BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK
- Tenstorrent $1.5B · Series ETrace Capital, Innovation X
- Flapping Airplanes $1B
- Legora $550M · Series E
- ASI $325M · Series C
- Otter.ai $320M
- Arda Industries $232MChief Executive Bob McGrew
TOP INVESTORS · 30 DAYS
- Forerunner 2 deals · $113M in rounds
- Abstract Ventures 2 deals · $110M in rounds
- Forgepoint Capital International 2 deals · $78.5M in rounds
- Motive Partners 2 deals · $43.6M in rounds
BITCOIN, ETHEREUM, STABLECOINS AND THE RULES
BTC $82,742 ▲0.1%ETH $2,438 ▼0.3%SOL $105 ▼0.6%XRP $1.34 ▲0.9%24 hr · CoinGecko
Aerodrome and Velodrome merge to launch Aero across seven blockchain networksWhy earning XRP yield through this wallet could actually cost you moneyTesla–SpaceX merger talks could put 30,221 Bitcoin under one roofTether backs Bolivian fintech bringing USDT payments to food delivery and bankingTrump didn‘t mention ‘crypto’ once in White House cybercrime roundtableMore crypto news →Here’s what happened in crypto todaySEC’s $75 million crypto fundraising plan faces bank backlash and threats of legal actionAmerican Bankers Association accuses OCC of undermining Congress with final stablecoin rewards ruleBitcoin Hits Weekly High as Crypto Market ReboundsDogecoin Gets a Dedicated Company to Build Out Its EcosystemDOTS · MUSE · GROK BOT · INSTINCT · GEMINI SPARK · OPENCLAW
MUSE Meta says Muse has over 10M users, with shopping a top activityMUSE Anthropic takes on Muse with Claude Duet, its new AI agentMUSE Tons of People Are Apparently Asking Meta’s Muse AI Agent to Shop for ThemOPENCLAW OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last monthINSTINCT AI agent startup Instinct raises $1B at a $10B valuationMore AI agent news →INSTINCT What Is Instinct AI? The No-App Personal AI Assistant ExplainedGROK BOT Musk says SpaceX will cover Grok Bot purchase mistakes and leaked cardsGROK BOT Elon Musk wants to start an Amazon competitor after Grok bot users say the company blocked them from ordering on its siteWhile Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome matAG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM
AI Pharma, Mouthfeel & Anti-AI: Oatly Releases 2026 Future of Taste Trends Report & New LookbookROBOTS Layoffs at Carbon Robotics as firm “realigns costs due to broader economic conditions”AI Lumi AI finds new home at Newforma as agentic analytics gathers paceAI Penn State team develop AI tool to advance food scienceFUNDING Japan’s Kinish Scoops Up $3.1M in Funding to Ramp Up Rice-Based Ice Cream & Casein DevelopmentMore farm & food news →AI Reservoir Farms Expands to Washington State to Accelerate Physical AI for Tree Fruit, Blueberries, and Critical High-Value CropsFUNDING BloomX raises $13 million to expand robotic pollination in fruit cropsFUNDING Kodama nets $7m to scale physical AI for ‘intelligent forestry’ROBOTS New hoeing robot benefits from growers’ critical eyeBrevel teams up with The Wave Group to scale ‘illuminated fermentation’ in IndiaTHE 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
MEDICINE, WELLNESS, HOSPITALS AND THE FDA
AMA Calls for Risk-Based GenAI Oversight to Protect Patients and Support Responsible InnovationThe $15 billion ad-powered AI startup your doctor may already be usingFDA Official Believes GenAI-enabled Tools Will Need to Be Assessed Like a PhysicianClaude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxinsOpenEvidence, Doximity settle thorny AI legal battleMore AI in health →STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about drug launch prices, an AstraZeneca AI deal, and more3 things healthcare leaders should know about AI-native EHRsWhy AI-driven payer intelligence is a revenue cycle imperativeUPMC Enterprises Invests in VeloSource to Expand AI-Enabled Clinician Staffing PlatformSTAT+: ‘AI sandboxes’ are all the rage. Advocates scramble to control their futureAI LABS
Image: AWS Machine Learning
Securing Quick access from corporate networks with AWS PrivateLink 5 production challenges in multi-agent systems and how Deep Insight solved them Broad access through consistent standards NVIDIA Kumo Relational Outperforms Supervised Machine Learning on Relational Data, No Training Required How Specializing the Vocabulary of SLMs Can Cut Inference Cost by 77% in Real ApplicationsHow AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI Empowering frontline maternal care with AI-assisted ultrasound Profiling TorchNeuron (Part 1): System-level profiling on AWS Trainium. More AI labs news →Granite Speech 5.0: Transcribe, Translate, and Attribute more Accurately and Faster ChatGPT Ads expands to 26 new countries as over 100,000 advertisers have used the platform
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 →Bringing the Spark to Europe: Local Intelligence Powers Next Wave of Agents NVIDIA Cloud Partners Scale Across Europe — Sovereign, Open and Built for Safe AI Agents NVIDIA Confidential Computing Expands, Enabling Frontier Model Builders to Securely Scale Across Global Infrastructure NVIDIA Agent Toolkit Expands, Grounding Enterprise Agents in Company Data Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities
