Kia ora! Welcome to New Zealand’s weekly roundup of AI news and education.
The 2026 Super Bowl just turned the Claude vs OpenAI rivalry into a mainstream cage match.
Anthropic is running four ads (our favourite below 😆), including two Super Bowl placements, to land one message: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”.
OpenAI fired back fast, with Altman calling the campaign misleading and pitching OpenAI’s own Super Bowl spot as a builder story: “anyone can now build anything”.
This is heating up because it’s a fight over incentives as AI moves from chat to agents that do real work, with trust, safety and IPO-level stakes riding on who sets the rules.
And while the ads grab headlines, both labs are shipping for the next phase: Anthropic is pushing Claude deeper into “work” territory, while OpenAI is rolling out enterprise agent and coding tooling, plus poaching Anthropic safety talent with its Head of Preparedness hire.
Check out our pick of the four ads below. Advantage, Anthropic.
Happy reading ✌️
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🇳🇿 New Zealand News
One of NZ's most-funded AI startup just failed. Soul Machines, once Auckland's poster child for AI innovation, entered receivership on 5 February. KPMG appointed as receivers. The company built digital humans used by brands globally but couldn't sustain commercial traction despite US$135M raised.
See banner on their website.
Our take: A tough reminder that global ambition needs global revenue. For the Kiwi tech community, this loss stings, but the talent and IP won't vanish. There’s now even more great talent on the market. We’ll probably see a few of them start their own ventures.
We’re reading AI-written news and don't know it. AUT research found major NZ newsrooms (NZME, Stuff, RNZ & TVNZ) all use AI tools for research, transcription, and writing. Most have ethics documents but don't prominently disclose AI involvement to readers.
2 min read.
Our take: If AI is writing the news we read, we should be told. Every major NZ newsroom uses these tools now and the question isn't whether to use AI, but whether to be honest about it with audiences.
NZ edtech platform reaches 130 countries. Teacher's Buddy's AI engine handles lesson planning and administrative tasks for teachers. $2.3M seed round backed by trans-Tasman investors Soul Capital and Giant Leap. Platform aims to triple its user base within a year.
2 min read.
Our take: Scaling from 12,000 to 30,000 teachers in 12 months is ambitious but achievable with the right tech stack.
AI finds hidden patterns in common gut condition. IBS affects one in seven New Zealanders, with women twice as likely to be diagnosed. Auckland Bioengineering Institute researchers used AI to identify eight distinct patient clusters within IBS, meaning people long treated as identical actually have different underlying conditions.
6 min read.
Our take: Too many patients get told their symptoms are "all in their head". This research validates what sufferers have known for years, one-size-fits-all treatment was never going to work.
✨A few people have been asking…
It’s Mike here, I run The AI Corner. I’m not just into writing about AI.
I help businesses improve margins without adding headcount by shipping AI systems that cut admin load, reduce cost-to-serve, and increase throughput.
🎙️ The AI Corner Podcast
This week's guest is Toby Cox, Founder of Geodde. Hear:
Why AI search is opening a new distribution channel that lets smaller players outrank bigger competitors in niche markets.
How Toby went from managing 70 engineers at Paloma to shipping an entire product solo using Claude Code and Rails.
His take on why staying lean and adapting fast matters more than building a big team in the AI age.
📚️ AI for Business
Helping leaders and teams adapt, learn, and scale with AI.
1️⃣ "We don't need new AI tools" is the new "we have a website, that's our internet strategy": When executives say they don't need another tool, they're right. But they're solving the wrong problem. The real gap isn't tools, it's that nothing talks to each other and the human is still the integration layer stitching context across a dozen platforms.
7-min read.
2️⃣ YC's latest batch request confirms it: outcomes as a service is the new business model: 68% of 436 recent Y Combinator companies are building AI-powered automation. Not chatbots. Full service replacements. FullSeam sells an "AI employee for finance", Panta runs "commercial insurance brokerage by AI agents", and General Legal is an "AI native law firm". Software sold productivity. Now it sells outcomes.
2-min read.
3️⃣ AI adoption isn't one transformation, it's five camps you climb in order: Most organisations live between Augment and Automate, pretending they're at Alliance. The pattern isn't failing because of wrong tools. It's skipping levels. From alignment to fluency to automation to redesign to compound intelligence, each camp requires acclimatisation before the next.
2-min read.
