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fastest growing private companies, which is a

Brian McCullough (1:46)

leader in responsibly developing an emergent technology

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of vital significance to our nation. End quote.

Brian McCullough (1:52)

The lawsuit follows a rollercoaster couple of weeks for Anthropic in which the company

Co-Host or Reporter (1:55)

was faced with the threat of and then the official designation of being made

Brian McCullough (1:59)

a supply chain risk. The designation is typically not made public and often applies to foreign companies that could be a cybersecurity threat or other material risk to national security, rather than companies headquartered in the U.S. additionally, President Donald Trump ordered all government agencies to cease using Anthropic's tech within six months.

Co-Host or Reporter (2:17)

Anthropic's blacklisting raised eyebrows and caused significant bipartisan controversy due to fears that disagreeing with a current presidential administration could significantly

Brian McCullough (2:26)

affect a company's bottom line and whether

Co-Host or Reporter (2:28)

it was able to operate as a business altogether.

Brian McCullough (2:31)

Anthropic argues that the government's actions penalize it for speech protected under the first

Co-Host or Reporter (2:36)

Amendment and violate its Fifth Amendment rights.

Brian McCullough (2:38)

Moreover, it says the demand for all government agencies to drop it falls outside

Co-Host or Reporter (2:43)

the authority of the Executive branch. Anthropic has said since the original announcement that it would challenge the supply chain

Brian McCullough (2:49)

risk designation in court.

Co-Host or Reporter (2:50)

In recent days, some of the company's biggest clients, like Microsoft, have made clear

Brian McCullough (2:54)

that they're continuing to work with Anthropic,

Co-Host or Reporter (2:56)

but setting up processes so that their work with Anthropic has no involvement in any of their own work with the Pentagon.

Brian McCullough (3:02)

However, the suit notes that government agencies outside the Department of Defense have cut ties with Anthropic. The General Services Administration terminated its one Gov contract, quote ending the availability of Anthropic services to all three branches of

Co-Host or Reporter (3:14)

the federal government and multiple other agencies, including the Department of the treasury and

Brian McCullough (3:18)

State Department, have publicly or reportedly privately

Co-Host or Reporter (3:21)

said they plan to cease using it as well. End quote.

Brian McCullough (3:31)

As mentioned, you know who made a point of saying they weren't dropping Anthropic?

Co-Host or Reporter (3:35)

Microsoft. And now we can see why. Among probably a bunch of other reasons,

Brian McCullough (3:40)

Microsoft this morning launched Copilot cowork, integrating Anthropic's Claude cowork tech into Microsoft 365 copilot and using WorkIQ to ground its

Co-Host or Reporter (3:50)

actions in work data. Quoting VentureBeat if you thought Anthropic was about to run away with the enterprise

Brian McCullough (3:55)

AI business, you're not totally off the mark.

Co-Host or Reporter (3:58)

Actually.

Brian McCullough (3:58)

This morning Microsoft announced Copilot Cowork, a new cloud based AI agentic automation tool within Microsoft's existing AI tool 365 Copilot, except now it can complete work on

Co-Host or Reporter (4:09)

users behalf across many Microsoft apps instead of contained within each one. If it sounds suspiciously similar to Anthropic's own Claude Cowork applications for Mac and Windows, released in January and February of this year respectively, that's to be expected as Microsoft and Anthropic work together on this new feature.

Brian McCullough (4:27)

Like Claude Cowork, Copilot Cowork allows users to delegate complex, multi step tasks to an AI agent that plans, executes, and delivers finished work. In this case, the AI is able

Co-Host or Reporter (4:37)

to move across and use all the tools and features of Microsoft's outlook Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and other M365 applications.

Brian McCullough (4:45)

The announcement represents Microsoft's most significant step yet in transforming Copilot from a conversational assistant into what the company calls an execution layer, an AI that doesn't just

Co-Host or Reporter (4:55)

answer questions, but actually completes work on a user's behalf. Microsoft's announcement blog post explicitly states that

Brian McCullough (5:02)

Copilot Cowork integrates the technology behind Claude

Co-Host or Reporter (5:05)

Cowork, and both products share a core premise.

Brian McCullough (5:08)

AI should plan and execute multi step

Co-Host or Reporter (5:11)

work, not just respond to prompts.

Brian McCullough (5:13)

But the two products diverge sharply in where they operate, what they can reach,

Co-Host or Reporter (5:17)

and who they're built for.