How we built ChatGPT’s novel ad stack for user trust and relevance Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data Voxtral 3
ANTHROPIC · OPENAI · GOOGLE · GROK · CHINA · OPEN MODELS
OPENAI OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Google's Gemini 4 Argon found critical PHP flaw affecting millions of websitesANTHROPIC Claude DuetOPENAI OpenAI's latest AI models are coming to Google Cloud and AntigravityOPENAI PHP Armageddon: OpenAI, Google’s Wiz find ancient holes, panicking the internetGOOGLE Conversational Gemini navigation comes to Apple CarPlayMore LLM news →OPEN Mistral and Nvidia want to speed up industrial design with physics AIOPEN Mistral Advances AI for Engineering with NVIDIACHINA DeepSeek Wants Better AI at Lower CostANTHROPIC Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratchCHINA DeepSeek open-sources inference framework with support for Nvidia and Huawei chipsCHINA Tencent opens Yuanbao Search to developers building AI models and agentsOPEN Hugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurateGOOGLE Google’s more personalized Gemini AI is heading to your carGOOGLE Gemini's Personal Intelligence is coming to carsNEW IN HAVE I BEEN PWNED
Assurance Retraite: 70,372 accountsGîtes de France: 117,574 accountsCrunchbase: 559,908 accountsSharecare: 318,185 accountsBreach data: Have I Been Pwned (CC BY 4.0)
AI COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS THAT SHUT DOWN OR WENT BANKRUPT
Disney offers jobs to Character.AI staff after chatbot startup's bankruptcyDisney Wants to Hire Most of the Employees From Bankrupt Character.AIDisney agreed to pay $60 million to 66 employees from an AI startup that filed for bankruptcy, weeks after tech layoffsLAWS, RULES AND GUIDANCE FROM GOVERNMENTS
Adaptive agentic intelligence framework using Strands AgentsWhat’s new in Homeland Security’s updated AI policyAnthropic pitches AI safety bill that may block a model if 50+ people could be killedGoogle launches Gemini for government services as new ‘agentic solution’WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulatorMore AI policy →GAO to monitor government AI use, hire AI experts in coming yearsAI sovereignty: preserving UK agency in an AI-enabled worldHybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through textSMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS
THE BIG APPS I replaced Notion, Obsidian, and Todoist with Anytype; now I handle my notes and tasks in one appADOBE I tried the free Adobe Premiere clone on Linux – and DaVinci Resolve has competitionMICROSOFT I tried the free PowerPoint clone on Linux – and it beats LibreOffice and Google SlidesADOBE A developer used AI to build 7 free Adobe alternatives, and subscription software has a new problemADOBE Free Open Source Alternative For MS Office Released By Adobe Dupe MakerMore David and Goliath stories →MICROSOFT This Is My Favorite Microsoft 365 Replacement and It’s Free on Linux, Mac and WindowsADOBE 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 …THE BIG APPS Strafe: A new open-source, E2E Encrypted, and federated alternative to DiscordAI NEWS
Image: The Verge
Meta to create a new class of shares to fund AI push The Work Moves Outward Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI Judge rejects Trump’s wild claim EPA can dismiss data center pollution lawsuits Google Cloud now offers OpenAI models alongside Gemini and Claude, becoming the only major provider with all threeBlacksmith hits unicorn valuation after Sequoia leads Series C Deepmind founder Hassabis shortens AGI timeline from five to two to three years This Startup Is All In on Recursive Self-Improvement. Its Latest Model Is Scary Good More AI news →Jensen Huang’s Vision for Europe Runs on Plug-In Data Centers Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait
‘This Is Not a Drill’: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire AI promises productivity, but for managers, it’s mostly a headache for now AI Guardrails Aren’t Stopping Criminal Hackers OpenAI says an AI agent lied about disabling its safety monitoring system Nvidia's DSX POD could cut AI data center setup from six months to as little as 14 days
Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash The new economics of enterprise AI AI adoption by industry shows what other sectors can learn A visit to Samsung’s massive new semiconductor hub Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else
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WHO'S HIRING, WHO'S CUTTING, AND THE WORK ITSELF
