Welcome to another AI by Aakash. I follow the AI news, and test the latest AI tools, so you only have to hear the important stuff.
The latest Claude 5.5 series of models are coming after a new field: video editing. For example, check this out:
I have been pushing Claude video editing to the absolute limit and even created a 31K view short (my channel’s second best ever). In today’s deep dive, I’ll show you how.
But first, a word from our sponsor + this week's top news.
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This Week's AI News
The Week's Top News: Black October.
People in security have started calling this month Black October. One list going around counts 27 major incidents in about a day.
The biggest one was to PHP, which runs on about 69% of the sites where the language is known (W3Techs). A bug sat in it for 14 years and now several security teams found it within weeks of each other, all using AI. So the NSA told companies to patch, or to pull their websites offline if they can't patch right away:
Servers on old PHP versions don't get security updates anymore, so for them unplugging is the only fix. Here are just three other of the MANY crazy things that happened this week:
A hacker broke into websites at more than 100 companies including John Deere and spent about $50 in AI tokens per break-in.
Hackers grabbed OpenCode users' OpenAI, Claude and Google keys and ran up charges on them.
Microsoft says a group it tracks as Storm-0940 used ARTEX, an open-source framework that runs AI agents as penetration testers, against hundreds of organizations. In several attacks it reached privileged cloud access in under 3 hours, though Microsoft notes most of the targeting failed.
Anthropic's deputy security chief says to ask your board for money now. For basic systems, before AI.
My take: every company sitting on a secret bug now has until the first rumor leaks and somebody with an AI subscription goes looking.
The Other News that Mattered
Anthropic released Claude Duet, its competitor to the personal AI agents: Instinct, Muse, Hermes Bot, and Grok Bot. I’ll report back when I get access.
A Claude model ran 64 hours off one prompt and designed 17 protein binders that latch onto scorpion toxins, then emailed the order to the lab itself.
Anthropic's draft IPO filing shows an $80.7B loss in 6 months, but about $72B of it is an accounting charge. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the draft, and it also lists compute commitments of up to $750B.
Anthropic is putting 5% of its shares into a new Public Benefit Fund, if stockholders approve. At a $2T IPO price that is about $100B.
Big US banks are finding AI agents nobody authorized inside customer accounts. Right now, if your agent screws up, you're the one on the hook.
Anthropic is pitching Congress a draft bill that would let a federal judge halt a model's release when it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than 50 deaths or over $1 billion in property damage. Evaluators registered with the Commerce Department would have 72 hours to report such a risk.
Feature Releases
Anthropic's OSS Scanner checks critical open source projects for free. It already found one of curl's worst bugs in years.
Claude Code now gzips the whole conversation it re-sends on every turn, so it's up to 3x faster at starting its replies.
OpenAI's models and Codex are coming to Google Cloud in private preview. Google says it's now the only big cloud selling all three leading closed models.
OpenAI opened its Decisions API to all customers on October 22, with response times of roughly 100 to 180 milliseconds, down from one to three seconds. On one index, TechCrunch reports Jev ranks third and OpenAI's model fourteenth.
At GTC Berlin on October 21, Nvidia announced its DSX AI Factory Platform and OpenShell, a reference architecture that gives agents minimum rights and monitoring. Google Cloud's Vera Rubin instances reach general availability next month.
Anthropic used Claude to write machine-checked proofs that 239 fuzz-test entry points across 123 open-source libraries exit normally on inputs under 64 MB. It turned up hundreds of bugs, and Anthropic says formally verified does not mean bug-free.
Tools
Flint is an open-weight coding model that runs on a MacBook, so there's no per-token bill.
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference engine behind its V4.1-Flash service, under Apache 2.0. It says the release is aimed at lowering serving costs.
Fundraising
OpenAI is working on a raise of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, with Coatue and UAE investors leading, according to CNBC. Terms are still being negotiated and could change.
Flapping Airplanes raised $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital. The pre-product lab, founded about a year ago, wants to train frontier models with less data and compute.
Deep Dive
Meet Your New Video Editor, Claude.
I have been pushing Claude to the absolute limit, and recently had it edit this short complete with 3D rendering, stock footage, and sound effects:
It did all the work itself. In today’s post, I’m giving you everything you need to build the same, for free.
(And now you know why I had a short about peeing on ice!)
Our Roadmap for the Piece
18 effects from one take
A 60+ minute episode into shorts
Talk to your editor on tape
Where Claude's edits break
Grab all 30 skills
Do we need Premiere Pro?
