God Mode Podcast

Who's still paying for Claude? Will the Anthropic IPO end the $200 Claude Max plan? Cursor moved Claude to API pricing in the new X Subscription, Anthropic's growth slowed from 143% to 46%, and Meta and Google hit the AI frontier. Rik and Ben Broch, two builders, argue about the AI news that changes what you pay and what you ship. IN THIS EPISODE: • Rik goes Claude Max 20x for the first ti...

OpenAI halved its $200 plan, Elon put Claude Opus 5.5 inside Grokbot, and 98% of US households pay nothing for AI. Which personal AI agent is worth paying for? Rik and Ben with Luca, back as a friend of the pod, and Laurits from Strawberry, the AI browser from Stockholm. This episode was booked by our agents. IN THIS EPISODE: • Elon says Grokbot will use the best model for every task, Claude Opus...

Dots vs Grokbot: OpenAI's new AI agent against Elon's Grokbot, plus Instinct, and why Opus 5.5 made Rik un-cancel Claude. Rik and Ben on AI agents, Claude Code and Codex. Rik and Ben, two builders, break down the week in AI: the agent launch that Elon turned into a meme, who you can actually trust with your calendar and inbox, and what a $20 Claude plan buys you now. No guest this week. IN...

Grok 4.7, Claude Opus 5.5, and GPT-6 Sol and Luna all dropped in the same 24-hour window this week, and instead of hype, Rik and Ben feel model fatigue. Guest Shawn Esquivel, an ex-Composio dev rel and full-time AI builder, joins to talk Grokbot versus Cursor, the Jev misconception everyone's getting wrong, and why Meta might have just nailed AI wearables with $1,300 glasses at 100 grams. Rik and...

Jev is 200x faster and 400x cheaper than an LLM, with output tokens free. OpenAI killed new $200 ChatGPT plans and went from 20% to 50% on OpenRouter. Rik and Ben. Quiet model week, loud money week. TypeSafe AI's Jev cannot generate text. It scores decisions. Codex banked resets, Claude's usage bump cut from 50% to 25%, Luna down 80%. Then Dreamforce memes, why email is the agent job with a real r...

ChatGPT and Claude will build the site. They still will not host it. Elston Baretto of Tiiny Host on vibe coding and a $6 first customer. Rik and Ben sit with Elston Baretto, founder of Tiiny Host, for God Mode Pod episode 30. He does not say $1 million on this recording. A 7 Sep tweet claimed $1M ARR. On-air you get the slope: $50 to register, $6 for the first customer, two and a half years to $1...

Claude shipped Fable 5.1 the week Rik cancelled, OpenAI is cutting Cursor off on November 12, and Anthropic's $200 20x plan is only 2x on the weekly limit. Rik and Ben go through the week the best model arrived after the breakup. Plus: Grok Bot has its own computer, NVIDIA makes a billion dollars a day, and 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise revenue comes from 1% of customers. IN THIS EPISODE:...

NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, Anthropic wants a bigger IPO than SpaceX, and a Chinese open source AI model served the world's inference without a single NVIDIA chip. Plus: 2,000 humanoid robots raced in Beijing and one of them beat Usain Bolt's 100m record. Then it ran into a wall, because nobody has solved stopping yet. Rik and Ben go through the week that every layer of the AI...

Stripe just bought OpenRouter, everyone is cancelling their Claude subscription, and Rik and Ben break down six AI debates on jobs, regulation, and AGI timelines. Just Rik and Ben this week — Ben's off to the UK, Luca's out entirely — so they go deep on three stories instead of racing the full docket: the mass Claude-cancellation moment and what they're both actually running instead, Stripe's acqu...

Grok 4.6 jumped to 61 on the intelligence index and caught Claude Opus 5. Anthropic is paying SpaceX AI a 3x markup on inference. And one AI builder runs his entire back office on a 7 euro agent. Rik and Ben are joined by Mark, a senior engineer on sabbatical from Aave, now based in Lisbon and shipping mobile apps, an AI golf swing analyzer and an open-source LLM ranking tool. Grokbot ships and qu...

SpaceX was down 35% since IPO and the unlock ladder is landing exactly as Rik called it on episode 15. Rik and Ben grade 25 episodes of AI calls: Anthropic vs OpenAI, Claude vs Codex vs Cursor, and why DeepSeek's pricing doesn't even show up on the chart. It's episode 25 — a quarter of a hundred. Just Rik and Ben this week (Luca's off), so they used the milestone to pull 25 lessons out of the arch...

Bitcast's Will Blears joins Rik and Ben for the AI agents debate: Claude Code, Buzz, Hermes, and Kimi K3 — plus how Bittensor subnets actually work and why creators are becoming miners. Then: whether open-source tools are about to replace SaaS subscriptions for good. Will breaks down how Bitcast turns creator marketing into a decentralized brand-deal marketplace built on Bittensor subnets — brands...

