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Today’s Menu

• Claude for Excel Opens to Pro Tier Customers

• Bitcoin Drops Below Eighty-Seven Thousand Dollars on Shutdown Fears

Markets

TODAY IN AI

Claude for Excel Opens to Pro Tier Customers

Anthropic just expanded access to its Claude for Excel integration, making the AI spreadsheet assistant available to Pro-tier customers after a three-month beta period that was limited to Max and Enterprise plans.

Claude for Excel initially launched in October in research preview, bringing the assistant directly into a text sidebar of Microsoft's spreadsheet platform. Users can now pull in several spreadsheets at once and work longer without hitting session limits thanks to behind-the-scenes memory management.

The update also adds safeguards to preserve existing cell contents, so Claude won't accidentally overwrite data while making edits.

2026 has been the year of getting Claudepilled, with Code, Cowork, and now a broader Claude for Excel release going down the line of taking on major knowledge work. Just like coding is becoming completely automated, the days of needing to know complex formulas and shortcuts are also coming to an end.

When AI can handle your spreadsheets from a sidebar without overwriting data, that's not just automation. That's eliminating another entire category of technical skills.

TODAY IN CRYPTO

Bitcoin Drops Below Eighty-Seven Thousand Dollars on Shutdown Fears

Bitcoin slipped below eighty-seven thousand dollars over the weekend as shutdown fears hit crypto markets. Here we go again.

The trigger: Senate Democrats said they would block a major spending bill if it includes funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The standoff raises the risk of another partial government shutdown, just months after the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

Polymarket odds for a shutdown by January thirty-first jumped from under ten percent on Saturday to seventy-six percent by Sunday night.

Around one hundred billion dollars was wiped from the total crypto market cap in just six and a half hours on Sunday. Bitcoin dropped three point four percent in twenty-four hours. Ethereum fell harder, down over five percent.

Liquidations piled up again. Over three hundred sixty million dollars in leveraged positions were flushed, with three hundred twenty-four million dollars of that coming from longs.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs just posted their worst week since February 2025. Net outflows hit one point three two billion dollars for the week ending January twenty-third.

Vincent Liu, CIO of Kronos Research, said: "Institutional demand looks cautious but targeted. Broad outflows signal risk-off sentiment."

The Fed announces its first rate decision of the year on Wednesday. Markets are expecting rates to stay unchanged, but all eyes will be on what Chair Powell says after. Earnings season heats up too. Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, and Apple all report this week.

And with Bitcoin trading like a risk asset, big tech results could move crypto as well. Add in Trump's latest tariff threats against Canada and rising tensions in Japan's currency markets, and there's plenty of fuel for more volatility ahead.

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Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Damon James