Nathaniel Whittemore

He has sounded alarms about the urgency of the situation despite his company's position of strength as the world's fourth most valuable firm.

Nadella reportedly now has a standing weekly meeting where staff can demo new features from competing labs.

Sources said that many of these meetings have featured cloud code driven by Opus 4.5, and they mentioned that the release of CoWork has ramped up the urgency of the meetings in recent weeks.

At this stage, the reporting doesn't include the term code red, but you have to think we're not far from an all-out response from Microsoft.

Twitter was, of course, ablaze with jokes.

Kyle Russell wrote, Microsoft Office?

Oh, you mean the Claude rapper.

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago, even before this, Gavin Baker said, Claude co-work is what Copilot should have been.

Evidently built in 10 days with Claude Code while Microsoft has been working on Copilot for years.

Although I have to say, one really insightful comment in response to Gavin came from Replit CEO Amjad Massad, who said, To make a bit of an excuse for Microsoft, the world is just waking up to the fact that coding agents are general agents.

It's Bitter Lesson adjacent.

Writing and executing code will likely outperform years of handcrafting vertical-specific agents with expert knowledge.

Actually, it might exactly map in Bitter Lesson.

Program synthesis is a form of scalable search.

Given the debates I've been having with you guys around my thesis that code AGI is functional AGI, I thought that was an interesting comment.

Moving over to Google's side of the house, Google is getting in the AI browser game with a big agentic upgrade for Chrome.

Google first added Gemini to Chrome in September, but that iteration kept the AI sandboxed in its own window.

With this update, Gemini will be able to use open tabs as context and function as a web agent.

That feature set is of course similar to agentic browsers from OpenAI, Perplexity, and The Browser Company, which were all released last year.

Google is even borrowing the UX, placing Gemini in a sidebar for split-screen agentic browsing.