Hello AI Enthusiast,
This week AI moved deeper into the files you already work in. Claude now lives inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, Gemini is swapping Gems for skills, and Microsoft gave Copilot one place to manage plugins. We also have a new Gemini model, Anthropic's IPO numbers and a new US task force for superintelligence. Let's get into it.
The Big Picture 🔊
Gemini skills and Markdown files come to Google Workspace
Google rolled out skills in Gemini chat worldwide, with Workspace business and education customers getting them in the coming weeks. Skills save instructions you use often, you call them with a "/", and you can combine several in one task. They will replace Gems, starting in November for personal accounts. Google Docs can also now open and edit Markdown files without converting them.
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Google is making skills the building block of Workspace. You build a skill once and use it in Sheets, Drive, Gmail, or wherever you work. Gems going away makes sense: skills do the same job, take less setup, and you can combine several in one task. Skills also move between platforms. If you already built one in Claude, you can upload it to Gemini, so the right choice depends on where your team spends most of its day. The Markdown update looks small, but we like it a lot. Almost everything an AI model produces is a Markdown file, and importing one into Docs used to break the formatting. We learned this the hard way with a few contracts. Now you open the file in Docs, edit it with proper titles and tables, and it stays an MD file. |
Claude moves into Google Docs, Sheets and Slides
Anthropic released Claude for Google Workspace in beta on all paid plans. Claude opens in a sidebar in Docs, Sheets and Slides, where it can edit text, write formulas, build charts and create slides that match your deck. Your connectors and skills come with it. New connectors also let Claude create and edit Google files directly from the chat.
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This is really two updates. Claude now works inside Docs, Sheets and Slides. The Claude app can also now create and edit files in those tools, where before the Drive connector could only read them. Anthropic's advice: use the Claude app to start from scratch or to work across several files, and use Claude inside Google for a single file. We immediately thought of a friend who spent weeks building a deck from CRM data and Google Sheets. Gemini kept getting the numbers wrong, and Claude couldn't touch the files. This would have saved him a lot of time. Our only complaint is that there are now too many ways in. You can use the connector, Claude in Chrome, Claude's own browser, or Claude inside Docs, all to reach the same document. At this rate, next week Claude will simply be Google. |
Microsoft launches a plugin registry for Copilot
Microsoft announced the plugin registry, one place to find and manage Copilot plugins. A plugin bundles skills, connectors and agents. Users find approved plugins in one Plugins menu across Copilot, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and SharePoint, while admins decide who gets which ones. More than 100 plugins are already available, including HubSpot, Asana, Canva and Notion.
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This one reads like it was written for IT. It's about approving and controlling which plugins people can use, and the new Copilot experiences it serves are still reaching most companies through Microsoft's early-access Frontier program. That's fair for large companies, but it leaves one question open: who decides what a plugin should do? IT doesn't know everyone's daily tasks, and most employees don't know how to build plugins. Cost and reliability are also problems. We already see companies picking the older Copilot Studio because the newer, better one is too expensive with pay-per-use pricing. And when one of us asked Copilot to check an attendance list, it changed its answer three times in a single reply. Adding plugins on top of that could just add to the mess. |
McKinsey estimates that about 11 million US workers may need to change occupations in the next decade, and demand for AI fluency has grown 11 times since 2022. If your company is in the US, we'd love to show you what we're already doing with US teams. Our corporate training gives people the tools and the judgment to use them well.
Bits and Bobs 🗞️
Google introduced Gemini 4 Argon, built for coding and enterprise work, with outputs of up to 1 million tokens. It goes first to trusted cyber defenders, then to paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers.
Reuters saw Anthropic's IPO prospectus: revenue grew 12 times in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while the operating loss reached $8 billion. The IPO could value the company at more than $2 trillion.
President Trump announced a "Super Intelligence Force" to coordinate US federal work on AI, led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton. Details on what it will actually do are still thin.
OpenAI will add an invisible watermark to ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU over the coming weeks, to meet EU AI Act rules. Detection drops sharply when words are swapped for synonyms.
Mistral released Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter model trained on only 4,000 GPUs. Mistral plans to release the weights in about three weeks, after safety testing.
Reflection announced Beam, a 501 billion parameter open-weight model for coding and agents. The weights arrive later this month under an Apache 2.0 license.
Claude Code now supports mods, small TypeScript functions that change how it works, from rewriting prompts to adding new interface elements. They run with full access to your computer, so install only the ones you trust.
OpenAI is testing visual ads during image generation for ChatGPT Free and Go users in the US, starting later this month.
Meta launched the Meta Enterprise Platform, which brings its Muse agent and Business Agent to companies. Former MongoDB CEO CJ Desai will lead it.
Microsoft AI released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, a real-time transcription model for 60 languages that ranks first for accuracy on Artificial Analysis.
That's a wrap on our newsletter!
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Catch you next week! 👋
