About this episode
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.
Titles we almost went with this week
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
AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money
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
