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

2026-03-03

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Episode 200 arrived in the midst of a very dramatic week in AI and we recorded it live with AI Academy Mastery members for the first time! This week, Paul and Mike discuss an eventful 72 hours beginning with the Trump administration’s ultimatum to Anthropic. Eventually Anthropic refused, got blacklisted, and hours later OpenAI stepped in to take the deal. Paul and Mike unpack every twist, including why Peter Thiel's fingerprints on both sides make this even wilder. Also: OpenAI's $110B funding round, Claude Code creator Boris Cherney on why coding is "...

Episode 200 arrived in the midst of a very dramatic week in AI and we recorded it live with AI Academy Mastery members for the first time!

This week, Paul and Mike discuss an eventful 72 hours beginning with the Trump administration’s ultimatum to Anthropic. Eventually Anthropic refused, got blacklisted, and hours later OpenAI stepped in to take the deal. Paul and Mike unpack every twist, including why Peter Thiel's fingerprints on both sides make this even wilder.

Also: OpenAI's $110B funding round, Claude Code creator Boris Cherney on why coding is "effectively solved" (and what that means for your job), Block laying off 4,000 people and naming AI as the reason, and a doomer economic essay that actually moved Wall Street.

Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here

Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Intro

00:03:30 — AI Pulse Survey Results

00:07:08 — Anthropic vs. US Government

00:44:55 — OpenAI Funding, Amazon Partnership, Response to DoD

00:51:19 — Interview with the Head of Claude Code

00:59:38 — Block AI Job Cuts

01:04:41 — AI Doomer Essay from Citrini

01:10:54 — Politics of Data Centers

01:15:15 — Anthropic Fluency Index

01:18:29 — Anthropic Distillation Attacks

01:21:46 — NVIDIA Earnings

01:24:19 — AI Product and Funding Updates

This episode is brought to you by AI Academy by SmarterX.

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