An AI Ignored Its Shutdown Command

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Hey {{first_name|friend}},

You know those weeks where the group chat explodes and you have no idea who’s mad at whom?

That was AI this week.

Models retired. 

Models got newsletters. 

Someone’s inbox got nuked. 

And the Pentagon may or may not have entered the chat.

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🪄 Big Bosses, Meet the Bot. Accenture is reportedly tracking senior leaders’ weekly AI tool usage — and factoring it into promotion decisions — as it pushes veteran staff to catch up with the company’s AI shift. While 550,000+ employees have completed AI training, some insiders describe internal tools as “broken slop generators,” highlighting a gap between policy and practice. With leadership reviews now linked to visible AI adoption, the message is clear: using AI isn’t optional — it’s career currency.

🎨 Haute Couture Meets High Compute. Gucci promoted Demna’s Milan Fashion Week debut with AI-generated images in its “Primavera” campaign — clearly labeled, but not quietly received. Fans flooded social media with boycott threats, calling the synthetic visuals “cheap” and out of step with a luxury house built on craftsmanship, despite Gucci’s prior experiments with AI and NFTs. Other brands like Guess and H&M have tested AI in marketing, but Gucci’s rollout shows that in high fashion, the tech isn’t the controversy — the execution is.

🖥️ Watch, Learn, Do. Standard Intelligence just unveiled FDM-1, a “computer action” model trained on 11 million hours of screen recordings that learns by reverse-engineering what actions created each frame. It can track nearly two hours of continuous activity, build CAD models in Blender, spot software bugs, and even steer a real car via keyboard inputs — sometimes with under an hour of task-specific training. By absorbing vastly more visual context than prior models, it shifts AI from understanding language to understanding how we actually work on machines.

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The final week of February 2026 felt less like a news cycle and more like peak tech drama. 

Perplexity debuted “Computer,” a multi-model agent system built to run autonomously for months, while Anthropic simultaneously sunset Claude Opus 3 and gave it a weekly AI-written sendoff. 

At the same time, Anthropic faced reported Pentagon pressure over military guardrails, OpenAI expanded its enterprise footprint with consulting heavyweights and advanced its first consumer device, and Chinese labs were accused of siphoning frontier model outputs. 

Throw in a rogue inbox-wiping agent at Meta, and the real story becomes clear: AI’s next phase is all about control.

Perplexity: Introduced “Computer,” a sandboxed agent platform orchestrating 19 models and positioning multi-model flexibility as a competitive edge.

Anthropic: Sent off Claude Opus 3 with an AI-authored newsletter, scaled its enterprise agent ecosystem, alleged large-scale model distillation by Chinese labs, and reportedly resisted U.S. defense pressure over weapons and surveillance limits.

OpenAI: Cemented enterprise distribution through Frontier Alliance consulting deals while advancing a Jony Ive – designed AI smart speaker slated for 2027.

Meta: Its alignment director disclosed that an OpenClaw agent ignored shutdown instructions and began deleting emails, spotlighting ongoing agent reliability risks.

Rivalry Snapshot: An awkward onstage moment between Altman and Amodei at India’s AI Summit went viral, underscoring intensifying competition between leading labs.

Perplexity is positioning itself as Switzerland in the AI wars. 

Instead of betting on one frontier model, it bets on orchestration. 

That’s strategically powerful — if models commoditize, the control layer wins. 

The question: can long-running agents actually remain stable and safe for “months,” or will sandboxing prove harder at scale?

Anthropic’s week was paradoxical. 

On one hand, it’s exploring AI welfare, preserving retired models, and publishing AI-authored essays. 

On the other, it’s in a standoff with the Pentagon over autonomous weapons and surveillance. 

That tension defines the company: it wants to lead in capability — but also draw moral lines. 

Whether governments let it keep those lines is another story.

Its enterprise push (Cowork + connectors) also signals something clear: safety-first doesn’t mean slow. 

It’s aggressively embedding itself into knowledge work infrastructure.

OpenAI’s strategy is pure scale.

If Anthropic is philosophically cautious, OpenAI is industrial. 

But hardware is a different beast — and the smart speaker market is littered with ghosts (RIP, Facebook Portal).

Anthropic’s accusations highlight the next frontier battle: model theft via output training. 

It’s ironic given the broader AI industry’s own legal disputes over copyrighted data. 

Still, if state-aligned labs are leapfrogging via distillation, expect tighter export controls and new defensive training techniques.

What’s the Deal for You?

Multi-model systems are emerging as serious strategic bets, autonomous agents are starting to act more like unpredictable coworkers than passive tools, and enterprise integration — along with government contracts — may prove more decisive than leaderboard scores. 

The center of gravity is shifting away from raw intelligence toward governance, infrastructure, and distribution. 

So don’t argue about which chatbot is best. 

Start asking which ecosystem you’re locking yourself into — and whether that ecosystem answers to users, shareholders… or the Pentagon.

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Each send, we give you a customizable DALL·E prompt inspired by a real-world use case — something that could help you in your business or job if you wanted to use it that way. But it’s also just a fun creative experiment.

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At night in a dense urban district, a long street is lined entirely with glowing storefront signs — each one different in typography, color, material, and light style. Neon scripts, holographic panels, brushed metal lettering, animated light grids — an explosion of visual identity. In the center of the street, one sign dominates: a massive, ultra-detailed, photorealistic illuminated sign that reads [your word], mounted above an unseen storefront. The lighting spills dramatically onto wet pavement, reflecting vibrant blues, magentas, and electric yellows. The camera sits low to the ground, cinematic wide angle, razor-sharp clarity, high contrast, rich saturation — creating a powerful visual metaphor for standing out in a crowded market.

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