AI Daily Digest — 2026-04-02

Kun Lu

- 5 minutes read - 976 words

Key Highlights

  • Anthropic’s DMCA overreach accidentally took down ~8,100 GitHub repos (including innocent forks) after the Claude Code source leak — they quickly retracted, but the incident raised serious questions about DMCA abuse and automated takedown processes
  • Anthropic on a “generational run” according to All-In Podcast analysis: $6B ARR added in February alone, Opus 4.6 widely praised, but philosophical concerns remain about their regulatory capture strategy in Washington
  • NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs set new MLPerf Inference records across all newly introduced benchmarks including DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-VL, with 2.7x throughput improvement through software optimization alone
  • Cognichip raised $60M to use AI for chip design, claiming 75%+ cost reduction and 50%+ timeline compression for semiconductor development
  • r/programming temporarily banned all LLM discussion, reflecting growing community tensions around AI-generated code content

Analysis & Opinion

Anthropic Took Down Thousands of GitHub Repos Trying to Yank Its Leaked Source Code — TechCrunch

Anthropic issued DMCA takedown requests that accidentally hit thousands of innocent GitHub repositories — far beyond the repos actually hosting leaked Claude Code source. The mass takedown sparked significant developer community backlash. Anthropic characterized the breadth as unintentional and retracted most notices, but the incident highlights the blunt-instrument nature of DMCA enforcement when applied to interconnected code repositories. The episode connects directly to Theo’s detailed video analysis (below) which traces the miscommunication between Anthropic’s legal team and GitHub.

Dorsey Makes the AI Case Against Managers — The Rundown AI

Commentary on arguments that AI may fundamentally challenge traditional management structures, examining how automation could reshape organizational hierarchies and the role of middle management in the AI era.

Meta’s Natural Gas Binge Could Power South Dakota — TechCrunch

Meta plans to build 10 new natural gas plants to power its upcoming Hyperion AI data center — energy requirements so vast they could theoretically supply an entire state. The piece underscores the growing tension between AI infrastructure ambitions and sustainability goals, as natural gas emerges as the reliability-first choice for continuous data center operations despite corporate renewable energy pledges.

The AI Marketing BS Index — Bastian Rieck (via Hacker News)

A satirical scoring rubric inspired by John Baez’s Crackpot Index, tailored for evaluating AI marketing claims. Awards points for common deceptive practices: 10 points for claiming invention without evidence, 20 for motte-and-bailey fallacies, 40 for unverifiable research collaborations. A humorous but pointed critique of the hype cycle.

r/programming Bans All Discussion of LLM Programming — Reddit (via Hacker News)

The r/programming subreddit announced a temporary ban on all LLM-related content, reflecting escalating community fatigue with AI-dominated discussion threads and debates over AI-generated code quality.

New Products & Tools

Cognichip Raised $60M to Use AI for Chip Design — TechCrunch

Cognichip claims it can reduce chip development costs by over 75% and cut timelines by more than half using AI to automate semiconductor design. The startup aims to democratize custom chip development by optimizing design tradeoffs and compressing multi-year development cycles to months.

Accelerate Token Production in AI Factories Using Unified Services and Real-Time AI — NVIDIA Developer

NVIDIA Mission Control 3.0 introduces modular, API-driven architecture for AI factory operations. Key features include multi-tenant isolation via VXLAN/PKeys and power management as a first-class scheduling primitive — addressing the reality that a 1% drop in usable GPU time means millions of tokens lost per hour.

Research

NVIDIA Extreme Co-Design Delivers New MLPerf Inference Records — NVIDIA Developer

NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra GPUs achieved record performance in MLPerf Inference v6.0, the only participant to submit results on all newly introduced benchmarks including DeepSeek-R1 Interactive, Qwen3-VL-235B, and GPT-OSS-120B. Software optimizations alone drove 2.7x throughput gains on existing GB300 NVL72 hardware between August 2025 and February 2026.

Interviews & Conversations

I Got DMCA’d by Anthropic (not a joke) — Theo - t3.gg (16 min)

Theo details receiving a DMCA strike on his fork of the official Claude Code repo — not the leaked source — for a one-word PR change. The takedown hit ~8,100 repos in the fork network. Anthropic quickly filed a retraction, narrowing enforcement to only the 96 forks of the actual leaked source mirror. Theo traces the likely miscommunication between Anthropic’s legal team and GitHub’s DMCA process, notes that false DMCA enforcement is illegal under US law, and credits Anthropic engineers (Thoric, Boris) for being transparent and even humorous in their public responses. He also reveals the leak originated from a manual npm deployment step that has since been automated.

Anthropic’s Generational Run, OpenAI Panics, AI Moats, Meta Loses Major Lawsuits — All-In Podcast (80 min)

The hosts analyze Anthropic’s extraordinary 2026 trajectory: Opus 4.6 (called “an inflection point” by Jensen Huang), Claude Code plugins triggering the “SaaS apocalypse,” $6B ARR added in February, and the new Computer Use agentic system. Chamath argues the Anthropic-vs-OpenAI rivalry is overhyped — they’re fundamentally different businesses (Anthropic is 75% API/enterprise, OpenAI is 75% consumer subscriptions) with incomparable revenue recognition methods. Sachs praises the products but criticizes Anthropic’s regulatory capture strategy around AI permissioning regimes in Washington. The episode also covers David Sachs’s appointment to co-chair PCAST (Trump’s science/tech advisory council) alongside members including Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su, and David Freeberg.

References

  1. Anthropic Took Down Thousands of GitHub Repos — TechCrunch, 2026-04-01 [blog]
  2. Dorsey Makes the AI Case Against Managers — The Rundown AI, 2026-04-02 [blog]
  3. Meta’s Natural Gas Binge Could Power South Dakota — TechCrunch, 2026-04-01 [blog]
  4. The AI Marketing BS Index — Bastian Rieck, 2026-04-01 [blog]
  5. r/programming Bans All Discussion of LLM Programming — Reddit, 2026-04-02 [blog]
  6. Cognichip Raised $60M to Use AI for Chip Design — TechCrunch, 2026-04-01 [blog]
  7. Accelerate Token Production in AI Factories — NVIDIA Developer, 2026-04-01 [blog]
  8. NVIDIA Extreme Co-Design Delivers New MLPerf Inference Records — NVIDIA Developer, 2026-04-01 [blog]
  9. I Got DMCA’d by Anthropic (not a joke) — Theo - t3.gg, 2026-04-02 [video]
  10. Anthropic’s Generational Run, OpenAI Panics, AI Moats, Meta Loses Major Lawsuits — All-In Podcast, 2026-03-27 [video]