Philip Morris International released a whitepaper on AI and human cognition. Yes, that Philip Morris. The white paper explores how human capabilities such as critical thinking, creativity and adaptability will be the superskill in the future. The risks of generative AI is cognitive atrophy, attention erosion and emerging cognitive decline. Philip Morris said it has leveraged AI to become a smoke-free company by 2030.
The non-profit AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute (AVERI) launched to create a third-party auditor of frontier AI models. The group created a framework for third-party audits of safety and security practices. AVERI was founded by former OpenAI policy chief Miles Brundage.
Anthropic published a paper on the "assistant axis" and explored how large language models adopt personas and can drift. The research is fascinating and scary at the same time.
Anthropic's January 2026 Economic Index report notes income disparities for AI usage, metrics on "economic primitives" and other takeaways. But most notable may be what hasn't changed. AI is being used to augment jobs not automate them away even as models improve.
Cloudflare said it has acquired Human Native, an AI data marketplace that transforms multimedia content into useful data that can be searched. The acquisition aligns with Cloudflare's efforts to enable content creators to monetize by providing training data to AI models. Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl approach is one of the new economic models being considered.
CEOs are quickly becoming the primary decision-maker for AI projects, according to BCG. There's a good reason for that as half of CEOs think they're toast if they don't nail the AI strategy.
AWS said its AWS European Sovereign Cloud is generally available and added that it will add AWS Local Zones in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal.
Google said Gemini is getting personal with Personal Intelligence, a setting that connects your personal Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos and other apps to Gemini. It's an interesting move that highlights how AI agents are going to create personalized experiences.
JPMorgan Chase is taking over Apple Card, but will have a bit of integration work ahead. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon explained: "If it was a traditional credit card thing, we can fold it in rather quickly and just put it in our systems. But it's not. They actually built a completely different, integrated into iOS tech stack and they did a good job. So it's good stuff. But we have to integrate that inside our system. And to do that, it's going to take two years and cost a bit of money to meet the terms and standards. Those terms and standards are actually quite good. Apple wants to take very good care of those customers. And a lot of those things will be built directly into our system and we could obviously apply some of that customer service stuff in other places. And we want to do it right. We have to rebuild what their tech stack is, embed it into our system."
Salesforce said Slackbot is generally available. Slackbot is billed as an AI assistant and chatbot that understands how you work. Slack is the conversational linchpin of Agentforce.
Apple is bundling its creator apps including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage in a bundle that'll go for $129 a year, or $12.99 a month. The move could move the needle on Apple Services revenue.
Anthropic has been busy of late. The company launched Anthropic Labs, which will be led by Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann. Anthropic also rolled out Claude for Healthcare.
