Welcome, humans.

If you thought Sam’s first response to Elon’s buyout offer was hardcore, wait until you get a load of this.

When asked by reporters “Do you think Musk's approach then is from a position of insecurity about xAI?”, Sam said: “Probably—his whole life is from a position of insecurity.” Daaaaaaaaaaaaaang, Sam!

All drama aside, the internet was awash with takes on why Elon is trying to buy* OpenAI, and there was some confusion over our explanation yesterday, so let’s take a sec to clear it up:

Elon's $97B OpenAI bid isn't about buying—it's about blocking.

Sam and company say OpenAI and its mission are not for sale. But that doesn’t matter. The takeover “bid” is more like a clever legal play than a serious purchase offer.

Elon is trying to establish a “fair market value” for OpenAI the non-profit so its assets are too expensive for Sam and OpenAI the for-profit to buy on the cheap.

Here's why: When a non-profit converts to for-profit, it needs to sell its assets at “fair market value.” It's a whole legal thing to prevent tax dodging—here’s Marc Andressen’s explanation of how this process works (full interview for context).

OpenAI's last valuation was around $150B, but experts thought the non-profit could sell for $30-40B. Whether OpenAI accepts or not (they won't), Elon just gave regulators a hard-to-ignore benchmark for what the company's worth—basically making the conversion super complicated.

P.S: If you want the backstory on why Elon’s suing Sam, we made a NotebookLM podcast out of the leaked emails that detail OpenAI’s founding and their falling out.

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• We deep dive into Anthropic’s AI Economics report.

• YouTube added AI dubbing and age ID tools.

• The UK and US skipped Paris AI declaration.

• Thomson Reuters won an AI copyright case over training data.

The state of AI at work (according to Claude)…

Ever wonder how people are actually using AI at work? Not what they say they're using it for, but what they're really doing with it?

Well, Anthropic just released a new report that took a peek under the hood of millions of Claude chats to find out some of those answers:

Today, software engineers and content creators are the power users—they account for almost half of all Claude conversations.

But it's spreading: about 36% of jobs are using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks. Most people (57%) use AI as a collaborator rather than a replacement.

They're using it to:

• Learn new skills and concepts.

• Brainstorm and refine ideas.

• Validate their work.

• Go back and forth on projects.

On the other hand, 43% use AI for straight-up automation (like “write this email” or “fix this code”).

The surprise? It turns out only 4% of all jobs use AI for 75% or more tasks—so the robots aren't stealing too many jobs just yet.

As far as what these folks are using Claude to do, check out this graphic:

Now here's what's interesting about who is using AI:

• Mid-to-high wage workers (think programmers making $75-100K) use it the most.

• Both low-wage jobs (like restaurant workers) and super high-wage jobs (like surgeons) barely use it at all.

• People with bachelor's degrees use it way more than those with either minimal education or advanced degrees.

Keep in mind, this data is just from Claude—not OpenAI. Claude doesn’t have any reasoning models yet, so many specialized professionals (like quants, data scientists, and researchers) are likely using OpenAI's newer o1 and o3-mini models instead. They might not show up in Claude's data, but they're DEFINITELY using AI.

So what are the best AI tools for all these tasks? 

Most professionals aren't picking just one tool—they're building a toolkit. You might use Claude or ChatGPT with Canvas for writing, Claude with Cursor or Github Copilot for coding, and Midjourney or Google’s Imagen 3 for images.

The key is knowing which tool fits which task. For that, we’ve got a special report coming your way soon…

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Treats To Try.

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Around the Horn.

• YouTube expanded its AI tools including auto dubbing and age ID features for creators in its Partner Program.

• The UK and US declined to sign an international AI declaration in Paris, citing national security concerns.

• Capital One launched an AI Chat Concierge to help customers research and purchase vehicles.

• Meta entered talks to acquire Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI, whose chips claimed triple the efficiency of Nvidia's H100 GPUs.

• Thomson Reuters won a landmark AI copyright case against Ross Intelligence, with the judge rejecting the defense’s fair use arguments.

  • Let’s double click on this, because it’s big: 

    • Ross trained their AI on legal summaries from Westlaw (owned by Reuters) to build a competing research tool, but never showed the summaries to users directly.

    • The judge rejected Ross's defense that using content for AI training made it “transformative,” since their end product served the same purpose as Westlaw's.

    • Key precedent: Using copyrighted content as AI training data is still infringement if your final product competes with the original work—we’ll see if that precedent holds up in OpenAI’s case…

Where do you #Neuron?!

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Sandra from Omaha, NE: My assistant, Cheeto, loves your color choices.

A Cat's Commentary.