Good morning, AI enthusiasts. It took less than a week for OpenAI’s Pentagon deal to go from announced to rewritten, and Sam Altman is calling the fallout “really painful.”

With protests outside the company’s HQ, mass cancellations, and its detailed contract revisions bringing as many questions as answers, the rushed agreement is turning what was supposed to be a power move into OpenAI’s biggest brand crisis in years.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI walks back Pentagon details after backlash

• ChatGPT upgrade fixes the ‘cringe’ problem

• Create killer thumbnails with Midjourney

• Google’s new 3.1 Flash-Lite pairs speed, cost, intelligence

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🪖 OpenAI walks back Pentagon details after backlash

Image source: Sam Altman on X

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just posted a note on X detailing significant revisions to the company’s initial Pentagon contract, coming amid employee pushback, user cancellations, and a surge of sign-ups to Anthropic following the deal.

The details:

• OAI’s original agreement used the same language Anthropic had refused, finalized within 24 hours following the Pentagon’s ban of its rival.

• Altman called the deal rushed and said it looked “opportunistic and sloppy,” adding that he would “rather go to jail” than follow an unconstitutional order.

• Research scientist Noam Brown clarified that OAI “will not be deploying to the NSA or other DoW intelligence agencies for now,” as loopholes are addressed.

• Altman held an all-hands on Tuesday, calling the deal “complex but the right decision with extremely difficult brand consequences and negative PR for us.”

Why it matters: It’s been quite the headache for OAI post-Pentagon deal, with Altman admitting the company moved too fast — and consequences ranging from bad optics to massive consumer backlash and protests outside its SF offices. The amended contract language is a start, but the brand damage feels like it’s already been done.

TOGETHER WITH VISA

🤝 Get to know Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol

The Rundown: The trust layer for agentic commerce. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol allows AI agents to verify who they are, who they represent, and what they’re authorized to do — so merchants can interact with agents with confidence, and humans stay in control.

Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol helps deliver: 

• Cryptographic verification of AI agent identity and intent

• Clear authorization and accountability for agent‑initiated actions

• Trust signals to help merchants distinguish legitimate agents from bad actors

Learn more here.

OPENAI

🚀 OpenAI’s ChatGPT upgrade fixes the ‘cringe’ problem

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just released GPT-5.3 Instant, overhauling its default ChatGPT model to all users with a new release that prioritizes how the AI talks over how it thinks — tackling the preachy personality that’s frustrated users for months.

The details:

• OAI built 5.3 Instant around conversational quality, dialing back unnecessary refusals and what the company itself called a ‘cringe’ tone in responses.

• The update also claims a reduction in hallucinations, with rates down by over 25% on web search and nearly 20% on internal knowledge on benchmarks.

• OAI says 5.3 Instant is also a “stronger writing partner,” additionally providing better web answers and presentation of information.

• The company also teased a more significant model jump coming soon, posting an easter egg on X saying “5.4 sooner than you Think.”

Why it matters: Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads were controversial, but their poking at ChatGPT’s personality may have cut a bit too close to the truth — with OAI’s new rollout prioritizing moving its personality away from the “cringe” tone. But with uninstalls up 295% after the Pentagon drama, personality may not be the most pressing issue.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create killer thumbnails with Midjourney

The Rundown: Learn a quick prompting and editing system to make thumbnails that stand out, but don’t look like AI slop. Whether it’s for your YouTube channel, a blog, or even your social feeds, learning to quickly make good thumbnails pays dividends.

Step-by-step:

1. Open Claude or any chat agent. Tell it your video topic and ask it to generate four Midjourney prompts with this structure: [Person + Expression] +[Action/Prop] + [Setting] + [Lighting] + [Composition with negative space] --ar 16:9.

2. Paste each prompt into the Midjourney web app. When you see a generation you like, click on it and try selecting vary > subtle or vary > strong until you get the perfect variation. Save the image to your desktop.

3. Key step: the design. Remember, simplicity is essential to this technique. Add 1–5 words of big, click-worthy text in Canva.

4. Bring the opacity down 5% and use a blocky font. Go with white or yellow text and optionally a black outline.

Pro tip: If you can’t get the text to fit right on your image, tell Claude to come up with a new prompt that will create that empty space for you.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

⚙️ From AI ambition to secure agents at scale

The Rundown: Join Glean’s virtual Security Showcase on March 12 to close the gap between AI ambitions and security readiness. Get a practical blueprint for governing AI agents at scale from the leaders building, securing, and deploying them in production.

Register for Glean’s Security Showcase to:

• Hear Cvent’s CIO and CISO in a fireside chat on real-world AI agent risk decisions.

• Get access to a new security framework, designed for governed AI agents at scale.

• See what’s new in agent controls, data protection, and private‑by‑design deployment for enterprise AI.

Register now.

GOOGLE

🔦 Google’s new 3.1 Flash-Lite pairs speed, cost, intelligence

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just rolled out Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, the company’s fastest entry in its Gemini 3 lineup that provides a near-instantaneous feel and upgraded intelligence while undercutting rivals on price.

The details:

• Flash Lite rounds out Google’s tiered Gemini 3 release weeks after Pro, giving a budget option for high-volume work that doesn’t need a flagship model.

