Tech
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Rani Molla

Waymo announces plans to expand to Boston and Sacramento

Today Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, announced plans to expand its autonomous ride-hailing service to Boston and Sacramento. The service is currently available to the public in six US cities, including Miami, which launched last month.

Waymo has completed 20 million fully autonomous trips and now provides about 400,000 driverless rides per week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday’s earnings call. He added that Waymo will also expand to additional cities in the US, as well as to the UK and Japan.

Boston would be Waymo’s first market in New England, though regulatory hurdles remain. “Before offering fully autonomous rides to Bostonians, we’ll first need the state to legalize fully autonomous vehicles,” the company said.

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Jon Keegan

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 gains financial research, improved coding features

It’s a model-for-model battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, as the startups vie for dominance in AI coding tools.

Not to be outdone by OpenAI’s release today of GPT-5.2-Codex, Anthropic has released a new model that also improves its coding skills: Claude Opus 4.6.

According to the release, the new model now has the ability to perform financial research, adding new utility to its Claude Cowork tool, which recently gained new legal work capabilities that made investors bet against established software companies. This time, the news is sinking financial research firms like Factset and S&P Global.

Claude Opus 4.6 can help with longer, more complex coding projects, and perform more detailed debugging and code review tasks. It also features improvements for its ability to work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Anthropic says that the new model made strides in safety as well, showing extremely low rates of “misaligned behavior.”

Claude Opus 4.6

Claude Opus 4.6

According to the release, the new model now has the ability to perform financial research, adding new utility to its Claude Cowork tool, which recently gained new legal work capabilities that made investors bet against established software companies. This time, the news is sinking financial research firms like Factset and S&P Global.

Claude Opus 4.6 can help with longer, more complex coding projects, and perform more detailed debugging and code review tasks. It also features improvements for its ability to work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Anthropic says that the new model made strides in safety as well, showing extremely low rates of “misaligned behavior.”

tech
Jon Keegan

OpenAI releases its answer to Claude Code, first AI model with "high capability" risk for cybersecurity

AI agents that can write code have quickly become one of the most profitable, and competitive, applications coming from the current crop of AI startups.

Anthropic’s Claude Code is enjoying a moment of popularity among software engineers, and it is shoring up the startup’s revenue projections as it aims for an IPO this year. Claude Code's launch, along with Anthropic's release of Claude Cowork, which is aimed at non-technical users, has been a key force behind software stocks' massive recent underperformance.

Today OpenAI released its latest salvo in the AI code war: GPT-5.3-Codex, an “agentic coding” model that takes its name from OpenAI’s Codex coding app.

OpenAI says that GPT-5.3-Codex is the first model that was “instrumental in creating itself.”

According to the announcement, the new model can be used to build complex websites, interactive games, and achieved a new industry-wide high score on the widely used SWE-Bench Pro software development benchmark test.

But the model is also the first that OpenAI has released that comes with a “High capability” risk for cybersecurity, meaning that the company's evaluations showed that the tool had the potential to be used for sophisticated cyber attacks, though OpenAI says it has added mitigations to prevent such misuse.

Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex

Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex

Today OpenAI released its latest salvo in the AI code war: GPT-5.3-Codex, an “agentic coding” model that takes its name from OpenAI’s Codex coding app.

OpenAI says that GPT-5.3-Codex is the first model that was “instrumental in creating itself.”

According to the announcement, the new model can be used to build complex websites, interactive games, and achieved a new industry-wide high score on the widely used SWE-Bench Pro software development benchmark test.

But the model is also the first that OpenAI has released that comes with a “High capability” risk for cybersecurity, meaning that the company's evaluations showed that the tool had the potential to be used for sophisticated cyber attacks, though OpenAI says it has added mitigations to prevent such misuse.

tech
Rani Molla

Google’s Gemini is gaining but OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the AI chatbot leader

Following Alphabet’s stellar earnings report Wednesday, analysts were quick to declare that the Google parent had blossomed from an AI laggard into a leader. The company posted strong revenue and profit growth, driven in part by heavy investment in artificial intelligence, and noted that its Gemini app had grown to more than 750 million monthly active users.

Still, usage data suggest Gemini remains far behind the market leader — at least as far as usage.

While Gemini is growing faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT — up 19% month over month versus 4% — it still trails by a wide margin in overall usage. In January, Gemini logged more than 2 billion global visits, according to new data from Similarweb, less than half of ChatGPT’s 5.7 billion.

tech
Jon Keegan

OpenAI’s Altman calls Anthropic an “authoritarian company” and says its Super Bowl ad is “deceptive”

Yesterday, Anthropic announced that it intends (for now) to keep its Claude chatbot free of ads. Competitors OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and Google all have expressed plans for ads in some form for their respective AI chatbots.

Anthropic also released cheeky ads depicting scenarios where people are asking questions to a personified version of their AI chatbot, only to recoil in confusion when the response transforms into a creepy ad.

It’s pretty clear that Anthropic was poking fun at the market-leading AI chatbot, ChatGPT. The characters playing the chatbot had the pitch-perfect tone of an eager-to-please ChatGPT session.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to be a good sport, calling the ads funny, but clearly they struck a nerve, prompting a 400-word post on X in which he called the ads “deceptive,” accused Anthropic of “doublespeak,” and said it was an “authoritarian company” that was heading down a “dark path.”

Altman pushed back on the depiction of how such creepy ads could show up in chats, saying that OpenAI has pledged to never weave ads into chat conversations, knowing it users would reject that.

Previewing how the rival AI startups might battle each other in the marketplace, Altman attacked Anthropic’s focus on paid subscription, rather than generous limits for free users (which appears to be working out pretty well for Anthropic):

“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.”

Both companies are racing to launch an IPO this year, which will only raise the stakes for this billionaire beef.

Rani Molla
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