New York’s “Pause Button” for Data Centers: A 3-Year Time-Out
New York state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would place at least a three-year moratorium on permits connected to building and operating new data centers. The proposal comes as AI-driven infrastructure demand surges nationwide, and it reflects growing concern that communities and power grids aren’t ready for the speed and scale of new facilities.
Supporters argue the pause would give New York time to set stronger rules—especially around energy use, grid connections, and who pays the costs—so utility customers aren’t left holding the bill. The move also fits a broader U.S. trend: multiple states are debating limits or “time-outs” on new data-center development, while New York’s governor has separately pushed an initiative aimed at modernizing how large energy users connect to the grid and requiring them to “pay their fair share.
Claude Just Became Your WordPress “Site Analyst”
WordPress has rolled out a new connector for Claude that lets you securely share selected behind-the-scenes site data with the chatbot. You stay in control: you decide what Claude can see, and you can revoke access whenever you want.
For now, the connection is read-only—Claude can’t edit your site—but it can answer practical questions using the data you allow. That includes things like summarizing monthly traffic, flagging low-engagement posts, highlighting what’s generating discussion, and helping you review items like pending comments or installed plugins. WordPress has also hinted that “write” capabilities could come later, enabling more direct editorial actions through chatbot integrations.
Reddit’s Next Big Bet: AI Search That Pays
On an earnings call, Reddit signaled that AI-powered search could become a major growth engine—not just a nicer product feature, but eventually a meaningful revenue driver. The company says generative search is likely “better for most queries,” especially the kind where there isn’t one perfect answer and what people really want is a range of real perspectives from many users, according to CEO Steve Huffman.
Reddit shared early traction numbers: weekly search users grew about 30% over the past year (from 60M to 80M), while its AI Q&A experience “Reddit Answers” jumped from 1M weekly users in Q1 2025 to 15M by Q4. Next, Reddit plans to unify traditional search with AI answers, make responses more media-rich, expand languages, and even test “dynamic agents.” It also said it’s aiming to personalize the experience for everyone (including logged-out visitors) starting in Q3 2026. The company’s AI-related momentum also shows up in licensing: its “other” revenue (which includes data licensing) hit $36M in Q4 and $140M for 2025.
15 Minutes to Win the Headline: The Agentic Coding Sprint
In a near-real-time showdown, OpenAI unveiled a new “agentic” coding push right after Anthropic released its own competing update—after reportedly moving its launch up by 15 minutes. The timing made the moment feel less like a normal product announcement and more like a race to define who leads the next phase of AI-assisted software building.
Alongside its agentic coding tool, OpenAI also introduced a new model meant to supercharge it: GPT-5.3 Codex. The company says it’s notably faster than the prior version, can handle more end-to-end “computer work” that developers do, and was even used internally to help debug and evaluate early versions of itself—highlighting how quickly these tools are moving from “code helper” to “semi-autonomous builder.
Opus 4.6: Anthropic’s “Agent Teams” Push Claude Beyond Solo Mode
According to TechCrunch (February 5, 2026), Anthropic has released Opus 4.6, positioning it as a bigger, broader upgrade for Claude Code. The standout addition is “agent teams” — multiple agents that can divide a large task into smaller pieces and coordinate in parallel, rather than one agent doing everything step-by-step.
The update also expands the model’s context window to 1 million tokens, bringing it in line with what Claude Sonnet already offers, which is especially useful for large codebases and big documents. On top of that, Microsoft PowerPoint gets a tighter integration: instead of generating a deck elsewhere and importing it, users can work with Claude directly in a side panel while building the presentation. The bigger theme: Anthropic says Opus is evolving from “just for developers” into something that can help a wider range of knowledge workers too.