Speaker 1: Welcome to AI Assembled, the top AI news for small business.
Speaker 1: I'm Chris daily and each week I bring you the
Speaker 1: most important AI developments that can transform your business. Let's
Speaker 1: dive into this week's top stories. Ten days after the
Speaker 1: US government ordered Anthropic to disable claud Fable five and
Speaker 1: Mythos five, the two models are still dark. Anthropic has
Speaker 1: confirmed this week that access remains suspended for every customer worldwide,
Speaker 1: and the company is now framing the episode as the
Speaker 1: first real export controlled test case for a frontier AI
Speaker 1: model itself, not the chips that power it that is
Speaker 1: the deeper story. For two decades, US export controls have
Speaker 1: focused on hardware GPUs fab equipment, the chips that build
Speaker 1: the models. The Fable order is the first time the
Speaker 1: United States has reached past the silicon and reached the model.
Speaker 1: Also revealed this week that its run rate revenue has
Speaker 1: cossed thirty billion dollars, up from roughly nine billion at
Speaker 1: the end of twenty twenty five, and that more than
Speaker 1: one thousand business customers are now each spending over one
Speaker 1: million dollars a year on Claud. That number doubled in
Speaker 1: under two months, so you have a company tripling its
Speaker 1: revenue in six months, while its most capable models are
Speaker 1: turned off by federal order. For a small business owner,
Speaker 1: two takeaways. One, the company you bought AI from last
Speaker 1: quarter may not be the same company next quarter, and
Speaker 1: the model you signed up for can be off the
Speaker 1: menu by Friday.
Speaker 2: Two. Every legitimate alternative is now seeing a flood of
Speaker 2: new demand, which means provisioning, pricing and rate limits across
Speaker 2: every frontier model provider are about to get worse before
Speaker 2: they get better. If you have not yet signed contracts
Speaker 2: for backup model access, this is the week to do it.
Speaker 2: The second story is a quiet but enormous data point
Speaker 2: from JP Morgan Chase Institute. For the first time, a
Speaker 2: major bank has published research based not on what small
Speaker 2: businesses say they are doing with AI, but on what
Speaker 2: they are actually paying for. Chase Business Banking tracked AI
Speaker 2: service payments by small businesses from twenty nineteen through twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. The findings AI adoption among small businesses has
Speaker 2: grown faster than any general purpose technology in history. PCs
Speaker 2: took decades, the Internet took fifteen years. AI is on
Speaker 2: a steeper curve than both. By December twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: twenty six point one percent of small employer firms were
Speaker 2: paying for at least one AI service. And here is
Speaker 2: the part that matters for your shopping list. The percentage
Speaker 2: of firms paying for only one AI service dropped from
Speaker 2: eighty nine percent in twenty nineteen to seventy two percent
Speaker 2: by two twenty five. The share paying for three or
Speaker 2: more AI services jumped from under one percent to nine percent. Translation,
Speaker 2: small businesses are no longer asking what is my AI tool?
Speaker 2: They are asking what is my AI stack? The SBE
Speaker 2: Council's twenty twenty six Tech You survey backs this up.
Speaker 2: The median number of AI tools used per small business
Speaker 2: is now five. For a small business owner who feels behind,
Speaker 2: here is the calibration. If you are using zero or
Speaker 2: one AI tool today, your competitors are running five, pick
Speaker 2: three tasks this week. Match each one to a different
Speaker 2: specialized tool, and stop trying to make a single AI
Speaker 2: do everything. And the third story closes the loop on
Speaker 2: what's behind those revenue numbers. Anthropic signed a new agreement
Speaker 2: with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next generation
Speaker 2: tis EPU capacity, expected to come online starting in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty seven, to put gigawatts. In context, a single gigawat
Speaker 2: powers about seven hundred and fifty thousand homes. Anthropic is
Speaker 2: committing multiple of those just for clawed inference. This is
Speaker 2: on top of Google's previously announced forty billion dollar investment
Speaker 2: in Anthropic and Anthropic's own fifty billion dollar commitment to
Speaker 2: American compute infrastructure announced last November. The reason this matters
Speaker 2: to a small business is not abstract. Compute capacity is
Speaker 2: what decides whether the AI tool you used Tuesday is
Speaker 2: still available Friday at the same speed and price. Frontier
Speaker 2: model providers have spent twenty twenty six rationing access rate limits,
Speaker 2: paid tiers, quiet performance throttles because demand is out running supply.
