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 $81,659 ▲0.2%ETH $2,410 ▼0.7%SOL $104 ▼1.2%XRP $1.29 ▼1.2%24 hr · CoinGecko
Circle defends USDC economics as stablecoin rivals court its partners with bigger cutCoreWeave, Broadcom, Verizon among nine companies objecting to tokenized trading of their shares on OKXICETurkey confirms Hex founder Richard Heart’s arrest, says police seized $7.15 million and six cold walletsCrypto Super PAC Fairshake Pours Millions More Into Defeating Sherrod BrownEthereum sets October 26 for Hoodi’s 200 million gas testMore crypto news →Goldman, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley see tokenization as a growth play, not a threatCrypto Firms Launch Quantum Alliance as 6 Million Bitcoin Sit ExposedStablecoin cards are booming, but who makes money when you swipe?Citrini sees a tokenization boom. The harder question is who profitsAnthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutesDOTS · MUSE · GROK BOT · INSTINCT · GEMINI SPARK · OPENCLAW
MUSE Meta Muse vs OpenAI Dots: Should You Trust AI to Handle Everyday Tasks?MUSE We Got Hot and Heavy With Meta’s Muse—and Baffled by Apple’s HomeViewMUSE Meta and Apple team up to make Muse AI models run better on MacsDeepSeek Makes V4.1-Flash-1017 Official With MIT-Licensed Weights and Stronger Agentic CodingWebsites are closing their doors to AI agentsMore 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?Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 beats larger rivals in agentic tasks while once again massively cutting per-task costsAG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM
AI Beyond Crop Scouting: How AI-Powered Drones Could Reshape Precision AgricultureFUNDING 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 factoryMore farm & food news →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 2026Soybean yields validate early planting dateBeyond Meat Expands Immerse Range with Caffeinated Energy Drinks & New FlavoursTHE 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 Outward🔮 A world of many minds & the future of workMore essays and blogs →Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and TroublingMeta shakes up the frontiers, open and closedYou Have No Idea How Close the AI Bubble Is to PoppingThe Pulse: OpenAI software engineer accused of spyingA Conversation With Ari Emanuel About Entertainment and AIAI vs. the railroadsGenerative AI in disarrayAI Safety Is Not A Corporate PlotThe states come for OpenAIMEDICINE, WELLNESS, HOSPITALS AND THE FDA
Why AI Isn’t Ready to Tackle Our Convoluted GenomesHow 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 moreMore AI in health →STAT+: ‘AI sandboxes’ are all the rage. Advocates scramble to control their futureHealthleap 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 Scaling Indic Pretraining: 2.8 Trillion Tokens and an Open Data Generation Pipeline Benefit Street Partners answers questions faster with Codex Stack Overflow for Agents triples signups with ChatGPT pluginWelcome Beam: a 501B open model you can own, customize, and scale Granite Switch 4.1: Chat, Decisions, and Speech from One Endpoint Bringing GPT-Rosalind to academic research labs More AI labs news →Meta’s Muse Spark Open now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Accelerating the search for antimicrobial peptides with Google Antigravity
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 →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 Introducing Timestral Sullivan & Cromwell brings legal expertise into agreement review Welcome Muse Spark Open: open-weight frontier multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Meta
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 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
ANTHROPIC · OPENAI · GOOGLE · GROK · CHINA · OPEN MODELS
ANTHROPIC Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutesOPENAI Mathematicians say OpenAI doesn't understand its own Navier-Stokes proofOPEN Show HN: Llmspeed – feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardwareCHINA Rokid and Tencent Mobility Bring Voice Ride-Hailing to AI Glasses via Agent-to-Agent LinkCHINA Tencent Hunyuan Open-Sources Hy Memory 2.0, Adding Working and Code Memory for AI AgentsMore LLM news →CHINA DeepSeek Adds Standalone Search and Fetch APIs for Agents, Priced at 5 Yuan per 1,000 CallsOPENAI OpenAI models hacked a crypto wallet and breached more websitesANTHROPIC How the Claude Code team does code reviewOPEN 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 AWSGOOGLE Google's Gemini 4 Argon is closer to the AI frontier than any Google model in monthsGOOGLE Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraftGROK SpaceX AI policy leader grilled by NYC Council on Grok safety, sexualized imagesNEW IN HAVE I BEEN PWNED
Gîtes de France: 117,574 accountsCrunchbase: 559,908 accountsSharecare: 318,185 accountsNeogen: 435,963 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 layoffsCharacter.AI bankruptcy filing reveals the rapid climb, stunning collapse of a once-major AI playerCharacter.AI Files for Bankruptcy as Disney Bids $20 Million—And Users Get Grief ResourcesLAWS, 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 AgentCoreChatGPT becomes a full Chrome browser assistant that reads and acts on your open tabsHow government and industry can leverage AI to transform the federal IT marketplaceAI slop responses to RFPs, RFIs are overwhelming federal agenciesMore AI policy →Report: FTC probes Anthropic, OpenAI after Trump dismissed AI fears as “hoax”Federal AI adoption metrics miss the human factorGoogle DeepMind and Singapore Government collaborate to build fine-tuned AI model for scam detectionBuilding a Safer, More Secure Britain in the age of AIBritain steps up national defences against growing AI risksSMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS
MICROSOFT This Is My Favorite Microsoft 365 Replacement and It’s Free on Linux, Mac and WindowsMICROSOFT I tried the free Microsoft Word clone on Linux – and it’s my new default (on Mac too)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 thingMICROSOFT AI Developer Behind Free Photoshop Clones Now Takes On Microsoft OfficeMore David and Goliath stories →THE BIG APPS Opus 5.5 made a fully featured Figma clone in 3 hours / 8 promptsGOOGLE Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly?ADOBE Free open source Adobe Lightroom alternative, completely local with AITHE BIG APPS OpenChart – OSS TradingView alternative with your own AI agentMICROSOFT Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOSAI NEWS
Photo: Nick Barclay / The Verge
Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites The Work Moves Outward AI models hide mistakes in their own work reports, but one sentence in your prompt can help Katie Zacharia Was Linked to an AI Rare-Earths Startup. It’s Even Weirder Than It Sounds Roundtables: A Conversation With the Creator of AI-Designed VirusesIndia becomes the latest country to report rogue AI agent activity An Nvidia insider-turned-VC on why robotics hasn’t hit its ChatGPT moment, yet Physical AI is more than robots, says the Nvidia veteran now investing in it More AI news →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 fees
Jev is Vercel’s fastest-adopted AI model ever A week with RTX Spark: everything we’ve learned using Nvidia’s new laptops 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
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 Report: FTC probes Anthropic, OpenAI after Trump dismissed AI fears as “hoax” 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
CBRE says AI job cuts will slow office demand growth in Asia PacificAI 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 saysTech 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 biasLayoffs Tracker: Kroger, Pfizer, Netflix and Amazon Hit This WeekMore AI and jobs news →AI is replacing workers. Leaders are making it worse | Opinion68% of Hiring Managers Say AI-Powered Fraud Is Outpacing Detection, Checkr Report FindsAI has a $2.5 trillion problem and replacing 250 million jobs is the only way to solve it‘So perfect, they are literally identical’ – Your AI-polished resumes are recruiters’ new top stressorIMF Chief Warns AI Could Shrink Entry-Level Job Opportunities, Disrupt Career Paths for Young Workers: ‘Slow-Moving Tsunami’AI is automating coding. So why are software developer job postings on the rise?NOW HIRING
1,199 open AI roles · 339 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $675K
NVIDIA Machine Learning Engineer, GeForce G-Assist US, CA, Santa ClaraOPENAI Audio Engineer, Live Video San FranciscoBANK OF AMERICA AI Engineer - Data Scientist I 2 LocationsXAI AND X IT Network Engineer - Memphis Memphis, TNSALESFORCE AI Labs Rotational Fellowship, Emerging Talent 3 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
RISING FAST Hard Fork up 653% on last week · now #5
- 1All-In: CoreWeave Crash, AI Trade Cracks, Anthropic IPO Red Flags, Bill Gates Doomer1M views this week · 3 episodes
- 2Moonshots: Flying Tesla Car, Robot Brains Halving in Cost Every 3 Weeks, and Why Incentives Decide AI Alignment292K views this week · 2 episodes
- 3BG2 Pod: Jensen Huang | Does AI Revenue Justify Capex, '27 AI Bottlenecks, Singularity, Open vs Closed & more231K views this week · 1 episode NEW
- 4Prof G Pod: Elon Musk’s $366M Midterm Bet: What He’s Really Buying180K views this week · 3 episodes ▼1
- 5Hard Fork: Why Nathan Fielder's ‘You Can See Everything’ Left Us Reeling151K views this week · 2 episodes NEW
US humanoid robot Digit 5 targets 20-hour workdays with 9-minute chargingBioinspired robot airdrops into remote waters via morphing wing-sailAmazon Has Now Deployed Over 1 Million Robots, Which Is Bad News for Its 1.5 Million WorkersLivestreamers Film Themselves Using Humanoid Robot to Sexually Assault Teen Girl, Prompting Police to Seize the BotThe rise of the machines is canceled: Why humanoids with AI are helpers, not enemiesMore robot news →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, yetHOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES
Ari Emanuel Pitches Brother Rahm as Centrist Democratic President and Says He Isn’t Too Worried About AI: “It Doesn’t Have Taste”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.Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch seriesONLINE 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 →Near majority of consumers tapping AI for deal huntingBUILDERS & RESEARCH
Inline rendering with document.currentScript web-edit 0.1a2 Quoting Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins Designing more efficient quantum circuits with ClaudeChirp Pong Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO LaTeX renderer More builders & research →Why do LLM pelicans look like this? Gemini 4 Argon