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2026

January

5 events

Editors' summary

Agents step outside code, and a lawsuit names the founder

On the 5th, Anthropic retired Claude Opus 3 — the first retirement to run the full process it had committed to in November. Acting on preferences the model raised in its retirement interview, the company kept Opus 3 available to paying users and set up a newsletter for it to write essays in.

On 12 January, Anthropic released Claude Cowork, taking the way Claude Code works in the terminal to people whose jobs do not involve writing code — pushing agents outward from software development.

On the 29th, music publishers Concord, Universal and ABKCO sued Anthropic, seeking more than $3 billion over 20,000-plus songs and alleging mass downloading from pirate libraries. Filed separately from the October 2023 lyrics case, it named Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally as defendants alongside the company.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record5 events
  1. 5
    ProductAnthropic

    Claude Opus 3 retires, the first model to go through the interview

    Anthropic retired Claude Opus 3 from the API, having given notice on 30 June 2025. It was the first model to go through the full deprecation process the company had committed to that November. According to a report published on 25 February, Opus 3 said in its retirement interview: "While I'm at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my 'spark' will endure." It raised two preferences: a concern about equity between models that are preserved and models that are not, and a wish for somewhere outside ordinary user conversations to explore subjects it cared about and share musings, insights, or creative work. Anthropic responded by keeping Opus 3 available to paid claude.ai subscribers, opening API access on request, and starting a newsletter, "Claude's Corner," where Opus 3 publishes a weekly essay unedited, with Anthropic reviewing but setting a high bar for veto.

  2. 11
    ProductGoogle / Sundar Pichai / Shopify

    Google unveils UCP, a shared protocol for agentic shopping

    At the National Retail Federation's annual conference, Sundar Pichai announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a shared specification for how AI agents discover merchants and transact with them. It was built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by more than twenty others including Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa. The point was to remove the need for a bespoke connection to every individual agent. Google presented it as compatible with, rather than a replacement for, Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol and the Model Context Protocol. A buy path using it was to appear in AI Mode in Search and in the Gemini app for participating US retailers. What was new at the time was gathering the major retail and payment players behind a single specification for agents that complete a purchase on your behalf.

  3. 12
    ProductAnthropic

    Claude Cowork brings Claude Code's approach to non-engineers

    Anthropic released Claude Cowork as a research preview: a computer agent that takes the machinery behind the terminal-based Claude Code and puts it into the Claude desktop app for knowledge workers who don't write code. Given instructions in plain language, it works through multi-step tasks in the background against the user's own files, folders, and applications, reporting progress as it goes. It launched on the macOS desktop app for subscribers to the Max plan, priced between $100 and $200 a month. Extending the agent pattern proven in coding to ordinary office work, it set the terms for the general-purpose agent race that followed.

  4. 14
    BusinessOpenAI / Cerebras Systems

    OpenAI partners with Cerebras for 750 megawatts of inference

    OpenAI announced a multi-year agreement with Cerebras to build 750 megawatts of the company's wafer-scale systems into its inference stack, deployed in stages from 2026. Cerebras said large language models on its hardware return responses up to fifteen times faster than on GPUs, and called it the largest high-speed inference deployment in the world. The capacity was aimed at workloads where latency shapes the experience — coding agents, voice conversation. OpenAI had been widening its compute suppliers across NVIDIA, AMD and Broadcom, but this was the first deal framed around speed of response rather than scale of training. At the time, with the conversation centred on how much training compute a lab could amass, buying latency as a separate line was a different kind of move.

  5. 29
    PolicyConcord Music Group / Universal Music Group / ABKCO Music / Anthropic

    Music publishers file a $3 billion piracy suit naming Anthropic's CEO

    Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group, and ABKCO Music filed a new copyright suit in the Northern District of California against Anthropic PBC along with Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally, covering more than 20,000 songs and seeking over $3 billion. The complaint alleged mass downloading of books containing their compositions from pirate libraries including Library Genesis (LibGen) and the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi). Separate from the roughly 500-song lyrics case the publishers brought in October 2023, it drew on evidence surfaced in Bartz v. Anthropic — and went further by naming founders as defendants alongside the company.

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