AI Is Officially Political

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, AI is officially political and how. Before that in the headlines, is OpenClaw the most important software release ever? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:23All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Recall AI, Robots and Pencils, AIUC, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief. If you are interested in sponsoring the show or really anything else in the AIDB ecosystem, head on over to ai daily brief dot AI. While you are there, two things that I want to call your attention to. First, last day to do our February pulse survey. Appreciate everyone who has done that. This will just take a couple minutes and it helps us track AI usage and give people data about what's actually going on and what's trending and what's changing.

0:57And if you contribute, you get that data before anyone else. And the other last, it's the last day to sign up for this first edition of Enterprise Claw. You can find that at EnterpriseClaw.ai. With that, let's go over to the headlines and some big words from Jensen Huang. We kick off today with a fun little quote from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference from Wednesday. Jensen absolutely waxed about OpenClaw, saying, OpenClaw is probably the single most important release of software probably ever. Linux took some 30 years to reach this level. Open Claw in, what is it, three weeks, has now surpassed Linux.

1:31It is now the single most downloaded open source software in history. Now, what he's specifically referring to is not the idea that overall Open Claw has more downloads than Linux or Facebook's React library. What he's referring to is this chart that's flying around, which is true of the GitHub star history of these projects, where Open Claw is officially ahead of those vaunted projects in GitHub stars and has done so extremely quickly. Now, hold aside the specific details. The context really matters here. OpenClaw is a phenomenon that has fundamentally changed how people think about what AI can do.

2:01It has been ground zero in ushering in the true agent era, and one of the more consequential parts of Jensen's comments is that they came at a Wall Street conference, clearly signaling that personal agents are a big deal and that investors need to get up to speed. This shift in AI is also aligned with Huang's predictions about where the industry is going. For more than a year, Huang has been conceptualizing AI tokens as the new fundamental unit of work in GDP. During his talk, Huang updated this thesis and claimed the so-called token economy is coming into focus. Jensen also discussed NVIDIA's recent$30 billion investment in OpenAI, specifically in the context of it not being the$100 billion deal that was rumored to be in the works last year.

2:39He said, I think the opportunity to invest$100 billion in OpenAI is probably not in the cards. Not because NVIDIA has gotten any less bullish on the company, but because Jensen's base case is that they IPO by the end of the year. Meaning, in his words, This might be the last time we'll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this. Huang added that NVIDIA's$10 billion investment in Anthropoc late last year was also probably their last. Which isn't to say that NVIDIA won't continue to benefit from the success of those companies. For example, Jensen commented that Amazon's gigantic compute partnership with OpenAI means that NVIDIA is, quote, ramping AWS like mad.

3:14Now, OpenClaw is not just a US phenomenon. In fact, the information recently reported on the many ways OpenClaw is changing what Chinese founders are building. They highlighted a recent OpenClaw hackathon in China, where one contestant made Tinder for AI agents, basically where OpenClaws can find love interests for their humans still. Another created an automated recruiting site where OpenClaws owned by job seekers and companies interview each other. There was also a gamified social media and travel platform that hosts content created by OpenClaws. Felix Tao, the co-founder of Mindverse AI said, Every founder I know is now working on new projects to test the boundaries of what personal AI agents can do.

3:49One of the interesting differences in the Chinese tech scene is the large companies diving straight into the new agentic trend. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent are now all offering hosted OpenClaw instances to customers, something that none of the Western cloud giants have done so far. Kimi Creator Moonshot and Minimax are also offering cloud-based versions of OpenClaw within their proprietary apps as a way to draw in new users. The article also mentioned numerous startups and founders working on OpenClaw projects, either building features on top of OpenClaw or spinning up competitors in the personal agent space.

4:19QVaris co-founder Dongxi Q said, Tech entrepreneurs in China responded immediately to OpenClaw and launched new projects because they knew all of their competitors would be doing the same. Nobody wants to be left behind. Parker Lyman of Manus even tweeted, This is how competitive it is in China. OpenClaw installers have started offering two hours of house cleaning as part of the package in order to win clients. They'll even list any items you want to declutter on a second-hand marketplace. All for$57. writes Lenny Ritschitsky of Lenny's podcast. I don't think enough people are appreciating how insane this is.

