Today we are looking back over an absolutely transformational month in AI. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. As part of my collaboration with KPMG, each month at the beginning of the month, we do a little bit of a recap of the previous month that preceded it. For the listeners who are somewhat less regular and don't have time to catch every show, it's meant to serve as a quick, simple recap of the key themes. Meanwhile, for those of you who are here every day, it's to put a fine point on any changes that the previous month represented.
Despite the incredible amount of attention around it, not every month in AI is huge. However, February of 2026 was this was the month that crystallized for a number of different groups that, to quote one of the viral pieces from the month, something big is happening. And in fact, one of the things that made the month so interesting was the extent to which the broad recognition that something had changed and that something big was indeed happening was the way that that realization cascaded across all sorts of different groups.
Let's talk about the AI insiders first. This is basically the people like you guys, the enfranchised, highly engaged, probably using vibe coding tools type of AI users who actually pay attention to when new models launch and what new capabilities they have. This is the group for whom basically the period from the holiday break at the end of last year up until now has been a steady realization and embracing of the idea that the generation of models that came around last November represented something meaningfully different than those that came before.
The core and first manifestation of this was, of course, around software engineering. And one of the people who's been in the eye of the storm and communicating what so many others have felt is former OpenAI founder Andrej Karpathy. About a week ago, he tweeted, "It's hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months. Not gradually and over time in the progress as usual way, but specifically this last December." He then goes on to explain exactly what happened.
Effectively, he says coding agents basically didn't work before December and they basically do now. As he puts it, the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence, and tenacity, and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.
Programming, he writes, is becoming unrecognizable. The era where you type code into an editor is done, he says, and instead we are now in the era of spinning up AI agents, telling them what to do in natural language, and then managing their work. The biggest prize, he says, is about orchestration. How many of these agents can you have going at once in a way that actually adds up to something real? He concludes this is nowhere near business as usual in software. And I think this does a pretty good job of summarizing what has shifted.
In short, agents that could actually do work, whom you give not a plan but just a goal and let them come up with a plan, are now for many of these most enfranchised users the primary way that they get value out of AI. And what's more, in February, this was given a name and a face and an icon in what was first named Claudebot, for a very short time named Moltbot, and ultimately finalized as OpenClaw.
OpenClaw has been so far the biggest, clearest manifestation of the change in autonomy ambition. OpenClaw created a process by which users could give those powerful new generation of models access to their systems and let them actually do meaningful work on their behalf. It started with simple personal assistant type things. Indeed, the OpenClaw homepage still says cleans your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for your flights. But that is 100% not where it stayed.
Almost immediately, people were using OpenClaw for much more extensive and much more ambitious autonomous or semi-autonomous work. I did a show around mid-month about the 10-agent team that I had built, which included one developer agent, two researchers, five project managers, one chief of staff, and a partridge in a pear tree. Because of OpenClaw, Mac minis and for some even Mac Studios became the hot new visualization of the new era of AI.
And again, what's super important to point out is that despite OpenClaw being very meaningfully not for beginners, something that indeed requires a ton of technical work and frankly beating your head against the wall as you sort through just legions of different problems, despite all of that, it was not just developers who were excited about it. It was all sorts of different types of people.
I have no better evidence for this than the response to Claw Camp, which is the self-directed program I put together that basically took the process that I had gone through to figure out how to build both my first agent and then the agent team and turned it into a sequence that other people could follow. It is not an easy sequence. It takes a lot of time and a lot of hard work. And yet nearly 5,500 people are doing it right now.
By the end of the month, we were starting to see the manifestation of ideas that have long lurked around the edges of AI as some exciting future potential, but which were now coming to the fore. Solopreneur Ben Sarah by himself built a company called Pulsia, which is an AI for running autonomous AI companies.