Speaker 2: The Google Broadcom deal is one of the biggest signals
Speaker 2: yet that the supply crunch is being addressed at industrial scale.
Speaker 2: The practical implication expect Frontier model pricing to keep falling
Speaker 2: and Frontier model availability to keep improving from late twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six into twenty twenty seven, which is why locking
Speaker 2: yourself into a long term enterprise AI contract right now
Speaker 2: at today's prices is probably the wrong move.
Speaker 3: Now to the biggest practical SMB story of the week,
Speaker 3: even though it shipped quietly. Microsoft Agent three sixty five
Speaker 3: went generally available on May first, but the meaningful update
Speaker 3: this week is that small business plans now have access
Speaker 3: to it for fifteen US dollars per user per month.
Speaker 3: As a standalone product, Agent three sixty five is what's
Speaker 3: called a control plane. It is a single dashboard where
Speaker 3: a small business owner can see every AI agent operating
Speaker 3: inside the company, including third party agents, not just Microsoft
Speaker 3: its own. You can see which agent ran, what it touched,
Speaker 3: what it changed, and roll the action back if something
Speaker 3: went wrong. The reason this matters in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 3: AI was a chat window your team typed into. In
Speaker 3: twenty twenty six, AI agents are actually doing things, sending emails,
Speaker 3: updating records, generating invoices, driving websites without anyone in the
Speaker 3: office watching. An ungoverned AI agent is functionally an unaccountable
Speaker 3: employee with system access. Agent three sixty five is the
Speaker 3: first off the shelf product priced for small business that
Speaker 3: makes that visible. The practical move this week, even if
Speaker 3: you don't buy Agent three sixty five yet, sit down
Speaker 3: and write a one page list of every AI tool
Speaker 3: in your business that has the ability to act not
Speaker 3: just generate. If that list has more than three items
Speaker 3: on it, you need governance before you need more AI.
Speaker 3: Story two in this block, and this one is going
Speaker 3: to hit some listener's billing statements directly. On June fifteenth,
Speaker 3: Anthropic changed how programmatic use of the Claud Agent SDK
Speaker 3: is billed on subscription plans. Programmatic usage now moves to
Speaker 3: a separate monthly credit pool build apart from your seat licenses. Translation.
Speaker 3: If you or your developer set up an automation that
Speaker 3: calls Claud in a loop, for example, an agent that
Speaker 3: reads every incoming email and drafts a reply, that automation
Speaker 3: will burn through credits at a rate completely separate from
Speaker 3: your normal subscription. The Anthropic blog buried the change. The
Speaker 3: actual impact will show up on small business credit cards
Speaker 3: over the next thirty days. If you've recently built or
Speaker 3: hired someone to build any Claud powered automation, get into
Speaker 3: the billing portal this week, find the new credit pool
Speaker 3: and set a hard cap. An agent in a loop
Speaker 3: can burn a month's budget in a weekend quickly. On
Speaker 3: the build layer. The open source workflow tool N eight
Speaker 3: N shipped a major update to its AI Agent Node
Speaker 3: version three point zero that adds tool level human in
Speaker 3: the loop approval in plain English. When an N eight
Speaker 3: N built agent is about to do something that costs
Speaker 3: money or sends a customer facing message, the agent stops
Speaker 3: and asks a human to approve the specific action first.
Speaker 3: This is the safest pattern available right now for any
Speaker 3: small business that wants to deploy agents without losing sleep.
Speaker 3: N eight N also added direct integration with Microsoft Agent
Speaker 3: three sixty five, so an N eight N built agent
Speaker 3: can appear as a governed member of a Microsoft three
Speaker 3: sixty five team, which means a small all business can
Speaker 3: build its own custom agent on the cheap and still
Speaker 3: get the governance and visibility of a big company stack.