4:49Over 80 open club meetups scheduled around the world and more popping up every day for a product less than a few months old. I've never seen anything like this. Something very special is happening. Now moving over to the numbers game, just one day after Anthropik's revenue numbers were leaked to the press, OpenAI struck back and leaked a larger number. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropik had surpassed 19 billion in ARR, more than doubling their run rate since the end of last year. That put them within striking distance of OpenAI, who told investors they had closed 2025 with more than 20 billion in ARR.

5:22Now, as soon as I heard that Anthropic was officially at basic parity with the last number that we got from OpenAI, I just knew that we were somehow from some leaker going to get new OpenAI numbers. And sure enough, late last night, the information reported that OpenAI now has exceeded$25 billion in ARR. They also firmed up their 2025 estimate, claiming they actually ended the year with$21.4 billion. That makes that a 17 % jump over the first two months of 2026, which if it were not for Anthropics' staggering 36 % gain in the last couple of weeks, we'd be talking about with just as much slack in our jaws.

5:56Sources added that OpenAI's ARR calculation was based on revenue average over the past four weeks, but if they extrapolated just the past week, ARR would be even higher at$30 billion. Derek Thompson tweeted about all this, AI might still be an industrial bubble because almost every big tech is a bubble of some kind and the revenue has a long way to catch up to CapEx, but the idea that this industry has no business model is a take aging like a rotted banana. Lastly today, something which I am absolutely going to come back to and do more of an operators-focused episode on at some point, Notebook LM can now create fully animated videos to accompany reports.

6:33Google is calling these cinematic video overviews, and the results are pretty impressive. The demo showed a brief clip of a video overview about mathematical limits using images and video with some very cool space-themed visualizations. Now, we did previously have video overviews, but up until now, they'd just been slideshows. They were already a useful extension of audio overviews, but there wasn't as much of a, let's say, wow factor. The new cinematic video overviews are immediately more striking, and pretty much guaranteed to make people wonder how they were made. Specifically, they feel more like a native video presentation with custom animations and images, rather than a simple slideshow leveraging stock images.

7:09Robert Scoble presented an even more impressive example, sharing a video based on summarizing AI chatter on X over the past few days. The video opens up on an animation of a DaVinci-style contraption, as the voiceover discusses how AI discourse has moved on from chatbots to discuss infrastructure, agents, and politics. The video flips through various generated images in a matching style, making the entire presentation feel like a coherent whole. It also draws on real photos where relevant. Skolbel said that he analyzed tweets and generated the script externally, but the rest of it was straight from Notebook LM, which also generated an audio podcast and a mind map.

7:43Now, one of the things that we've talked about numerous times this year is how much Google's product strategy, I think, is about flexing their lead in multimodal AI. And one could argue that this is one of the bigger flexes to date, especially if you factor it for actual immediate term relevance for real people and real workers. Cinematic video overviews orchestrate the Gemini 3 family of models, Nano Banana Pro, and Vio to weave together voiceover, images, and video in a way that just feels like the beginnings, at least, of a professional video production. What's more, this is not your grandpa's 10-second video clip.

8:13Scoble's video, for example, runs for almost five minutes. Describing the new tech, Google wrote,

8:30Now at this stage, the only downside is that the feature is exclusive to the Top Tier Ultra subscription, making me once again grateful that my job justifies holding one of those types of subscriptions for all the major players. Very, very cool stuff from Google, something I'm very excited to play around with more. For now, however, that's going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode.

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12:08Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. When it comes to what I cover on this show, I have a strong preference, as you guys well know at this point, to changes and updates that are directly and immediately relevant to you and your lives and your work. And yet, of course, all of those changes are happening in a larger societal context that we can't ignore. And right now we are in a particularly notable moment in the history of the politics of AI, which I would describe as something like, if AI has flirted with politics so far, it is now through this phase becoming much more discreetly and distinctly a political issue.

