Sergey Brin commits DeepMind to a Claude catch-up

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Catching Anthropic’s lead in coding just became Sergey Brin’s personal project.

The once-retired Google co-founder is now reportedly running a DeepMind “strike team” focused on closing Gemini’s internal coding gap with Claude — with Brin framing the push as the shortest route to the holy grail of self-improving AI.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Brin mobilizes DeepMind to chase Anthropic on code

  • Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 closes open-source gap

  • Create high-converting landing pages in Claude Design

  • Adobe’s new agentic AI platform for enterprises

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

💻 Brin mobilizes DeepMind to chase Anthropic on code

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Google co-founder Sergey Brin is personally rallying DeepMind to out-code Anthropic with Gemini, according to The Information — creating a new “strike team” and pitching the effort to staff as the shortest route to self-improving AI systems.

The details:

  • Research engineer Sebastian Borgeaud, who previously ran DeepMind’s pretraining, is leading the group under CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu and Brin.

  • In an internal memo, Brin told staff the real prize is AI that trains the next AI, with coding being the capability that gets Gemini there.

  • DeepMind researchers reportedly rate Claude’s code-writing above Gemini’s internally, which kicked off Brin’s push for a dedicated team.

  • Gemini engineers now have to use Google’s internal agent tools on complex tasks, with usage tracked on a company leaderboard called Jetski.

Why it matters: After dominating the AI conversation towards the end of 2025, Google has had a slow start to 2026. But Brin’s push isn’t a product response — it’s an internal one, and the strike team’s real job is to automate Google itself, closing the gap with deeply embedded AI systems already operating inside Anthropic and OpenAI.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

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The Rundown: Most teams pick an API by checking a benchmark table and calling it done—a shortcut that could miss what really matters in production. This guide from You.com explains why raw latency is a misleading signal and what to measure instead.

What you’ll get:

  • Why p50 latency hides the failures your users actually experience

  • The “time-to-useful-result” framework that captures what benchmarks leave out

  • Four hidden cost drivers that show up in your logs, not vendor tables

  • How to evaluate APIs at your actual concurrency levels, not the demo conditions

Stop optimizing for the wrong number. Learn what to measure instead.

MOONSHOT AI

🔓 Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.6 closes open-source gap

Image source: Moonshot AI

The Rundown: Moonshot AI’s Kimi open-sourced K2.6, a new agentic coding model that nears or outperforms models like GPT-5.4, Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro across top benchmarks for reasoning, coding, and more at a fraction of the cost.

The details:

  • K2.6 beats GPT-5.4, Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on benchmarks including Humanity’s Last Exam w/ tools (reasoning) and SWE-Bench Pro (coding).

  • On long-horizon work, K2.6 can work for 12+ hours straight across 4,000+ tool calls, with Kimi showing it refactoring an 8-year-old codebase in demos.

  • Always-on agents like OpenClaw and Hermes now run on K2.6, with Kimi reporting one internal agent operated autonomously for five days straight.

  • K2.6’s agent swarms can now spin up 300 parallel sub-agents at the same time to complete tasks, triple the amount of its K2.5 predecessor.

Why it matters: Dario Amodei just said open-source and China are 6-12 months behind frontier labs, and while that may be true of internal releases, public systems are looking a lot closer. Given frustrations over usage rates and the rise of autonomous agents, K2.6 looks like a powerful, cost-effective new option for agentic workflows.

AI TRAINING

🧑‍🎨 Create high-converting landing pages in Claude Design

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Claude Design, Anthropic’s new design tool, to generate four mockup variations of your website’s landing page.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to claude.ai/design, select the wireframe option, click create, and write: who the page is for, what you’re selling, and the action a visitor should take”

  2. Find and screenshot a landing page you like. Try searching “top landing pages in [your niche]” and the checkout pane of a site that does millions of daily transactions, like Amazon, eBay, or PayPal

  3. Add the screenshots to your brief, and tell Claude to create four variations of the mockup. Answer any follow-ups, and wait 2-5 minutes for results

  4. Click any element and leave a note like “rewrite this CTA to be outcome-specific” or “add a testimonial.” Claude applies the changes to refine outputs

Pro tip: Click Share > Handoff to Claude Code > Send to Claude Code Web to get Claude Code to build and deploy the final website for you.

PRESENTED BY SLACK

🤖 Work smarter, not harder with Slackbot

The Rundown: Your team is already using AI tools. But are they actually getting smarter results? Slackbot, Slack’s built-in AI, turns your entire workspace into a productivity engine — surfacing answers, drafting content, and automating the busywork so your team can focus on what matters.

In this free guide, you’ll discover:

  • How Slackbot synthesizes conversations, files, and apps for instant answers

  • Ways to automate routine tasks without writing a single line of code

  • How teams are using AI to move faster and collaborate more effectively

Read the free guide.

ADOBE

🤖 Adobe’s new agentic AI platform for enterprises

Image source: Adobe

The Rundown: Adobe just introduced CX Enterprise at its Adobe Summit, a new agentic platform built to help businesses coordinate marketing, content, and customer interactions through networks of AI agents.

The details:

  • CX Enterprise weaves three pillars under one agentic orchestration layer: brand visibility, content supply chain, and customer engagement.

  • CX Enterprise Coworker assembles the correct agents and tools based on a specific user goal, creating a plan and executing multi-step actions.

  • Adobe’s Marketing Agent now plugs into systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot, coordinating between the agents and Adobe apps.

  • The company is also launching an agent skills catalog, enabling enterprises to create reusable, customizable workflows within the platform.

Why it matters: The entire design world is moving toward agentic workflows, with Figma Agents, Canva Agents, and Adobe all jockeying for position. The bigger threat is the labs cutting out the middleman: Launches like Claude Design and every subsequent improvement will make legacy orchestration paths more difficult.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤖 Scrunch – See how AI interprets your site, run a free audit, and unlock the new way to reach customers*

  • ⚙️ Kimi K2.6 – Moonshot AI’s powerful open-source coding and agent model

  • 🧠 Chronicle – OpenAI’s Codex feature that uses screen context for memory

  • 🚀 Qwen3.6-Plus – Alibaba’s new AI with a 1M context window, strong coding

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI rolled out Chronicle, a Codex preview feature that runs background agents capturing your screen to build persistent memories, limited initially to Pro users on Mac.

Ex-Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun said people shouldn’t listen to Dario Amodei about AI’s impact on labor markets, or “Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me”, saying economists have the most important perspective.

Lovable denied reports that it suffered a data breach after users flagged that public project chats were visible, saying the issue was a documentation failure.

Tinder and Zoom partnered with Sam Altman’s World, letting users get “proof of humanity” badges via iris scans to combat AI bots and deepfakes.

Anthropic expanded its Amazon deal for 5 GW in compute, with the tech giant investing up to $25B more into Anthropic in exchange for its $100B+ AWS commitment.

Recursive Superintelligence raised $500M at a $4B valuation, with the four-month-old startup founded by OAI and Deepmind alumni building AI that improves itself.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Julie N. in Grand Junction, CO:

“As a digital marketer, I use ChatGPT as my assistant. I will feed all of my information about a client’s Google Ads needs into it, including budget, landing page, and let it design keyword-appropriate headlines and descriptions, set the ad strategy, and recommend additional campaign options.

Also, I will take my stream-of-consciousness thoughts about a potential SEO package and create a front-facing & admin-side PDF that I can share with potential clients.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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