Speaker 3: For a small business with one technical person or a
Speaker 3: fractional IT provider, this is the most practical, lowest cost
Speaker 3: agent build path available right now.
Speaker 2: Last story this week, and it is a deadline. The
Speaker 2: Colorado Consumer Protections for Artificial Intelligence Act takes effect June thirtieth,
Speaker 2: eight days from this episode. We talked about this last week,
Speaker 2: but the deadline is now on top of us, and
Speaker 2: the question every small business needs to answer this week
Speaker 2: is not am I subject to it? The question is
Speaker 2: can I prove I'm in compliance if someone asks quick refresher.
Speaker 2: The law applies to anyone using high risk AI systems
Speaker 2: in decisions about Colorado residents, hiring, lending, housing, insurance, education,
Speaker 2: essential services. Small businesses with under twenty five million dollars
Speaker 2: in revenue get a grace period on some obligations, but
Speaker 2: not on the disclosure requirement. If your business uses AI
Speaker 2: anywhere in a decision that affects a Colorado customer, employee,
Speaker 2: or applicant, you need a plain language notice telling them so.
Speaker 2: Three actions to take in the next eight days. One
Speaker 2: write the disclosure. It can be as short as one paragraph.
Speaker 2: Where on your site or in your hiring flow AI
Speaker 2: is used and what categories of decision it shapes. Two
Speaker 2: post it where the Colorado relevant person will see it
Speaker 2: your career's page, your loan application page, your insurance quote flow.
Speaker 2: Three save a screenshot and a dated copy. Even if
Speaker 2: no Colorado regulator ever asks you've now built the template,
Speaker 2: every other state is about to copy New York, California, Illinois, Texas,
Speaker 2: same law architecture, different effective dates. The work you do
Speaker 2: this week protects you in five states by Christmas. So
Speaker 2: here is the bottom line. On this week. The US
Speaker 2: government has now demonstrated it can turn off Frontier AI
Speaker 2: models on three hours notice. JP Morgan just proved with
Speaker 2: hard bank transaction data that small businesses are running five
Speaker 2: tool AI stacks, not single tools. Microsoft made governance affordable
Speaker 2: for small business at fifteen dollars a head. Anthropic is
Speaker 2: quietly charging extra for the automation's Small businesses are most
Speaker 2: likely to build N eight N made human in the
Speaker 2: loop the default for the cheapest agents on the market,
Speaker 2: and Colorado's AI law is live in eight days. The
Speaker 2: market is no longer asking whether small businesses will adopt AI.
Speaker 2: The market is sorting out who will adopt it safely,
Speaker 2: with proof and with a backup. Here is your five
Speaker 2: step action plan for the next thirty days. One sign
Speaker 2: up for a backup Frontier model account this week. If
Speaker 2: your primary is Claude, open an account on GPT or
Speaker 2: Gemini or vice versa. The fable shutdown showed how fast
Speaker 2: access can disappear. Don't wait for your turn. Two, write
Speaker 2: a one page inventory of every AI tool in your
Speaker 2: business that can act, not just generate. If it sends updates, posts, charges,
Speaker 2: or replies, it's on the list. Three If you've built
Speaker 2: any AI automation on the claud Agent SDK, get into
Speaker 2: your billing portal this week and set a hard credit cap.
Speaker 2: The new June fifteenth billing change is silent and expensive.
Speaker 2: Four Post your Colorado AI disclosure before June thirtieth one paragraph,
Speaker 2: plane language, dated screenshot in your records. It is the
Speaker 2: template you'll use everywhere by year end. Five. If you
Speaker 2: are still on a single AI tool, pick two more
Speaker 2: this month, one for a different task, category one as
Speaker 2: a redundancy backup. The JP Morgan data is unambiguous. The
Speaker 2: small businesses winning with AI right now are running a stack,
Speaker 2: not a single app. That's the brief.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's AI assembled the top AI
Speaker 1: news for small business. If you found this valuable, share
Speaker 1: it with a fellow business owner. If you want a
Speaker 1: hands on group that you can work with on your
Speaker 1: specific AI needs, consider joining Business Success Academy at Freshmediaworks
Speaker 1: dot com slash BSA until next week. Keep innovating and
Speaker 1: keep it real