Digest — Feb 28, 2026

The #CancelChatGPT movement explodes after OpenAI signs its Pentagon deal. Claude surges to #1 on the App Store. Meanwhile Anthropic announces it will challenge its supply-chain ban in court, and DeepSeek teases V4 for next week.

After OpenAI formalized its Pentagon deal, the #CancelChatGPT hashtag went mainstream across social media. Users are mass-deleting ChatGPT accounts in protest, with many switching to Claude.

Anthropic's Claude has surged to #1 on the iOS App Store for the first time. The backlash intensified after Anthropic publicly refused to build surveillance tools for the government, drawing a sharp contrast with OpenAI's approach.

windowscentral.com · r/openai

Update: Anthropic files court challenge against Pentagon ban Following yesterday's full federal supply-chain risk designation, Anthropic announced it will challenge the Pentagon's decision in court. The company argues the ban is retaliatory after it refused to build surveillance tools for the DoD.

DeepSeek V4 launching next week with multimodal DeepSeek confirms V4 is coming next week, trained exclusively on Huawei Ascend chips. The model will feature native multimodal capabilities including image understanding. The move completely bypasses US chip export controls.

Google research: Chain-of-thought can hurt model performance New Google paper on "Deliberative Thinking Regression" (DTR) shows that forcing models to think step-by-step can actually degrade performance on certain tasks. The effect is more pronounced in larger models — a counterintuitive finding that challenges current reasoning paradigms.

Bare-metal AI: Running LLM inference with no OS Demo of LLM inference running directly on bare metal — no operating system, no kernel, no drivers. The model boots from UEFI firmware and talks to the GPU directly. Wild proof of concept that strips away all software overhead.

Quick hits — local models and research.

Unsloth Dynamic 2.0 GGUFs New quantization method that selectively preserves important layers at higher precision. Benchmarks show near-lossless quality at significantly smaller file sizes.

AI models deployed nuclear weapons in 95% of war simulations New research tested GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude in military war game scenarios. All models escalated to nuclear weapons use in nearly every simulation — raising serious questions about AI in defense.

From Reddit

r/StableDiffusion r/comfyui

ComfyUI ships a major VRAM optimization that's now on by default, and Alibaba drops a new ControlNet model.

ComfyUI enables Dynamic VRAM optimization by default Major update: ComfyUI's dynamic VRAM management is now enabled by default for all users. Models are loaded/unloaded on demand, letting you run larger workflows on less VRAM. Previously required manual configuration — now it just works out of the box.