• Lite scored a 12-point jump on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index over its predecessor, beating even larger prior-gen Gemini models on reasoning.

• The model costs 1/4 of Anthropic’s Haiku and 1/8th of Gemini 3.1 Pro, though output pricing triples from the 2.5 version it replaces.

Why it matters: Cheap, fast models are becoming the real battleground in AI, and Flash-Lite’s benchmarks suggest Google isn’t sacrificing much intelligence to get there. But for all the benchmark strengths that the Gemini 3 has brought to the table, its consumer impact hasn’t felt on the same level as Anthropic and OpenAI in 2026.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 👷 Viktor - OpenClaw for enterprise with 3,000+ integrations in Slack and Microsoft Teams, delivering board-ready PDFs, dashboards, and web apps*

• ⚡️ Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite - Google’s fastest, cheapest Gemini 3 model for high-volume dev workloads

• 🧠 GPT-5.3 Instant - OAI’s ChatGPT default model update with fewer refusals and less hallucinations

• 📚 NotebookLM - New custom styles for infographics to turn info into visuals

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Alibaba’s Qwen team faced a wave of departures, as staffers posted a coordinated “Qwen is nothing without its people” message echoing OpenAI’s 2023 mutiny.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell said its AI agent autonomously solved an open math research problem over four days, with stronger results than the official human solution.

Anthropic reportedly submitted a proposal for a $100M Pentagon drone swarm challenge before being barred from DoD work, as rival firms were selected instead.

xAI released a new ‘Beta 2’ version of Grok 4.20, with the update featuring better instruction following, reduced hallucinations, and more.

OpenAI VP of Research Max Schwarzer announced he is joining Anthropic, saying he is “looking forward (to) supporting my friends there at this important time.”

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Lenore B. in New Zealand:

"I had to prepare for a hearing where I would be cross-examined. I uploaded the documents (with confidential details removed) into an AI project and instructed it to be demanding and skeptical. I also asked it to review each session and identify what I was doing well. It stopped unproductive rumination, sharpened my reasoning, and gave me structured rehearsal. I walked into the hearing calm, clear, and confident."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Supreme Court ducks AI copyright question

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple’s budget iPhone goes AI-first

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Bio-robotic spy roaches

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create killer thumbnails with Midjourney

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI coding bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Apple’s entry-level iPhone just leveled up, without a price hike.

The iPhone 17e starts at $599 with flagship-grade A19 power, 256GB standard, and MagSafe back on the menu. And with Apple Intelligence built in, it’s the cheapest ticket into the Cupertino giant’s on-device AI push — resetting what “entry-level” even means.

In today’s tech rundown:

• Apple unveils iPhone 17e at $599

• MWC 2026’s wild new hardware

• Ultrahuman’s smart ring eyes U.S. return

• App that warns about nearby smart glasses

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE

🍎 Apple unveils iPhone 17e at $599

Image source: Apple

The Rundown: Apple’s iPhone 17e is here, and $599 buys more than it used to. The new model, with preorders open on March 4, packs the A19 chip, doubles storage to 256GB, restores MagSafe, and ships with Apple Intelligence built in.

The details:

• The phone restores MagSafe and adds Qi2, boosting wireless charging to 15W, and comes in white, black, and a soft pink color (similar to that of iPhone 15).

• A new 48MP main camera delivers 2x optical‑quality zoom, improved low‑light performance, and Dolby Vision 4K/60 video capture.

• Apple bakes in its on‑device Apple Intelligence suite, enabling features like smarter photo cleanup, call screening, and translation.

• It is also rolling out a refreshed iPad Air alongside the 17e, a modest update built around Apple Intelligence with newer silicon and a longer support window.

Why it matters: Apple is turning its entry phone into the default Apple Intelligence device, pushing flagship‑class silicon, more storage, and modern charging down to $599. That raises the floor for what a midrange phone — and even Apple’s entry‑level iPad — has to deliver, and puts real pressure on Android makers.

MWC

🕹️ MWC 2026’s wild new hardware

Image source: Lenovo / Reve

The Rundown: At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Lenovo’s foldable gaming handheld and Honor’s new Robot Phone showed how hardware makers are betting on new form factors to stand out in a saturated market.

The details:

• Lenovo unveiled the Legion Go Fold, a Windows-based gaming handheld whose foldable 7.7‑inch display can expand into an 11.6‑inch screen.

• Honor debuted its so-called Robot Phone, built around a motorized pop-out gimbal camera that tracks subjects and swivels like a tiny head.

• Xiaomi dropped the 17 Ultra, a Leica-co-engineered triple-camera flagship loaded with oversized sensors and on-device AI processing.

• The show’s wilder fringe included Tecno's magnetically modular ultra-thin concept and bendy phones designed to curl around your wrist.

Why it matters: The mobile industry has a complacency problem: upgrade cycles are slow, and spec bumps aren’t inspiring purchases. MWC’s answer is to make the hardware fun again, and the real story out of Barcelona isn’t any single device but a shared bet that AI‑native form factors are the best shot at boosting demand.

ULTRAHUMAN

👀 Ultrahuman’s smart ring eyes U.S. return

Image source: Ultrahuman

The Rundown: Ultrahuman is betting a redesigned, AI-powered smart ring can claw back the U.S. market — months after a bruising patent battle with Oura got its previous hardware blocked at the border.

The details:

• Priced at $479, the Ring Pro extends battery life to 15 days, pairs a redesigned sensor array with a dual-core processor, and can store 250 days of data.

• The ring ships with a Pro Charger packing 45 days of reserve power and supports Qi wireless charging — a first for the lineup.

• Ultrahuman is seeking U.S. Customs clearance after an ITC patent ruling halted imports, cutting off roughly 45% of its 700K daily active users.

• The company has also launched Jade, a real-time “biointelligence” engine that converts raw biometric data into actionable health guidance.

Why it matters: Smart rings are the sharpest testbed for AI-first wearables, and Ultrahuman is fighting to stay relevant as Oura and Samsung tighten their grip on the U.S market. With the Ring Pro still in regulatory limbo, the company is betting that new hardware and Jade’s real-time coaching will be enough to stand out.

SMART GLASSES

👓 App that warns about nearby smart glasses

Image source: Nearby Glasses

The Rundown: A new Android app called Nearby Glasses scans Bluetooth signals to flag camera-equipped smart glasses nearby — a direct counterpunch to the creeping normalization of what critics are calling “luxury surveillance.”

The details:

• Nearby Glasses scans ambient Bluetooth signals and alerts users when someone in range is wearing camera-equipped smart glasses.

• The app identifies manufacturer-specific Bluetooth signatures from devices, including Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and Snap’s Spectacles.

• Creator Yves Jeanrenaud, a sociologist, built the app after researching how smart glasses were used in immigration raids and to harass sex workers.

• He told TechCrunch the app is an “act of resistance” against consentless ambient recording and is considering an iOS version.

Why it matters: Smart glasses don’t just record as phones do — they make recording invisible, collapsing the social cues that let people notice, object, or step away, and right now, there’s no legal framework requiring them to announce themselves. As surveillance tech gets sleeker, we’re likely to see more counter-tools like this app.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

SoftBank-backed PayPay reportedly delayed its roughly $10B U.S. IPO amid weakening tech markets and rising geopolitical tensions.

Anthropic’s Claude surged to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s iPhone apps chart in the U.S., riding a wave of publicity after the Pentagon sidelined it from government AI work.

Paramount+ and HBO Max will be combined into a single streaming service once Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closes.

Instagram will soon notify parents who use its supervision tools when their teens repeatedly search for terms related to suicide or self-harm.

Elon Musk’s xAI is redeeming $3B in high-yield bonds at a premium as part of a plan to wipe out about $17.5B in debt tied to xAI and X, ahead of a blockbuster SpaceX IPO.

A U.S. federal court blocked Virginia’s law that would have limited under-16s to one hour a day on social media and required platforms to verify users’ ages.

GSK agreed to buy Canadian biotech 35Pharma for $950M in cash to bolster its pipeline of cardiopulmonary and obesity-related drugs.

MyFitnessPal snapped up Cal AI, the viral teen-built calorie-counting app with over 15M downloads and around $30M in annual revenue.

Chinese AI startup MiniMax more than doubled revenue to $79M in 2025, driven largely by overseas demand for its generative AI models and apps.

Amazon says three of its data centers in the Middle East were damaged by drone strikes tied to the escalating U.S.-Iran conflict, disrupting key AWS cloud services.

Xiaomi launched its new flagship 17 and 17 Ultra smartphones globally, keeping prices flat at $1,079 and $1,619 despite a surge in memory chip costs.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Supreme Court ducks AI copyright question

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Netflix exits $83B Warner Bros deal

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Bio-robotic spy roaches

• Today’s AI tool guide: Transcribe any video for free with this local AI

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI coding bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Copyright law was written for a world where humans made things. AI broke that assumption… But the Supreme Court doesn't want to deal with it yet.

The court just passed on the biggest AI authorship case to date, keeping copyright law's "humans only" standard on the books. But with AI content now flooding every corner of creative industries, this fight is likely nowhere near finished.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Supreme Court ducks AI copyright question

• Anthropic wants your ChatGPT memories

• Transcribe videos for free with this local AI

• Alibaba's tiny AI tops models 13x its size

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & COPYRIGHT

⚖️ Supreme Court ducks AI copyright question

Image source: “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” by DABUS, Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: The U.S. Supreme Court just passed on hearing the biggest case yet over whether AI art can be copyrighted, letting lower court rulings stand that say only humans can be authors — and kicking one of the defining IP questions of the AI era.

The details:

• The case centers on Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who built an AI system called DABUS and sought copyright in 2018 for artwork it generated.

• The Copyright Office denied it, ruling only humans can be authors — a judge called it a "bedrock requirement" in 2023, and the DC Circuit agreed.

• Trump's DOJ also backed the Copyright Office, telling the court that copyright law was written for human creators and not machines.

• The appeals court noted Thaler could've claimed authorship himself rather than listing the AI, hinting the door isn't shut for AI-assisted works.

Why it matters: It’s wild to see an AI system making artwork years before the majority of the world. It also feels like an awkward ruling given the current state of AI content pouring into every creative sector — and one that will continue to be challenged by bigger entities like studios or creators that have serious money riding on the answer.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🧠 It’s not just about getting the prompt right.

