🗂️ Claude gains new Skills

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Remember that scene in The Matrix where Neo downloads capabilities directly into his brain? Anthropic just gave Claude the same power — except it’s for your company's workflows.

The new Skills feature packages entire processes into folders that Claude loads on demand, a simple solution that may be more powerful than it appears.

In today’s AI rundown:

Anthropic's Skills teach Claude your workflows
Pew poll shows global AI concern outweighs excitement
Generate on-brand presentations with Claude Skills
OpenAI recruits black hole physicist for science initiative
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🌟 Anthropic's Skills teach Claude your workflows

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Skills for Claude, a folder-based system that lets organizations bundle workflows, procedures, and executable scripts into packages their AI assistant can autonomously access when handling specific tasks.

The details:

Skills function as directory packages containing instruction files, code scripts, and reference materials that Claude loads dynamically based on task relevance.
The system uses "progressive disclosure,” with Claude first seeing skill names and descriptions, then deciding which components to activate for a workflow.
Users can build custom skills through an interactive "skill-creator" assistant requiring no manual file editing or coding expertise.
Multiple skills can also coordinate, allowing agents to combine for tasks like brand guidelines with financial reporting templates in a single workflow.

Why it matters: Anthropic’s Alex Albert summed it up well in comparing Skills to “loading in” specialized knowledge, like in The Matrix, and the real upgrade is simplifying the process. By packaging expertise into folders rather than code, Skills can better infuse enterprise knowledge and workflows with real agentic capabilities.

TOGETHER WITH RETOOL

🚀 AI AppGen that’s ready to deploy

The Rundown: Most AI dev tools stop at prototypes. Retool's AI-assisted dev capabilities create full-stack apps that are connected to your data, deployed in your environment, and secure by default — taking you from prompt to production in minutes.

With Retool, you get:

Prompt to a working app you trust in minutes
Built-in security and role-based access
Edits grounded in context
Deployment in your preferred environment

Build with AI that knows your enterprise.

THE WORLD & AI

😨 Pew poll shows global AI concern outweighs excitement

Image source: …

The Rundown: Pew Research just released new results from a survey of over 28,000 adults across 25 countries on AI sentiment, finding nervousness outpacing optimism for the technology globally.

The details:

50% of respondents in the U.S., Italy, Australia, and Greece report anxiety over rising AI use, with Israel, South Korea, and Sweden emerging most optimistic.
The EU ranks as the most trusted regulatory body at 53% confidence, beating out both the U.S. (37%) and China (27%) for perceived oversight credibility.
Young adults under 35 consistently report both greater AI awareness and optimism compared to those over 50, with major gaps in countries like Greece.

Why it matters: The AI wave is here, but contrary to what we see in our tech-forward bubble, not everyone is excited about it. These results expose some interesting divides (like countries with the most AI exposure harboring some of the deepest anxiety) that give a much broader view of how the world is grappling with the transformative tech.

AI TRAINING

📊 Generate on-brand presentations with Claude Skills

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a custom Claude Skill that automatically generates presentations following your company's brand guidelines, eliminating hours of manual formatting and logo placement.

Step-by-step:

Create a "Brand_Guidelines" folder with Skill.md file containing your brand specs (colors, fonts, logo rules) in YAML format, plus a /resources subfolder with your logo.png
Zip the entire Brand_Guidelines folder (right-click → compress on Mac/Windows). Don't zip just the contents inside
Go to Claude Settings → Capabilities, enable "Code execution and file creation", then upload your Brand_Guidelines.zip under the Skills section
Prompt Claude: "Create a 10-slide PowerPoint for [topic] following our company brand guidelines with logo,” and it automatically applies your colors, fonts, and logo placement
Download the presentation or save directly to Google Drive if connected

Pro tip: Reference your sample presentation in prompts by saying "match the layout style of sample_presentation.pptx" to get Claude to copy your slide designs every time.

PRESENTED BY UNFRAME

📊 The 2025 Enterprise AI Trends Report

The Rundown: Discover how top enterprises are using AI to boost efficiency, scale innovation, and manage risk in 2025. This exclusive report reveals the key trends shaping AI strategies and how leaders are overcoming barriers like data quality and tech compatibility to drive real transformation.

Findings from the report include:

66% of execs place productivity and knowledge access at the core of AI strategies
55% of enterprises state data quality & availability as the top barrier to scaling AI
Only 16% of orgs have fully integrated AI, with tech compatibility as a key barrier

Download the report.

AI RESEARCH

🧪 OpenAI recruits black hole physicist for science initiative

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI announced the hiring of theoretical physicist Alex Lupsasca as the first academic researcher for its OpenAI for Science division, with the team focused on advancing AI-driven discoveries in areas like scientific reasoning, math, and physics.

The details:

The initiative aims to combine AI models with scientific tooling, positioning itself as "the next great scientific instrument" for researchers.
Lupsaca said GPT-5-Pro “completely changed his mind” on AI in research, taking less than 30 minutes on a physics problem that took him days.
OpenAI VP Kevin Weil also revealed that GPT-5 has already shown “limited novel research abilities” across math, quantum theory, biology, and more.

Why it matters: OpenAI has been criticized for ‘focusing’ on releases like Sora’s social video platform or less restrictive content generation, but many fail to see the Google-style multi-front strategy playing out. The industry leader seems to be confident it can play a big role in the entire AI stack, from TikTok-style apps to scientific breakthroughs.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🎨 FLORA – AI canvas for brand and marketing teams to ideate, iterate, and refine their creative work with full creative control*
💨 Claude 4.5 Haiku - Anthropic’s new small, cost-efficient model
🎥 Veo 3.1 - Google’s upgraded video generation model
🎬 Apps - Runway’s new mini-tools for editing and creating images and videos

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Apple AI search executive Ke Yang is reportedly leaving the company to join Meta, marking another high-profile departure from Apple’s AI division.

Microsoft introduced new AI updates with Windows 11, including a voice-activated ‘Hey Copilot’ command and Vision capabilities that see users’ screens and take actions.

Anthropic launched Microsoft 365 integration, enabling direct access to SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams data, alongside enterprise search for Claude.

Cognition released SWE-grep and SWE-grep-mini, a new series of models that accelerate code context retrieval by 10x while matching frontier model accuracy.

Google Labs creative director Henry Daubrez posted that the rumors surrounding the Veo 3.1 were overhyped, emphasizing it’s a “partial upgrade and not a revolution.”

OpenAI rolled out new updates to its Sora 2 app, including a Storyboards feature for planning outputs and longer video generations of up to 25 seconds.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

‘Today’s workflow comes from reader Vicky D. in Kent, OH:

“I volunteer at my local dog shelter. After getting to know a dog, I write children's books about them in the hopes of getting them adopted. I prompt about the dog's personality, breed, and skills. AI then helps me develop my story. I upload some images of the dog and am prompted to create images for the different parts of the story. I then compile the book in Canva to create the final PDF and upload it to my publisher!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.