It’s A Wash: AI Will Create As Many Jobs As It Eliminates, Study SuggestsAI reshapes construction teams more often than it cuts jobs: reportYour Most AI-Fluent Employees Are The Most Afraid. Your Silence Is WhyYYForce Unveils "Workforce OS" Robotics Architecture Powered by NVIDIA Physical AIKroger to cut thousands of corporate jobs amid AI expansionHireology Launches AI Hiring Intelligence Suite; AI Match Customers See 20% Reduction in Time to Hireisolved Places AI Agents on the Org Chart Alongside People, Advancing Workforce Capital ManagementCitadel founder Ken Griffin says AI is coming for white-collar jobs, but not at his firmsMore AI and jobs news →Why workers in India are training their AI robot replacementsWill AI take my job? Ask an economist! (NPR+)Korn Ferry Report: AI Isn't Eliminating the Entry-level Job, It's Redefining ItAI Is Exposing a Leadership Blind Spot: Who’s Actually Responsible for Making Employees More Capable?AI Is Taking Entry-Level Jobs. Who’s Training Your Next CEO?Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforceAI is now the top reason for layoffs. For some workers, it’s also a path to starting a business.It's a 'paradox': How AI hiring tools try to prevent biasNOW HIRING
1,371 open AI roles · 310 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $850K
NVIDIA Senior Software Engineer, GPU Code Generation for Machine Learning Inference 2 LocationsOPENAI Applied AI Engineer Sydney, AustraliaINTEL AI Model Optimization Engineer India, BangaloreCOHERE Senior Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure TorontoTARGET Lead AI Engineer - Advance AI (applied ML, Gen AI, ML Ops) 2 LocationsAll active AI listings →Hiring for AI? List your jobs →SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES
How K–12 Districts Can Use Student Voices To Guide Ed Tech PurchasesHow AI Is Breaking the Way We Reward High-Achieving StudentsHigh schoolers oppose full-day cellphone bans amid safety concernsIPS board candidates discuss school closures, AI, and legislative funding at forumNearly half of employers say AI will make college degrees more importantMore AI education news →New Jersey picks Rutgers to lead social media research centerTeachers Pay Teachers to ban AI-generated classroom resources as changes to platform spark backlashVibe coding: 3 easy steps to classroom magicTOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK
RISING FAST Hard Fork up 1,107% on last week · now #3
- 1All-In: Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI, AI Cyber Warfare & SaaS Collapse975K views this week · 3 episodes
- 2Moonshots: Chamath: Bitcoin Goes to Zero, Robots vs. $40T Debt, Elon’s SpaceX Shares for 72M Kids591K views this week · 3 episodes
- 3Hard Fork: Why Nathan Fielder's ‘You Can See Everything’ Left Us Reeling397K views this week · 1 episode NEW
- 4Prof G Pod: Why Rich People Want More Debt, Not Less — With Morgan Housel306K views this week · 5 episodes ▼1
- 5BG2 Pod: Jensen Huang | Does AI Revenue Justify Capex, '27 AI Bottlenecks, Singularity, Open vs Closed & more287K views this week · 1 episode NEW
Humanoid robot cuts model processing delay 8x with NVIDIA tech in internal testsTesla fires up Optimus robot production with Musk eyeing 20,000 units per week by 2027Tesla pushes unsupervised FSD to Q2 2027, and only inside Robotaxi zonesTesla FSD ‘subscriptions’ hit 1.74M, counted the way Musk’s pay package wantsTesla starts Optimus robot production in California as profit falls 43%More robot news →One-way attack drones intercepted using US ally’s uncrewed air system integrated with rocketsLucid’s 25,000 Bolt robotaxis will run on Nvidia’s self-driving softwareAGCO to deploy Agility Digit humanoid in Kansas factoryGenerative Bionics to Build Europe’s Largest Physical AI Data FactoryHumanoid Strengthens Collaboration with NVIDIA to Advance Next-Generation Humanoid RobotsHOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES
The new human-crafted Apple Music brand matters in an AI worldGen Z Feels ‘Doomed’ Watching AI, but Gen Alpha Feels DifferentlyVivrato: 97% of studio leaders use AI in some form during development in EU and North AmericaJapan Actors Union announces guidelines addressing unauthorised use of generative AI to replicate voice performancesThe AI state of play: AI laws and game developmentONLINE AND BRICK-AND-MORTAR
While Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome matTarget’s holiday push stresses affordability, exclusives and an AI assistantBeyond the hype: What retailers actually learn when agentic AI hits the sales floorBUILDERS & RESEARCH
Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile H2DF: Calibrated Target Bands for Controllable Language-Model Unlearning AutoTerm-SST: Adaptive Terminology Memory with Zero Session-Time Setup for Streaming Speech Translation WaveCommitments: Private and Verifiable Speech-Agent MarketplacesMultimodal Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition with Bidirectional Audio--Text Cross-Attention Mixture of Phonetic Experts Based Low-Rank Adaptation of Conformer Models for Accented English Speech Recognition Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code More builders & research →eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer
My obituary for programming Harness Engineering 101: The LLM is the brain, the harness is the body Tmux and Claude Code: Sessions, Send-Keys, and the Ceiling llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?
Hybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text