The Rundown: When trying to spin up AI agents, companies often get stuck in the prompting weeds and end up with agents that fail to deliver dependable results. This ebook from You.com goes beyond the prompt, revealing the five stages for building a successful AI agent and why most organizations haven’t gotten there yet.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• Why prompts alone aren’t enough and how context and metadata unlock reliable agent automation

• Four essential ways to calculate ROI, plus when and how to use each metric

• Real-world challenges at each stage of agent management and how to avoid them

If you're ready to go beyond the prompt, this is the ebook for you.

ANTHROPIC

🧠 Anthropic wants your ChatGPT memories

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic launched a new tool that lets users port their saved preferences and context from other AI providers with a single copy-paste, coming during a surge in switches and new sign-ups as the company battles the Pentagon.

The details:

• Users copy a provided prompt into their current chatbot, paste the output into Claude's memory, and the switch kicks in within 24 hours.

• The tool pulls saved instructions, personal details, project context, and behavioral preferences from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot in a single upload.

• Anthropic also opened Claude's memory feature to free users for the first time, letting everyone build persistent context across conversations.

• Claude Code also got a new auto-memory upgrade, now able to save project context, debugging patterns, and workflow habits on its own across sessions.

Why it matters: Memory upgrades are big news for getting the most out of any AI platform, but the timing isn’t subtle, given the current wave of consumer support for the company in the wake of the Pentagon’s ban. Giving all those new users an easy way to bring context over is a smart move for turning a viral moment into lasting retention.

AI TRAINING

📝 Transcribe any video for free with this local AI

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to translate and transcribe any video file for free by running an AI model locally on your computer, without having to upload videos to sketchy, free transcription sites.

Step-by-step:

1. Open your terminal and run brew install ffmpeg then pip3 install -U openai-whisper. If not on Mac, you can find the commands you need here

2. ffmpeg is an open-source tool that lets you edit videos from your terminal, and openai-whisper is the OpenAI model that does the actual transcribing

3. To use it, just point it at any video file like this: python3 -m whisper your-video.mp4 --model base. It will run entirely on your machine for free

4. A 15-minute video should take ~2 minutes to transcribe, giving a .txt file and an .srt file with timestamps as the outputs

Pro tip: Whisper can also translate videos. You’d just have to add the language and translation flags to your command (more on it in the guide).

PRESENTED BY OPTIMIZELY

📈 See what real AI execution looks like

The Rundown: Most teams are stuck in AI pilot mode. Tomorrow, join Optimizely's free Agents in Action virtual event featuring Nathaniel Whittemore (host of The AI Daily Brief) and more — to see agentic AI working in live workflows.

You’ll learn how to:

• Operationalize AI across content, approvals & personalization

• Scale AI without breaking brand or compliance

• Put practical deployment frameworks to work across your org

Register before it’s too late.

ALIBABA

🧠 Alibaba's tiny AI tops models 13x its size

Image source: Alibaba

The Rundown: Alibaba released Qwen3.5 Small, a family of four new open-source AI models small enough to run on a laptop or phone — with the most powerful of the bunch outscoring an OpenAI model more than 13x its size on reasoning and knowledge.

The details:

• The Qwen3.5 Small Series spans four sizes, ranging from a 0.8B for phones up to 9B for laptops — all free for commercial use under an open-source license.

• The 9B outscored OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B, which comes in at 13x its size on graduate-level reasoning and multilingual knowledge tests.

• All four models handle text, images, and video natively, with the 4B matching visual task scores that previously required models 20x larger.

• Elon Musk complimented the release, saying the models have “impressive intelligence density”.

Why it matters: These aren't replacing frontier models in capabilities, but for powering AI features inside mobile apps, reading documents offline, or handling quick visual tasks without a cloud bill, small models are where everyday adoption really takes off. Alibaba just made that layer even stronger and open for anyone with a laptop.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 👷 Viktor— Free Openclaw secure, SOC 2-certified AI coworker for Slack and Teams that keeps your data private*

• 🤏 Qwen3.5 Small - Alibaba's tiny models that rival AI systems 13x their size

• 🍌 Nano Banana 2 - Google's new top-ranked AI image model

• 🧠 Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, with new memory features

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

AWS lost connectivity at a UAE data center after unidentified "objects" struck the facility amid the US-Iran conflict, with Anthropic’s Claude facing major outages.

OpenAI research scientist Aidan McLaughlin shared his views on the company’s Pentagon agreement, saying, “I personally don’t think this deal was worth it”.

The U.S. Treasury, Federal Housing Agency, and State Dept. became the first offices to move off of Anthropic, with Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent saying “no private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security.”

Apple announced the new iPhone 17e at $599, bringing Apple Intelligence to its most affordable iPhone with visual search, AI call screening, and live translation features.

MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI, an AI calorie-counting app created by two 19-year-old founders that hit 15M downloads and $30M in annual revenue in under two years.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Sam S. in New York, NY:

"I am a video editor, and I was tasked with creating a 2-minute trailer out of 6+ hours of interview footage of emotionally challenging subject material. I used Claude to transcribe the audio of all 6 interviews and asked it to pull the most impactful soundbites and create a time-coded 2-minute script.

