Anthropic’s Big Brain Drop, OpenAI’s Shopping Spree & America’s AI Moonshot

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👋 Morning, Reader!

If it feels like the AI race is speeding up again — that’s because it is. Anthropic just dropped a frontier model with brains and savings, OpenAI wants to be your personal shopper, and the U.S. government is going full sci-fi with an AI moonshot.

Let’s dig in. 🚀

🤖 Anthropic Climbs the AI Ranks with Claude Opus 4.5

Cheaper, faster, smarter — Claude just leveled up.

Anthropic’s back with Claude Opus 4.5, and it’s not just keeping pace — it’s setting it. The company’s newest flagship model rivals Gemini 3 and GPT-5.1 across nearly every benchmark, dominating in coding, reasoning, and safety.

The details:

• First model to break 80% on the SWE-Bench Verified coding benchmark.

• Outperforms Gemini 3 in reasoning, tool use, and problem-solving.

• Built to orchestrate teams of smaller Haiku models — think “Claude, the AI manager.”

• Massive 66% price drop from Opus 4.1, with huge efficiency gains.

• New updates: unlimited chat length, Claude Code on desktop, and Excel integration.

Why it matters:
Anthropic’s making a statement: top-tier AI doesn’t have to cost a fortune. With performance this strong and pricing this aggressive, Claude Opus 4.5 isn’t just competing — it’s crowding the field.

💬 Your move, OpenAI.

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🛒 OpenAI Turns ChatGPT Into Your Personal Shopper

From chat to checkout — the AI mall is open.

OpenAI just launched Shopping Research, an in-chat buying assistant that builds personalized guides by scanning trusted sources and asking you what you actually want.

The details:

• Runs on a GPT-5 mini model trained for product discovery.

• Creates curated lists of 10–15 products based on your preferences.

• Focuses on electronics, home goods, and beauty, soon expanding to all categories.

• Instant Checkout is in testing, letting you buy directly inside ChatGPT.

Why it matters:
This is OpenAI’s biggest step yet into consumer commerce. Forget Googling “best headphones 2025” — just ask ChatGPT, and it does the homework. If ads and affiliate links arrive next, OpenAI might be coming for Amazon and Google’s turf.

🛍️ The future of shopping might just talk back.

🇺🇸 The U.S. Launches the ‘Genesis Mission’ for AI Science

AI moonshots are officially back on the government’s agenda

President Trump signed an order launching the Genesis Mission, a massive effort to accelerate U.S. scientific discovery with AI — aiming to turn decades of research into days.

The details:

• Brings together 17 federal labs and DOE supercomputers into a unified AI platform.

• Trains AI agents on decades of scientific data to automate experiments and predictions.

• Targets national challenges like biotech, energy, and materials research.

• The White House called it the largest research coordination since Apollo.

Why it matters:
This is the government’s biggest swing yet at AI for science — and it’s a power play against China’s state-backed research surge. Expect major U.S. labs, cloud giants, and private AI firms (hello, OpenAI and Anthropic) to join the project soon.

🧬 Think Manhattan Project energy, but with GPUs instead of uranium.

🗞️ Other News

👨‍💻 Sam Altman + Jony Ive revealed their AI device design is finalized — and it may launch in under two years.

🎭 OpenAI’s Sora can’t call its new feature “Cameo” anymore — the real Cameo sued and won a restraining order.

💻 Microsoft released Fara-7B, an open-weight model that runs locally on laptops and can autonomously browse and complete web tasks.

🏗️ Amazon pledges $50B from 2026 to build AI and supercomputing data centers for U.S. government use — including defense and intelligence.

🧪 Artificial Analysis dropped a brutal new physics benchmark, CritPt, where Gemini 3 Pro still leads (even while solving <10% of it).

💻 Google’s ‘Aluminium OS’ will merge ChromeOS and Android into one unified desktop platform — powered entirely by Gemini at the core.

💻 Mastery tools of the day

• NextDocs - Turns prompts into polished docs by generating structure and formatting while letting you swap between multiple AI models

• Excelmatic - Turns natural language questions into Excel insights by generating charts, detecting trends, and extracting KPIs

• RightBlogger writes SEO-optimized blog posts and auto-publishes them to WordPress, Webflow, or Ghost on your schedule

• PracTalk - Runs AI mock interviews that analyze your speech patterns and answer quality, then delivers feedback to improve performance

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• Really Good Search is Really Hard

• No free lunch in vibe coding

• How we built the v0 iOS app

• Work, Woodlands, and Geocaches

• OpenAI Business Breakdown & Founding Story

• The Fate of Google's Ad Tech Monopoly Is Now in a Judge's Hands

• Companies Predict 2026 Will Be the Worst College Grad Job Market in Five Years

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Read the guide to get your CTV campaign live in time for the holiday rush.

Learn more.

⚡ The Takeaway

AI innovation is now hitting three speeds at once:

• Corporate — OpenAI builds for everyone.

• Competitive — Anthropic fights for the crown.

• Cosmic — the U.S. literally launches a government AI mission.

And through it all, one truth remains: the AI race isn’t slowing — it’s institutionalizing. 🧠💥

✨ Thanks for reading Not So Artificial!

If today’s edition made your neurons fire faster than Claude 4.5’s code, forward it to a friend who still thinks “AI news” means ChatGPT got a new color scheme.

See you tomorrow — same inbox, same innovation rush. ⚙️

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