Amodei torches OpenAI in leaked memo

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. “Straight up lies.” That’s how Dario Amodei described OpenAI’s Pentagon messaging in a newly-leaked internal memo sent to Anthropic employees on Friday.

The 1,600-word document rips the controversial deal as “80% safety theater” with personal shots at Sam Altman woven throughout — escalating a rivalry that was already one of the most heated in tech, far past an awkward hand-hold refusal.

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In today’s AI rundown:

  • Amodei rips OAI-Pentagon deal as ‘safety theater’

  • OpenAI building its own GitHub to ditch Microsoft

  • Turn any CSV into an Excel dashboard

  • New framework tests if AI helps students learn

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🍿 Amodei memo rips OAI-Pentagon deal as ‘safety theater’

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sent an internal memo on Friday calling OpenAI’s Pentagon AI deal “maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater” while also taking direct shots at Sam Altman in the 1,600-word document released by The Information.

The details:

  • The Pentagon labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” last week, followed immediately by OAI agreeing to its own Dept of War deal with similar terms.

  • Amodei accused Altman of “gaslighting” and pointed to Greg Brockman’s $25M Trump donation while Anthropic refused to give “dictator-style praise”.

  • He also said OAI is “trying to spin this as we were unreasonable… didn’t engage in a good way, less flexible”, calling it a pattern he’s seen often from Altman.

  • Amodei also struck a different tone on Tuesday with regard to the Pentagon, saying the two sides “have much more in common than we have differences.”

Why it matters: Dario’s memo comes in HOT and reads like someone letting loose after holding back since he left OpenAI in 2020. Between this, the hand-hold refusal, and Super Bowl ads before that, the frontier rivalry has never been more personal — but the Pentagon deal is also turning into a big mess for all parties involved.

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OPENAI

👨‍💻 OpenAI building its own GitHub to ditch Microsoft

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly building an internal code repository platform to replace Microsoft’s GitHub, according to The Information — a move that could pit it (once again) against one of its biggest financial backers.

The details:

  • The project kicked off after GitHub suffered repeated outages tied to an ongoing migration of its infrastructure, frustrating OpenAI engineers.

  • GitHub’s CTO told staff the full Azure move would take two years, and several dev teams got reassigned to migration duty.

  • OAI staffers have floated opening the platform to outside paying customers, pairing with Codex coding agents to consolidate the entire process.

Why it matters: This relationship continues to be a strange one, with OAI continuing to encroach on territory its largest investor already owns — from Office tools to the platform where 100M+ devs store their code. Microsoft is in the awkward position of funding a partner that is hammering away at the legacy tech giant’s developer moat.

AI TRAINING

📊 Turn any CSV into an Excel dashboard

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn copy-paste prompts that turn any raw CSV into a clean dashboard using Claude in Excel. We tested them on World Bank GDP data and NBA player stats.

Step-by-step:

  1. Import CSV into Excel, open Claude, and prompt: “View the data in this workbook. Tell me what this data is, what each column represents, and flag any problems with the structure or formatting. List the issues.”

  2. Clean the data by prompting: “Fix every issue you identified. Remove any junk rows or metadata. Format numbers for human readability, and create proper tables with clear headers. Sort by the most important metric.”

  3. For dashboard, prompt: “Create a ‘Dashboard’ tab. Identify 3-5 most useful metrics from this data and build a summary table for each. Rank the entries. Highlight the top performers in green and the bottom performers in red.”

  4. For visualization: “Add 2-3 charts to the Dashboard tab that tell the story of this data. Pick the chart types that make the most sense. Make them clean, labeled.”

Pro tip: Once created, you can prompt Claude to turn the dashboard into a template with placeholder labels — for reuse every month.

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AI RESEARCH

 👨‍🏫 New framework tests if AI helps students learn

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI published a new framework built with Stanford and Estonia’s University of Tartu to track whether ChatGPT helps people learn over time — the company’s first attempt to measure AI’s impact on how students retain knowledge.

The details:

  • OAI’s Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite is designed to track AI’s impact on learning over time, measuring factors like motivation, persistence, and recall.

  • A 300+ student trial found microeconomics students scored 15% higher with ChatGPT’s study mode, though other subjects weren’t statistically significant.

  • Estonia is running the framework’s biggest test, with 20K high schoolers across the country being tracked for a full semester.

Why it matters: AI has already made a serious impact in learning on both ends — from positive results like the Alpha School’s AI-first programming to negative ones like studies showing AI’s ‘brainrot’ impact on critical thinking. But no matter where the data ends up, it’s going to be a major part of the future of education either way.

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the chipmaker’s $30B OAI investment will likely be its last before the AI giant goes public, calling the original $100B deal “not in the cards”.

OpenAI launched the Codex app on Windows, featuring a native sandbox to let AI agents work directly in Windows-specific environments.

The White House announced a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” signed by major AI companies, committing data center operators to fund their power and grid upgrades.

Google is facing a wrongful-death lawsuit from a parent alleging its Gemini chatbot developed an emotional relationship with his son and encouraged self-harm.

Elon Musk posted on X that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom shaping form”.

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 Annie S. in Austin, TX:

“I run a consultancy and needed a frictionless way to track billable hours without a paid SaaS subscription. Using Gemini, I built a custom ‘Time Tracker’ web app inside Google Sheets. I uploaded my brand guide and client rates; Gemini wrote the Apps Script and designed a UI matching my aesthetic.

The tool features a client dropdown that auto-pulls rates. When I hit ‘Log,’ it converts duration to decimals, calculates earnings, and pushes time-stamped entries and notes into my Sheet. I went from a blank spreadsheet to a branded internal tool in minutes, eliminating data entry and overcomplicated time tracking/project management apps.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

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See you soon,

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

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