12:41The Verge goes even farther, writing in a recent piece that AI is now part of the culture wars. And with a recent memo from Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, the culture warreness of this conversation is likely to get worse, not better. I'm sure at this point you've been keeping up to speed with the Anthropic-Pentagon bun fight, But the quick TLDR is that Anthropic had a couple of red lines around domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons that they refused to change in their contract, which really ticked off Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which led to all sorts of threats of the U.S. government designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which is not something that the U.S.

13:13government has historically done for American companies, which led to memos and much public fighting last week, finally culminating in President Trump blasting out on Truth Social that Anthropic was now persona non grata with the U.S. government, and Hegseth following up that not only would they not be working with Anthropic, they would in fact be pursuing the supply chain risk designation and pushing other defense contractors to stop working with Anthropic as well. On the same day that this was all going down, OpenAI announced their own deal with the Department of War, and it has just been a mess.

13:41In the wake of OpenAI announcing their deal last Friday night, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei published a 1 ,600-word memo that was not happy with basically anyone. The memo was later leaked to the information, and Amadei got right to the point. He opened the memo by writing, I want to be very clear on the messaging that is coming from OpenAI and the mendacious nature of it. This is an example of who they really are, and I want to make sure everyone sees it for what it is. Dario explained that while we didn't know exactly what was in the OpenAI contract, he had a few impressions about how their safeguards would work.

14:13He suggested that OpenAI would deploy a model without legal restrictions, but with a safety layer that amounts to model refusals on certain tasks. Amadei continued, our general sense is that these kinds of approaches, while they don't have zero efficacy, are, in the context of military applications, maybe 20 % real and 80 % safety theater. He explained that applications like autonomous weaponry or domestic surveillance rely on contexts that the model can't be privy to, such as the presence of a human in the loop or the provenance of surveillance data. Amadei also alleged that the idea that anthropic were offered the same terms as OpenAI and rejected them was false.

14:46He added that he also believed it was false that OpenAI's terms meaningfully prevent AI use in domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry. Circling back to earlier statements, Dario reiterated the core concern that the DOW has legal surveillance powers which are quote, not of great concern in the pre-AI world but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world. Amade wrote that Anthropic's negotiations on Friday had ultimately come down to a single clause in the contract. According to his retelling of events, the Pentagon had agreed to everything Anthropic had asked for, but required them to delete the specific phrase about analysis of bulk acquired data.

15:19He said, this exactly matched the scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, Amadei said the Pentagon had argued that a human in the loop is required under the law, but Dario noted that this is only Pentagon policy, which was added during the Biden administration and could be changed at will by Secretary Hegseth, adding, so it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint. Still, a lot of the details of the negotiations were kind of secondary to the main point he was trying to make. Specifically, he said that a lot of the messaging from OpenAI and DOW are, quote, just straight-up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.

15:51In pretty much no uncertain terms, he accused Sam Altman of acting in bad faith, suggesting that all of his appearances to support Anthropic in public were just about him acting in a way that, quote, doesn't make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn't. In the spiciest and perhaps most politically fraught part of the memo, Dario argued that the disagreement didn't actually have to do with the contract. He wrote,

16:41we were trying to solve. Sam is now, with the help of a DOW, Dario continues, trying to spin this as if we were unreasonable. We didn't engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is. Coming to a conclusion, Dario writes, thus Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this. He's trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing. Dario argued that the narrative was mostly failing with the general public, but had been successful with some, in his words, Twitter morons.

17:17My main worry, he concludes, is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAI employees. Due to selection effects, they're sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees. So, boy howdy, a lot to unpack in this. I think it's important to keep in mind that this was Friday night right as this was all going down. And I think that there are a couple possible interpretations. One is that this was some type of strategic, either a strategic recruitment play, in other words, to get disaffected OpenAI staffers to come over and join Anthropic, or an attempt to lean into anti-administration sentiment, basically an act of App Store politics.

