The Rundown AI / Articles / AI / Sora breaks bad with Hollywood

Sora breaks bad with Hollywood

PLUS: Patients control AI and robotics with thought

Zach Mink

October 21, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s Sora AI platform has seemingly been breaking bad on celebrity likenesses since its launch — but Bryan Cranston just made it literal.

With a new joint statement from the AI leader and Hollywood agencies that vows to tighten guardrails, one of the AI video app’s biggest viral strengths is quickly becoming a liability.

In today’s AI rundown:

OpenAI to tighten Sora guardrails after Hollywood complaints
Anthropic brings Claude Code to the browser
Automate performance reviews and PIPs
Napster pivots to AI with holograhphic companions
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📺 OpenAI to tighten Sora guardrails after Hollywood complaints

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI just released a joint statement alongside actor Bryan Cranston, major Hollywood agencies, and the SAG-AFTRA union, saying it will ‘strengthen guardrails’ on Sora 2 over replication of celebrity’s likenesses and voices.

The details:

Cranston found AI videos of himself circulating on Sora 2, including one showing him taking selfies with Michael Jackson — despite never opting in.
OpenAI apologized for the “unintentional generations”, vowing to implement stronger guardrails in a “productive collaboration” with the union and agencies.
The statement also rallied support for the NO FAKES Act, calling for protections against unauthorized AI replicas of performers' voices and likenesses.
SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin warned that Cranston represents "countless performers" at risk, calling opt-ins "the only way to do business" with AI firms.

Why it matters: Sora has been breaking bad (🥁) since launch, and it’s no surprise to see action from estates like Martin Luther King Jr. and now Cranston. While there have been opt-ins from celebrities like Mark Cuban, much of the virality of the platform has been built on what now feels like a very murky legal area for AI and digital likenesses.

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ANTHROPIC

⚙️ Anthropic brings Claude Code to the browser

Image source: Claude

The Rundown: Anthropic just introduced Claude Code on the web in research preview, allowing developers to code directly from browsers instead of in a terminal — with the agentic assistant also able to handle multiple tasks at once in the cloud.

The details:

Users can connect GitHub repositories and assign tasks, with the coding assistant able to run several instances at once with real-time progress tracking.
Each coding session happens in its own isolated workspace, preventing any single task from accessing files or networks outside its designated boundaries.
Pro and Max users can now access Claude Code via browser or iOS app, assigning tasks and getting automatic pull requests when work is complete.

Why it matters: Bringing Claude Code out of command-line tools feels like a massive convenience move for today’s on-the-go era of work, providing a streamlined experience for routine tasks. The web interface is also likely a more accessible way for less experienced users to experiment with the tool in a less intimidating interface.

AI TRAINING

💯 Automate performance reviews and PIPs

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect ChatGPT to your Google Drive knowledge base and then use agent mode to automatically transform messy employee notes into structured performance reviews and improvement plans.

Step-by-step:

Create a Google Doc called "Employee Review" with rough notes for each employee (name, role, KPIs, feedback)
In ChatGPT, click "+" → "Connected apps" and enable Google Drive access
Prompt with system instruction + templates: "Analyze my 'Employee Review' doc and create performance reviews and 30/60/90 PIPs using these formats: [paste templates with SMART goals structure]"
Enable Agent Mode and prompt: "Update the Employee Review doc with the structured sections for each person"
Schedule monthly automation: "Run third Saturday at 9 AM, update Employee Review doc from latest notes, regenerate reviews and PIPs"

Pro tip: Keep adding rough notes weekly — the scheduled agent consolidates and formats monthly. If the agent can't edit initially, grant permissions and re-run.

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NAPSTER

🪞 Napster pivots to AI with holographic companions

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Former file-sharing and music streaming service Napster just launched Napster 26, pivoting to an AI platform with a $99 holographic display that projects 3D AI assistants above Mac screens without the need for glasses.

The details:

The platform offers 15,000+ AI companions like coding specialists or wellness coaches, which appear as 3D holograms through the Napster View display.
Users can also create AI "digital twins" of themselves that Napster claims can attend meetings, answer questions, and manage an online presence.
The company was acquired for $207M this year by 3D technology firm Infinite Reality, which transitioned the music platform to an AI companion product.
Napster 26 launches for Mac with subscriptions starting at $19 monthly and the View hardware priced at $99 or coming free with annual plans.

Why it matters: While Napster’s brand may evoke nostalgia for the 90’s kids, this is a pretty wild “rebrand”. AI companies have been pushing AI that can view user’s actions, and this hologram takes that experience very literal — though given xAI’s Grok companion moves, there may be more of a market for this experience than we think.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

⚙️ Claude Code - Anthropic’s agentic coding assistant, now available on web
🤖 Lindy AI CMO - A marketing team powered by AI agents
🐠 Fish Audio S1 - Expressive text-to-speech model with voice cloning
💨 Claude 4.5 Haiku - Anthropic’s new small, cost-efficient model

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic launched Claude for Life Sciences with new scientific platform connectors, AI skills for lab protocols, and improved performance on biomedical tasks.

Researchers found that LLMs can develop "brain rot" when exposed to low-quality web content, losing reasoning, memory, and safety skills that stay even after retraining.

Krea open-sourced its realtime-video model, a 14B parameter system allowing users to create, modify, and restyle video outputs via a near-instant stream.

Elon Musk announced that xAI is postponing the launch of Grokipedia to the end of the week, saying more work still needs to be done to “purge out the propaganda.”

DeepSeek released DeepSeek OCR, a tool that compresses image-based docs 10x while retaining 97% of the information, enabling AI models to handle much longer files.

Wikipedia revealed that its page views have dropped 8% in the last year, attributing the decrease to AI models scraping content over directly visiting the site.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Carolyn B. in the United States:

"I teach asynchronous courses and I use AI across all aspects of my work, from generated subject matter content, instructional design of student learning experiences, storyboarding media and interactive assets, styling HTML/CSS to produce elegant inviting course pages, configuring and embedding chatbots to support student engagement, evaluating student submissions, numerous admin tasks…, and analyzing the effectiveness of all of the above."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.