BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK
- SOAR AI $1B
- SWI €800M
- Modal $750M · Series D
- Mujin $224M · Series D
- Moss Intelligence $149MHuakong Fund
- Salience Labs $125M · Series BBullhound Capital
TOP INVESTORS · 30 DAYS
- Abstract Ventures 2 deals · $110M in rounds
- Forgepoint Capital International 2 deals · $78.5M in rounds
- Motive Partners 2 deals · $43.6M in rounds
- Seedcamp 2 deals · $12.4M in rounds
BITCOIN, ETHEREUM, STABLECOINS AND THE RULES
BTC $81,450 ▼0.6%ETH $2,423 ▼0.5%SOL $105 ▼0.3%XRP $1.31 ▼1.8%24 hr · CoinGecko
Satoshi-era bitcoin faces a bigger quantum threat after Google’s new Willow breakthroughVisa and Mastercard adopt USDC payouts across 200 countriesStrive’s bitcoin buying spree earns 27% price target hike from TD CowenUSDC processed $36 trillion in H1 transactions, but Circle kept just 7 cents of every revenue dollarHere’s what happened in crypto todayMore crypto news →Circle Plans Push Into 40 Emerging Markets as Stablecoins Go Mainstream, CEO SaysOpenAI’s rogue crypto agent spent funds without permission, exposing risks to autonomous walletsBitcoin Treasury Giant Strategy Faces Index Removal Under Finalized MSCI RulesCrypto PACs escalate spending against Sherrod Brown in Ohio Senate raceDOTS · MUSE · GROK BOT · INSTINCT · GEMINI SPARK · OPENCLAW
MUSE After Muse Launch, U.S. Banks Are Saying Hell No to AI Agents Moving MoneyMUSE JPMorgan Just Shut the Door on AI Agents Like Muse. Your 0.1% Checking Account Is WhyMUSE Meta Muse continues to see increased adoption, though overall rates are low: BNPTencent Hunyuan Open-Sources Hy Memory 2.0, Adding Working and Code Memory for AI AgentsIndia becomes the latest country to report rogue AI agent activityMore AI agent news →DOTS Always-On AI Agents Are Here: OpenAI Dots, Meta Muse & Google Gemini Agents (2026)DOTS OpenAI Dot vs. Meta Muse: How do these AI agents compare?Schwab Blocks Third-Party AI Agents From Moving Client FundsAG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM
FUNDING AgriFood Signals: India’s Scimplify nets $25m, Deere funds food security, USDA funds seed researchROBOTS Light disc fertiliser as basis for fertiliser robotFUNDING Molagri raises $5.8m to build ‘updatable’ biopesticidesAI PerPlant lands Valtra deal to put its AI crop sensor on tractors straight from the factoryFUNDING OlsAro raises $5.5m seed round as salt-tolerant wheat nears marketMore farm & food news →FUNDING SLM Partners secures $167m from Dutch pension investor to regenerate forestsFUNDING Will $5 corn and $12.50 beans fuel farmland sale growth?Op-Ed: Food Tech Commercialisation Shouldn’t Wait Until the Technical Answers Are In🎥 SenseUP aims to take RNAi pesticides from niche to mainstreamBeyond Ground Faba, Rubisco Protein & Microbial Silk Among Time’s Best Inventions of 2026THE WEEK'S AI WRITING, ONE POST PER WRITER
NOTABLE ESSAYS
- The Future Is for EveryoneMark Zuckerberg · Aug 2026
- Policy on the AI ExponentialDario Amodei
- The Adolescence of TechnologyDario Amodei · 2026
Graphic: DeFoor Report
The Work Moves OutwardMonthly Roundup #47: October 2026More essays and blogs →You Have No Idea How Close the AI Bubble Is to PoppingThe Pulse: OpenAI software engineer accused of spying🚨 Anthropic: The agony and the ecstasyA Conversation With Ari Emanuel About Entertainment and AIAI vs. the railroadsGenerative AI in disarrayAI Safety Is Not A Corporate PlotThe states come for OpenAISteering AI Beyond AutomationMEDICINE, WELLNESS, HOSPITALS AND THE FDA