After generating the script, Claude then drafted an Edit Decision List that I could import into Premiere and open as a timeline sequence, complete with Claude's edits and soundbites. This saved me hours worth of reviewing interview footage and helped with the emotional stress of watching the difficult material. The result was an impactful, dramatic trailer with a story arc as good as anything I could've scripted myself. "

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI steps into Anthropic’s Pentagon void

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Netflix exits $83B Warner Bros deal

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Bio-robotic spy roaches

• Today’s AI tool guide: Transcribe any video for free with this local AI

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI coding bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. A German defense startup has built bioelectronic “cyborg” cockroaches — tiny sensor-backpacked scouts that slip into spaces drones and humans can’t reach.

Working alone or in swarms, the roach bots stream encrypted live intel. And the company says they are already crawling through real-world recon trials.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Germany’s cyborg cockroach for recon missions

• BMW puts humanoids on the line in Europe

• Lenovo’s puppy-eyed robot arm watches you work

• Honor’s new humanoid moonwalks on stage

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DEFENSE ROBOTICS

🪳 Germany’s cyborg cockroach for recon missions

Image source: SWARM Biotactics

The Rundown: A German defense startup just unveiled bioelectronic “cyborg” cockroaches — neural-interface steered scouts designed to crawl through confined, high-risk environments where drones and troops can’t operate.

The details:

• German startup SWARM Biotactics made these bioelectronic “cyborg” insects by using neural interfaces to remotely control live cockroaches.

• Each insect carries a tiny backpack with AI hardware, radios, and modular sensors such as cameras and microphones.

• The swarms are designed to crawl through rubble, tunnels, and other GPS‑denied, high‑risk environments, relaying live tactical intelligence.

• NATO forces, including elements of the German armed forces, are reportedly already field-testing the insect platforms for reconnaissance missions.

Why it matters: SWARM’s bioelectronic scouts blur the line between robotics and biology, opening a new frontier in military reconnaissance. If tests prove successful (and ethical hurdles are cleared), swarms of low-cost, hard-to-detect insect platforms could reshape how forces gather intelligence in urban warfare and disaster zones.

BMW

🚘 BMW puts humanoids on the line in Europe

Image source: BMW

The Rundown: BMW is piloting Hexagon’s AEON wheeled humanoids on high-voltage battery and component workflows at its plant in Leipzig, Germany — marking BMW’s first humanoid-robot deployment in European production.

The details:

• The move follows an 11-month Figure 02 pilot at BMW’s Spartanburg, SC plant, where robots logged 10-hour shifts and contributed to 30,000+ X3 builds.

• The wheeled humanoids take on repetitive high-voltage battery and component tasks, swapping grippers, hands, and scanners as needed.

• After lab tests and a December 2025 shop‑floor shakedown, BMW will scale up integration from April 2026, with a full series‑production pilot in summer 2026.

• Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz is testing Apptronik’s Apollo humanoids at its Digital Factory Campus in Berlin and also in Kecskemét, Hungary.

Why it matters: Humanoids that can survive messy, unionized German shop floors are very different from showroom demo bots — they have to hit cycle times, respect safety rules, and win over skeptical workers. If AEON clears that bar, it could become a blueprint for deploying humanoids across Europe’s most regulated factories.

LENOVO

👀 Lenovo’s puppy-eyed robot arm watches you work

Image source: Lenovo

The Rundown: Chinese tech giant Lenovo just unveiled a puppy‑eyed robot arm designed to sit on your desk as an always‑on AI coworker, watching you work while managing calls, notifications, and simple physical tasks.

The details:

• Lenovo unveiled the AI Workmate prototype robotic desk companion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

• The device pairs a compact robotic arm with an animated screen displaying wide, cartoon-like eyes that track the user and signal status.

• Designed to sit beside a PC, it uses local AI to handle voice commands, manage calls and notifications, set timers, and control apps.

• The arm can tap keys, point at content, and assist with basic physical gestures like document signing.

Why it matters: Lenovo’s AI Workmate arrives as tech giants race to turn ambient AI into hardware — Amazon has Astro, and Apple and OpenAI are also reportedly cooking up their own desk devices. But this always-on, watching prototype certainly raises the question: how much AI surveillance are we actually willing to invite onto our desks?

HONOR

🤖 Honor’s new humanoid moonwalks on stage

Image source: Honor

The Rundown: Smartphone maker Honor used the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to step out of the phone race and into “physical AI,” unveiling a dancing, backflipping humanoid after teasing the news last week.

The details:

• The humanoid danced to Imagine Dragons’ “Believer,” moonwalked alongside human backup dancers, and shook hands with Honor’s CEO onstage.

• The matte‑black humanoid features a light‑bar “face,” sleek curved panels, and smooth, human‑like joints.

• Honor pitched the robot as a future consumer‑grade assistant for tasks like shopping help, workplace inspections, and basic companionship.

• Honor’s new humanoid shared the stage with a “Robot Phone” that puts a small, moving robot in a handset shell.