Basically, you sign up for Pulsia, give it an idea, or just ask it to surprise you, where it'll go do some research and come up with a relevant idea that seems related to you, and then it will build a company around it. Pulsia gives it access to everything from GitHub to Meta ads. Basically everything that you could need to run an online business. The company is up to an annual run rate of over $1.25 million in just a couple of weeks.
So if this whole increase in autonomy ambition was the key theme represented by OpenClaw, wouldn't you think that all the big labs would be racing to catch up with that? Indeed, you would. And indeed, that's what happened. At the beginning of the month, OpenAI released the Codex app, the latest in their push to catch up with and then eventually try to exceed Claude Code. And by the middle of the month, they had made another huge move by hiring the creator of OpenClaw to build these types of systems inside the context of OpenAI.
Many thought that the whole situation surrounding OpenClaw was a bit of a bobble for Anthropic, given that it had originally been named Claudebot after Anthropic's Claude, which instead of embracing, Anthropic asked for a name change, which is what led to Moltbot and eventually OpenClaw. Still, pretty much everyone assumed that the type of features that OpenClaw made available were likely to come to Claude Code pretty soon.
And sure enough, over the last week and a half or so, we saw first Anthropic release remote control. Basically, a way where you can move from a Claude Code session on your computer to managing it from your phone while you're on the go. This being, of course, one of the main appeals of OpenClaw, the fact that you get to interact with it through Telegram or WhatsApp or another app on your phone. And we also saw Anthropic release scheduled tasks inside of not Claude Code, but CoWork.
Also, over the last week, Perplexity announced Perplexity Computer. Now, they've been working on this for the last couple of months, but it's very much playing in the same space as OpenClaw in that you give it a wildly ambitious task to be built and it can just go figure out how to do it. Microsoft announced Copilot tasks, and we've also heard reports that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is actually using OpenClaw and encouraging his team to check it out and so on and so forth. We also got Notion custom agents, and basically I think you can assume that this clawification of AI, in other words, the move to actual agentic AI, is going to continue to proliferate across the industry.
Now as we transition to the next group that woke up, it's important to note again that the people who were Claude coding and OpenClawing weren't just the devs. In preparation for a segment about these new tools, CNBC's Deirdre Bosa went to try to build her own version of Monday.com with Claude CoWork just to understand and share with her audience what's actually possible. She figured it wouldn't work, but it would be a good way to show people the current state of the technology.
An hour later, she writes, "I literally have my own Monday.com that's plugged into my calendar and Gmail and surfaced a kid's birthday that was not anywhere on my radar and I need to get a gift for." Finance and markets content creator Joe Weisenthal was actually a couple weeks ahead of everyone else, starting to play around with Claude Code in a big way back in January, and in many ways preceding the realization that the rest of Wall Street would have coming into February, because if one group that woke up in February was the AI insiders, the other group was Wall Street.
February was the month of the SaaS apocalypse, and it actually started off at the end of January when, after Google shared the demo version of Genie 3 where you could create 60-second immersive worlds, a bunch of gaming industry publisher stocks fell. But that would be just the very beginning. But the big actual story of this SaaS apocalypse would end up being that basically every time Anthropic announced some new plugin for Claude Code or CoWork, a set of stocks that were somewhere between directly and nominally related to that plugin's focus would just absolutely crater.
On February 10th, Bloomberg wrote that Wall Street's new hot trade was dumping stocks that were in AI's crosshairs. And it was not just one category. We saw this in games. We saw this in productivity software. We saw it in finance. We saw it in legal. On February 10th, the Wall Street Journal went so far as to call Wall Street's hot new trade dumping stocks that, in their words, were in AI's crosshairs. And remember, this is not just one category. This is games, legal, software, general productivity software.
IBM seeing their worst single-day drop in 25 years because Anthropic wrote a blog about its Cobalt tool, which had been announced months earlier. All of this was the perfect caustic environment for Catrini Research to drop their highly viral piece called "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," which basically articulated a theoretical doom loop scenario that led to utter economic catastrophe.
