Cursor — a third-party tool with no privileged access — extracts more performance from Anthropic's own Opus 4.7 than Anthropic's own Claude Code does.
God Mode Podcast
Cursor — a third-party tool with no privileged access — extracts more performance from Anthropic's own Opus 4.7 than Anthropic's own Claude Code does.
TL;DR
Three AI builders break down the biggest week in AI yet: Cursor's third-party harness outperforms Anthropic's own Claude Code on Opus 4.7, Codex launches as an everything-app with HeyGen video and browser baked in, Grok 4.3 drops at one-quarter competitor pricing, and GitHub Copilot kills flat-rate subscriptions. Stripe Treasury turns Stripe into an AI-native bank, SpaceX approves Elon's $7.5T pay package with a Mars colony clause, and the Department of War picks seven AI partners — pointedly excluding Anthropic. Key takeaway: the abstraction layer (Cursor, Phantom) captures more value than the base-layer infrastructure (model labs, blockchains).
Three builders discuss the biggest AI news of the week: Cursor outperforming Claude Code on Anthropic's own models, Codex becoming an everything-app with HeyGen integration, Grok 4.3 dropping at a fraction of competitors' prices, GitHub Copilot moving to usage-based billing, Stripe Treasury launching with MCP support, SpaceX's $7.5T pay package for Elon, and the Department of War naming seven AI partners while notably excluding Anthropic.
Chapter 1 · 00:00
Anthropic built the model. Cursor figured out how to use it better than Anthropic.
Cursor extracts more performance from Opus 4.7 than Anthropic's own Claude Code does — despite having no privileged access. The harness is a different discipline from model training, and Cursor's years of multi-model developer experience give it an edge the labs can't easily replicate.
A third-party harness with no privileged access outperforms Anthropic's own Claude Code when running Anthropic's Opus 4.7 model.
GPT 5.5 reportedly performs better inside Cursor than inside OpenAI's own Codex environment.
Chapter 2 · 01:08
Cursor just declared war on the companies it pays for compute.
Cursor has been perfecting the developer experience since 2022, giving it years of institutional knowledge across multiple models.
Elon Musk placed a bid valuing Cursor at $60 billion, which likely emboldened the company to launch its competing SDK.
Cursor's new SDK lets anyone embed its full harness, runtime, and models into their own product. Cursor now competes with the OpenAI and Anthropic — the same companies it pays billions to for inference. This is the same collision that happened between cloud providers and Snowflake.
Chapter 3 · 09:20
Cursor pays huge sums to OpenAI and Anthropic for all this inference, but now they're competing for the layer that those labs have wanted to dominate.
Chapter 5 · 18:50
Codex is becoming the everything app — browser, video generation, and code in one frame.
Codex now integrates a browser (via former Atlas) and HeyGen video generation directly inside the app. Engineers prefer it because everything is in one frame — no switching between tools. Claude Code's split UX is costing Anthropic users.
Grok 4.3 launched at $1.25 per million input tokens versus Anthropic's $5 and OpenAI's $5 — roughly one-quarter the price. It also claimed the number-one spot on Bridgebench with the lowest hallucination rate in the field. The AI race is shifting.
Chapter 6 · 25:10
Grok 4.3 is priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens — roughly one-quarter of Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing.
Grok 4.3 is priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens — roughly one-quarter of Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing.
Grok 4.3 took the number-one spot on Bridgebench with the lowest hallucination rate in the field at the time of release.
Chapter 7 · 28:50
The latest DeepSeek model is reportedly 90 to 95% cheaper than GPT 5.5 and comparable Claude models, enabling significant cost savings by using it for routine tasks.
The latest DeepSeek model is reportedly 90 to 95% cheaper than GPT 5.5 and comparable Claude models, enabling significant cost savings by using it for routine tasks.
OpenAI is reportedly building an AI-first phone designed to replace iPhones, targeting a 2028 launch.
Chapter 8 · 31:35
Apple has one year to figure out AI before OpenAI ships a phone to replace the iPhone.
Apple Intelligence is 'one of the most pathetic versions of AI in 2026.' Tim Cook stepped down because he had no idea what AI was. OpenAI is building an AI-first phone targeting 2028, and Apple has roughly one year before John Turnis's product-focused leadership has to prove it can compete.
Chapter 9 · 36:50
Neuralink shares were available on a crypto-based pre-IPO platform at an implied valuation of $43 billion.
Neuralink shares were available on a crypto-based pre-IPO platform at an implied valuation of $43 billion.
