You might be surprised by how much you can do with AI without opening another chatbot. Some open source projects can turn a long video into ready-to-edit clips, give you a team of AI agents, keep your research organised, or even make changes directly to your Office files.

I can say that the plugins I'm about to share with you guys are proven to be a game changer for me especially if you use Adobe After Effects to edit your videos.

Meta launched a new standalone app called Forum this week, and the easiest way to describe it is: Facebook Groups trying to become Reddit. The app revolves around discussions instead of algorithmic feeds. Users can post with nicknames, follow conversations across communities, and use an AI-powered “Ask” feature that pulls answers from discussions happening in different groups. Meta says the goal is helping people see “what real people are saying, not just what’s trending.” A few years ago, this probably would have looked like another random Meta side project destined for the company’s graveyard of abandoned apps. Right now though, the timing feels more interesting. Social platforms are running into a weird problem in the AI era. Feeds are getting flooded with synthetic content, engagement bait, AI generated replies, and recommendation systems that increasingly feel detached from actual human conversation. At the same time, places built around real discussions, Reddit, Discord communities, niche forums, even group chats, suddenly feel more valuable again. And now Meta, the company that spent years optimizing social media around scale and algorithmic feeds, is building a product around smaller communities and conversation quality instead.

Setting up a new PC is always exciting but let’s be honest, a fresh system feels incomplete until the right software is installed. Over time, I’ve realized that no matter what I’m using the computer for work, study, or everyday tasks, there are a few essential tools I always end up installing first.

Anthropic just got hit with a designation the US government usually reserves for Chinese tech companies like Huawei. Not for a data breach. Just for refusing to let the military use its AI for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons without human oversight. That's the short version. The longer version is messier, more interesting, and honestly a little hard to believe is happening in 2026. On Friday, President Trump ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using Claude, according to The Guardian. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth followed up by labelling Anthropic a "supply chain risk to national security", a tag that bars any military contractor from doing business with the company. The same label America uses on Huawei. Applied, for the first time ever, to an American company, India Today reports. Anthropic's response was short and direct. "No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons," the company said in a statement Friday night. So that's where we are.

There's a version of this story where Anthropic was trying to protect itself from large-scale model theft. There's another where one of the AI industry's biggest privacy advocates quietly crossed a line its own users never expected. What makes this headline important isn't just that hidden tracking code existed. It's that the company behind it was Anthropic. Just months ago, Anthropic publicly refused to let the Trump administration use Claude to surveil American users. The company defended that position in court, arguing that AI companies shouldn't become tools for government surveillance. That stance became part of Anthropic's identity. Then came a very different decision. In March, Anthropic quietly added hidden tracking markers to Claude Code that flagged users' timezones, proxy connections, and potential ties to Chinese AI labs. The code remained unnoticed until security researcher Thereallo discovered it last week. After the discovery went public, an Anthropic engineer confirmed it on X, described it as an "experiment" intended to combat account abuse and model distillation, and said the company had already planned to remove it. The tracker was taken down shortly afterward. The bigger question isn't whether Anthropic had a reason. It's whether a company that built its reputation on privacy can afford to hide surveillance from the very developers it asks to trust its tools.

Claude users have spent months playing a very specific game, how much work can you squeeze out of Opus before the rate limits slam shut? Anthropic is finally loosening things up. The company says it's doubling Claude Code limits, removing peak-hour reductions for paid users, and significantly raising Opus API caps. The reason is also there in the same announcement. Anthropic now has access to all the compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center. That's over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. That's the kind of announcement that makes you realize AI companies aren't just shipping models anymore. They're building power infrastructure.