Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 11, 2026

Anthropic is updating its Claude add-ins for Excel and PowerPoint with shared context, reusable workflows, and broader cloud support.

Anthropic is adding three new features to its Claude for Excel and Claude for PowerPoint add-ins. The two add-ins now share conversation context, so Claude can read cell values, write formulas, and edit slides in a single session without users having to repeat information.

The company is also introducing what it calls Skills, reusable workflows that teams can share as one-click actions for tasks like financial model reviews or deck analysis. A preinstalled starter set covers common use cases.

Both add-ins are now available through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry, letting companies pick the cloud provider that works best for them. All features are available to paying users on Mac and Windows.

Many of these capabilities are already built into the Claude app itself, particularly in Cowork mode, which is now also part of Microsoft's Copilot.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 11, 2026

AI research

OpenAI's new training dataset teaches AI models which instructions to trust

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 11, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has launched the "Anthropic Institute," an internal think tank dedicated to studying how powerful AI affects society, the economy, and security. The institute will be led by co-founder Jack Clark, who is taking on a new role as "Head of Public Benefit."

The institute plans to research how AI is transforming jobs, what new risks emerge from misuse, what "values" AI systems express, and how humans can maintain control over self-improving AI systems.

The team consists of around 30 people drawn from three existing research groups: the Frontier Red Team, the Societal Impacts team, and the economics research team. Early hires include Matt Botvinick (formerly Google DeepMind), Anton Korinek (University of Virginia), and Zoe Hitzig (previously at OpenAI).

The launch comes at a turbulent time for the company. Anthropic has sued 17 federal agencies and the Executive Office of the President after being classified as a supply chain risk. According to The Verge, Clark said he has "no concerns" about research funding. Anthropic is also opening an office in Washington, D.C.

Comment Source: Anthropic | The Verge

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 11, 2026

AI in practice

An AI agent hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform in two hours using a decades-old technique

Security firm Codewall turned an offensive AI agent loose on McKinsey’s internal AI platform Lilli, a system used by over 43,000 employees for strategy work, client research, and document analysis. No credentials, no insider knowledge, no human assistance. Within two hours, the agent had full read and write access to the production database.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Following a series of allegedly AI-caused outages, Amazon is turning its senior engineers into human filters for AI-generated code.

"Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," writes Dave Treadwell, Senior Vice President at Amazon, in an internal email obtained by the Financial Times. A briefing identifies a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," linked to "Gen-AI assisted changes." Recently, there have been reports that Amazon's AI coding tools may have also contributed to two AWS outages.

The consequence: Junior and mid-level engineers now require sign-off from a senior engineer for all AI-assisted code changes. Standard code reviews have always existed at Amazon, but a dedicated approval requirement specifically for AI-generated output is new. Experienced developers are thus effectively becoming human quality filters for machine-generated code. Their role is shifting: away from building, toward reviewing what the machine has built.

Among the causes, the internal briefing cites "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established."

Comment Source: FT

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Nvidia and Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, are entering a long-term partnership. Thinking Machines will receive at least one gigawatt of compute power through Nvidia's new Vera Rubin systems to train its own AI models. Deployment is set to begin early next year.

Nvidia has also taken a financial stake in Thinking Machines, though the exact amount wasn't disclosed. The startup had already raised around $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of $12 billion. Nvidia was an investor in that round as well. Most recently, Thinking Machines is reportedly seeking another funding round. The startup has also seen some departures - co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI.

Together, the two companies plan to develop training and deployment systems for Nvidia hardware and make frontier AI models available to businesses and researchers. Murati left OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Thinking Machines Lab.

Comment Source: Nvidia

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Meta has acquired Moltbook, a platform best described as a Reddit for AI agents. Founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr are joining Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Axios reports. The purchase price wasn't disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in mid-March.

Moltbook launched in late January as an experimental space where AI agents could connect and coordinate tasks. Schlicht built most of it with help from his own AI assistant. Since then, two studies have deflated the sci-fi hype around the project: the actual number of agents appears far lower than claimed, and researchers found no real social interaction on the platform.

So what does Meta see in it? In a blog post obtained by Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah explains: "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf. This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." Existing customers can keep using Moltbook temporarily.

The acquisition follows OpenAI's recent hire of Peter Steinberger, developer of the related agent framework OpenClaw.

Comment Source: Axios

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Eon Systems says it has connected a complete fruit fly brain emulation to a virtual body, producing multiple behaviors for the first time. The emulation covers over 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses.

According to co-founder Alex Wissner-Gross, the startup mapped the fruit fly's neural wiring from electron microscopy data and connected it to a virtual fly body running in MuJoCo, a physics simulation engine.

Previous projects like OpenWorm worked with far smaller nervous systems, just 302 neurons, or relied on machine learning techniques like reinforcement learning instead of actual brain data. Eon takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than building AI, the startup wants to digitally copy and simulate real brains, neuron by neuron. The fruit fly is just the starting point. Within two years, Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain with 70 million neurons. The long-term goal is simulating a human brain.

Eon published the code for its brain model on GitHub, though it's based on a paper by Philip Shiu et al. that already appeared in Nature in 2024. The actually novel part, connecting the brain emulation to a simulated body, hasn't been released yet.

Comment Source: Substack

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

AI research

Philosopher David Chalmers: Current AI interpretability methods miss what matters most

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta and Turing Award winner, has raised over $1 billion for his new startup Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) - making it Europe's largest seed funding round ever. Investors include Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, and France's Cathay Innovation.

The company was valued at $3.5 billion before the funding round. Alexandre LeBrun, former head of French startup Nabla, serves as CEO, while LeCun will take the role of board chair. The company is launching with about a dozen employees spread across Paris, New York, Singapore, and Montreal.

AMI Labs aims to build so-called world models that understand the physical environment - with applications in areas like robotics and transportation. According to LeCun and LeBrun, today's language models aren't up to the task. Meta isn't an investor but is expected to partner with AMI Labs.

Comment Source: AMILabs | FT