17 March 2026
#203: Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3, NYT AI vs. Humans Writing Test, Atlassian’s AI-Era Layoffs & Grammarly's Expert Cloning Scandal
The Artificial Intelligence Show
About
Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits to block the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation and the back-and-forth on X between the Pentagon CTO and AI policy experts is revealing what this fight is really about. Paul and Mike unpack the politics, the implications, and why a deal is inevitable.
Then: 86,000 people took the NYT's AI writing quiz and most preferred the machine. Paul shares his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it? Plus Atlassian's 1,600 AI-driven layoffs, Amazon's AI-caused outages, McKinsey's chatbot getting hacked in two hours, and more.
Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here
Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 — Intro
00:03:11 — AI Pulse Survey Results
00:07:48 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3
00:30:02 — New York Times Releases Controversial "AI Writing Quality" Quiz
00:46:18 — Atlassian Layoffs and Job Loss Dashboard
00:58:49 — Adobe CEO Stepping Down
01:07:14 — Amazon AI-Related Outages and Engineering Struggles
01:14:28 — McKinsey AI Chatbot Hacked
01:19:49 — AI Politics Update
01:24:06 — Grammarly AI "Expert Review" Controversy
01:30:51 — Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch Agent
01:34:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates
This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.
This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.
It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey
Visit our website
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Join our community:
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Then: 86,000 people took the NYT's AI writing quiz and most preferred the machine. Paul shares his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it? Plus Atlassian's 1,600 AI-driven layoffs, Amazon's AI-caused outages, McKinsey's chatbot getting hacked in two hours, and more.
Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here
Click here to take this week's AI Pulse.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 — Intro
00:03:11 — AI Pulse Survey Results
00:07:48 — Anthropic vs. Pentagon Round 3
00:30:02 — New York Times Releases Controversial "AI Writing Quality" Quiz
00:46:18 — Atlassian Layoffs and Job Loss Dashboard
00:58:49 — Adobe CEO Stepping Down
01:07:14 — Amazon AI-Related Outages and Engineering Struggles
01:14:28 — McKinsey AI Chatbot Hacked
01:19:49 — AI Politics Update
01:24:06 — Grammarly AI "Expert Review" Controversy
01:30:51 — Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch Agent
01:34:47 — AI Product and Funding Updates
This week’s episode is sponsored by our 2026 State of AI Report.
This year, we’re going beyond marketing-specific research to uncover how AI is being adopted and utilized across the organization, and we need your help to create the most comprehensive report yet.
It’s a quick seven-minute lift. In return, you’ll get the full report for free when it drops, plus a chance to win or extend a 12-month SmarterX AI Mastery Membership. Go to smarterx.ai/survey to share your input. That’s smarterx.ai/survey
Visit our website
Receive our weekly newsletter
Join our community:
Slack Community
YouTube
Looking for content and resources?
Register for a free webinar
Come to our next Marketing AI Conference
Enroll in our AI Academy