BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK
- DeepSeek $15BCATL
- Nvidia-backed Nebius $3.5B
- Tenstorrent $1.5B · Series ETrace Capital, Innovation X
- Flapping Airplanes $1B · Seed
- Legora $550MAtreides
- ASI $325M · Series C
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 $81,766 ▼1.2%ETH $2,403 ▼1.4%SOL $104 ▼0.5%XRP $1.33 ▼1.4%24 hr · CoinGecko
Here’s what happened in crypto todayEthereum delays Glamsterdam Hoodi testnet launch over security risksBitcoin Core changes security policy as AI makes bugs easier to findHSBC rolls out its first HKD stablecoin RedCoin to retail usersBitcoin, gold trim early losses as yen gives up gains. Oil stays near $100More crypto news →Chainlink partners with LG CNS to drive Korean won stablecoin expansionBitcoin slides below $81,500 as tech stock sell-off spreads to Asian equitiesa16z drops crypto branding, expands $2.2B fund into AI and frontier techEthereum’s long-awaited Glamsterdam upgrade hits another roadblock as 13 security risks emergeSenate's top Democratic investigator looking into Tether payments to Bo Hines' firmDOTS · MUSE · GROK BOT · INSTINCT · GEMINI SPARK · OPENCLAW
MUSE Meta turns Muse sharing back onCLAUDE Claude Duet vs Grok Bot vs ChatGPT Work vs Meta Muse: Which AI agent is worth using in India?MUSE In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse call your MuseCLAUDE Agents on the desktop: Claude Cowork and its equivalentsOPENCLAW OpenClaw creator says he spent $10 million in tokens last monthMore AI agent news →MUSE Meta Muse, Grok Bot and Instinct Compete for the Same Entry Point: Howie Xu and Peng Zheng Break Down the AI Assistant Profitability PuzzleCLAUDE How Anthropic’s Claude Duet differs from Meta Muse in the AI agent raceINSTINCT AI agent startup Instinct raises $1B at a $10B valuationINSTINCT What Is Instinct AI? The No-App Personal AI Assistant ExplainedAG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM
ROBOTS Dutch robot builder AIGRO declared bankruptROBOTS Kubota and Agtonomy introduce autonomous M5L tractor for specialty cropsFUNDING Pythag Tech Gets $4.25M to Make Cultivated Meat Production Faster & Cheaper with AIROBOTS FieldSense FSR500: lightweight spraying robot designed for easy farm repairsAI Pharma, Mouthfeel & Anti-AI: Oatly Releases 2026 Future of Taste Trends Report & New LookbookMore farm & food news →ROBOTS 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 DevelopmentAI Reservoir Farms Expands to Washington State to Accelerate Physical AI for Tree Fruit, Blueberries, and Critical High-Value CropsTHE 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
Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says its AI outperforms doctors on hard cases as he chases ‘medical superintelligence’Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditionsDevelopers, not doctors, should be held accountable for generative AI medical devices, providers sayAMA Calls for Risk-Based GenAI Oversight to Protect Patients and Support Responsible InnovationThe $15 billion ad-powered AI startup your doctor may already be usingMore AI in health →FDA Official Believes GenAI-enabled Tools Will Need to Be Assessed Like a PhysicianClaude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxinsOpenEvidence, Doximity settle thorny AI legal battleUPMC Enterprises Invests in VeloSource to Expand AI-Enabled Clinician Staffing PlatformAI LABS
Image: NVIDIA
Kazakhstan Expands Compute for Its AI Future Build more responsive apps with the Decisions API Amazon Polly delivers a major upgrade to its Generative engine How IskayPet unified corporate knowledge with Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Bases Announcing new ways to customize models with SageMaker AI, without managing GPUsOlmoEarth v1.3: State-of-the-art embeddings for the whole planet NVIDIA Unveils Minerva to Bring End-to-End Observability for AI Factories Beyond tree cover: mapping the world’s forest types More AI labs news →Ensemble forecasting with IBM Granite time-series models What FDE means at OpenAI
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 →NVIDIA Cosmos Opens New Tools to Train, Evaluate and Deploy World Models Broad access through consistent standards NVIDIA Kumo Relational Outperforms Supervised Machine Learning on Relational Data, No Training Required How AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI Empowering frontline maternal care with AI-assisted ultrasound
ChatGPT Ads expands to 26 new countries as over 100,000 advertisers have used the platform Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities Voxtral 3
ANTHROPIC · OPENAI · GOOGLE · GROK · CHINA · OPEN MODELS
CHINA ByteDance’s PineDrama targets overseas growth with an ecosystem behind its free modelCHINA Huawei Details Stellar AI Fabric Storage-Network Design to Ease the KV Cache BottleneckCHINA DeepSeek and MiniMax Complete AI Export Registration and Move Ahead With Overseas LicensingOPENAI OpenAI makes its Jev competitor widely available as decision model competition heats upGOOGLE Google's Agent Compute Engine gives every Gemini agent its own hardware-isolated micro virtual machineMore LLM news →OPENAI Uber puts all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT WorkGROK Grok Bot can now add events, set reminders, and even turn off your lights for youOPEN Hugging Face’s New AI Biology Model Lets You Chat With DNAOPEN Leading European Financial Services Organizations Embrace Open Models to Build Proprietary IntelligenceANTHROPIC Claude Now Works with Google Docs, Sheets, and SlidesANTHROPIC Claude DuetANTHROPIC Show HN: Omnara – Open-source alternative to Claude Managed AgentsOPEN Mistral Advances AI for Engineering with NVIDIAGOOGLE 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
Websites shut down globally after AI finds cybersecurity flaw affecting 70% of the internetSurvey shows Google shutting down Assistant for Gemini could be one of its bigger blundersAn AI chatbot files for bankruptcy. Is it a bad omen for the industry?Disney Wants to Hire Most of the Employees From Bankrupt Character.AIAI bot company Character.ai seeks bankruptcy protectionLAWS, RULES AND GUIDANCE FROM GOVERNMENTS
OpenAI urges Newsom to strengthen California’s AI safety law with additional safeguardsLawfare Daily: AI, Child Safety, and the LawAI’s hidden storage bill: What inference leaves behindWhat’s new in Homeland Security’s updated AI policyGoogle launches Gemini for government services as new ‘agentic solution’More AI policy →WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulatorAI sovereignty: preserving UK agency in an AI-enabled worldSMALL TEAMS TAKING ON THE GIANTS
ADOBE Can Free AI Clones Really Replace Photoshop? I Put LightCraft and PhotoCraft to the TestADOBE The strangest new Photoshop competitor wasn't built the usual wayMICROSOFT I tried the free PowerPoint clone on Linux – and it beats LibreOffice and Google SlidesADOBE I tried the free Adobe Acrobat clone – and finally have a pro PDF editor on LinuxADOBE 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 moreTHE BIG APPS Strafe: A new open-source, E2E Encrypted, and federated alternative to DiscordTHE BIG APPS Opus 5.5 made a fully featured Figma clone in 3 hours / 8 promptsAI NEWS
Photo: Rose Wong / MIT Technology Review
Designing an AI serving harness built to last The Work Moves Outward Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say The Social Society Helping Women Join the AI Boom Sure, let’s smoosh SpaceX and Tesla together, who cares1Password launches a way for AI agents to log in on your behalf without seeing your password Canva releases its first image generation model Discord now formats Markdown previews right More AI news →The Foundations of Scalable AI Major US banks are locking out AI agents that log in with customer credentials
Chinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise Only 13 percent of companies see real returns from AI, Gartner survey finds Hackers got a four-day head start on epic PHP2Shell vulnerability Recursive shows first result of its AI-driven research process with Flint Meet Mori, a Cute Robot Mushroom That Doesn’t Really Say (or Do) Anything
An AI agent in "Skynet mode" hijacks unprotected language models to launch self-sustaining cyberattacks OpenAI agents analyze mouse brain data in 32 minutes, a job that would take humans months Making the case for context-aware AI Hackers Exploited the PHP Vulnerabilities Days Before They Were Patched OpenAI's latest AI models are coming to Google Cloud and Antigravity
Judge rejects Trump’s wild claim EPA can dismiss data center pollution lawsuits This Startup Is All In on Recursive Self-Improvement. Its Latest Model Is Scary Good Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash
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WHO'S HIRING, WHO'S CUTTING, AND THE WORK ITSELF
Electronic Arts lays off 400 in latest blow to beleaguered gaming industryCEOs say they’re not yet seeing transformational change from AIAI is splitting HR into 2 archetypes, study showsGoldman Sachs: Next Recession Could Trigger AI LayoffsAI could displace one in 11 workers, Goldman says, but the layoffs are likely waiting for a recessionAI job boom favors men as female employment growth stallsHolly and 17A Win $1.1 Million National Grant to Design the AI-Ready Workforce for State GovernmentsKorn Ferry Report: 81% of Employers Plan to Increase Early-Career Hiring as AI Reshapes Entry-Level JobsMore AI and jobs news →Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs in an AI pushWhy a global bank is slashing thousands of jobs — and what the Fed says about AI replacing workersIt’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 Whyisolved Places AI Agents on the Org Chart Alongside People, Advancing Workforce Capital ManagementWhat if an AI bubble bursts — and that accelerates AI job losses?Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI’s workforceNOW HIRING
1,366 open AI roles · 307 new this week · most wanted: Solutions & customer · top pay $850K
TRUIST TEMPO- AI Enablement Director - Productivity & Efficiency Leader 2 LocationsOPENAI Principal Software Engineer, ChatGPT Education and Learning San FranciscoPNC Software Engineer Lead - Data and Automation Machine Learning Operations - (Python, PySpark, Pandas, Hadoop, SQL, MLOps, GenAI, Cloud (AWS, Azure), Helm) 3 LocationsPERPLEXITY Member of Technical Staff, (Software Engineer, Experience) San FranciscoCAPITAL ONE Distinguished AI Engineer Bangalore, InAll active AI listings →Hiring for AI? List your jobs →SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND CAMPUSES
I run an edtech platform I hope you barely useThe Trump official who compared ed-tech to the tobacco industryCould Tech Sovereignty Free Higher Ed From Big Tech?How K–12 Districts Can Use Student Voices To Guide Ed Tech PurchasesHow AI Is Breaking the Way We Reward High-Achieving StudentsMore AI education news →High 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 importantNew Jersey picks Rutgers to lead social media research centerTOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK
RISING FAST Hard Fork up 1,174% on last week · now #3
- 1All-In: Arvind Krishna & Nikesh Arora: Quantum Threat, Open vs Frontier AI, AI Cyber Warfare & SaaS Collapse1.1M views this week · 3 episodes
- 2Moonshots: Chamath: AGI Is Here, Anthropic’s $100B Giveaway, Elon’s SpaceX Shares for 72M Kids550K views this week · 2 episodes ▲1
- 3Hard Fork: Why Nathan Fielder's ‘You Can See Everything’ Left Us Reeling436K views this week · 1 episode NEW
- 4Prof G Pod: AI Agents Could Break the Banking System — With Ethan Mollick327K views this week · 5 episodes
- 5My First Million: We watched the Elizabeth Holmes doc (and honestly, WTF)112K views this week · 3 episodes NEW
UK operators search 6.7 times more for CRM and ERP than for cash-cycle tools as factory robots pass five millionGoogle DeepMind uses Gemini 4 Argon to teach Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid new skills from video120ft emerges from stealth with €576,000 to build humanoid-powered microfactoriesFormer OpenAI science lead launches Warp Science to automate wet labs with robotsTesla buyers are buying for Full Self-Driving and not for the car, data showsMore robot news →Tesla pushes Optimus deliveries to late 2027, says hands still a problemFortescue is using KUKA welding robots to handle 6 MW charging cables [video]Meet Mori, a Cute Robot Mushroom That Doesn’t Really Say (or Do) AnythingTesla pushes unsupervised FSD to Q2 2027, and only inside Robotaxi zonesHOLLYWOOD, MUSIC, TV AND GAMES
Collage Wants to Navigate New AI Studios Through the Hollywood System‘The Hunger Games’ Producer Nina Jacobson Talks Using AI to Test ADR Lines Before Recording with Actors: ‘We Would Never Use It’ in the FilmSuno admits it has not deleted all the recordings used to train its AI, in answer to UMG and Sony’s ‘laundering’ lawsuitUniversal Music Group becomes first major music company to license TYGER, which uses AI to adapt songs to gameplay in real timeThe new human-crafted Apple Music brand matters in an AI worldMore AI entertainment news →Vivrato: 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
Walmart welcomes external AI agents — with some guardrailsMore than a Store: Can AI plan my Thanksgiving meal?Why customers are fed up with AI chatbotsAI boosts discovery but reviews still seal the deal, new research showsTarget’s holiday push stresses affordability, exclusives and an AI assistantMore AI retail news →Beyond the hype: What retailers actually learn when agentic AI hits the sales floorBUILDERS & RESEARCH
baseVultra: Compact Nonlinear Recurrence with Reallocated Capacity Lighthouse: On Building a Trustworthy Digital Assistant for Exploring History with Civil Rights Archives TauIndianBankBench: Procedure-Aware, Action-Oriented Evaluation of Tool-Using Conversational Agents FusionEval: Benchmarking Model Fusion for Large Language Models Measuring Research Progress and Linguistic Inclusion in Low-Resource LanguagesDonating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation Quoting Armin Ronacher Claude Duet More builders & research →Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile
Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins
WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator