The Rundown AI / Articles / AI / The White House rethinks its Anthropic fight

The White House rethinks its Anthropic fight

PLUS: Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

Zach Mink

May 1, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The government spent months escalating its fight with Anthropic. Then Mythos showed up with cyber capabilities powerful enough to make the feud look a lot less simple.

The White House is now trying to thread an awkward needle: keep the model close for national security, limit who else can use it, and avoid looking like it is fully backing down from the Pentagon's hard line all at the same time.

In today’s AI rundown:

The White House’s Anthropic stance gets complicated
Gemini comes into Google-powered cars
Stress test business ideas with Perplexity
OpenAI finds source of ChatGPT's goblin obsession
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC VS. THE WHITE HOUSE

🔒 The White House’s Anthropic stance gets complicated

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The White House is pushing back on Anthropic’s plan to more than double the private sector’s access to its Mythos AI over compute concerns for its own use, just as a national security memo prepares to address parts of the Pentagon feud.

The details:

Anthropic wanted access expanded from about 50 firms to nearly 120, with U.S. officials citing compute strains that could impact government use.
A White House AI memo will reportedly push multi-vendor AI adoption for agencies and address some of Anthropic's worries that led to the initial feud.
Axios reported that the government action would “allow agencies to get around the supply chain risk designation”, despite the current legal battle.
GPT 5.5 reached similar cyber capabilities to Mythos, with former AI czar David Sacks saying all frontier models will reach the level in 6 months.

Why it matters: The White House is changing its tune on Anthropic, seemingly largely in part to wanting more access of its own to the powerful Mythos. But with Sec. of War Pete Hegseth saying Thursday that Anthropic is “run by an ideological lunatic”, there is some internal division between wanting to bury the hatchet vs. continuing the fight.

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The vanishing cost gap between text and video
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Architecting just-in-time content generation pipelines
Streamlining corporate knowledge-sharing operations

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GOOGLE

🚗 Gemini moves into Google-powered cars

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google is beginning its Gemini upgrade for vehicles with Google built-in, swapping out Assistant for a more conversational system that handles navigation, messages, music, vehicle questions, and hands-free controls across compatible cars.

The details:

Drivers can ask for changes to car settings like temperature, control the radio, and pull from Google Maps for customized updates or route planning.
A beta Gemini Live mode supports conversations for learning and brainstorming, with Gmail, Calendar, and Home integrations coming later.
Gemini can also pull vehicle-specific answers from manufacturer manuals for car assistance and battery status or charging stations for EV cars.
The rollout comes to compatible cars in the U.S. first, with General Motors also announcing the feature for ~4M of its vehicles from model year 2022 onward.

Why it matters: One day, AI integrations in cars will be as common as a radio (and eventually the systems will all be driving the cars, too) — but for now, we’re still in the infancy of the rollout. These initial features are fairly basic, but a step on the path towards ‘smart car’ systems of the AI age that provide a serious intelligence upgrade.

AI TRAINING

🤔 Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Perplexity Deep Research to stress test any business idea. Save the prompt below once and rerun it on every idea you have to see what’s feasible to build.

Step-by-step:

Open Perplexity and switch to Deep Research mode. This works on the free plan (5 queries/day) and is basically a hidden version of Perplexity Computer
Paste this prompt with your idea in the chat, hit run, and walk away for 5 to 6 minutes. Perplexity does the research and builds the slide deck in the same run
Save the prompt somewhere you will actually use it again, like in a dedicated Perplexity space
Then, every Saturday morning, take one idea off your list and run it. You will burn through a year of half-evaluated ideas in a month

Pro tip: Build variants. A 6-slide version for a co-founder pitch, a version that compares two ideas, or a 90-day MVP plan for ideas that already cleared validation.

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AI RESEARCH

🧌 OpenAI finds source of ChatGPT's goblin obsession

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just traced ChatGPT's habit of peppering its responses with goblins, gremlins, and assorted fantasy creatures back to a single reward signal in its 'Nerdy' personality, which ended up bleeding into model behavior throughout releases.

The details:

After ChatGPT-5.1's November launch, 'goblin' mentions jumped 175% in user conversations, with 'gremlin' up 52% and other creatures seeing similar spikes.
When OpenAI mapped creature use across personalities, the Nerdy preset lit up, driving two-thirds of all goblin mentions from just 2.5% of traffic.
Even users who skipped Nerdy got goblins, with fine-tuning loops recycling the creature-favored outputs back into ChatGPT's default mode.
OpenAI retired Nerdy in March and shipped GPT-5.5 with a Codex prompt specifically banning goblins, gremlins, ogres, trolls, raccoons, and pigeons.

Why it matters: ChatGPT’s goblin-mode is a fun little quirk for your Friday, and another example of how weird LLMs can truly be. A reward in a single personality mode led to a pattern of creature preferences that trickled across chats around the globe. Just like Anthropic’s Golden Gate Claude, we might need a standalone GoblinGPT.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

💳 Link - Stripe's wallet for AI agents with human approval on every purchase
🔐 Claude Security - Enterprise tool for scanning and patching vulnerabilities
🎨 Imagine Agent - xAI's agentic canvas in Grok for image and video creation
🤖 Cloud Computer - Manus's cloud for always-on agents, scrapers, more

📰 Everything else in AI today

Meta opened its ads platform to third-party AI tools via a new MCP server, allowing advertisers to manage campaigns through Claude, Cursor, or any connected agent.

OpenAI announced that it has already surpassed its 2029 Stargate goal of securing 10 GW of compute, with 3 GW added in the last 3 months.

Elon Musk revealed during questioning in his trial vs. OpenAI that xAI has used distillation techniques to train on OpenAI models.

Anthropic launched the public beta for Claude Security, a system that leverages Opus 4.7 to scan codebases for vulnerabilities and help enterprises generate patches.

Cursor released Security Review, which also deploys autonomous agents to check for vulnerabilities and run scheduled codebase scans with results posted to Slack.

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 Anonymous:

"Like millions around the globe, I am a recovering addict, more specifically an alcoholic. A lot of literature and studies are available. Some of the core writings go back to the 1930s and have been kept in their original format to preserve their meaning.

The volume of information is amazing and use and nuance is essential to keep the message personal. To help my own journey, I created a notebook in NotebookLM referencing several books produced by Alcoholics Anonymous, clinical research studies, and work by independent authors.

This allows for daily motivational messages, key topics of a particular recovery step, or the clearing up of decisive material with pros and cons. Turning some of these subjects into an audible debate in NotebookLM is a great way to take on differing views and see differences and indeed similarities. It's also a real go-to for speaking notes, recovery workbooks, and deep research."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.