Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 9,208 new readers. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have fought over companies, lawsuits, talent, and more. Now the feud is landing somewhere developers may actually feel it… One of the most popular AI coding editors on the market.
OpenAI’s models will exit the newly SpaceX-owned Cursor by mid-November, with Musk’s record on past agreements as the dealbreaker. Elon’s response? He “couldn’t care less.”
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OpenAI cuts out Cursor after SpaceX acquisition
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The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
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Submit your iOS app to the App Store with Codex
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Court rejects Pentagon’s Anthropic blacklist
OPENAI & CURSOR
Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown
The Rundown: OpenAI just announced that it will be removing its models from coding platform Cursor by Nov.12, coming after the company was acquired by SpaceX last month — citing Elon Musk’s history of violating contracts as the reason for the decision.
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OAI said it stretched the wind-down as far as its contract allows via cancellation rights that opened once Cursor was sold, calling the decision “incredibly tough.”
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OAI’s evidence includes the $2M-a-year tweet deal Musk killed after buying Twitter, plus xAI training on its outputs, which Musk called “partly” true.
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Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown reaffirmed support for Cursor, with many calling out the company’s similar move against Windsurf over its potential OAI acquisition.
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Musk posted “I couldn’t care less,” while Cursor CEO Michael Truell pushed for a fix, putting OAI’s slice of its AI traffic at a seemingly light 5% of overall usage.
Why it matters: Cursor has typically been a neutral coding editor carrying all frontier options for developers to choose from. Now, it finds itself in the middle of the lunchroom fight between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Though with xAI’s newfound Grok surge and Cursor’s internal model progress, competition might also play a bigger role than ever.
TOGETHER WITH BLOTATO
The Rundown: Blotato automates your DMs using Claude, ChatGPT, Hermes, or any AI Agent, helping you turn engagement into actionable leads. This case study shows you how to convert attention into sales by engaging viewers instantly with lead magnets, special offers, and guides.
In this case study, you’ll learn:
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How one DM automation led to $120K ARR
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How to easily set up DM automations with Claude or ChatGPT
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Best practices for turning attention into leads
THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE
The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.
Zach, Editor-in-chief: It’s one of my favorite times of the year… Fantasy football draft season! But I was feeling particularly behind on my research this year, and my first draft that snuck up on me was a keeper league that complicates the structure and player pool.
I used Claude to help build a war room plan for the draft, dropping in our league settings, keepers, and a brain dump of my ideal strategies and gut reads. After a few clarifying questions, Claude went out to research and came back a few minutes later with a generated live artifact based on its scan. The strategy factored in my exact pick slots and expected available players, potential targets built around my keepers, and (admittedly) sharp rationales for some options I hadn’t considered.
Once in the draft, I updated my picks as they went, and Claude then modified the page, recalibrating ideal options based on where my team was trending. Highly recommend as a co-manager!
Adrian, Developer: A while ago, my dad told me he wanted to use AI to analyze matches for the World Cup. He had never coded before, and his AI experience was pretty much limited to occasionally asking Gemini a question. I installed Claude Code for him and gave him a few prompting tips. He ended up building a full football analytics site himself and putting it on Vercel so he could show it off to his friends.
Getting started with AI is much easier than people assume; sometimes you just need a project you actually want to make. Now that the Premier League season has kicked off, he’s already reworking the site for that.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to take a mobile app from Xcode to the App Store with ChatGPT Work and App Store Connect. You will prepare the listing, upload the build, set a price, and submit it without hunting through every screen.
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Start with a working app. Follow Part 1 to build it. Tell Codex: “Build this app and send it to App Store Connect.” It will build, archive, and distribute it from Xcode
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Open App Store Connect in Codex’s browser and sign in. Tell Codex to fill the description, upload screenshots of the app, and everything else needed
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Complete the App Review contact, age-rating, and content-rights fields, then select the build. Review each answer before continuing
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Set a price in App Store Connect, then click “Add for Review”. You may see flags for things that need to be fixed. Fix each, then click “Submit for Review”
Pro tip: If you want a subscription or one-time premium upgrade, ask Codex to add Apple’s StoreKit framework, then set up the product in App Store Connect.
PRESENTED BY OPTIMIZELY
The Rundown: 96% of brands struggle to execute personalization at scale. Optimizely’s upcoming webinar explores how Corinthia Hotels built a 7-agent AI system, achieving a 100% brand approval rate, 10x productivity, and 150+ hours saved — all with zero PII ever entering the AI layer.
The Oct. 7th session will cover:
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How Corinthia personalizes across 5 personas and 14 lifecycle stages, mapping 76 behavioral signals to 6,384 content variants
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Live demos of autonomous personalization and creating dynamic 1-1 experiences
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How to maintain brand control without humans in the quality control loop
ANTHROPIC VS. DEPARTMENT OF WAR
Image source: Court Listener
The Rundown: A federal judge ruled that the Pentagon broke the law when it blacklisted Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” deciding that it was payback for the lab’s pushback on military AI rather than a response to a real security threat.
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The Dept. of War issued the label in June, forcing its frontier Mythos and Fable models offline for nearly a month while the two sides publicly sparred.
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The move made Anthropic the first U.S. firm ever hit with a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries, with all govt. agencies ordered to drop its models.
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Judge Rita Lin held that the blacklist violated the First and Fifth Amendments, saying national security isn’t a “blank check” to punish critics.
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The label still technically survives while a second case sits in appeals court, and the Pentagon has said its “wind down” of Claude usage will finish by Sept. 30.
Why it matters: Anthropic scores the ruling confirming what many in the industry felt (including ourselves) in June — that the label was more retaliatory than safety-related. While Anthropic might no longer have the Pentagon as a customer regardless, future attempts to block models may now come with a legal precedent for pushback.
COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY
Today’s workflow comes from reader Zan:
Microsoft is retiring Publisher on Oct. 1, 2026. I have many .PUB files that I need to convert to PDFs before then, but I did not want to use online converters. I wanted a solution that would run locally on my computer.
I worked with Claude to create a lightweight program that searches for .PUB files on a drive of my choice and converts them into high-quality PDF files, placing each new PDF in the same folder as its source file.
Opening PowerShell manually and managing permissions was too cumbersome, so Claude also created a batch file to make the process easier. For anyone who wants to create their own mini-program, I asked Claude to create a reusable prompt.
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🚀 Hy4 preview – Tencent’s new 770B open-source model with 1M context
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🤖 Grok Bot – xAI’s always-on agent team with its own cloud computer
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🚀 GLM-3.5-Flash – Z AI’s new model revealed as the mystery Ox Alpha
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🎥 H3 Max – Fal’s top-ranked post-trained video model tuned for speed and quality
Tencent released Hy4 preview, a new small open-source model that nears the capabilities of top open options with particularly strong coding skills.
xAI’s Grok Bot added new features including shareable Bots and agentic shopping through a Link integration, allowing the agents to spend money via a single-use card.
Anthropic announced weekly limit changes coming on Sept. 14 for Claude Code, facing backlash for presenting a 17% decrease as a usage raise.
Fal set up a new ‘infinite stream’ of AI-generated video, taking advantage of its Minimax H3 Max’s ability to generate 5 seconds of output in just 3 seconds.
Sony Music and Warner Music sued Anthropic (naming CEO Dario Amodei as defendant), alleging “one of the largest and most blatant” ongoing thefts of IP in history.
That’s it for today!
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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown
