A Brief Overview of This Week in AI
A quick look at a few things that happened in the AI space this week, including DoD negotiations, new free tiers, Cursor updates, and GPT 5.4.
2026-03-05
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A quick look at a few things that happened in the AI space this week, including DoD negotiations, new free tiers, Cursor updates, and GPT 5.4.
This week saw Anthropic refuse to hand over its Opus model to the DoD on ethical grounds while OpenAI opted for an API-based military contract, highlighting the tension around defense deployments. In developer news, OpenAI dropped GPT 5.4 alongside offering Codex for free, and Cursor launched "Always on Agents" to automate your morning test suites.
Here is a brief review of a couple things that happened in the AI space over the last week.
One event this week involves the Department of Defense and their negotiations with Anthropic and OpenAI. The core issue came down to an ethical line that Anthropic was unwilling to cross.
Anthropic was going to effectively hand over their Opus model for the DoD to run on their own hardware. This approach would give the government control over the infrastructure but maintain a strict boundary on how the model is deployed and managed. OpenAI took a different approach. Their strategy was to have the DoD call OpenAI's APIs directly. This disagreement on deployment architecture highlights the ongoing tension between AI safety and government defense requirements.
OpenAI released GPT 5.4. This release continues their trend of incremental updates. It is worth pulling into your current workflows to see how it handles logic and reasoning tasks compared to previous versions.
OpenAI is also offering Codex on their free plan on a temporary basis. If you have been waiting to try out their dedicated coding models, hop on it while you can.
For engineers, Cursor rolled out Always on Agents. This feature is designed to automate tasks that engineers typically start their day running.
Instead of spending your first hour pulling the latest branches, running test suites, or waiting for builds, you can walk into work and review code sooner. This will save some time for specific engineering roles. If this was around while I was in big tech, it could have saved me some time every day.
These are just a few of the updates from the past week.