Anthropic blocks xAI’s Claude access

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Nothing says “your AI model is excellent” quite like a competitor secretly using it for their own development.

Anthropic just cut off xAI’s Claude access after discovering Musk’s lab was using the rival models for its own development — both a testament to Claude’s coding dominance and a reminder that the AI wars are getting increasingly territorial.

P.S. We’re sorry today’s newsletter is later than usual — we had a brief technical issue over the weekend, but everything is back to normal now. Thanks for your patience!

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic blocks xAI from using Claude

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

  • Google’s new open standard for AI shopping

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC & XAI

🚫 Anthropic blocks xAI from using Claude

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic reportedly cut off xAI’s access to Claude models last week after discovering Elon Musk’s AI lab had been using the rival system through Cursor to speed up internal development, according to tech journalist Kylie Robison.

The details:

  • xAI cofounder Tony Wu confirmed the block in a Wednesday internal memo, telling staff their Claude access via Cursor was no longer working.

  • Anthropic’s terms explicitly ban customers from leveraging its models to build or train competing AI systems, a policy xAI apparently violated.

  • Wu reportedly framed the setback as motivation, saying xAI will take “a hit on productivity” but will accelerate work on its own coding tools.

  • The move mirrors past enforcement actions, with Anthropic previously revoking OpenAI’s API access and limiting Windsurf over competitive concerns.

Why it matters: xAI’s internal Claude usage is a testament to the big moment Opus and Claude Code are currently having in the industry’s coding scene. It’s also unsurprising to see things getting territorial — and with coding assistants now essential for AI development itself, rival model use will continue to be a messy battleground.

TOGETHER WITH CONCIERGE

👋 Your brand’s AI answer engine

The Rundown: Today’s buyers use AI every day to answer their questions, and have no patience for a scavenger hunt on your website. Concierge is a custom Perplexity-style answer engine, trained on your company’s content, that lives on your website and delivers accurate, personalized responses to ultra-specific questions.

Modern brands use Concierge to:

  • Handle any buyer question (no matter how technical) with advanced RAG on your content & media

  • Control and visibility over every conversation, with guardrails and sentiment analysis

  • Build trust with website visitors before they are willing to commit to a demo

Use Concierge to turn every question into an opportunity.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Zach, AI Writer: Nano Banana Pro has been a step change both for staying true to prompts and also being able to take its own creative liberties. The ability to talk through prompt brainstorming, image edits, and even providing context directly from our newsletter has made for some highly personalized new creative paths.

Jason, Developer: I have been using Grok in my Tesla, and it is a fun way to navigate and find new places to try around me. You can ask it to map multiple locations now, and ask it things like “after my first destination, I want to get coffee from a local place, not a chain”. It’s given some unique, interesting options I never would’ve explored otherwise.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: My father works in the construction industry and is only able to write in Chinese; however, all of his clients require quotations in English. I taught him how to use ChatGPT’s voice and image for translating from Chinese to English, and for drafting professional construction quotations directly through the platform.

AI TRAINING

🛠️ Find dozens of free AI tools with Google Labs

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google Labs’ free AI tools to build marketing content for your business. There are dozens of overlooked tools to help tackle whatever your use case is, but we’ve pulled our favorite three for you to try.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to labs.google/experiments to see a full list of tools.

  2. First is Pomelli. Copy your brand’s website URL and paste it into Pomelli. After ~5 minutes and you’ll get bespoke ad campaigns with image and video assets.

  3. Next, use Flow. Create start and end frames via Create Image, add them to Frames to Video with a prompt, then stitch clips using the scene builder.

  4. Finally, go to ImageFX for image iteration. Use the suggested styles to polish up your prompting skills and try locking the “seed” to keep outputs consistent.

Pro tip: Click the dropdown beside ImageFX and select MusicFX for generating music.

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The Rundown: MongoDB Atlas is the developer-friendly database used to build and scale gen AI and LLM-powered apps, without needing a separate vector database.

What makes Atlas ideal for AI:

  • Native vector search that eliminates costly multi-system architectures

  • 125+ cloud regions across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

  • A developer-friendly backend built for AI/ML apps and recommendation engines

Start building today.

GOOGLE & AI RETAIL

🛍️ Google’s new open standard for AI shopping

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, a new open-source framework designed to let AI agents handle the entire shopping journey — built alongside major retailers like Shopify, Walmart, Target, and Etsy.

The details:

  • UCP creates shared infrastructure for AI systems to manage product discovery, checkout, and post-purchase support across different platforms and agents.

  • Google is adding native checkout to AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, letting users complete purchases mid-conversation via Google Pay.

  • A new Business Agent puts branded assistants directly in Search, with the ability to personalize interactions, provide offers, and access customer insights.

  • Over 20 companies endorsed UCP at launch, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Macy’s, Best Buy, and American Express.

Why it matters: Google’s UCP joins a growing stack of AI commerce protocols, but they’re all designed to be interoperable rather than competing head-to-head. The real shift will happen behind the scenes for users, while brands being optimized for agentic shopping will likely be as important as websites in the early days of e-commerce.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ☎️ Bland AI – Automate your businesses phone calls with AI*

  • 🎨 Midjourney – Niji V7 model with improved anime, text rendering, & more

  • 💬 Scribe v2 – ElevenLabs’ new SOTA transcription model

  • 🏆 NousCoder-14B – Nous Research’s olympiad programming model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro solved three Erdos problems using Harmonic’s Aristotle, with mathematician Tererence Tao and others breaking new ground on the unsolved proofs.

Epoch AI released new data finding that global AI compute capacity is doubling every 7 months, with Nvidia chips accounting for over 60% of production since 2022.

Alibaba’s Qwen head Justin Lin said Chinese AI companies have a sub 20% chance of overtaking frontier models in 3-5 years, citing resource gaps against U.S. rivals.

ElevenLabs launched Scribe v2, a new SOTA transcription model that the company claims achieves the lowest error rate on industry benchmarks.

Meta announced nuclear energy deals with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo for up to 6.6 GW by 2035, making it one of the largest corporate nuclear purchasers in U.S. history.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Healthcare, a new HIPAA-compliant platform now rolling out to major hospitals for clinical and administrative workflows.

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 Elaine X. in Toronto, Canada:

“Recently, scam emails in my Gmail inbox increased — hard to block and never-ending to delete. Instead of constantly cleaning my inbox, I used Gemini to guide me step by step in building an automated workflow in n8n.

Every new email now triggers the workflow, where Gemini analyzes the content using a strict prompt to identify scams and advertorial-style emails. Messages flagged as spam are filtered out before reaching my inbox.”

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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