Brian McCullough (5:19)

Claude Cowork is a desktop agent.

Co-Host or Reporter (5:21)

It lives on your machine first Mac,

Brian McCullough (5:23)

now Windows and operates within folders you

Co-Host or Reporter (5:25)

explicitly grant it access to.

Brian McCullough (5:28)

It can read, edit, and create local files, automate browser tasks, and connect to external services through Anthrapic's growing library of MCP connectors and plugins, spanning tools like Google Drive, Slack, DocuSign, and Salesforce.

Co-Host or Reporter (5:41)

Its power comes from flexibility.

Brian McCullough (5:42)

Users can point it at essentially any local workflow, and Anthropic's open plugin architecture

Co-Host or Reporter (5:47)

means its reach keeps expanding.

Brian McCullough (5:50)

But it is fundamentally a personal tool. The user manages what Claude can see, and the security model depends on folder level, sandboxing and individual judgment about what to share.

Co-Host or Reporter (6:00)

Copilot Cowork operates in the cloud inside Microsoft 365's infrastructure and draws on something Claude Cowork simply cannot access the full

Brian McCullough (6:09)

graph of a user's enterprise work data. That means Outlook, email threads, teams, conversations, calendar history, SharePoint files, Excel workbooks, and

Co-Host or Reporter (6:18)

the relationships between them.

Brian McCullough (6:20)

When Copilot Cowork reschedules a meeting or builds a briefing document, it is pulling from signals across all of those systems simultaneously, a capability that requires deep integration with M365 APIs and data layer rather

Co-Host or Reporter (6:32)

than just local file access. Enterprise IT administrators retain control through existing identity permissions and compliance policies, and all actions are auditable by default.

Brian McCullough (6:43)

The practical upshot is that these products are likely to appeal to different buyers

Co-Host or Reporter (6:47)

solving different problems, at least in the near term.

Brian McCullough (6:50)

Organizations that are deeply embedded in the

Co-Host or Reporter (6:52)

Microsoft 365 ecosystem which is to say

Brian McCullough (6:55)

most large enterprises are the natural audience for Copilot coworkers.

Co-Host or Reporter (6:59)

For a Fortune 500 company whose employees

Brian McCullough (7:01)

live in Outlook teams and SharePoint all day, the value proposition is compelling. An AI agent that already understands your organizational context, operates within your existing security and compliance framework, and doesn't require employees

Co-Host or Reporter (7:13)

to adopt a new application or manage local file permissions.

Brian McCullough (7:18)

IT departments that have spent years configuring M365 governance policies will find Copilot Cowork

Co-Host or Reporter (7:24)

far easier to greenlight than a standalone desktop agent that requires individual users to make security decisions about folder access.

Brian McCullough (7:31)

Claude Cowork, by contrast, is likely to

Co-Host or Reporter (7:33)

attract organizations and individuals who need more flexibility than M365 can provide. Teams working across heterogeneous tool stacks, power

Brian McCullough (7:42)

users who want granular control over what

Co-Host or Reporter (7:44)

the AI can touch, and companies already building on Anthropic's API and plugin ecosystem. End quote.

Brian McCullough (7:57)

Uk based data center developer N Scale raised a $2 billion Series C round led by Acre and 8090 Industries at a $14.6 billion valuation and added Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg to its board. Quoting Bloomberg. Norwegian energy firm Acre ASA and investment

Co-Host or Reporter (8:17)

firm 8090 Industries led the series C round, which values the startup at $14.6 billion, the AI HYP Scaler said in a statement on Monday.

Brian McCullough (8:25)

Several tech companies also participated in the round, including Nvidia, Lenovo and Nokia. Spun out of cryptocurrency mining operations in early 2024, n scale quickly became one of the most prominent data center newcomers, cashing in on the AI boom. As a so called neo cloud operator renting out computing resources to companies developing

Co-Host or Reporter (8:44)

AI, NScale has tried to distinguish itself

Brian McCullough (8:48)

as a provider tailor made for Europe,

Co-Host or Reporter (8:50)

pledging major projects in the uk, Norway and Portugal.

