Welcome to episode 345 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week and are ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including what’s going on between Anthropic, the DOD, and OpenAI, what the war means for Middle East data centers (Spoiler – I hope you have a good Disaster Recovery plan), and Transit Gateway pricing changes that are enough to make a grown man cry. And don’t bother waiting: Matt has completely forgotten almost two years of “bye everybody” and now claims full amnesia as to what his outtro is. Oh well. Let’s get into today’s show.

• Claude Learned to Use a Computer Better Than Your Dad **OpenAI
• Amazon and OpenAI’s $138 Billion AI Bromance
• When Two AZs Go Dark the Cloud Gets Crispy
• Fifty Billion Reasons AWS Loves OpenAI Now **Anthropic
• Azure Still Wins Even When AWS Thinks It Did
• Fire, Water, and a Multi-AZ Assumption Goes Up in Smoke
• Claude Refuses to Go Full Skynet for the Pentagon
• GPT-5.3 Instant Finally Stops Lecturing You
• No Killer Robots Without Human Approval Please
• Terraform Finally Sees Your Forgotten Cloud Resources
• Stage Before You Rage Deploy Azure Firewall
• CrowdStrike to Zscaler AWS Wants Your Security Tab
• One Hub to Rule Your API Sprawl
• Transit Gateway Attachments Just Got Surprisingly Expensive
• Azure Container Registry Finally Has Room for Your AI Hoarding
• Bedrock Gets a Roommate OpenAI Moves In
• Azure Firewall Gets a Safety on the Trigger
• Stop Writing Scripts, Just Import the Dang Infrastructure
• Audit Your APIs Before March 2026 Bites You
• Damn it… my excuse not to DR is gone
• I’m Epically Furious about DR

03:34 Anthropic acquires Vercept to advance Claude’s computer use capabilities

• Anthropic acquired Vercept, a team specializing in AI perception and interaction, to strengthen Claude’s computer use capabilities.
• The Vercept founders, including Ross Girshick, bring deep expertise in how AI systems visually interpret and interact with software interfaces.
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows substantial improvement in computer use benchmarks, jumping from under 15% on the OSWorld evaluation in late 2024 to 72.5% today.
• The model is now approaching human-level performance on tasks like navigating spreadsheets and completing multi-tab web forms.
• Computer use enables Claude to operate inside live applications the way a human would, handling multi-step workflows across tools that cannot be automated through code alone.
• This is relevant for enterprise use cases involving document processing, browser-based workflows, and cross-application task management.
• This is Anthropic’s second acquisition in a short period, following the purchase of Bun, which was tied to the Claude Code milestone. The pattern suggests Anthropic is actively acquiring specialized engineering teams rather than just technology assets.
• For developers and businesses building agentic workflows on Claude, the improved computer use performance means more reliable automation of complex, real-world software tasks without requiring custom integrations or APIs for every application involved.

05:18 Justin – “It seems like every day I have to upda...