The AI Breakdown

This week on The AI Breakdown, we talk about OpenAI’s Frontier launch, an enterprise platform designed to help organisations build, deploy, and govern AI agents across real workflows.

Anthropic fires back with Claude Opus 4.6, including a one million token context window in beta and new agent teams designed to split complex work across multiple cooperating agents, with a clear push beyond coding into everyday knowledge work like documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

We then zoom out to the money and the infrastructure. Google is introducing a Workspace add on called AI Expanded Access from March 1, 2026, signalling the shift toward paid higher tier usage. Cerebras just closed a one billion dollar Series H at about a twenty three billion valuation, as demand for compute fuels a new wave of AI hardware competition.

Finally, Super Bowl LX made AI advertising feel like a cultural inflection point. Anthropic used its spot to promise Claude will remain ad free, while OpenAI ran a Codex ad built around the idea that you can just build things now. iSpot data reported by AdWeek says 23 percent of Super Bowl commercials featured AI, and Axios covered X rolling out BrandRanx to track ad conversation in real time as the game unfolded. 

And with the echoes of the Dot Com Super Bowl and the Crypto Bowl still fresh in marketers minds, it raises the question, will the Super Bowl burst the AI bubble?

In this week’s AI Weekly Briefing, I break down the biggest developments in artificial intelligence from the past seven days, from viral open-source AI agents like OpenClaw, to major enterprise moves as Snowflake deepens its partnership with OpenAI.

You’ll also hear how Amazon Ads is adopting the Model Context Protocol to make agent-driven workflows more practical, why cybersecurity firms like Malwarebytes are exploring AI-native threat checking, and what ElevenLabs’ latest voice advances mean for media, accessibility, and deepfake risk.

Plus: a cautionary tale from Moltbook’s security breach, a look at xAI’s Grok Imagine pushing generative video to mass scale, and why multi-agent coding tools could reshape the way developers build software.

CES 2026 quietly marked a turning point. AI stopped being the shiny feature you bolt on for a headline, and started behaving like electricity. It's just assumed.

In this episode, I break down the five AI themes that defined the show:

AI PCs go mainstream: Your next laptop refresh might be your biggest AI decision this year. AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm are putting serious on-device capability into enterprise hardware, and that changes where your AI runs, how your data moves, and how much control you actually have.

Edge AI and the "no cloud required" wave: From real-time deepfake detection on laptops to Caterpillar embedding a voice assistant into excavators that works without connectivity, on-device AI is solving the unsexy problems: latency, offline reliability, and data control.

ROI-first AI: Siemens and PepsiCo showed what "show me the numbers" looks like: 20% throughput gains and 90% of issues caught before physical changes. The pilot era is over.

Physical AI: Boston Dynamics' Atlas is heading to Hyundai factories by 2028. But the nearer-term story? Copilots for heavy machinery that upgrade the tools you already have.

Trust as the bottleneck: The limiting factor isn't clever models. It's governance, guardrails, and getting your data right.

If you take one thing from CES 2026: AI is becoming infrastructure. That means it's going to be boring, expensive, and absolutely worth getting right.

This week on The AI Breakdown, I cover the biggest AI moves in about 10 minutes from Mastercard’s agentic shopping push, to Apple’s Siri reboot, YouTube’s AI creator avatars, and Nvidia’s signals that retail AI is scaling fast.

In this week’s AI news breakdown, we look at how Google and Shopify are accelerating agentic commerce, with open protocols for AI shopping agents and in chat checkout through Gemini.

Also on the radar:

Shopify Winter ’26 RenAIssance and what Agentic Storefronts mean for merchants

OpenAI’s ad model for ChatGPT and the knock on effects for marketing and trust

Wikipedia signing paid access deals with AI firms and what it signals for the content economy

ChatGPT Translate and the shift in expectations for translation quality
Gemini’s personal intelligence upgrade and the privacy trade off