19 August 2026

OpenAI and Anthropic add learning-by-example features to chatbots

OpenAI launched Record & Replay and Anthropic launched Record a Skill, both letting their AI systems learn tasks by watching a user perform them once instead of reading written instructions.
Demonstrating a task captures unspoken details that written prompts miss: a person asking their manager to review expensive meals, or treating client dinners differently from team lunches.
Researchers call this tacit knowledge, the context people understand but cannot fully explain. One study estimated 40% of company knowledge exists only in employees' heads, never written down.
Recorded skills can run in the background automatically on a schedule, unlike prompt-based interactions which require a user to actively request them each time.
Both companies converging on demonstration-based learning within weeks suggests traditional prompts alone cannot capture how people actually work, which varies widely even among people doing identical jobs.