The AI industry is experiencing a massive shift in military policy and consumer preference as March begins. OpenAI’s controversial Pentagon deal continues to dominate the discourse, prompting an amendment from Sam Altman and a wave of employee unrest, which has seemingly catalyzed Anthropic’s Claude to overtake ChatGPT as the #1 app on Apple’s App Store. Infrastructure investments show no signs of slowing down, with Nvidia and Amazon committing billions to optics and European data centers, respectively. Meanwhile, the hardware space is heating up with Apple’s iPhone 17e and the “Agentic AI” theme taking center stage at MWC 2026 amid a looming global RAM shortage.

The AI industry enters a pivotal weekend defined by safety reckoning and record capital deployment colliding head-on. xAI faces its deepest crisis as safety is reportedly dismantled from within, while Anthropic celebrates a historic 30 billion dollar funding round. India prepares to host the first major AI summit in the Global South, and software stocks continue hemorrhaging trillions as Wall Street prices in AI disruption. Meanwhile, a wave of safety researcher departures across OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI signals growing tension between commercial pressures and responsible development.

📋 Quick Takeaways

• OpenAI officially retires GPT-4o and several legacy models from ChatGPT on February 13, amid 13 consolidated lawsuits over mental health harms
• GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark launches on Cerebras chips — OpenAI’s first production model not running on Nvidia, delivering 1,000+ tokens/sec at 15x faster speeds
• MiniMax M2.5 from China achieves near-frontier performance on SWE-Bench at 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5
• Zhipu AI’s GLM-5 reaches Intelligence Index score of 50, trained on Huawei Ascend chips — a milestone for non-Nvidia AI training
• Baker McKenzie cuts up to 1,000 jobs citing AI, in the largest AI-driven layoff in the legal industry
• Google warns that nation-state hackers from Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia are using Gemini for cyberattacks
• Waymo deploys 6th-generation Ojai robotaxis, plans expansion to 20+ cities including Tokyo and London
• Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad drives 11% user growth and Apple App Store top-10 ranking, beating OpenAI, Google, and Meta
• Samsung begins shipping HBM4 samples, the next-gen memory critical for AI accelerator performance
• Autonomous vehicles forecast to operate or test in 39 global markets by end of 2026

🤖 AI Model Releases & Retirements

OpenAI Officially Retires GPT-4o and Legacy Models from ChatGPT

On February 13, OpenAI officially pulled the plug on GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and o4-mini from ChatGPT, alongside the previously announced retirement of GPT-5 Instant and Thinking. All conversations now default to GPT-5.2. API access remains unchanged for the time being.