📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - The Pentagon wants War Claude, every benchmark collapsed, and a solo founder hit $700K ARR with AI agents

Hey, it’s Alex, let me tell you why I think this week is an inflection point.Just this week: Everyone is launching autonomous agents or features inspired by OpenClaw (Devin 2.2, Cursor, Claude Cowork, Microsoft, Perplexity and Nous announced theirs), METR and ArcAGI 2,3 benchmarks are getting saturated, 1 person companies nearing 1M ARR within months of operation by running AI agents 24/7 (we chatted with one of them on the show today, live as he broke $700K ARR barrier) and the US Department of War gives Anthropic an ultimatum to remove nearly all restrictions on Claude for war and Anthropic says NO. I’ve been covering AI for 3 years every week, and this week feels, different. So if we are nearing the singularity, let me at least keep you up to date 😅 Today on the show, we covered most of the news in the first hour + breaking news from Google, Nano Banana 2 is here, and then had 3 interviews back to back. Ben Broca with Polsia, Nader Dabit with Cognition and Philip Kiely with BaseTen. Don’t miss those conversations starting at 1 hour in. Thanks for reading ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show! This post is public so feel free to share it.Anthropic vs Department of WarEarlier this week, the US “Department of War” invited Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic to a meeting, where-in Anthropic was given an ultimatum. “Remove the restrictions on Claude or Anthropic will be designated as a ‘supply chain risk’ company” and the DoD will potentially go as far as using the Defence Production Act to force Anthropic to ... comply. The two restrictions that Anthropic has in place for their models are: No use for domestic surveillance of American citizens and NO fully autonomous lethal weapens decisions given to Claude. For context, Claude is the only model that’s deployed on AWS top secret GovCloud and is used through Palantir’s AI platform. As I’m writing this, Anthropic issued a statement from Dario statement saying they will not budge on this, and will not comply. I fully commend Dario and Anthropic for this very strong backbone, but I fear that this matter is far from over, and we’ll continue to see what is the government response. EDIT: Apparently the DoD is pressuring Google and OpenAI to agree to the stipulations and employees from both companies are signing this petition https://notdivided.org/ to protest against dividing the major AI labs on this topic. Anthropic and OpenAI vs upcoming DeepseekIt’s baffling just how many balls are in the air for Anthropic, as just this week also, they have publicly named 3 Chinese AI makers in “Distillation Attacks”, claiming that they have broke Terms of Service to generate over 16M conversations with Claude to improve their own models, while using proxy networks to avoid detection. This marks the first time a major AI company publicly attributed distillation attacks to specific entities by name.The most telling thing to me is not the distillation, given that Anthropic has just recently settled one of the largest copyright payouts in U.S history, paying authors about $3000/book, which was bought, trained on and destroyed by Anthropic to make Claude better. No, the most telling thing here is the fact that Anthropic chose to put DeepSeek on top of the accusation list with merely 140K conversations, where the other labs created millions. This, plus OpenAI formal memo to Congress about a similar matter, shows that the US labs are trying to prepare for Deepseek new model to drop, by saying “Every innovation they have, they stole from us”. Apparently Deepseek V4 is nearly here, it’s potentially multimodal and has been allegedly trained on Nvidia chips somewhere in Mongolia despite the export restrictions and it’s about to SLAP! Benchmark? What benchmarks? How will we know that we’re approaching the singularity? Will there be signs? Well, this week it seems that the signs are here. First, Agentica claimed that they solved all publicly available “hard for AI” tasks of the upcoming ArcAGI 3, then Confluence Labs announced that they got an unprecedented 97.9% on ArcAGI2 and finally METR published their results on the long-horizon tasks, which measure AI’s capability to solve task that take humans a certain amount of hours to do. And that graph is going parabolic, with Claude Opus 4.6 able to solve tasks of 14.6h (doubling every 49 days) with 50% success rateWhy is this important? Well, this is just the benchmarks telling the story that everyone else in the industry is seeing, that approximately since December of 2025, and definitely fueled by early Feb drop of Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3, something major shifted. Developers no longer write code, but ship 10x more features.This became such a talking point, Swyx Latent.Space coined this with https://wtfhappened2025.com/ where he collects evidence of a shelling point, something that happened in December and I think continued throughout February. Speaking of benchmarks no longer being ...