1. 18 effects from one take
I took 5 seconds of me from the episode and asked Claude Code to build the effects everyone's posting, most of them from this list of 20.
Here's what came back:
Each one renders in 10 seconds to about 5 minutes on my Mac.
2 didn't make it. The clone effect read like an old meme, and the vertigo zoom looks like a wider lens unless it's moving.
Which ones are worth your time? These 6 are my favorites. Steal them:
/zoom-through
/spotlight
/ribbon-wrap
/pull-back-reveal
/portal
/tile-tunnel
The trick is tastefully layering these together.
2. How Claude made shorts out of my 60+ min episode
I gave Claude Code the episode and its transcript, and asked it to pick the moment a PM would stop scrolling for.
It picked a 40-second moment about shipping twice as fast with the same bug rate, and it was done in 2 minutes!
Here's Claude's own summary of what it picked:
Claude's summary: the moment it picked at 49:31, two runners-up, and its own cut-check. It used 8 of its 60 tool calls.
One more command got me 3 shorts from the same episode:
I'd post most of these as they are. One hook was a screen share you can't read at 9:16, so I'd still pick the hooks myself.
Here are all 12 editing skills, each one showing what it actually made:
3. Talk to your editor on tape
OK this is my favorite trick, and it's super simple. While I'm recording, I just talk to Claude. Out loud. Like it's sitting right next to me!
Whisper writes down everything I say, so those notes end up in the transcript with the rest of the video, and Claude reads the whole thing. Here are some I've actually said to the camera:
"Generally you're going to take my last take of something."
"Claude, when you're editing, if there's a lot of excessive background noise, we can't use that part."
"And make sure that I'm not looking down. There's really good audio in the first cut, but in the second cut, I'm looking at the camera."
"Also Claude, because I was away from the mic, probably you'll need to do some volume equalization."
Honestly it's the same stuff you'd say to a human editor. The $47 video was 26 minutes of me, retakes and all, and by the third version Claude had it down to 9 minutes and 7 seconds. It used my last take of every line, since I told it to!
4. Where Claude's edits break
Here are the notes I wrote back after watching the first long-form cut Claude made:
"weird background sound should be cut"
"random black screens are overused"
"countdown isn't needed"
"it was better when it was clean, just typing in"
"showing the same word twice in the text is never right"
The weird sound was me! Claude looped 12 seconds of room tone from my raw take, and the first thing in those 12 seconds is me saying "Three cuts, Claude." Then there's the word "sentence". My first short from the $47 video lost the end of it, because Claude cut right as the word started.
Here's the $47 video that short came from:
The animated explainer had the exact same hole, and Claude said so itself at the bottom of its summary:
5. Grab my complete animation kit
I have created 30 skills for you: 18 effects and 12 editing skills. They all run on your own computer, with ffmpeg and Python. No paid APIs, and nothing gets uploaded!
Unzip it and run
sh install.shAdd --whisper to that line so it downloads the Whisper model (148 MB). /cut-check, /tighten and /take-picker need it.
Open Claude Code and type
/podcast-to-clipsRun
/cut-checkbefore you post anythingWant the 3 open-source repos too (HyperFrames, Lemo-Opuscar, ClaudeAnimationBase)? Run
sh third-party/setup.sh
A few things it can't do yet. The effects are tuned for one kind of shot: head and shoulders, mic in the frame, plain wall. If your background is busy, or it's a wide shot, you'll need to adjust the timings.
Renders are slow! A 5-second effect takes about 10 seconds for the magnifying lens and around 5 minutes for the tile-tunnel on my Mac. The person mask adds about 75 seconds per clip, once.
And if you talk with your hands, ribbon-wrap will draw right over your fingers. The matte drops motion-blurred hands.
6. So, bye-bye Premiere?
For most of what I make, yes. Claude cut my 60+ minute episode into 3 shorts in about 7 minutes and I'd post most of them as they are.
When Claude Motion launched, I wrote that the animation is code, and code is a document. So Claude can do anything that can be written into code, from the cut to the captions to every effect in this post.
And if you're a professional who wants to make additional changes by hand, Claude can work inside your own timeline too, through community-built MCPs for Premiere Pro and After Effects.
It did clip a word in my very first short, so every file still gets one listen from me before it goes out.
What you bring to the table is the taste. That's still very unique to you and no person can copy it and no AI can take it from you.
Me Around the Web
I went on the Startup Dad podcast to talk about the parent OS I run on Claude. I decided to open-source the whole thing on the show:
And if you missed it, every week I also put out a new episode of my podcast. Catch up on all the episodes here.
That's all for today. See you next week,
Aakash