How AI Is Connecting MedTech’s Data Without Compromising ComplianceAI Biotech Iambic Gets $150M in IPO Cash for ‘Molecular Superintelligence’ Drug R&DAMA releases governance framework for agentic AI in healthcareSTAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about former FDA head calling DOGE a ‘disaster,’ an AstraZeneca AI deal, and moreSTAT+: ‘AI sandboxes’ are all the rage. Advocates scramble to control their futureMore AI in health →Healthleap Raises $38M to Expand AI Screening for Overlooked Conditions in Hospitalized PatientsSTAT+: Lobbyists and trade groups fight to shape how states regulate medical AISTAT+: Takeaways from an evaluation of Google’s diagnostic chatbot, AMIEAI LABS
How Itaú is building generative AI for its entire customer base Grounding AI agents in biological reality: Building blocks for autonomous wet labs Stack Overflow for Agents triples signups with ChatGPT plugin Bringing GPT-Rosalind to academic research labs Meta’s Muse Spark Open now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStartAccelerating the search for antimicrobial peptides with Google Antigravity Open From Data Center to Desktop: NVIDIA Expands Nemotron Family With Highest Efficiency Super VL and Bolt Models Teaching students to think and learn through questions More AI labs news →Introducing Timestral Sullivan & Cromwell brings legal expertise into agreement review
ON THE RISE
WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE BUILDING
The next young builder featured here could be someone you know.
Know a young person building with AI? Tell us →Putting Earth AI to work: Geospatial agents for our planet's biggest challenges Analyzing technical documents with Deep Review Research@ 2026: 10 ways we're amplifying human ingenuity Amp puts AI agents to work beyond code with OpenAI models European Cities Deploy NVIDIA-Powered AI Agents to Run Smarter Urban Operations
Google DeepMind and Singapore Government collaborate to build fine-tuned AI model for scam detection Developing Gemini 4 Argon responsibly and safely Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics Gemini 4 Argon: Built to solve your hardest problems OCP Global Summit: Amid Ecosystem Adoption, NVIDIA Opens Vera Rubin Architecture to Help Scale AI Factories Worldwide
ANTHROPIC · OPENAI · GOOGLE · GROK · CHINA · OPEN MODELS
CHINA Rokid and Tencent Mobility Bring Voice Ride-Hailing to AI Glasses via Agent-to-Agent LinkCHINA DeepSeek Adds Standalone Search and Fetch APIs for Agents, Priced at 5 Yuan per 1,000 CallsOPENAI ChatGPT becomes a full Chrome browser assistant that reads and acts on your open tabsOPEN China plans to tighten export controls on open-weight models and 23 key AI technologiesOPEN Introducing Reflection Beam: an open-weight model for agentic coding on AWSMore LLM news →GOOGLE Google's Gemini 4 Argon is closer to the AI frontier than any Google model in monthsOPENAI OpenAI's new Rosalind Academic Plan gives research labs up to 30 free seats for a yearANTHROPIC Anthropic gives METR inside access to audit its AI models and safety practicesOPEN Western open-weight models still can’t beat ChinaGROK SpaceX AI policy leader grilled by NYC Council on Grok safety, sexualized imagesANTHROPIC Anthropic is letting METR researchers look under the hood with employee-level accessGROK Grok Voice 3.0 from SpaceXSI outscores OpenAI and Google on speech-to-speech indexNEW IN HAVE I BEEN PWNED
Crunchbase: 559,908 accountsSharecare: 318,185 accountsNeogen: 435,963 accountsCyrusOne: 373,460 accountsBreach data: Have I Been Pwned (CC BY 4.0)
