#203: Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3, NYT AI vs. Humans Writing Test, Atlassian’s AI-Era Layoffs & Grammarly's Expert Cloning Scandal

Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits to block the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation and the back-and-forth on X between the Pentagon CTO and AI policy experts is revealing what this fight is really about. Paul and Mike unpack the politics, the implications, and why a deal is inevitable. Then: 86,000 people took the NYT's AI writing quiz and most preferred the machine. Paul shares his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it? Plus Atlassian's 1,600 AI-driven layoffs, Amazon's AI-caused outages, McKinsey's chatbot getting hacked in two hours, and more. Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here Click here to take this week's AI Pulse. Timestamps: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:03:11 — AI Pulse Survey Results 00:07:48 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3 00:30:02 — New York Times Releases Controversial "AI Writing Quality" Quiz 00:46:18 — Atlassian Layoffs and Job Loss Dashboard 00:58:49 — Adobe CEO Stepping Down 01:07:14 — Amazon AI-Related Outages and Engineering Struggles 01:14:28 — McKinsey AI Chatbot Hacked 01:19:49 — AI Politics Update 01:24:06 — Grammarly AI "Expert Review" Controversy 01:30:51 — Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch Agent 01:34:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report. This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet. It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey Visit our website Receive our weekly newsletter Join our community: Slack Community LinkedIn Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Looking for content and resources? Register for a free webinar Come to our next Marketing AI Conference Enroll in our AI Academy