Ink & Code News: March 14, 2026
Stuffy Stuff That Happened This Week
Welcome to Ink & Code News! As we shift over from the YouTube Live Show, I’m not sure what this feature will ultimately end up looking like. But here we are.
So, what the heck happened this week? Here are a few things:
⚔️ The Pentagon AI Drama: Chapter 2 or 3 or 100?
The Anthropic vs. Pentagon standoff we covered last week just escalated on multiple fronts.
Pentagon CTO draws a hard line: Emil Michael said “there’s no chance” of renewing talks with Anthropic, claiming Claude would “pollute” the military supply chain with “a different policy preference.”
Plot Twist: Anthropic hit back with two federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” designation — a label historically reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic argues the move violates its First Amendment rights.
Plot Twist 2: OpenAI’s Head of Robotics, Caitlin Kalinowski, resigned over OpenAI’s Pentagon deal, calling the decision rushed and saying safeguards around domestic surveillance and lethal autonomy weren’t properly defined. ChatGPT uninstalls have surged 295%, and Claude has dethroned ChatGPT as the #1 app in the App Store.
❗Note: We don’t talk politics here. We focus on writing with technology. But the power struggle between these entities directly affects the tools in your workflow.
✍️ Author Takeaway: The companies behind your writing tools are at war — and the fallout is reshaping the AI landscape in real time. If your workflow runs on a single platform, this is your diversification wake-up call. Save your prompts and workflows locally. Stay informed about who builds your tech and what they stand for.
🤖 The Clawdbot Chronicles: Agents & Acquisitions
In the continuing Clawdbot/Moltbot/Openclaw drama, we’ve got this:
Meta buys Moltbook, the AI agent social network: Meta acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like platform where AI agents powered by OpenClaw post, comment, and organize autonomously. The platform has 2.8M registered bots with nearly 200K verified to real people. Co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr are joining Meta’s Superintelligence Labs.
Plot Twist: The whole thing was a weekend project. Matt Schlicht built Moltbook using his OpenClaw bot named “Clawd Clawderberg.” Mark Zuckerberg tried to recruit OpenClaw’s Peter Steinberger first but lost out after he joined OpenAI.
✍️ Author Takeaway: AI agents are no longer a future concept — they’re building communities, triggering acquisitions, and doing real work right now. For authors, this is a preview: agents handling research, marketing, and distribution on your behalf. The lesson? Agents are powerful but unpredictable. Understand what they’re doing before you hand them the keys.
💻 Your Toolkit Is Shapeshifting
The tools authors use daily evolved this week. Here’s what shifted.
Claude launched interactive visuals in chat: Anthropic launched a feature letting Claude create charts, diagrams, and interactive visualizations directly in conversation.
Claude for Excel and PowerPoint gets cross-app intelligence: Claude now shares full context across all open files — update a spreadsheet, build a model, drop the output into a pitch deck. One continuous workflow.
Google supercharges Docs, Sheets, and Slides with Gemini: Docs writes first drafts in your style. Sheets drafts spreadsheets with real-time data. Slides generates editable, theme-matched presentations. Drive answers natural-language questions across documents, emails, and the web.
Perplexity launches Computer — an always-on AI worker: A digital agent that executes complex tasks, conducts analysis, and creates production-ready assets. Now available for Pro users (many of us have this free for a year).
Claude Code updates: New local scheduled tasks on desktop, plus a loop command running recurring prompts for up to 3 days.
✍️ Author Takeaway: Every major tool in your workflow evolved this week. Claude became a visual thinker. Google’s suite got dramatically smarter. Persistent AI agents went mainstream. The tools you learned six months ago have already changed. The authors who stay curious and keep experimenting have the edge. This week’s theme in action: Ride the AI Wave and pivot, don’t panic.
🛸 Stranger than Fiction: The Weird Side of AI
Actually, most of the stories this week are already stranger than fiction (Pentagon, Clawdbot), but here are a couple more:
Doom-Playing Brain Cells
Scientists at Cortical Labs programmed a biocomputer made of lab-grown human brain cells to play Doom (1993). We’ve officially entered “organic computer” territory — and the first thing humanity did was make it play a 30-year-old video game.
The AI Hairline Judge
At MWC 2026, a tool called HeyCheckScalp debuted — AI that analyzes photos of your head and delivers a “brutally honest” report on your temple recession and crown thinning. (There are also Dinosaur bots on that article page. Just sayin…)
What do you think?
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Suggestions? Let’s hear them in the comments below!
Always love these Ink & Code news report outs! So informative! :-) Thanks for compiling!