A concerted effort to ditch ChatGPT for Claude has emerged online, even affecting reddit fan forums r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and the broader r/Singularity, which on Sunday were brimming with posts about moving to Claude.
Top of the list
As a result, Anthropic’s chatbot has climbed to number one, top of the list for productivity apps in the App Store — beating out both OpenAI and Gemini. Last week, it was hovering around 50th.
At more than double the cost of last years record deal, the funding highly values OpenAI by investors, according to Reuters.
Amazon invested $50 billion, Nvidia put up $30 billion and SoftBank shelled out $30 billion, agreeing to a $840 billion valuation, the largest of any frontier AI lab by far.
«Strategic partnership» with Amazon
Amazon’s deal structure is slightly different, as it comes in the terms of a strategic partnership where OpenAI will receive $15 billion up front, and then qualify for the rest $35 billion «over the coming months.»
OpenAI has committed to using 2 gigawatts of capacity on AWS’ Trainium platform and will make their models available on Amazon’s services.
None of this is said to change OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, OpenAI says in a release.
At the same time, OpenAI’s Nick Turley says they have surpassed 900 million weekly users and has 50 million paying subscribers, up from roughly 800 million before.
Read more: Sama’s thank you thread, writeups on Reuters, CNBC
The spat started when Anthropic refused new terms in their Pentagon contract, saying they would not use their AI for autonomous killing and mass surveillance.
In a stunning reversal, these safeguards are written into an agreement offered just hours later to OpenAI (see below).
Continue reading “Pentagon and Trump unloads on Anthropic, agrees with OpenAI on same safeguards”
The new ChatGPT Android app (v1.2026.055) mentions a new "Naughty chats" setting
"This setting lets ChatGPT use spicier, adult-themed language, when you ask. Available to users 18+ only." pic.twitter.com/7oZiAGbWJ4
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) February 26, 2026
According to ChatGPT watcher Tibor Blaho, adult mode is getting closer to going live, with «spicier, adult-themed language.»
The idea was to get age verification on ChatGPT sorted first, so teens could be protected from «sensitive content,» while the app would let «adults be adults.»
Verification was rolled out in January, and people have been asking when ChatGPT for adults would finally ship.
Now The Information (paywalled) is citing sources from an all hands meeting at OpenAI touting an early prototype of a smart speaker.
Continue reading “OpenAI’s first device will reportedly be a pocket-sized AI speaker, due in 2027”
Ads from Expedia, Qualcomm, Best Buy, and Enterprise Mobility have started appearing in relation to ChatGPT queries, Adweek reports.
The «early tests» have been ongoing since February 9th, and OpenAI is asking advertisers to pay a $200,000 minimum to join in.
— We believe ads play an important role in continuing to support broad access to AI, Asad Awan, ads and monetization lead at OpenAI, tells Adweek in a statement.
— By working closely with partners in this pilot, we’re able to thoughtfully test new ad experiences, he continues.
The advertising intelligence platform Adthena ran a test on over 500 prompts in ChatGPT and found ad placements on only 0.8% of responses, according to Adweek.
Adthena also found ads were clearly labeled, sometimes triggering on the first prompt, that OpenAI is surpisingly focused on privacy and user control, and that the text format seemed familiar and trusted.
Read more: Adweek, and Adthena on LinkedIn.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amedei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were, however, for some reason, placed right next to each other on stage — and the acrimonious rivals promptly refused the gesture.
Continue reading “Faux pas at Indian AI summit as Amodei and Altman refuse hands”
That’s why OpenAI is now launching «an advanced, optional setting for higher risk users.»
The idea is to disable tools an adversary might use to «to exploit to exfiltrate sensitive data,» such as prompt injection attacks in files or on the web.
When using Lockdown Mode, web use is limited to cached content only, and no live network access is available outside of OpenAI’s «controlled network»
Most people will never need this feature, OpenAI says, but it might be useful for corporate execs, security teams, journalists and officials.
OpenAI is also launching an «Elevated Risk»-setting, that lets users fine-tune network access for Atlas and Codex.
Both features are coming to users «in the coming months.»
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement.
Anthropic won that battle, and saw a jump in daily active users of 11%, CNBC writes, quoting BNP Paribas. In comparison, ChatGPT jumped 2.7% and Gemini added 1.4%.
Anthropic also won the battle over social media engagement, with more positive posts (25.5%) after their ad was shown than OpenAI (16.3%) — even though OpenAI led with 25K posts to Anthropic’s 10K.
Measuring through Instagram, OpenAI’s ad scored a 44% positive sentiment from 3,829 engagements on its post, while Anthropic scored 41% on 3,738 mentions, far behind the likes of Pepsi’s 33K mentions.
Read more: CNBC, Business Insider and Digiday.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
OpenClaw, the open agentic platform you can steer from your favorite app to do lots of useful things, went viral over the last the couple of weeks — with millions of views, downloads, and 100k stars on GitHub.
It also spawned Moltbook, and showed the future of intelligent AI agents for all to see — as the founder, Steinberger, was inundated with investment and job offers.
Continue reading “Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw joins OpenAI, agents to become «core»”
The model helped scientists by simplifying expressions and made a simple formula for this general case.
Then it spent nearly 12 hours reasoning the new problem, verifying the formula and «producing a formal proof.»
Continue reading “Internal OpenAI model aids in physics discovery, answers expert maths quiz”
The drawback is that it’s text-only and only has a 128K context window, and it’s supposed to be used «where latency matters as much as intelligence.»
Continue reading “OpenAI introduces Codex-Spark, greatly improving coding speed”
Codex is now rolling out to all engineers at the company, in close cooperation with the OpenAI team who built in «cloud-managed admin controls» and fail-safe processing.
They even helped onboard the Nvidia team, saying «It’s shocking how quickly they’ve adopted Codex», and that they move like a giant startup.
GPT-5.3-Codex was only launched last week, and is perceived as a possible profit engine, competing with Claude Code for enterprise customers.
That would likely be GPT-5.3, debuted last week for Codex. It’s a blazingly fast and more capable successor to 5.2, and is said to be one of the first models used to make itself.
The new Codex model has been a great success, funneling a 60% growth in overall use just last week.
That model is also available to Free and Go users for a limited time, and is now being extended with perhaps reduced limits, Altman says:
— We want everyone to be able to try Codex and start building.
Read the full scoop on CNBC
— Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks, they write.
Paid tiers other than Go won’t be seeing any ads at all, and the stated reason for them is to give more queries and responses to the ad-supported tiers, while keeping them fast and responsive.
It’s possible to turn off ads and get limited messages, and under-18s won’t be getting ads. They will also be disabled for «sensitive topics» such as health, mental health and politics.
The test is only for the U.S. market as it stands, and the plan is for ads to make up a little less than half of OpenAIs income once they get off the ground, CNBC reports.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement. Writeups on Engadget, The Verge, and Gizmodo.