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AI Daily Brief — 04 February 2025

Tuesday opened with a measured Chinese counter-strike and a methodological landmark from Anthropic. As Trump’s 10% IEEPA tariff on Chinese imports took effect, Beijing answered with 15% duties on US coal, coke, and LNG, 10% on crude oil and agricultural machinery, export controls on five critical minerals, an anti-monopoly probe into Google, and a WTO complaint. Anthropic published its Economic Index — a first-of-its-kind initiative analyzing millions of anonymized Claude.ai conversations to track AI’s labor-market impact, with the underlying dataset open-sourced. Sam Altman ran OpenAI’s first-ever Korean Builder Lab in Seoul and announced a strategic partnership with Kakao bringing ChatGPT to KakaoTalk’s 50 million users.

Top stories

  • Anthropic launches Economic Index. Initial findings: software development and technical writing concentrate usage; roughly 36% of occupations see AI in at least a quarter of tasks; 57% of usage is augmentation versus 43% automation. Built on Clio privacy-preserving analysis. Anthropic open-sourced the dataset alongside. via Anthropic
  • China retaliates against Trump tariffs. Hours after the 10% IEEPA duty took effect, Beijing unveiled: 15% duties on US coal/coke/LNG and 10% on US crude oil, agricultural machinery, and large-displacement vehicles (effective Feb 10); export controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum, and indium; PVH and Illumina added to the Unreliable Entity List; a WTO complaint; and an anti-monopoly investigation into Google. via White & Case
  • OpenAI hosts first Korean Builder Lab in Seoul. Altman and CPO Kevin Weil led the event at The Plaza Hotel for ~100 CTOs and developers from leading Korean AI startups. Altman unveiled the 2025 roadmap: expanded fine-tuning, multimodal advancements including speech, and agent orchestration. via Korea Times
  • Kakao and OpenAI announce strategic partnership. Kakao CEO Shina Chung and Altman announced ChatGPT integration into KakaoTalk (50M users) and into Kakao’s upcoming Kanana AI brand. Kakao will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise internally. OpenAI’s second major Asia alliance of the week after the SoftBank JV. via Kakao
  • Malicious DeepSeek packages flood PyPI. Positive Technologies’ Expert Security Center disclosed a supply-chain campaign flooding the Python Package Index with fake DeepSeek packages carrying malicious payloads — targeting developers and ML engineers integrating DeepSeek into projects amid the viral moment. via Computerworld

Who shipped

Anthropic‘s Economic Index plus dataset was the day’s research drop. OpenAI shipped partnerships and a roadmap, not a model. Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, and Mistral made no dated launches — Mistral’s Le Chat mobile and Gemini 2.0 GA were 24-48 hours away.

Open-source pulse

European data-protection regulators joined Microsoft, OpenAI, and the US government on the DeepSeek copyright/data-provenance probes. The Italian block, Irish DPC inquiry, and Texas state action layered into a coordinated Western regulatory squeeze.

By the numbers

  • 57% / 43% — Anthropic Index augmentation vs automation split
  • ~36% — occupations with AI in ≥25% of tasks (Clio analysis)
  • 15% / 10% — China retaliatory tariff rates on US imports
  • 5 critical minerals under new export controls
  • 50M — KakaoTalk users reached by OpenAI partnership
  • Most-mentioned actor: Anthropic

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 4 February 2025.