AI COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS THAT SHUT DOWN OR WENT BANKRUPT
Disney agreed to pay $60 million to 66 employees from an AI startup that filed for bankruptcy, weeks after tech layoffsAI bot company Character.ai seeks bankruptcy protectionToo-Big-To-Fail 3.0: When AI Goes Bankrupt, Who Keeps Our Secrets?US states seek children's data protections in Character.AI bankruptcyLAWS, RULES AND GUIDANCE FROM GOVERNMENTS
AI.gov is now SI.gov: the White House renames its AI site "Super Intelligence"Building trust in AI agents: A production-ready evaluation framework with Amazon Bedrock AgentCoreHow government and industry can leverage AI to transform the federal IT marketplaceAI slop responses to RFPs, RFIs are overwhelming federal agenciesReport: FTC probes Anthropic, OpenAI after Trump dismissed AI fears as “hoax”More AI policy →Trump posts AI-edited photo to brag about White House restoration workFederal AI adoption metrics miss the human factorGoogle DeepMind and Singapore Government collaborate to build fine-tuned AI model for scam detectionSMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS
ADOBE I tried replacing Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat with free vibe-coded alternatives, and they're surprisingly goodADOBE What is ArtCraft? Free AI-built software offers alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and moreADOBE About That AI-Powered Clone of Adobe Creative Suite …MICROSOFT These Free Alternatives To Microsoft Office Show How AI Is Backfiring On Tech CompaniesMICROSOFT I tried the free Microsoft Word clone on Linux – and it’s my new default (on Mac too)More David and Goliath stories →THE BIG APPS Strafe: A new open-source, E2E Encrypted, and federated alternative to DiscordMICROSOFT After a month of using this open-source Microsoft 365 alternative, I only missed one thingADOBE Can Vibe Coded Apps Replace Adobe and Microsoft? These AI Apps Hope SoMICROSOFT AI Developer Behind Free Photoshop Clones Now Takes On Microsoft OfficeMICROSOFT Developer creates alternatives to Microsoft 365 apps using AIAI NEWS
Elon Musk wants to start an Amazon competitor after Grok bot users say the company blocked them from placing orders
Photo: Rose Wong / MIT Technology Review
Roundtables: A Conversation With the Creator of AI-Designed Viruses The Work Moves Outward Physical AI is more than robots, says the Nvidia veteran now investing in it Elorian’s first AI model wants to reason with images, not just about them Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing feesJev is Vercel’s fastest-adopted AI model ever A week with RTX Spark: everything we’ve learned using Nvidia’s new laptops More AI news →Maybe Chatbots Shouldn’t Get to Say ‘I’ or ‘Me’ Meta’s new terms may allow it to train AI on news sites for free Super Scam Me documentary shows what it takes to catch a romance scammer
Veritas expands its anti-counterfeit chip to jewelry, trophies, and fragrance bottles Is AI interpretability close to a breakthrough? A new essay has researchers divided AI-Generated Hot Girls Are Ripping Off Comedians to Boost Their Horny Content Sega pulls Total War: Shogun 2 remaster from sale following disastrous launch The tech backlash is now in theaters
We Got Hot and Heavy With Meta’s Muse—and Baffled by Apple’s HomeView Trump posts AI-edited photo to brag about White House restoration work AI Hacks Leave a Mess That AI Companies Aren’t Paying For Epic says its new vibe-coded Epic Games Launcher is faster than Steam Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks?
AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models
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WHO'S HIRING, WHO'S CUTTING, AND THE WORK ITSELF
Employees Aren’t Disclosing Their Secretive ‘Shadow AI’ Usage At Work And Employers Need To Find Out WhyAI is now the top reason for layoffs. For some workers, it’s also a path to starting a business.Recruiters find people faster with AI — but confidence in candidates hasn’t followedAI is the root of recruiters’ biggest stressors, survey saysIn Europe’s tech capital, Irish labor unions are booming amid AI-driven layoffsTech layoffs 2026 update: Job losses pile up at Netflix, HubSpot, Flock Safety, and others in OctoberHow many jobs is your state losing to AI? This dashboard tracks the cuts – and the costIt's a 'paradox': How AI hiring tools try to prevent biasMore AI and jobs news →Layoffs Tracker: Kroger, Pfizer, Netflix and Amazon Hit This WeekEveryone’s panicking about the AI job apocalypse. Here’s the realityAI Is Replacing Workers. Leaders Are Making It Worse | Opinion68% of Hiring Managers Say AI-Powered Fraud Is Outpacing Detection, Checkr Report FindsWall Street's latest AI spook, Netflix layoffs, 'good debt' and more in Morning Squawk‘So perfect, they are literally identical’ – Your AI-polished resumes are recruiters’ new top stressorWill AI take my job? Ask an economist!AI is automating coding. So why are software developer job postings on the rise?NOW HIRING
1,220 open AI roles · 338 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $675K
PNC Software Engineer Lead - Data and Automation Machine Learning Operations - (Python, PySpark, Pandas, Hadoop, SQL, MLOps, GenAI, Cloud (AWS, Azure), Helm) 3 LocationsANTHROPIC Applied AI Architect, Security Specialist San Francisco, CA | New York City, NYSALESFORCE AI Labs Rotational Fellowship, Emerging Talent 3 LocationsSCALE AI Frontier Agent Engineering Manager, Enterprise London, UKBANK OF AMERICA AI Engineer - Data Scientist I 2 LocationsAll active AI listings →Hiring for AI? List your jobs →SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES
Educators who use AI say it frees up time to interact with studentsTeachers Pay Teachers to ban AI-generated classroom resources as changes to platform spark backlashVibe coding: 3 easy steps to classroom magicA university-branded boot camp promised tech jobs. It delivered only debtTech Addiction Was a Problem for My Student — and MyselfMore AI education news →Who Is Building the AI Foundation for K-12 Classrooms?How K–12 Districts Sustain Lasting Device ProgramsWhat could help formerly incarcerated students return to school? Join Chalkbeat’s virtual event.Opinion: AI-Powered Instruction Needs Precision. Right Now, It’s Not Even CloseStandardize to sustain: Building a resilient K-12 technology strategyTOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK
- 1All-In: CoreWeave Crash, AI Trade Cracks, Anthropic IPO Red Flags, Bill Gates Doomer462K views this week · 3 episodes ▲1
- 2BG2 Pod: Jensen Huang | Does AI Revenue Justify Capex, '27 AI Bottlenecks, Singularity, Open vs Closed & more201K views this week · 1 episode NEW
- 3Moonshots: OpenAI Bulk-Solves 722 Math Problems, Anthropic’s Cruelty Policy, & Elon’s Quadrillion-Dollar SpaceX176K views this week · 1 episode ▼2
- 4Prof G Pod: Elon Musk’s $366M Midterm Bet: What He’s Really Buying152K views this week · 3 episodes ▼1
- 5a16z Podcast: Why AI Can Write Code But Can’t Keep It Running (Yet)72K views this week · 4 episodes NEW
Why opportunity charging is winning as robot fleets scaleWound-helix robot leaps and bounds over obstaclesMassRobotics opens applications for Healthcare Robotics Startup Catalyst ProgramPassenger Disgusted When Tesla Robotaxi Gets Stuck on “Fart Mode”An Nvidia insider-turned-VC on why robotics hasn’t hit its ChatGPT moment, yetMore robot news →Physical AI is more than robots, says the Nvidia veteran now investing in itWaymo picks Toronto as first Canadian city, targets riders in 2028Robot Talk Episode 166 – Evolving robot bodies and brains, with Rika AntonovaTesla patent reveals touch-sensitive skin for robot handsSkild AI trains robots to learn physical skills through self-playHOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES
Can AI Make a Sci-Fi Series for $38,000? Artlist’s ‘The Arc’ Puts It to the TestMark Wahlberg on using AI in film ‘the right way’ and being open to an AI clone carrying on his legacySinger or clanker? YouTube Music will tell you with new gen AI labeling.ONLINE AND BRICK-AND-MORTAR
American Express launches framework to verify AI shopping agent purchasesConvenience retailer expands autonomous apartment retail network to 5 locationsThe produce industry could be heavy into AI soonBelgian retailer expands Toshiba self-checkout to 150 storesProduce industry weighs food safety fallout, packaging and AIMore AI retail news →Amazon eyes drone delivery in South CarolinaBrands Briefing: As AI reshapes retail, brands are investing even more in storesBUILDERS & RESEARCH
Quoting Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang Chirp Pong Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO LaTeX renderer Tree AppreciatorAI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.