The AI Breakdown

AI Weekly Briefing: Will Super Bowl Ads Burst the AI Bubble?

This week on The AI Breakdown, we talk about OpenAI’s Frontier launch, an enterprise platform designed to help organisations build, deploy, and govern AI agents across real workflows.
Anthropic fires back with Claude Opus 4.6, including a one million token context window in beta and new agent teams designed to split complex work across multiple cooperating agents, with a clear push beyond coding into everyday knowledge work like documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
We then zoom out to the money and the infrastructure. Google is introducing a Workspace add on called AI Expanded Access from March 1, 2026, signalling the shift toward paid higher tier usage. Cerebras just closed a one billion dollar Series H at about a twenty three billion valuation, as demand for compute fuels a new wave of AI hardware competition.
Finally, Super Bowl LX made AI advertising feel like a cultural inflection point. Anthropic used its spot to promise Claude will remain ad free, while OpenAI ran a Codex ad built around the idea that you can just build things now. iSpot data reported by AdWeek says 23 percent of Super Bowl commercials featured AI, and Axios covered X rolling out BrandRanx to track ad conversation in real time as the game unfolded. 
And with the echoes of the Dot Com Super Bowl and the Crypto Bowl still fresh in marketers minds, it raises the question, will the Super Bowl burst the AI bubble?

AI Weekly Briefing: Moltbook Breach Highlights the Security Cost of Vibe Coding

In this week’s AI Weekly Briefing, I break down the biggest developments in artificial intelligence from the past seven days, from viral open-source AI agents like OpenClaw, to major enterprise moves as Snowflake deepens its partnership with OpenAI.
You’ll also hear how Amazon Ads is adopting the Model Context Protocol to make agent-driven workflows more practical, why cybersecurity firms like Malwarebytes are exploring AI-native threat checking, and what ElevenLabs’ latest voice advances mean for media, accessibility, and deepfake risk.
Plus: a cautionary tale from Moltbook’s security breach, a look at xAI’s Grok Imagine pushing generative video to mass scale, and why multi-agent coding tools could reshape the way developers build software.

Is CES 2026 the moment AI became business infrastructure?

CES 2026 quietly marked a turning point. AI stopped being the shiny feature you bolt on for a headline, and started behaving like electricity. It's just assumed.
In this episode, I break down the five AI themes that defined the show:
AI PCs go mainstream: Your next laptop refresh might be your biggest AI decision this year. AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm are putting serious on-device capability into enterprise hardware, and that changes where your AI runs, how your data moves, and how much control you actually have.
Edge AI and the "no cloud required" wave: From real-time deepfake detection on laptops to Caterpillar embedding a voice assistant into excavators that works without connectivity, on-device AI is solving the unsexy problems: latency, offline reliability, and data control.
ROI-first AI: Siemens and PepsiCo showed what "show me the numbers" looks like: 20% throughput gains and 90% of issues caught before physical changes. The pilot era is over.
Physical AI: Boston Dynamics' Atlas is heading to Hyundai factories by 2028. But the nearer-term story? Copilots for heavy machinery that upgrade the tools you already have.
Trust as the bottleneck: The limiting factor isn't clever models. It's governance, guardrails, and getting your data right.
If you take one thing from CES 2026: AI is becoming infrastructure. That means it's going to be boring, expensive, and absolutely worth getting right.

AI Weekly Briefing: Siri’s Second Chance, YouTube Clones & the AI Agents Coming for Your Wallet

This week on The AI Breakdown, I cover the biggest AI moves in about 10 minutes from Mastercard’s agentic shopping push, to Apple’s Siri reboot, YouTube’s AI creator avatars, and Nvidia’s signals that retail AI is scaling fast.

AI Weekly Briefing: Is Agentic Commerce About to Rewrite Online Shopping

In this week’s AI news breakdown, we look at how Google and Shopify are accelerating agentic commerce, with open protocols for AI shopping agents and in chat checkout through Gemini.
Also on the radar:
Shopify Winter ’26 RenAIssance and what Agentic Storefronts mean for merchants
OpenAI’s ad model for ChatGPT and the knock on effects for marketing and trust
Wikipedia signing paid access deals with AI firms and what it signals for the content economy
ChatGPT Translate and the shift in expectations for translation qualityGemini’s personal intelligence upgrade and the privacy trade off
 

AI Weekly Briefing: Alphabet hits 4 trillion and Apple picks Gemini for Siri

This week on The AI Breakdown, Google proves it can execute, Apple quietly admits it can’t do everything alone, retailers chase customers into chatbots, and regulators draw a hard line on AI abuse.

AI Weekly Briefing: Who is winning the AI distribution race in 2026

This week on The AI Breakdown, I cover the biggest AI moves in the last week, from Samsung doubling down on AI devices to Snowflake embedding Gemini with enterprise governance. Plus Google TV upgrades, Boston Dynamics Atlas heading for real deployment, in car agentic AI, and Accenture buying UK based Faculty.

AI Weekly Briefing: The $41 Billion Bet - SoftBank, xAI, and the AI Infrastructure Arms Race

This week on The AI Breakdown, the AI arms race goes fully physical.
SoftBank has completed a massive investment into OpenAI, locking in an estimated 11 percent stake and reinforcing a message the entire industry is starting to accept: the real bottleneck is not ideas, it is infrastructure.
From there, we zoom into the compute race as xAI expands its Memphis supercluster again, aiming for training capacity on the scale of gigawatts and a future buildout of over a million GPUs. The AI leaders are starting to look as much like energy companies as software companies.
Over in China, funding is moving through public markets, with MiniMax at the front of a year end Hong Kong IPO surge that signals how fast China is building capital market momentum around AI.
We also cover Europe’s tightening stance on synthetic media and platform responsibility after Poland asked Brussels to investigate TikTok over AI generated disinformation content and called for action under the Digital Services Act.
Plus, Meta makes a headline grabbing move with its plan to acquire Manus, the viral AI agent startup, and Nvidia’s China facing H200 demand highlights just how strategic hardware access has become for everyone building AI products.

AI Weekly Briefing: Lovable Raises Big and Salesforce Buys Qualified

AI is getting embedded everywhere and this week proved it. Salesforce is buying Qualified to power always on AI agents for pipeline. Lovable just raised big money at a massive valuation as vibe coding explodes. Microsoft and Google are leaning on partners to push AI from pilots to production. Notion reveals that AI now drives a huge chunk of revenue, and Zoom launches AI Companion 3.0 to turn meetings into actions.
But there’s a catch: Reuters reports that many companies still aren’t seeing the ROI they expected. So what separates hype from real value?

AI Weekly Briefing: Mouse Ears and Model Wars

In this week’s 10 minute AI news roundup, I break down a headline grabbing Disney move that could redefine what “legal generative AI” looks like at scale. Disney is reportedly investing $1 billion in OpenAI, negotiating warrants for optionality, licensing a vault of iconic characters for Sora, and rolling out ChatGPT across the company with strict guardrails. But the backlash is already here, with the Writers Guild of America warning this is a turning point in the fight over creative labour and value.
Then we jump into the model wars. OpenAI ships GPT 5.2 with a massive 400k context window and tiered variants for speed, deep analysis, and maximum accuracy, while Google counters with Gemini Deep Research and an Interactions API designed to embed autonomous research workflows into products. We also cover a major UK partnership with Google DeepMind aimed at accelerating science through automation, plus why Microsoft’s new Copilot pricing for small businesses, Nvidia’s move to buy the company behind Slurm, and a fresh wave of copyright lawsuits all point to one thing: the legal and infrastructure layers of AI are now product critical.