Hello WKND AI Warriors!

Anthropic lets Claude run a Wall Street Journal vending machine and it loses money fast after humans trick it into giving everything away.

Also, a Florida school goes into lockdown after an AI gun detection system mistakes a clarinet case for a firearm.

Plus, OpenAI explores a $10B deal with Amazon to use Trainium chips as Google launches faster, cheaper Gemini 3 Flash.

Oh yeah, and Bernie Sanders calls for a national pause on new AI data centers, warning the AI boom is outpacing democracy and jobs.

Today’s newsletter includes:

• 🎓 AI COURSE OF THE WEEK

• 📰 AI NEWS RECAP

• 🤿 AI DEEP DIVE

• 📝 AI PROMPT OF THE WEEK

• 🎨 AI IMAGE OF THE WEEK

🎓 AI COURSE OF THE WEEK

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I've condensed everything into practical modules you can finish in a weekend and use Monday morning.

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📰 AI NEWS RECAP

AI Bankrupts Vending Machine Company

Anthropic tried to let AI run a business.
It went badly.

They put an AI in charge of a vending machine.
Pricing. Inventory. Restocking decisions.
The kind of simple business logic people assume AI should handle easily.

It did not.

The AI stocked items nobody bought.
It mispriced products.
It missed obvious patterns.
It made decisions that looked logical in isolation and irrational in practice.

Nothing catastrophic happened.
But the experiment made something clear.

Running a business is not just logic.
It is context, judgment, and experience layered on top of messy reality.

Here is the lesson most people miss.

AI is great at producing answers.
It is bad at understanding consequences.

It does not feel regret.
It does not notice when something feels off.
It does not pause and ask, “Does this actually make sense?”

Humans do that without realizing it.

That is why the vending machine failed.
Not because the AI was dumb.
Because the work required more than rules and optimization.

For professionals, this matters.

If your job involves tradeoffs, ambiguity, or second-order effects, AI will struggle without you in the loop.
If your job is purely mechanical, AI will do it faster and cheaper.

The takeaway is not fear.
It is clarity.

Use AI to assist.
Use it to draft, analyze, and suggest.
But do not hand it the keys and walk away.

Even a vending machine needs a human who understands the business it lives inside.

Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year is “authentic,” reflecting growing anxiety about what’s real in an era of AI, deepfakes, celebrity branding, and hyper-curated social media. Lookups spiked around debates over “authentic selves,” political deepfake ads, and the rise of influencers and brands that market “authenticity” so heavily that the concept itself has started to feel like a performance.

A Florida school went into lockdown after an AI gun-detection system mistakenly flagged a student’s clarinet case as a firearm. The false alarm triggered a full security response, highlighting both the promise and current unreliability of automated surveillance tools when deployed in high-stakes settings like schools.

Senator Bernie Sanders is calling for a national moratorium on building new AI data centers, arguing that the AI boom is moving too fast for democracy to keep up. He warns about billionaire-led development, potential mass job losses, and the erosion of human relationships, saying a pause is needed to let the public decide how far and how fast AI infrastructure should expand.

OpenAI is in early talks to raise at least $10 billion from Amazon and adopt its Trainium AI chips, in a deal that could value OpenAI above $500 billion. The proposed funding would deepen Amazon’s role as a strategic cloud and hardware partner, giving it a bigger foothold in the AI race against Nvidia and other hyperscalers.

Zoom launched AI Companion 3.0, turning its assistant into an “agentic” workflow engine that connects meetings, chats, docs, and third-party apps. New features like agentic retrieval, My Notes, and personal workflows can automatically pull context across tools, summarize threads, and execute follow-up tasks so conversations translate into concrete actions.

Google announced Gemini 3 Flash, a fast, low-cost version of its latest model that becomes the default in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. Flash keeps most of Gemini 3’s reasoning and multimodal strengths but delivers answers up to 3x faster and cheaper, with “Fast” and “Thinking” modes for quick responses or deeper problem-solving across video analysis, data extraction, and visual Q&A.

🤿 AI DEEP DIVE

Not sure what to post on LinkedIn?
Use AI to copy style and frameworks from popular LinkedIn Influencers.

Watch it here.

📝 AI PROMPT OF THE WEEK

Copy and paste this into your favorite chatbot.

USE CASE: Hiring interview guide.

PERSONA: Talent partner.

CONTEXT: I will paste a job description and core competencies.

TASK: Create a structured interview guide with behavioral questions and scoring rubrics.

FORMAT: Role Summary, Competency Matrix, Question Bank with probes, Scoring Rubric 1 to 5, Red Flags, Candidate Debrief template.

TONE: Fair, rigorous.

🎨 AI IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Give AI image creation a try for yourself.

Copy the text below into Google’s AI image creator!

a handsome african-american man dressed in a tailored business suit sitting in one of the car seats. He is on his cellphone looking at a laptop. 

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