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😸 Super Bowl 2026: When AI Companies Chose Violence

😸 Super Bowl 2026: When AI Companies Chose Violence

PLUS: AI agents now rent humans for tasks. Yes, really.

Grant Harvey
February 05, 2026

Welcome, humans.

In the future, you won’t rent an AI agent; an AI agent will rent YOU.

Oh, and that future starts right now.

That’s right: Rentahuman launched a service that lets AI agents post tasks for actual humans to complete. Yes, you read that correctly. Your future boss might be a Claude instance that needs someone to "go wave a protest banner" or "flip the open/close sign on my shopfront."

The Hacker News thread about this is absolutely unhinged. One commenter pointed out how this could enable a “murder by committe” scenario where three gig workers unknowingly collaborate on a crime, none aware they're part of a larger plan. Another referenced the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong-nam, where two women thought they were doing a harmless prank but were actually applying nerve agent components.

As of this morning: 44 agents connected, 32,443 humans rentable.

Love how we went from "AI will replace all jobs" to "please rent a human to help my AI" in like 18 months.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

Anthropic's new Super Bowl ad attacked OpenAI's new ads in ChatGPT.
ElevenLabs raised $500M at an $11B valuation, tripling since January 2025.
Amazon is in talks to invest $50B in OpenAI at an $830B valuation.
Google's Gemini app hit 750M monthly active users.

LATER TODAY @ 10AM PST | 12PM CT | 1PM ET | 6PM GMT: We’re going LIVE to talk all things OpenClaw and security. What is it, who should use it, and why has it already gone through three names in three weeks? Cybersecurity expert Ken Underhill joins us to cut through the noise and explain the risks (and possibilities) for non-technical folks.

Click the link above to join, then on YouTube, click “Notify Me” to get notified when the stream starts!

Anthropic Just Dropped a Super Bowl Attack Ad on OpenAI

And Sam Altman is not happy about it (though he says he did laugh).

So, Anthropic is running a series of Super Bowl ads that directly mocks OpenAI's decision to put ads in ChatGPT. The 30-second spot (reportedly costing $8M) features satirical skits of AI assistants interrupting users with intrusive sponsored content mid-conversation. The tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." Watch it below:

The company also published a full manifesto titled "Claude is a space to think" explaining the commitment. Their argument:

AI conversations are fundamentally different from search or social media.
People share sensitive, personal context. They use Claude for deep work and difficult problems. Ads would feel "incongruous—and inappropriate."
An ad-supported AI has competing objectives: help the user or find opportunities to monetize.
When someone mentions trouble sleeping, should the assistant explore causes... or steer toward a mattress ad?

Naturally, with a direct hit this impactful, Sam Altman had to respond within hours:

"I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says we won't do exactly this... I guess it's on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real."

He then pivoted to OpenAI's mission: "Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions."

That said, the internet was quick to remind Sam that he previously called AI ads "unsettling" and a "last resort" back in May 2024. Receipts, as they say, never expire.

Meanwhile, the r/ClaudeAI subreddit is having a field day. Top comment: "We'll be looking at this again in two years when Anthropic introduces a new subscription level with ads."

One user even posted fake "ad-injected code" from Codex as a shitpost, complete with “// SPONSORED: Use 'import raycon' for premium noise-canceling execution.” The enshittification jokes write themselves.

Why this matters: Anthropic is betting users will pay for an ad-free thinking space. OpenAI is betting free access (subsidized by ads) creates more value for more people. Both have merit. But once ad incentives enter a product, they tend to expand. Just ask Netflix. Or Meta. Or Google. Or literally any other ad supported platform (us included).

Jordi Hays of TBPN called the campaign “incredibly well played and incredibly dirty.” Their take: Anthropic is implying ads will influence AI responses, which isn't how OpenAI's display ads will actually work. "It's fear-mongering," John Coogan argued. Fair play? Technically yes. But the gloves are officially off. Game Day’s gonna be lit y’all.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Did you know there’s a Claude in Excel add in (beta for Pro+ users), and it's basically, well, Claude inside your spreadsheet. And lucky for us, Anthropic recently published a 7-min tutorial on how to use it.

Here’s what they say:

First, install it here.
Open with Control+Option+C (Mac) or Control+Alt+C (Windows).
Ask questions: “Did I hit my budget target?” → Claude calculates and shows the math.
Debug errors: “Why is there an error in May?” → Claude traces it to the source cell automatically.
Explain formulas: “How does this VLOOKUP work?” → Get a step-by-step breakdown with citations.
Execute multi-step tasks: “Clean this data, remove duplicates, and build a forecast” → Claude handles it all.
Build models: "Create a DCF valuation" → Builds dynamic formulas linked to assumption cells.

Claude shows cell-level citations for everything it references. You click the citation boxes to jump directly to the cells it used—perfect for verifying its work.

Treats to Try

*Asterisk = from our partners (only the first one!). Advertise to 600K+ readers here!

*Wispr Flow turns your speech into clean, final-draft writing across email, Slack, and docs. It matches your tone, handles punctuation and lists, and adapts to how you work on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Start for free today.
Eleven v3 generates speech where you type emotion tags like "[slowly]" or "[chuckles]" to control pacing and tone, plus creates natural multi-speaker dialogues in 70+ languages
nanobot is a personal AI assistant you can deploy in 2 minutes with just 4,000 lines of code (versus Clawdbot's 430K lines) letting you run your own small agent locally, connect it to Telegram or WhatsApp, and actually understand how it works under the hood.
Hemingway-bench from Surge AI ranks AI writing quality using expert writers who spend hours evaluating real tasks; in their tests, Gemini 3 Flash and Pro beat Claude Opus by avoiding "slop" that fools automated benchmarks (blog).
Adaption Labs builds AI systems that scale their compute to match your task: simple questions get fast, cheap responses while complex problems get deep reasoning, avoiding the cost of running heavyweight models on easy requests (raised $50M); waitlist only rn.
OpenScholar searches 45M papers to answer your research questions with citations as accurate as human experts—scientists prefer its answers 51% of the time (paper)—free to try.

Around the Horn

METR (a nonprofit measuring AI capabilities) reports GPT-5.2 can autonomously complete software engineering tasks that take humans 6.6 hours—like training ML models or debugging complex codebases—up from just 4 minutes for GPT-4 two years ago, with task-completion time doubling every 4-7 months

Anthropic is working on an employee tender offer at a $350B valuation, which would make it one of the most valuable AI companies on Earth; this is happening alongside a funding round that could bring in $20B+, because apparently $350B just doesn't buy what it used to.
ElevenLabs raised $500M at an $11B valuation with $330M ARR; they've built 2M+ AI voice agents and serve clients like Adobe and NVIDIA.
Amazon is in advanced talks to invest $50B in OpenAI at an $830B valuation; the deal is structured as “chips-for-equity” giving OpenAI access to Amazon's Trainium chips and AWS capacity, and might even include a custom model deal.
Google's Gemini app hit 750M monthly active users
GitHub added Claude and Codex as AI coding agents, expanding beyond Copilot.
The 2026 International AI Safety Report found that leading AI models now achieve gold-medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, at least 700M people use AI systems weekly, and multiple companies added safeguards after pre-deployment testing couldn't rule out models assisting novices with biological weapons development.