The State of AI Q2: AI's Second Moment

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today, we are discussing the state of artificial intelligence in Q2, 2026 The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
Alright, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors KPMG, Blitzi, Super Intelligent, and Robots & Pencils. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors.ai.dailybrief.ai. Now this week, the deal is that I am traveling with my family and so the plan is to not be doing our regularly scheduled episodes. Instead, this is the AI Daily Brief's Q2 build week. We're going to have shows with a much more practical bent, including a show all about our new maturity map benchmark, a masterclass on using skills with Nufar Gaspar, and even the ultimate AI catch up guide to share with friends and family who are just getting started on their AI journey. Today we're going to kick it all off with something that I've wanted to start doing for a while, which is a big quarterly state of AI report. You can find the full 87 slides at q2.aidbintel.com, as well as on play.aidalibrief.ai, but we'll be going through all the highlights here. The big theme, of course, is what we've been exploring all quarter, which is the idea of AI Second Moment and the implications as the capability gap grows. The sources for this, of course, include all of the episodes from the previous quarter, all of our Pulse Survey results, plus more than 400 sources that are constantly being explored and debated by our team of OpenClaw researchers. This was, in short, the most consequential quarter in AI since ChatGPT launched. In fact, this is why I'm calling this AI Second Moment. If the first moment was viable AI Assistant experiences via chatbots like ChatGPT, the second moment is all about workable agentic systems. Now, the stakes of the second moment are significantly higher than the stakes were back in 2022 The capabilities have scaled up dramatically. We've gone from the fastest growing app in history with 100 million users in its first five weeks to billions of weekly active users across platforms. The economic stakes have gone from speculative venture bets to a planned $650 billion in CapEx this year, $400 billion in a SaaS-pocalypse wipeout, and single funding rounds worth tens or even $100 billion. The corporate reality has gone from the very first explorations of AI to AI-first mandates 40% staff cuts, and total reorientation of the enterprise, and of course we are finally emerging into a period of greater political volatility around AI as well. Let's talk first about the inflection point. Something clicked over the holidays. The combination of the new set of models, including Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, plus the harnessed capabilities of Claude Code and Codex, were clearly transformative, but it actually took people going away and having some time away from their normal pace of work to see just how much had changed. I remember when I saw Midjourney CEO David Holds say, I've done more personal coding projects over the Christmas break than in the previous ten years combined that we were in for something big this year. Now at the core of this is obviously Claude Code. While Claude Code was first introduced last March, throughout 2025 we came to understand that Claude Code was fundamentally misnamed, at least in terms of how many people were using it. Even before this burst of activity, non-technical people were using Claude Code for all sorts of non-coding use cases, previewing a lot of the key trends from Q1 of 2026 Throughout Q1 Claude Code grew spectacularly, from 1 billion in revenue to 2.5 billion in annualized revenue in just a couple of months. But last quarter was also the quarter when Claude Code style capabilities came for the rest of knowledge work in the form of Claude Cowork. It was launched in January and within a couple weeks we had not only a lot of technology users, but even significant market reactions. The information reported that Cowork triggered emergency meetings at Microsoft, and when we learned that Cowork had been entirely built with Claude Code, it put a really fine point on just how much had changed about software engineering. And even though much of the story of the last quarter was focused on the products through which we used the models like Claude Code and Claude Cowork, we also got more frontier capabilities shipped in the last 90 days than any quarter in AI history. We got, in sequential order, GPT 5.2 Codex, Genie 3, the first playable version of their world model, Opus 4.6, GPT 5.3 Codex, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Nano Banana 2, and GPT 5.4. And what was interesting is that at this point it's very clear that there is no single benchmark winner across all different use cases. If you look at many of the most common benchmarks, GPQA Diamonds, WeBenchVerified, TerminalBench, The Meter, Long Task Horizon, GDPVal, there is a constant jockeying between the latest Gemini, GPT, or Claude model, and they all tend to be within a very small reach of one another. When it came to markets, if Q4 2025 was all about the AI Bubble narrative, Q1 was the quarter when Claude Code killed the AI Bubble. We had public recantings of previous AI skepticism from people like legendary investor Howard Marks, and in general, the story about AI moved from what if it doesn't get any better, and what that means for the infrastructure build out, to is this going to take all the jobs in very short order? Now, with all of that prelude, the output of the inflection point was an explosion in the world of agents. When the history books are written, Q1 2026 will be remembered as the quarter of OpenClaw, from humble origins as ClaudeBot back in January, to a very brief stint as Moltbot, to finally reaching its final form as OpenClaw, and eventually being recruited into OpenAI just a couple weeks later. OpenClaw became