An Anthropic spokesperson remained tight-lipped on whether "Claude, or any other AI model, was used for any specific operation, classified or otherwise" in a statement to the WSJ, but noted that "any use of Claude - whether in the private sector or across government - is required to comply with our Usage Policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed."
Rival OpenAI sees it differently, and now plans to embed advertising in ChatGPT, something that CEO Sam Altman had previously said would be a "last resort". It's an indication that AI companies are still trying to balance the cost of development with the provision of service to their users.
It did so with the blessing of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who decided to delegate the meticulous work of route planning to Anthropic's AI model. This involves consulting orbital and surface imagery of Mars in order to set a series of waypoints to guide the rover's movements. Once plotted, this data gets transmitted about 140 million miles or 225 million kilometers - the average distance from Earth to Mars - where it's received by Perseverance as a navigational plan.
Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars. Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.
For the past three years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has been dominated by a single, anxious question: What will be left for us to do? As large language models began writing code, drafting legal briefs, and composing poetry, the prevailing assumption was that human cognitive labor was being commoditized. We braced for a world where thinking was outsourced to the cloud, rendering our hard-won mental skills, writing, logic, and structural reasoning relics of a pre-automated past.
November was the month AI went full gladiator mode: three frontier labs released their best models within a week, Google reclaimed the throne with Gemini 3, and open source proved it can win Olympic gold medals in mathematics. Meanwhile, the agent revolution became official doctrine at Microsoft and Google, and China's AI ecosystem hit escape velocity with 10 million app downloads in seven days.
Tim Metz is worried about the "Google Maps-ification" of his mind. Just as many people have come to rely on GPS apps to get around, the 44-year-old content marketer fears that he is becoming dependent on AI. He told me that he uses AI for up to eight hours each day, and he's become particularly fond of Anthropic's Claude. Sometimes, he has as many as six sessions running simultaneously. He consults AI for marriage and parenting advice, and when he goes grocery shopping, he takes photos of the fruits to ask if they are ripe. Recently, he was worried that a large tree near his house might come down, so he uploaded photographs of it and asked the bot for advice. Claude suggested that Metz sleep elsewhere in case the tree fell, so he and his family spent that night at a friend's. Without Claude's input, he said, "I would have never left the house." (The tree never came down, though some branches did.)
Anthropic will now let its Claude AI chatbot "remember" the details of previous conversations without prompting. The feature is only rolling out for Team and Enterprise users for now, allowing Claude to automatically incorporate someone's preferences, the context of the project they're working on, and their main priorities into each of its responses. Anthropic rolled out the ability for paid users to prompt Claude to remember past chats last month,
Ahead of the NFL season, the Chicago-based cloud engineer built a custom AI draft agent that pulls real-time data from ESPN and FantasyPros, factoring in last-minute intel like injuries and roster cuts.
Anthropic is launching a research preview of a browser-based AI agent powered by its Claude AI models, the company announced on Tuesday. The agent, Claude for Chrome, is rolling out to a group of 1000 subscribers on Anthropic's Max plan, which costs between $100 and $200 per month. The company is also opening a waitlist for other interested users. By adding an extension to Chrome, select users can now chat with Claude in a sidecar window that maintains context of everything happening on their browser. Users can also give the Claude agent permission to take actions in their browser and complete some tasks on their behalf.
Apple seems to be opening the door wider for alternatives to ChatGPT within its development tools. The latest beta version of Xcode 26 shows that not only Apple's own models and OpenAI's ChatGPT will be supported, but that Anthropic's models will also be making their debut. This further expands the AI functionality that was first presented at WWDC24 under the name Swift Assist and later announced in a broader form at WWDC25.