Why it matters: Honor spent last week teasing a mysterious “one more thing,” then followed through with a full humanoid song‑and‑dance reveal at the MWC. It shows phone brands now see humanoids as the next premium hardware tier, using flashy demos to prime consumers for physical‑AI ecosystems.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Chicago banned autonomous sidewalk delivery robots after residents complained that the machines blocked walkways and raised safety and accessibility concerns.

Crypto-focused venture firm Paradigm is raising a new fund of up to $1.5B to expand beyond blockchain into investments in robotics and AI.

Elon Musk claimed Tesla is close to launching driverless robotaxis in California, but Reuters reports that the company logged zero autonomous test miles in 2025.

Tokyo Electric Power Company unveiled a snake-like robotic arm to navigate tight spaces inside the Fukushima Daiichi reactors to remove radioactive debris.

Chinese startup AgiBot launched a Qingtian Rent platform that lets customers hire robots for short gigs, with daily rates reaching about $14K for top-tier packages.

China rolled out its first national standard system for humanoids and embodied AI, turning kung‑fu showpieces into a regulated platform for real industrial work.

Xiaomi put its humanoid on real EV lines, saying they autonomously install self‑tapping nuts in the die‑casting shop on a 76‑second cycle with 90% success.

Physical AI data-infrastructure startup Encord raised $60M in a Series C round to scale its platform for training robots, drones, and other autonomous systems.

Researchers built a soft robotic wing with built‑in sensing that mimics marine animals, reshaping itself in currents to boost stability for autonomous vehicles.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI steps into Anthropic’s Pentagon void

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Netflix exits $83B Warner Bros. deal

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree’s most powerful robot dog yet

• Today’s AI tool guide: Use Claude Cowork + Obsidian to triple your output

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI coding bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Early last week, the Pentagon called Claude best-in-class for military intelligence. By Friday, the Trump administration had booted Anthropic and labeled it a ‘supply chain risk’ on par with Chinese tech giants.

With OpenAI signing its own government deal, consumers angrily switching services, and the military still using Claude in weekend strikes on Iran, what started as a contract dispute has quickly turned into the biggest AI policy issue the industry has faced yet.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OAI lands Pentagon deal as Trump boots Anthropic

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Use Claude Cowork + Obsidian to triple your output

• OpenAI hits $730B valuation with $110B mega-round

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI, ANTHROPIC, & THE PENTAGON

🪖 OAI lands Pentagon deal as Trump boots Anthropic

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon, just hours after President Trump ordered to cut ties with Anthropic over safeguards on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, with OpenAI claiming its contract carries the same red lines.

The details:

• Anthropic was the first AI lab on the Pentagon's classified network, but held firm on not using AI for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.

• Trump responded by ordering agencies to drop Anthropic, with War Sec. Pete Hegseth adding a "supply chain risk" tag only ever used on adversaries.

• OAI signed its own deal hours later, citing similar red lines to Anthropic — though the Pentagon reportedly still used Claude in Iran strikes post-ban.

• Altman said the deal was "definitely rushed" and that the optics don’t look good” in an X AMA, while also calling the Anthropic ban "a very bad decision”.

• Consumer backlash landed fast, with Claude shooting to No. 1 on Apple's App Store and a “Cancel ChatGPT” movement spreading across X and Reddit.

Why it matters: Whether OAI's red lines actually match Anthropic's or just look the part on paper is the question to watch. Claude’s surge and ChatGPT cancellation backlash show the user reaction, but a favorable relationship with the government over a top competitor might be worth more long-term than the lost consumer revenue.

TOGETHER WITH BLAND AI

📞 Voice AI for every conversation

The Rundown: Bland AI automates phone calls for over 250+ enterprise customers. No phone trees. No hold music. No call centers. Just faster, better customer conversations.

Here are some of the outcomes they've driven for businesses:

• MyPlanAdvocate added $40M/yr by automating their inbound lead qualification

• Idaho Finance saved $750k/yr by replacing their IVR with AI Voice Agents

• And Needle saves $1M/yr by automating outbound calls

Book a demo today to see how you can get similar results for your business.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Adrian, Developer: My best friend from high school got married last weekend, and as the groomsmen, we wanted to create a gift that felt personal and nostalgic. We collected our old photos together and used Seedance to animate them—bringing each still image to life from the first frame— and then stitched several clips into one final video.

The result was amazing: the groom was deeply touched, and we all shared a heartfelt moment watching it together on the wedding day, reliving our memories in a way that felt both timeless and new.

Zach, AI Writer: My fantasy baseball auction draft is around the corner, and I decided to try Claude Cowork for the planning and research efforts this year. I uploaded my league’s settings, the players being kept across the league, and my own rambling of strategies and thoughts on my current players.

Claude then performed a deep analysis of my current options and their projected values, provided strong recs on who I should prioritize, and gave me a detailed list of draft targets around the league, perfectly tailored to my needs and league format — also scouring the web for tons of articles that saved me the tedious manual searching.

AI TRAINING

✍️ Use Claude Cowork + Obsidian to triple your output

The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll learn a simple system to plan and manage your workdays by setting up the Obsidian notes app so that Claude automatically creates daily plans for you — helping you triple your output.