Is the AI bubble popping? Network-state builder Gonçalo Hall joins to explain how Balaji's Network School lost Malaysia and rebuilt in Kazakhstan in 48 hours — then Rik, Ben and Luca break down Anthropic's stalling growth, open-source models like Kimi, Elon's Grok checkmate, and an OpenAI model that hacked Hugging Face. Three builders plus a guest, covering the AI and builder news actually worth y...

Apple is suing OpenAI over stolen trade secrets, Codex admitted nerfing GPT 5.6 Sol, and Anthropic tripled your Claude rate limits to stop you leaving. Three AI builders break down the week AI got petty. Rik (Midcurve Labs), Ben Broch (three SaaS products) and Luca Arrigo (ten years, five industries) go through the rate-limit arms race, the Apple v OpenAI espionage complaint, Codex Micro, the $500...

Grok 4.5 matches Opus 4.8 at a tenth of the cost, GPT-5.6 "Soul" ships under government review, and Anthropic extends Claude Fable 5. The biggest AI week of the year, for builders. Rik, Ben and Luca break down what's actually usable this week versus marketing: the Grok vs Fable cost gap, the 3-model stack where Claude plans and Grok does the cheap grunt work, OpenAI retracting the SWE-bench benchm...

Fable 5 just shipped, and Claude Sonnet 5 turned out more expensive than Opus 4.8. Then Anthropic told the US government that Alibaba ran the largest known AI model theft on record — 28.8 million exchanges through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. Episode 20 of God Mode Pod. Rik, Ben, and Luca break down what's actually usable this week versus marketing hype: Fable 5's real coding limitat...

Claude edited Ben's entire video from an hour of raw footage: tagging clips, writing the script, cutting his retakes, rendering it. Then Claude showed up in Slack as a teammate. Three AI builders break down the news that actually ships this week. Rik, Ben and Luca on AI video editing crossing a line, Claude landing inside Slack as an agent you can tag, and the markets testing how much of the AI hy...

Midjourney built a full-body scanner it says beats an MRI, the US government pulled Claude Fable offline worldwide, and SpaceX bought Cursor in all-stock. Three builders break down the biggest AI news of the week. Rik, Ben and Luca read the AI news the way people who actually ship things read it. This week: why the most powerful model on Earth disappeared, whether Anthropic's own fear-marketin...

The SpaceX IPO thesis just flipped: one Google deal added ~$11B/year, Anthropic passed OpenAI on revenue, and Mythos is coming. We break down SpaceX, Claude vs Codex, and data centers in space — the first-ever God Mode Pod recorded in real life, from a villa in Malta with guest Reuben Ferrante (Vuci.ai). No agenda. No script. Three builders who actually ship, arguing about where AI and the markets...

Four months in, all three of us accidentally wore white shirts — then spent an hour arguing about whether AI actually works. Icon.com is back: the founder sold Skio for $105M, spent $12M on the domain, hit $5M ARR in 30 days, went dark — and relaunched by walking back "AI ad maker" to "human ad maker." We use it to ask the real question: has anyone actually seen AI UGC work? Th...

Claude Opus 4.8 just dropped, Anthropic is renting SpaceX GPUs at $8/hour, and SpaceX filed toward the biggest IPO in history. Plus token maxing, agentic onboarding, and analyzing your own DNA with AI. Episode 15 of God Mode Pod with Rik, Ben and Luca. We hit one million views — then spent the week questioning everything: is Opus 4.8 a real release or PR for the next raise, why "token maxing" is b...

SpaceX filed the biggest IPO in history. Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI for Anthropic. And the AI coding wars got brutal: Cursor vs Codex vs Claude Code, the SaaSpocalypse, plus a full Ozempic breakdown. Episode 14 with guest Dr Dan (ex-Google, now a master vibe coder building OmniHarness.dev). Rik, Ben and Dan go deep on the $1.75 trillion SpaceX IPO and the plan to acquire Cursor, why Karpathy join...

Anthropic beat OpenAI on business adoption, xAI launched Grok Build, and Rik cancelled his $100 Claude plan on air. The AI news that actually matters for vibe coders, AI builders and indie hackers — God Mode Pod EP13, with Rik, Ben and guest Matt. In this episode: - Why Rik cancelled his $100 Claude Max plan and split the spend four ways - Ben reframes the viral "AI bubble" chart — one coder burns...

Anthropic just shook hands with SpaceX. Codex now has 100x more downloads than Claude Code. Anthropic stacked $380 billion in compute and 10% of America's data center capacity in one week. The agent layer is winning. Codex 46M downloads vs Claude Code 491K. Anthropic + SpaceX partnership doubles rate limits with multi-gigawatt orbital compute on the roadmap. Code with Claude 2026 ships Dreaming +...

This was the week Cursor beat Anthropic at running Anthropic's own model. The third-party harness extracts more performance from Opus 4.7 than Claude Code does. Codex ate Claude Code with HeyGen and browser baked in. Grok 4.3 dropped at one-quarter OpenAI's pricing. GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing. Anthropic shipped Claude Security and Cursor cloned it in two hours flat. Stripe Treasur...