Despite that report producing a lot of good counter conversation as well, when in the middle of last week Block announced that it was cutting 4,000 employees, about 40% of its overall staff, many pointed to it as evidence of the exact sort of white-collar carnage that the Catrini report was discussing. Now, there has of course been a lot of debate about the extent to which it might be the biggest case of AI washing we've seen so far. But this is where the environment is heading out of February and into March.
Wall Street is extremely jumpy when it comes to AI. And this time it's not because of the size or circularity of infrastructure deals, but because AI might be too good. Then of course there's Washington. Not only was February the month Washington woke up to AI, but that the rest of us woke up to the complication of the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley when it comes to AI. I just did an extended episode about this and we talked about the latest in the headlines.
But of course the TLDR is that through a series of steps seemingly going back to the Nicolas Maduro Venezuela raid, there was a negotiation where Anthropic wanted specific redline carveouts around AI being used for autonomous weapons and for domestic mass surveillance, with the White House instead wanting the standard to be any lawful uses. Now, of course, this disagreement wasn't just about these specific uses. It was much more about who gets to determine for what and how AI is used.
It was the first manifestation of what was always an inevitable power struggle, even if it happened in a very ugly way. Indeed, before the fight took its most dramatic turn, already members of Congress like Thom Tillis were pretty disgusted around how the whole thing was happening. Tillis said, "Why in the hell are we having this discussion in public? Why isn't this occurring in a boardroom or in the secretary's office? I mean, this is sophomoric."
It of course only got more so as President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that not only would the US government not be working with Anthropic, but that they were going to be designating them a supply chain risk, arguing that that meant that other contractors of the US government would also have to drop their relationships with Anthropic, which if it came to pass would have some pretty serious and dramatic implications. Now, this particular manifestation of the battle itself isn't even done yet. And again, it is just the first in what will be a much bigger power struggle in the years to come.
So those were the big things. AI insiders woke up and changed their level of autonomy ambition. Broader white-collar workers got dragged along and started to use things like Claude Code, Claude CoWork, and even OpenClaw. This spilled over into a recognition on Wall Street that, as Matt Schrader's post put it, something big was happening, which led to lots of chaos in the markets. And to cap it all off, we have, of course, the absolute bun fight that is Anthropic versus the Pentagon.
In terms of other key details, a couple things that are worth noting, especially as we keep an eye on what we expect in March. First of all, while we didn't get the much-anticipated DeepSeek 4, we did get Seedance 2.0 from ByteDance, which is a video generation model that had many people in the AI industry asking whether it was the first example of China open-weight models not only catching up with the US, but actually exceeding it.
The big one to watch for coming up in March is of course that DeepSeek event which people have been predicting as coming next week for basically every week for the last four weeks. Anthropic added Sonnet 4.6 to Opus 4.6 making a complete 4.6 suite and Google dropped Gemini 3.1 Pro. One interesting note about Google's releases is that they're very clearly flexing the opportunities around multimodal, although exactly how that's going to hit and what it's going to matter for, especially as everyone is just talking about code generation, remains to be seen.
Capping the month in models off was also another Google model, Nano Banana 2, which was actually more of a functional upgrade than anything else, making Nano Banana much faster and cheaper, although also improving things like text handling and text reasoning. One final story from the month that I think does a good job of capturing where we are.
When METR finally shared where Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6 were on their long-horizon task study, both were high, but Opus 4.6 especially was basically off the charts at this point. In other words, we are in uncharted territory where even the metric that became one of the most, if not the most important metric in some ways of showing AI progress last year just can't keep up any longer.
And with March now here, we could be heading for something else huge. My X/Twitter today is filled with rumors of GPT not 5.3, but 5.4 and a lot of breathless discussion about how much better it is. We'll see if that's actually true, but no matter what, 2026 is off to a rollicking start. And that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching. As always, thanks to KPMG for sponsoring the monthly recap.
