AI Daily Newsletter: Mark Zuckerberg Doubts AI Agents and Alibaba Bans Claude Code

🔴 Zuckerberg Admits AI Agents Are Slower Than Expected

Mark Zuckerberg recently held an internal town hall meeting at Meta, acknowledging that AI agents are not developing as quickly as he had hoped. Despite plans to spend up to $145B in 2026 and 8,000 layoffs, Meta’s agentic AI development is falling behind schedule. He stated that “replacing people with AI” is much harder than initially imagined. This is a notable signal from one of the companies currently investing the most in AI.

Source: TechCrunch | Reuters

🎮 Claude Code + Fable 5 Port Command & Conquer Generals to iOS Native

Ammaar Reshi, Lead Product and Design for Google AI Studio, used Anthropic’s Claude Code in combination with Fable 5 to port the real-time strategy game “Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour” (2003) to iPhone and iPad. The first build took only 40 minutes, followed by a few hours of debugging. The game runs natively on ARM64, without an emulator, and supports full touch controls. Reshi mentioned that he used up his entire Claude Max quota in 2 days and posted the entire source code on GitHub.

Source: The Decoder

📚 AI Tutor Surpasses Active Learning in the Classroom

A randomized controlled trial study at Dartmouth College showed that AI tutors achieved an effect size of 0.71–1.30 standard deviations in learning outcomes, surpassing traditional active learning methods in the classroom. Students learned more in less time and felt more engaged and motivated. The study was published in Nature Scientific Reports and presented at the ITB 2026 workshop.

Source: Nature | Dartmouth Study PDF

⛏️ Amazon Mechanical Turk Stops Accepting New Customers

AWS will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform that has been operating since 2005. Mechanical Turk was once a crucial tool for collecting labeled data for AI tasks (human labeling, quality control). This move marks the end of an era for human-powered microtasks, as AI-based solutions are becoming increasingly effective.

Source: TechCrunch

🚫 Alibaba Bans Employees from Using Claude Code

Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code programming tool starting from July 10, according to multiple sources. Anthropic had previously banned Chinese companies from using its services. This move reflects the geopolitical tensions in the AI sector between the US and China, making it difficult for Chinese developers to access advanced AI programming tools.

Source: TechCrunch