Chapter 10 · 39:45
Crypto already ran this movie. Phantom printed. Solana didn't. AI is the remake.
In crypto, Phantom wallet made more money than Solana itself. The same dynamic is playing out in AI: Cursor and other abstraction layers will capture more value than the model labs running the underlying compute. Every tool call is a potential revenue event.
Chapter 11 · 47:20
The safest AI bet isn't building models. It's owning the data agents can't get without you.
Agents calling tools are the new Google searches. Services like Apify that gate access to hard-to-scrape platforms (Facebook, TikTok, Reddit) become indispensable once agents can't access data themselves. Owning proprietary data sources is the most defensible position in the next five years.
For three years, VC money secretly transferred from light users to power users via flat AI subscriptions. GitHub Copilot's shift to usage-based billing from June 1 is the canary in the coal mine. AI subsidies will disappear just like Uber's — and then everyone becomes a power user or pays the price.
GitHub Copilot announced it will move from flat-rate subscriptions to usage-based billing starting June 1, 2026.
Chapter 12 · 49:43
For the last three years, the reality is that there's been a flat AI subscription cost. But secretly, what was happening is there was a wealth transfer from light users to power users — from basically the VC investors to all of us.
Chapter 15 · 1:02:00
You don't need a bank account anymore — Stripe just became the financial OS for AI agents.
Stripe Treasury is now an AI-native bank: hold multi-currency balances, pay anyone in 160 countries by email, earn 2% cashback — and connect it all to your AI agents via the Stripe MCP. Stripe already knows your revenue trajectory better than you do.
Stripe Treasury allows users to hold funds in multiple currencies, earn 2% cashback, and pay anyone in 160 countries with just an email address.
Chapter 16 · 1:05:10
OpenAI's market is constrained by planet Earth. SpaceX's isn't.
OpenAI and Anthropic face fierce competition and a hard compute ceiling — a 10x growth from their current valuations would require consuming all the world's energy. SpaceX's market is literally off-planet. All three hosts picked SpaceX when asked to choose one investment.
Chapter 17 · 1:09:00
Elon's pay package requires 100 terawatts of space compute — 1,000x everything on Earth today.
Elon Musk's SpaceX compensation package only vests if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion valuation, launches 100 terawatts of compute into space (1,000 times today's global data-centre capacity of 0.1 TW), and establishes a Mars colony of 1 million people. People laughed at the Tesla package too.
SpaceX's board approved a pay package for Elon Musk contingent on hitting a $7.5 trillion company valuation.
Elon Musk's SpaceX pay package requires establishing a permanent Mars colony of at least 1 million people as one of its conditions.
Current global data-centre compute capacity sits at approximately 0.1 terawatts, making Elon's 100-terawatt compute target 1,000 times today's total.
Chapter 18 · 1:12:40
This builder is mapping his entire genome to feed it to AI — and building a clinic around it.
The 19-year-old founder of CalAI, after selling that app, launched a new stealth startup that hit $177K MRR within one month of launch.
Luca Arrigo is getting his entire genome sequenced and plans to feed the raw data into AI models to find personalised health insights. His business vision: open a local clinic where people come in for a saliva swab, outsource the sequencing to external labs, and use AI to deliver personalised medicine at scale.
The original Human Genome Project took 13 years to sequence the genome and only achieved 92% completion of the sequence.
Chapter 19 · 1:19:10
The US military picked 7 AI partners. Anthropic wasn't one of them.
The US Department of War chose SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and AWS as its seven AI partners. Anthropic — widely considered a leading safety-focused lab — is conspicuously absent. AWS, a major Anthropic investor, made the list.
The US Department of War named seven AI partners — SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and AWS — notably omitting Anthropic.
Over 1.3 million Department of War personnel have used the AI platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months.
No indexed bits in this chapter.
Cursor extracts more performance from Opus 4.7 than Anthropic's own Claude Code does — despite having no privileged access. The harness is a different discipline from model training, and Cursor's years of multi-model developer experience give it an edge the labs can't easily replicate.
In crypto, Phantom wallet made more money than Solana itself. The same dynamic is playing out in AI: Cursor and other abstraction layers will capture more value than the model labs running the underlying compute. Every tool call is a potential revenue event.
Elon Musk's SpaceX compensation package only vests if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion valuation, launches 100 terawatts of compute into space (1,000 times today's global data-centre capacity of 0.1 TW), and establishes a Mars colony of 1 million people. People laughed at the Tesla package too.
