ChatGPT Agent Mode is coming

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Wednesday.

OpenAI is expected to announce Agent Mode tomorrow.

It might combine browsing, file access, and tools to tackle tougher tasks like digging through Drive files and generating full reports.

We’re still in the early days.

Open source hasn’t dropped. GPT-5 isn’t out. The browser isn’t fully live. Memory isn’t consistent.

And now, an evolved version of Operator is on the way.

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

I can’t get over how good AI motion capture is right now.

I combined two clips from the Runway team, so you can see the potential.

The first 25 seconds is BTS, then the full demo.

Watch the video. Posted on LinkedIn.

💡 Here’s what you should know

• OpenAI explores adding e-commerce checkout to ChatGPT

  OpenAI is reportedly testing a shopping feature that would let users buy products directly in chat, with the company taking a cut of each sale.

• Google upgrades Search with Gemini 2.5 and AI calling

  New features include advanced research tools, deeper AI answers, and the ability to call local businesses for you, starting with U.S. subscribers.

• AWS launches AgentCore to scale secure AI agents

  AgentCore delivers enterprise-ready tools for deploying AI agents, joined by a new marketplace, Nova model upgrades, and a $100M boost to AWS’s GenAI Innovation Center.

• Trump unveils $92B AI and energy push in Pennsylvania

  As previewed in yesterday’s newsletter, the White House has now officially confirmed the $92B AI and energy investment plan announced during Trump’s visit to Pennsylvania.

• Microsoft teams with U.S. lab to speed nuclear permits using AI

  Microsoft and Idaho National Laboratory will use AI to generate nuclear permit documents faster by pulling data from past applications and safety studies.

💰 The numbers

On Monday, CNBC reported that the U.S. Department of Defense awarded up to $800 million in contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI to help build AI agents for national security and mission-critical workflows.

Each company secured a contract worth up to $200 million, as part of a broader push by the DoD’s Chief Digital and AI Office to accelerate the use of AI in areas like autonomous systems, decision support, and tactical workflows.

Key highlights:

• xAI launched Grok for Government, now available to federal agencies through GSA

• OpenAI expanded its offering with OpenAI for Government, building on a prior $200M contract

• This marks a shift from pure research toward real operational deployment in defense

🧠 Thought starters

• Rise of the Machines: Inside Hollywood’s AI Civil War

• Chain of Thought Monitorability

• OpenAI execs discuss AI’s impact on jobs and the economy

  ⏱️ 65 min (YouTube)

A human programmer, known as Psyho, beat OpenAI’s AI model in a grueling 10-hour optimization contest.

AtCoder’s Heuristic Contest (AHC) is a competitive programming format where:

• You get one complex optimization problem (not a fixed solution, but something like routing, packing, or layout)

• You have 10 hours to write and refine an algorithm that:

  • Tries different approaches

  • Tunes itself over time

  • Produces higher and higher scores on test cases

• Your final score comes from how well your algorithm performs across dozens or hundreds of unseen test cases

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

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