4️⃣ AI advantages compound while technology advantages get copied: Better websites get matched in months. AI doesn't work that way because the advantage isn't the tool, it's the organisational learning that builds around it. By month twelve, the capability and the tool are fused. The company that started 18 months ago can't go back. The one starting now can't close the gap at a constant rate.
3-min read.
🌍 Tech Updates From Global
The selected top headlines from each major AI tech company.
OpenAI
Launched Frontier enterprise platform for building and deploying AI agents, with Uber, State Farm, Intuit and Oracle as launch customers.
Released GPT-5.3-Codex coding model, 25% faster than GPT-5.2 and the first classified "high capability" for cybersecurity.
Signed $200 million multi-year partnership with Snowflake to embed frontier models across 12,600 data cloud customers.
Reportedly in advanced talks with Amazon over a potential $50 billion investment that could see OpenAI models power Alexa.
Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed Sora-generated content will appear on Disney+ sometime in fiscal 2026.
Posted Q4 2025 revenue of $113.8 billion (up 18% YoY) with Google Cloud surging 48% to $17.7 billion quarterly.
Gemini app surpassed 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million but still trailing ChatGPT's 810 million.
Rolled out Gemini-in-Chrome updates including persistent side panel, auto browse task delegation and Nano Banana image editing.
Faces DOJ investigation into whether its billion-dollar deal to power Apple's Siri with Gemini constitutes a monopoly.
Introduced Personal Intelligence mode allowing Gemini to integrate Gmail, Photos and YouTube for personalised assistance.
Launched Project Genie from DeepMind, a general-purpose world model generating interactive virtual environments for Ultra subscribers.
Reportedly invested $2 billion in Anthropic at a $30 billion valuation with preferred access to Claude models for Google services.
Anthropic
Released Claude Opus 4.6 with a one-million-token context window, multi-agent teams, and new PowerPoint and Excel capabilities.
Claude Cowork plugins triggered a $285 billion rout in software stocks, with Thomson Reuters falling nearly 16% in a single day.
Aired Super Bowl LX ads declaring "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude," sparking a public feud with OpenAI's Sam Altman.
Published formal commitment to keep Claude ad-free, directly contrasting with OpenAI's reported plans to test advertising in ChatGPT.
Goldman Sachs revealed embedded Anthropic engineers have spent six months building autonomous AI agents for trade accounting.
Reportedly signed term sheet for a $10 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation.
Opus 4.6 includes native PowerPoint creation, upgraded Excel with native operations, and agent teams in Claude Code.
Microsoft
Partnered with Palantir in a $500 million deal integrating Azure AI with Foundry for US defence and intelligence applications.
Continues on pace to exceed $100 billion capex for FY2026, with power grid constraints limiting data centre expansion.
Paying social media creators $400,000–$600,000 for long-term partnerships to promote Copilot and other AI tools.
Enhanced Copilot with voice grounding in Outlook, natural language queries and Ground Agents in Notebooks.
Launched Agent 365 governance suite treating AI agents as managed identities within Entra ID for enterprise security.
Amazon
Custom AI chip revenue exceeded $10 billion annually with 1.4 million Trainium 2 chips deployed and Trainium 3 launched.
Pledged $50 billion for AI supercomputing capacity dedicated to US government agencies across GovCloud regions.
Cut 16,000 jobs linked to AI-driven efficiency restructuring alongside its massive infrastructure spending increase.
xAI
Merged with SpaceX in the largest corporate merger in history, creating a combined entity valued at approximately $1.25 trillion.
Filed with the FCC to launch up to one million satellites intended as solar-powered orbital data centres for AI training.
Launched Grok Imagine 1.0 with 10-second video generation at 720p, having produced 1.245 billion videos in the prior 30 days.
Meta
Became the first major tech company to formally tie employee performance reviews to AI tool usage and adoption.
Partnered with ElevenLabs to bring voice AI technology to Instagram and Horizon Worlds.
Rolling out Avocado LLM and Mango for image and video generation alongside new agentic commerce tools for shopping discovery.
Apple
Planning late-February unveiling of Gemini-powered Siri, with Google confirmed as preferred cloud provider for the chatbot upgrade.
Scaled back "Project Mulberry" AI health coach, opting to integrate features individually within the Health app instead.
Opened CarPlay to third-party AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for the first time.
Tim Cook hinted at AI-enabled new product categories for Apple's 50th anniversary, including potential robots and smart speakers.
Facing class-action lawsuit alleging "AI-washing" over Apple Intelligence features marketed on iPhone 16 but not yet delivered.
👋 Mike & Erin