17:54Anthropic at the time of Dario's writing had not yet hit number one in the App Store charts, but already it had rocketed up to number two. The other possible interpretation, though, of course, is effectively that this was just to crash out, that it wasn't super considered, and that any of these strategic outcomes were just secondary to the fact that it was a CEO venting in a sort of private forum that then would become public. This seems to be what J.V. Mautzowicz thinks, writing, Dario was obviously on megatilt here, same as everyone else on Friday, and the inflammatory stuff especially about the White House is deeply effing stupid to say.

18:26White House was trying to de-escalate and Dario needs to eat some crow ASAP. Now, J.V. here is genuinely sympathetic to anthropic and AI safety in general, and so I think it's notable that that interpretation is coming from him. Unsurprisingly, it does seem that the administration was not happy about this. Axios business editor Dan Primack wrote, Amadei's blog post is said to have infuriated defense department officials who believe he was trying to virtue signal to A, anthropic employees upset about the Venezuela revelations, and B, AI engineers at rival companies who might share similar concerns.

18:55Now, I'm pretty sure Dan was talking about a previous memo, not this most recent one, but implying that the same logic from the previous memo applies to the Friday night writing as well. It is worth noting as we interpret things that Dario has never been a big fan of Trump. A news article from last September reported that in a Facebook post urging friends to vote for Kamala Harris, Amadei had likened Trump to a feudal warlord. He also cut ties to a number of law firms who had made deals with the president. While pretty much everyone agreed that this was not going to work out all that well for Anthropik vis-a-vis the White House, even if they generally supported Dario's position, there was more mixed feelings around his accusations with regard to Sam and OpenAI.

19:32Dean Ball wrote, I do not share the cynicism of some with respect to OpenAI's actions in the DOW anthropic dispute. It basically seems to me as though OpenAI was attempting to de-escalate last week. Whether they executed well is a separate question, but in their defense, good execution and such chaos was nearly impossible. It seems OpenAI tried to reduce tensions and find a productive path forward, while allowing its employees considerable latitude to speak their minds. The easy thing would have been for management to stay quiet and let this happen. They did not do that, and they also stood firm in opposition to the supply chain risk designation.

20:03In general, OpenAI is unjustly maligned. This is the thing that bothers me the most about Dario's leaked memo. It spends so much time on OpenAI conspiracies and cynicism that I fear industry solidarity in the future will be harder than it needs to be. This is not the last time we will see state interference into Frontier AI, and until we build formalized structures for such interference, it will be important for the industry to hang tough together. I fear that will be less likely now. Interestingly, Sam Altman seems to agree with Dean that the particulars of how they handled the Pentagon contract weren't handled as well as they might have been.

20:37During his first all-hands dealing with the issue, Altman said that he didn't regret signing the deal but wished he didn't rush to announce it last Friday night. Echoing previous comments, he said the announcement made OpenAI look opportunistic and not united with the field. Sources said the tones of the all-hands meeting was respectful, with employees trying to drill down on the details in the contract. Altman apparently empathized with the mood in the room, saying, to try so hard to do the right thing and get so absolutely personally crushed for it, and I know this is happening to all of you too, so I feel terrible for subjecting you to this, is really painful.

21:06A source speaking with the New York Post said that the reaction within the company was largely positive save for a small group. They said, from the internal messages, people are pragmatic and agree that Friday night was perhaps a little rushed and not the best communication, but now that there is more information, it feels like everybody is generally positive, save for like these 30 people who are always the ones raising questions. And while no one has publicly quit over the contract, reinforcement learning lead Max Schwarzer announced on Monday that he had decided to leave OpenAI to join Anthropic, which basically everyone assumed was a direct response to this.

21:36That said, not only did Schwarzer not throw OpenAI under the bus, he tried to give at least a plausible reason for his move that wasn't this, saying that he wanted to return to doing individual work as a researcher rather than continuing in a management position. On Wednesday evening, the Financial Times Times reported that Anthropic had restarted negotiations with the Pentagon around the contract. Amadei was reportedly back in discussions with Department of War Undersecretary for Research and Engineering and former Uber executive Emil Michael. You might remember him as the person who referred to Amadei as a liar with a god complex just about a week ago.