the most starred open-source project on GitHub ever, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called it maybe the most important software release ever, and effectively the rest of the industry was racing to integrate Claw-type features as fast as they could. We saw OpenClaw-type capabilities from Notion and their custom agents, from Perplexity with Perplexity Computer, NVIDIA actually announced a version of OpenClaw called Nemoclaw that was an enterprise-grade wrapper around it, and Anthropic has just been going feature-by-feature, bringing into the native Claude Code and Claude Cowork ecosystem all of the things that people love about OpenClaw. In the last 30 days at the time of recording, we've gotten remote control, dispatch, computer use, scheduled tasks, projects and Cowork, and a whole bunch more. And while OpenClaw and Claude might have dominated a lot of the conversation inside the AI industry, by just about any measure, OpenAI had a very, very good quarter as well. Back in December, you'll remember that Sam Altman declared an internal code red, as Gemini surged on the consumer side and Anthropic surged on the enterprise side. That led, yes, to a very fast sequence of new models, but also a real emphasis on Codex, which has been a powerful contender and competitor against Claude Code throughout the quarter. OpenAI successfully recruited OpenClaw's Peter Steinberger to come join the company, and has been doubling down on their new focus, cutting out the side quests as CEO of Applications Fiji Simo put it. Indeed, in some ways, you have Anthropic and OpenAI converging towards a similar core despite coming at it from completely opposite sides. OpenAI had the starting point of product sprawl with a wide variety of standalone products that they're now merging into one super app and trying to consolidate everything under one roof, basically working inward from the edges, whereas Anthropic has moved from its single dominant product to make that core tool extensible so the ecosystem builds around it, working outward from the center. Now a big part of the story of this quarter, as I alluded to at the beginning with Claude Code popping the bubble, was a very different story about AI in the markets. The big theme was the SaaSpocalypse. Basically everywhere you looked across public software companies, there was carnage. Much of the pain happened in big bursts as well, driven by narratives like Claude announcing some new industry-focused feature for co-work. Basically, investors' concern flipped from what if AI isn't good enough to what if AI is too good. Cetrine's 2028 research report was case in point of that. Stories of layoffs and job destruction dominated headlines, with highlights like Block cutting 40% of their staff, being read as portents for a very aggressive AI-era recalibration, although of course as we've discussed in previous shows about jobs, there also might have been quite a bit of AI washing going on. And yet of course in the background, the CapEx explosion continued unabated. The hyperscalers expect to spend $650 billion on CapEx this year, which is three times what they were spending a couple of years ago, and even more than the inflation-adjusted amount that was spent on the US interstate highway buildout. Supporting the shift in focus away from the AI bubble narrative towards the what if AI is too good narrative was just the absolute monster revenue growth in so many companies in the AI space. Claude Code, as we already talked about, as a standalone product went from $1 billion to $2.5 billion in about two months. Cursor doubled its annualized revenue from $1 to $2 billion this quarter. Lovable ran up to $400 million in annualized revenue, including a $100 million jump in a single month. Replit says that they're on track for $1 billion in ARR by the end of 2026 And overall, and what will be a big part of the story, Anthropic hit a $19 billion run rate. Which brings us, of course, to the Agentic Enterprise, because one of the big stories, and one of the big cross-cutting themes, throughout the quarter was the idea of Anthropic as the new enterprise default. Based on RAMP statistics, Anthropic's share of first-time enterprise AI buyers jumped to 70%, with OpenAI at 25% and others at around 5%. While OpenAI's annualized revenue remains higher than Anthropic at around $25 billion, Anthropic is quickly closing the gap. Across the enterprise, we saw a shift away from pilots into production, with deeper deployment depth and more focus on actual agents. Indeed, applied agenda capabilities, what companies are actually using agents for, continue to expand. Gardner is betting that by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprises will have working agents in production, and thanks to new products like agent credit cards from RAMP and Stripe, they'll be able to do more, like actually spend money. If 2025 was supposed to be the year of enterprise AI agents, 2026 appears to be when that's actually coming true. I think NVIDIA's Nemo Claw is a case study in what you're going to see a lot of this year, which is an enterprise-grade hardening of existing agentic tools to make them viable in an enterprise setting. Whatever else is going on in markets, it's clear that things are changing. On one end of the spectrum, you've got a very significant increase in the number of companies listing agents as a material risk, and on the other end of the spectrum, we're seeing just how much agents can change company design. Pulsio, which is a company that produces fully agentic companies, has reached 6 million in annualized revenue with a single founder and zero employees. Now whether those companies actually turn into anything real, and whether Pulsio can be durable and not just curiosity revenue remains to be seen, but as founder Ben Serra put it, the zero employee company isn't a thought experiment anymore. It's a live dashboard with weekly metrics.