Episode
AI Weekly Briefing: Anthropic’s Mega-Round, Faster Code, and he Rise of Agent Hijacking
- Podcast
- The AI Breakdown
- Published
- Feb 18, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 779
- Processing state
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Summary
This week on The AI Breakdown, Anthropic just raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation, making it the second-largest private funding round in tech history. Meanwhile, OpenAI dropped GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, their first model running on Cerebras hardware instead of NVIDIA, pushing past 1,000 tokens per second and redefining what "fast" means for AI-assisted coding. But the story of the week might be the one that got less attention: researchers caught an infostealer exfiltrating the entire identity of an OpenClaw AI agent - tokens, cryptographic keys, behavioural guidelines, and private memory files. It's a stark preview of what happens when agents become high-value targets. Beyond the headlines, we dig into Claude Cowork landing on Windows, Google quietly shipping Gemini-powered audio summaries in Docs, Zoom pushing deeper into agentic workflows, Microsoft wiring up new Copilot connectors, Slack's rebuilt Slackbot, and Oracle Health rolling out AI clinical note-drafting across the NHS. Plus, OpenAI hired the founder of OpenClaw, and what that tells us about the race to own the agent layer.