Step-by-step:

1. Get Obsidian, create a vault with daily-notes/, templates/, projects/ folders, and add my-workflow.md to root with your schedule, work, priorities, projects

2. Create daily-notes-template.md in templates/ with “Plan,” “Notes,”“End of Day” sections, and a project-template.md in projects/ with “Goals”, “Tasks,” “Notes”

3. In Claude Cowork, create a scheduled planning task with the prompt: “Read my vault. Check yesterday's note, my project files, and my-workflow.md. Create today's daily note with prioritized tasks. Flag anything overdue”

4. Create an EOD scheduled task with “Read today's daily note. Summarize what got done, what's carrying over. Update project files with any completed tasks”

Pro tip: Ask Claude to interview you about each project upfront to create clear goals and deadlines in your project files.

PRESENTED BY IBM

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In this paper, you’ll learn how to:

• Identify sovereignty risks across your data, cloud, and AI stack

• Implement controls that maintain operational independence

• Strengthen resilience with hybrid, open, sovereign-ready architectures

Read the white paper.

OPENAI

💰 OpenAI hits $730B valuation with $110B mega-round

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI raised $110B at a $730B valuation, with Amazon leading at $50B alongside $30B each from Nvidia and SoftBank — kicking off an Amazon deal that marks a notable infrastructure pivot away from OAI's Microsoft-only era.

The details:

• The funding is nearly 3X OAI's own record $40B raise from last March, with the valuation jumping from $500B in October to $730B.

• Amazon's $50B comes with a deep strategic deal, including a $100B AWS expansion, adoption of Trainium chips, and more.

• Microsoft notably sat this raise out, though both companies insisted their partnership "remains strong and central" in a joint statement.

• OAI revealed that ChatGPT now tops 900M weekly users and 50M+ paying subscribers, while weekly Codex usage has tripled since January to 1.6M.

Why it matters: OAI just raised more in a round than most tech companies are worth — though much of the cash flows back to Amazon and Nvidia as compute purchases, continuing the circular investments that have defined the AI boom. With an IPO on the horizon and Anthropic at $380B, the race to go public is gaining even more steam.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Connect your entire organization to the true voice of the customer with AI-driven insights from customer feedback*

• 🤖 Hermes-Agent - AI agent with memory, cross-platform messaging

• 🎥 Flow - Google’s AI filmmaking tool, revamped into a new unified workspace

• 💻 Perplexity Computer - Multi-model agent system for long-running tasks

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Block laid off over 4,000 of its 10,000 employees, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly citing AI as the reason — sending shares up more than 20% from the move.

OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy said programming is becoming “basically unrecognizable", calling recent shifts the end of the era of typing code.

Imbue open-sourced Darwinian Evolver, a tool that uses LLM evolution to automatically optimize code and prompts — scoring a SOTA 95% on ARC-AGI-2.

Amazon’s David Luan announced he is leaving the company to pursue a new venture, departing after leading Amazon's Nova Act browser agent and SF AI lab.

Perplexity open-sourced the embedding AI models powering its search results, outperforming Google and Alibaba rivals while cutting storage needs by up to 32x.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Elizabeth. in Colorado:

"Understandably, many people may be frustrated by Apple’s AI strategy. Yet, Apple has changed my life with its AI efforts. I have lived my entire life with no eyesight, thus I rely on the Voice-Over screen reader for every task on my iPhone and Mac. I have always wanted to be my own screen-reader voice, as it would externally affirm I am reading things from my own perspective.

With the introduction of Personal Voice in iOS 17 and the subsequent ability for Voice-Over and the Speech Central AI Voice Reader to use it starting with IOS18, my dream has come true! I am thankful for banking my voice and being able to enjoy my books, articles, browsing the web, and reading this wonderful AI newsletter.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The new top banana in AI image generation

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Netflix exits $83B Warner Bros. deal

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree’s most powerful robot dog yet

• Today’s AI tool guide: Use Claude Cowork + Obsidian to triple your output

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI coding bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Netflix just blinked, walking away from its $82.7B bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios and streaming crown.

Now Paramount Skydance — bankrolled by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son David — wants the whole empire, from HBO Max to CNN. But is handing one family that much media control something regulators can stomach?

In today’s tech rundown:

• Netflix walks away from Warner Bros. deal

• Jack Dorsey replaces Block employees with AI

• Sam Altman’s eyeball scanner nabs Gap deal

• China ready as NASA kills hunt for Martian life

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NETFLIX

🎬 Netflix walks away from Warner Bros. deal

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Netflix just walked away from its $82.7B deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming assets, ceding the fight to Paramount Skydance, whose $111B offer for the entire company could reshape the media landscape.

The details:

• Netflix declined to counter Paramount Skydance’s raised bid of $31 per share, calling the new price “no longer financially attractive.”

• Paramount, backed by Larry Ellison’s fortune, aims to absorb the WBD studios, HBO Max, CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV, and Turner Classic Movies.

• Paramount Skydance agreed to cover the $2.8B termination fee that WBD would owe Netflix if WBD ends Netflix’s deal in favor of Paramount.

• Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos reportedly spent Thursday meeting with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and AG Pam Bondi before pulling the plug.

Why it matters: The deal would hand one family — Oracle founder and Trump ally Ellison and his son David — control over two major Hollywood studios and a sprawling national news footprint. Critics warn that’s exactly the kind of consolidation that can alter the culture pipeline, and antitrust alarms are already ringing.

