting, Two out of the three judges on the DC Circuit panel have been very, very sympathetic to the Trump administration's aggressive claims about executive authority in the past. Expanding his analysis on X, Bullock noted that the case is moving quickly and could receive a final order within six weeks. Now, even if they fail to convince the panel, Anthropic could appeal to the full DC Circuit, which is majority Democrat, and also have the timing right to get their case on this year's Supreme Court docket in the fall. Bullock predicted Anthropic would probably succeed at the Supreme Court, commenting, The dynamic here is not left versus right. It cares about the law at least a little bit or doesn't like the administration, versus does not care about the law at all and likes the administration. Now how, if at all, the revelations about the power of Anthropic's mythos impact this remains to be seen. But for now, that is going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode.