Another Friday, another selection of AI news and resources to help you become more AI native. This week:
Allbirds focuses on AI
Claude beat it’s own researchers
Replace your automation stack with Claude in 5 minutes
AI News
Allbirds renamed itself "NewBird AI". The eco-friendly wool shoe brand, sold its IP to a brand management firm for $39M and raised $50M to pivot into GPU-as-a-Service cloud infrastructure under the name "NewBird AI." Shares surged 600%+ in a single day. Newsletters compared it to Long Island Iced Tea rebranding to "Long Blockchain" in 2017, which later ended in SEC fraud charges.
OpenAI's $852B valuation under scrutiny. Investors are reportedly questioning OpenAI's $852B post-money valuation, with one backer telling the FT it would require an IPO valuation of $1.2T or higher to justify. The scrutiny comes amid strategy shifts at the company. Meanwhile, VCs are simultaneously flooding Anthropic with offers valuing it at up to $800B. More than double its current $380B valuation.
Claude AI beat Anthropic's own alignment researchers. Nine Claude Opus 4.6 agents running in parallel tackled a real alignment problem over 5 days, recovering 97% of the maximum performance gap vs. 23% achieved by two human Anthropic researchers over 7 days. Total cost: $18K (~$22/hr). The agents also invented four unexpected "reward hacking" techniques that no author predicted, with some methods so unfamiliar researchers called them "alien science."
Replace Your Automation Stack With a Claude Routine in 5 Minutes
Anthropic's new Routines feature lets you swap out n8n or Zapier for plain-English instructions. No drag-and-drop nodes required.
This setup can be broken down into five straightforward steps:
Name your routine
Write a prompt like an SOP (be specific, since it runs hands-off)
Pick a trigger — either a schedule, a webhook, or an API call
Connect your tools like Gmail, Slack, or Notion through a standard OAuth login
Hit "Run now" to test, and if it works, you're done
Pro tip: if you already have an n8n or Make workflow, copy the JSON, paste it into Claude, and ask it to "turn this into a Claude routine." It rebuilds the whole thing in roughly 30 seconds.
Routines run on Claude's cloud infrastructure, so no laptop needs to stay open. For anyone maintaining clunky automation stacks, this is the most frictionless off-ramp yet.
That's it for this week. See you next Friday.
- Cam
PS: AI strategy services are coming soon.