Brian McCullough (8:53)

Nscale's latest round places it among Europe's most valuable startups and the new board appointments add seasoned tech executives to a board that previously consisted of its management

Co-Host or Reporter (9:02)

and investors without much experience in the sector. NScale has raised funds quickly, bringing in

Brian McCullough (9:07)

$1.5 billion in a short span in

Co-Host or Reporter (9:09)

2025 and lining up around the same

Brian McCullough (9:11)

amount in loans earlier this year, Bloomberg

Co-Host or Reporter (9:13)

previously reported the company was planning to raise a $2 billion round. Last year, N Scale and Acre announced

Brian McCullough (9:19)

plans to develop a data center project near the Arctic Circle as a joint venture with OpenAI as the anchor customer.

Co-Host or Reporter (9:26)

On Monday, N Scale said it was folding its Norway operations into one entity, end quote.

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Brian McCullough (11:48)

the information says that the U S led war in Iran is complicating plans by Gulf nations to spend more than $300 billion on AI investments, putting at risk a potential source of funding for AI tech startups. Quote Countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia have become big destinations for data centers. Local firms are developing the projects along with us, such as Xai, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and Google, which are drawn to the region for its cheap energy. Drone strikes on three Amazon data centers in the region suddenly made those projects appear riskier. A prolonged war could also reduce overseas investment into the region from firms such as Brookfield, which is working with multiple

Co-Host or Reporter (12:30)

Gulf nations on their AI investments.

Brian McCullough (12:32)

OpenAI and XAI have raised money from Gulf nations and made plans to build

Co-Host or Reporter (12:36)

data centers in the region, leaving them

Brian McCullough (12:38)

more exposed to the risks of the conflict than rival Anthropic, which has raised money in the Gulf, has been reluctant

Co-Host or Reporter (12:44)

to build large scale computing facilities there.

Brian McCullough (12:47)

Gulf nations won't rush to divert resources away from AI investments because of their economic and strategic importance, said analysts who cover the region. But they might have little choice if the conflict stretches on for a long time.

Co-Host or Reporter (12:59)

If that turns into months or even

Brian McCullough (13:01)

longer, there could certainly be a disruptive

Co-Host or Reporter (13:03)

pause to some of that investment, said

Brian McCullough (13:05)

Stefan Minton, an analyst at technology research firm idc.

Co-Host or Reporter (13:09)

Minton said he expects the Gulf's spending

Brian McCullough (13:12)

to continue in the near term after the tech giants themselves. Gulf countries have been among the biggest funders of AI spending. Plans by Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cover everything from

Co-Host or Reporter (13:24)

land and power for data centers to

Brian McCullough (13:26)

efforts to build powerful AI models in local dialects.

Co-Host or Reporter (13:29)

The priciest items are Nvidia GPUs, which the countries have fought hard to import due to national security concerns on the

Brian McCullough (13:35)

part of the US Government. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently said the country planned to spend $50 billion on semiconductors in the short term, and the UAE could spend upwards of

Co-Host or Reporter (13:47)

$30 billion purchasing its allotment of Nvidia chips through next year, according to current market prices.

Brian McCullough (13:52)

Those chips won't be usable if regional

Co-Host or Reporter (13:54)

leaders can't find a way to continue funding and protecting their data centers.

Brian McCullough (13:58)

Saudi Arabian officials have said they plan to build Data centers consuming 6.6 gigawatts of energy by 2034.

Co-Host or Reporter (14:05)

Elon Musk's XAI is working with Humane, the company overseeing the plans to develop a data center in the country that

Brian McCullough (14:11)

could consume 500 megawatts of energy.

Co-Host or Reporter (14:14)

Before the AI boom, data centers used to be between 10 and 50 megawatts. A 1 gigawatt data center costs between 50 and 60 billion dollars to build, end quote.

Brian McCullough (14:30)

Finally today, another one of these A study of 1488 US workers, has found that AI use can reduce burnout but also cause AI brain fry, a mental fatigue from using AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity. Quoting Harvard Business Review, Firms are incentivizing employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents, for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance.

Co-Host or Reporter (14:57)

Meta for one includes the number of

Brian McCullough (14:59)

lines of code generated by AI as

Co-Host or Reporter (15:01)

a performance metric for engineers.

Brian McCullough (15:03)

As enterprises use more multi agent systems, employees find themselves toggling between more tools. Contrary to the promise of having more

Co-Host or Reporter (15:11)

time to focus on meaningful work.

Brian McCullough (15:12)

Juggling and multitasking can become the definitive

Co-Host or Reporter (15:15)

features of working with AI.

Brian McCullough (15:17)

Unsurprisingly, workers are finding themselves up against the limits of their cognitive abilities when working this way. In recent weeks, online AI users have described increased cognitive load, saturated attention and mental fatigue in social media posts. Engineer Francesco Bonacci, founder of KUA AI, wrote a popular X post titled Vibe coding Paralysis when infinite productivity breaks your brain, in which he lamented, quote I

Co-Host or Reporter (15:43)

end each day exhausted not from the

Brian McCullough (15:45)

work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six work trees open for half written features, two quick fixes that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I'm

Co-Host or Reporter (15:54)

losing the plot entirely. End quote.

Brian McCullough (15:57)

As A research group that studies emergent workforce and AI trends. These signals caught our attention. The literature is filled with mixed signals on the relationship between AI and worker burnout.

Co-Host or Reporter (16:06)

Burnout is a state of chronic workplace stress consisting of exhaustion, negative feelings about work and decreased effectiveness on the job. Some studies suggest that using AI to

Brian McCullough (16:16)

replace tiring tasks alleviates exhaustion. Other studies, sometimes on the same pop, show AI use worsening burnout outcomes. The emergence of acute overwhelming mental fatigue

Co-Host or Reporter (16:27)

with intensive AI oversight as distinct from burnout adds new complexity to the picture.

Brian McCullough (16:32)

To understand what was going on, we conducted a study of 1,488 full time

Co-Host or Reporter (16:37)

US based workers, 48% male versus 51%

Brian McCullough (16:40)

female, 58% independent contributors versus 41% leaders

Co-Host or Reporter (16:44)

at large companies across industries, roles and levels.

Brian McCullough (16:48)

We asked them about patterns and quality of AI use, work experiences and cognition and emotions. We found that the phenomenon described in

Co-Host or Reporter (16:56)

these posts, cognitive exhaustion from intensive oversight

Brian McCullough (16:58)

of AI agents is both real and significant. We call it AI brain fry, which

Co-Host or Reporter (17:03)

we define as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity.

Brian McCullough (17:09)

Participants described a buzzing feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision making and headaches.

Co-Host or Reporter (17:15)

This AI associated mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee

Brian McCullough (17:20)

errors, decision fatigue and intention to quit. There's some nuance here, however, we also found when AI is used to replace routine or repetitive tasks, burnout scores but

Co-Host or Reporter (17:30)

not mental fatigue scores are lower. This highlights the subtle but important distinction

Brian McCullough (17:35)

between the types of stress that AI

Co-Host or Reporter (17:37)

can alleviate and those that it may worsen.

Brian McCullough (17:39)

First, we found that the most mentally taxing form of AI engagement was oversight or the extent to which the AI

Co-Host or Reporter (17:45)

tools required the workers direct monitoring. The workers in our study who reported

Brian McCullough (17:49)

that their AI worked required high rather than low degrees of oversight, expended more mental effort on the job. A high degree of AI oversight also predicted 12% more mental fatigue for participants. Finally, more intensive AI oversight also predicted 19% greater information overload, the experience of

Co-Host or Reporter (18:07)

feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information one must process at work.

Brian McCullough (18:10)

A second important AI related predictor of both cognitive load and mental fatigue was the extent to which an employee reported that the presence of AI tools has increased their workload.

Co-Host or Reporter (18:19)

Those two factors together AI oversight and an increase in workload and increase an employee's sphere of accountability requiring them to

Brian McCullough (18:27)

pay attention to more outcomes for more tools in the same amount of time.

Co-Host or Reporter (18:31)

It makes sense that cognitive load increased

Brian McCullough (18:33)

and with it their mental exhaustion. We also found a fascinating relationship between the number of AI tools used simultaneously

Co-Host or Reporter (18:39)

and perceived productivity increases as employees go

Brian McCullough (18:42)

from using one AI tool to two simultaneously, they experience a significant increase in productivity.

Co-Host or Reporter (18:48)

As they incorporate a third tool, productivity

Brian McCullough (18:50)

again increases, but at a lower rate. After three tools, though, productivity scores dipped. Multitasking is notoriously unproductive, and yet we

Co-Host or Reporter (18:58)

fall for its allure time and again.

Brian McCullough (19:01)

Our findings are both a guide and a warning. Used thoughtfully, this data can help design

Co-Host or Reporter (19:05)

AI driven workflows to diminish burnout.

Brian McCullough (19:07)

They also point to specific manager, team, and organizational practices to avoid mental fatigue

Co-Host or Reporter (19:12)

even as AI work intensifies. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.