This episode
Factual claims made this episode, and whether a source was named.
Cursor, a third-party tool with no privileged access, extracts more performance from Anthropic's Opus 4.7 model than Anthropic's own Claude Code harness does.
GPT 5.5 performs better inside Cursor than inside OpenAI's own Codex environment.
Cursor was founded in 2022.
Elon Musk placed a bid valuing Cursor at $60 billion.
Grok 4.3 is priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, compared to Anthropic's $5/$25 and OpenAI's $5/$30.
Grok 4.3 claimed the number-one position on Bridgebench with the lowest hallucination rate of any available model.
GPT 5.5 became the most expensive AI model per token, overtaking Opus 4.7.
Despite higher per-token pricing, GPT 5.5 uses fewer tokens to solve the same problem as Opus 4.7, making it cheaper in effective cost.
GitHub Copilot announced a shift from flat-rate subscriptions to usage-based billing effective June 1, 2026.
The latest DeepSeek model is 90 to 95% cheaper than GPT 5.5 and comparable Claude models.
Global data-centre compute capacity currently sits at approximately 0.1 terawatts.
Elon Musk's SpaceX pay package requires hitting a $7.5 trillion valuation, deploying 100 terawatts of compute in space, and establishing a permanent Mars colony of at least 1 million people.
The Human Genome Project took 13 years to sequence the human genome and only achieved 92% completion.
The US Department of War named seven AI partners: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and AWS — excluding Anthropic.
Over 1.3 million Department of War personnel have used the AI platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months.
Google invested $40 billion into Anthropic.
OpenAI is reportedly building an AI-first phone in collaboration with Qualcomm, targeting a 2028 launch.
The 19-year-old creator of CalAI launched a stealth startup that reached $177,000 MRR within one month of launch.
Neuralink shares were available for investment at a $43 billion implied valuation on a crypto-based pre-IPO platform.
Tim Cook stepped down as Apple CEO, with John Turnis set to take over effective September 2026.
This episode
Referenced as having bid $60 billion for Cursor and as having a new $7.5T SpaceX pay package requiring 100 TW of compute and a Mars colony.
Former US AI czar and All In podcast co-host, discussed as increasingly vocal in criticising Anthropic's alleged fear-mongering around the Mythos model.
AI-powered IDE and coding harness discussed extensively as outperforming Claude Code on Opus 4.7 and launching a new SDK.
AI lab discussed as maker of Claude and Opus 4.7, whose own harness (Claude Code) is being outperformed by third-party tools, and was excluded from the Department of War AI partner list.
AI lab discussed as maker of GPT 5.5 and Codex, building an AI-first phone, and named as a Department of War AI partner.
Discussed as approving a $7.5T valuation pay package for Elon Musk with Mars colony and compute clauses, and as a Department of War AI partner.
Discussed as launching Stripe Treasury — an AI-native banking product with MCP integration, 2% cashback, and multi-currency support.
Discussed as facing an existential threat from OpenAI's planned AI-first phone; Tim Cook stepped down and was replaced by John Turnis.
Chinese AI lab whose new model is reportedly 90-95% cheaper than GPT 5.5, making it a compelling option for routine agentic tasks.
Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, mentioned as available for investment at a $43 billion valuation on pre-IPO crypto platforms.
OpenAI's coding product discussed as becoming an everything-app with browser and HeyGen video integration, seen as a direct competitor to Claude Code.
Anthropic's own CLI coding harness, discussed as being outperformed by Cursor on Anthropic's own Opus 4.7 model.
XAI's new model launched at roughly one-quarter the pricing of competitors and took #1 on Bridgebench for lowest hallucination rate.
Anthropic's unreleased cybersecurity AI model, discussed as possibly comparable to GPT 5.5's security capabilities and the basis for Claude Security.
Announced shift from flat-rate subscriptions to usage-based billing starting June 1, 2026, seen as a signal of the end of the AI subscription era.
Cloud-based IDE discussed as an alternative to Cursor, used by Luca and noted for active model-switching in its back-end.
Used as a blockchain analogy for AI model labs — the base layer that provides infrastructure but captures less value than the abstraction layer above it.
A web-scraping API platform cited as a key example of proprietary data infrastructure that AI agents will increasingly depend on.
Anthropic's new public-beta cybersecurity product for enterprise customers, suspected to be based on the Mythos model.
Solana's dominant wallet app used as an analogy for the AI abstraction layer (Cursor), which captures more value and brand equity than the underlying infrastructure.
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