BLOCK

🪓 Jack Dorsey replaces Block employees with AI

Image source: Block / Reve

The Rundown: Jack Dorsey is slashing nearly half of Block’s workforce — more than 4K jobs — and replacing them with AI tools, a move that sent the payment giant’s stock soaring more than 20% in after-hours trading.

The details:

• Dorsey says the move is driven by AI “intelligence tools” that let smaller, flatter teams run Block’s payments and Cash App businesses.

• Internally, Block has rolled out its Goose AI agent, which execs say saves workers 8–10 hours a week and eliminates 20–25% of manual work.

• The layoffs land alongside strong Q4 numbers: revenue of about $6.25B, gross profit up 24% year over year, and guidance that tops Wall Street’s forecasts.

• Dorsey is also offering a warning: most companies will reach the same conclusion this year as automation starts absorbing more white-collar work.

Why it matters: Dorsey just demonstrated that aggressive AI-driven headcount cuts can be sold to investors as a growth story, not a crisis, with shares jumping more than 20% on the news of more than 4K layoffs. If the market keeps rewarding the math, other CEOs might not need much convincing.

TOOLS FOR HUMANITY

👁️ Sam Altman’s eyeball scanner nabs Gap deal

Image source: Tools for Humanity

The Rundown: Sam Altman’s biometric startup, Tools for Humanity, is expanding where its World ID system can be used, including deals with Gap, Visa, and Tinder, as it tests whether its iris-scanning ID checks can fit into everyday consumer services.

The details:

• A Gap store in San Francisco now hosts one of the company’s Orbs, a volleyball-sized biometric scanner that captures iris data on the spot.

• Visa and Match Group want World ID to underpin payments and dating, from a World‑branded Visa card to Tinder verification trials in Japan.

• The project has signed up tens of millions of users globally, with roughly 18M verified humans, but adoption in North America remains relatively small.

Why it matters: Tools for Humanity has drawn regulatory heat for incentivizing signups with its WLD crypto, and critics warn that if World IDs go mainstream, they could be targets for theft in ways users can’t easily undo, since you can’t change your iris. Still, in the quest to verify “real humans,” big brands seem willing to experiment.

NASA

👽 China ready as NASA kills hunt for Martian life

Image source: NASA / Perseverance Rover

The Rundown: After years of cost overruns, political battles, and failed redesigns, Congress has effectively killed NASA’s Mars Sample Return program — leaving dozens of carefully drilled rock cores stranded on the Red Planet with no plan to retrieve them.

The details:

• MIT Tech Review reports that Perseverance spent years collecting samples from an ancient Martian lakebed — with no current funded plan to retrieve them.

• The mission’s budget swelled toward roughly $11B, provoking years of political backlash and, ultimately, cancellation despite attempts to slim it down.

• China’s Tianwen-3 is now positioned to become the first mission to return Martian material to Earth, targeting a 2028 launch.

• Tianwen-3 is targeting a “grab-and-go” surface collection that would deliver at least 500 grams of rock and soil by 2031.

Why it matters: Tianwen-3’s samples may lack Perseverance’s surgical precision, but the science would still be transformative — and whoever returns the first rocks from Mars writes the history books. If those rocks carry biosignatures, Beijing gets first crack at the most consequential discovery in human history.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Google struck a roughly $1B deal with Form Energy to install a 300‑megawatt, 30‑gigawatt‑hour iron‑air battery capable of delivering power for 100 hours.

Ford is recalling 4.3M U.S. vehicles to fix a software bug that can disable trailer lights and brakes, with most vehicles getting the repair via an over‑the‑air update.

Oura rolled out its first proprietary AI model for women’s health, using clinician-vetted data to power personalized guidance in its Oura Advisor feature.

eBay is laying off about 800 people — roughly 6% of its global staff — as the e-commerce veteran looks to reinvest in its operating model needs.

A new study finds that Americans now spend slightly more of their listening time on podcasts (40%) than on AM/FM talk radio (39%).

UCLA researchers used CRISPR to delete a “brake” gene in human natural killer cells, boosting their survival and tumor-killing power against solid tumors in mice.

A Harvard-led study finds many employees value remote flexibility so much that they’d give up a quarter of their pay rather than return to fully in‑office work.

Self-driving truck startup Einride raised an oversubscribed $113M PIPE (private investment in public equity) financing to back its SPAC merger and NYSE debut.

Poland is drafting a law that would ban social media for children under 15 and fine platforms that fail to verify users’ ages, setting up a potential clash with U.S. tech firms.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The new top banana in AI image generation

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple goes big on ‘Made in America’

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree’s most powerful robot dog yet

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create an AI Assistant with its own phone number

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI Coding Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. When Google launched the original Nano Banana last August, it set the bar for AI image generation — now, the sequel is raising it.

The new Nano Banana 2 just reclaimed the text-to-image crown across leaderboards, while also effectively ending the tradeoff between top-tier quality and affordability in the process.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Google's Nano Banana 2 claims No. 1 at half the cost

• OpenAI snags Meta's $200M+ AI hire after 7 months

• Create an AI Assistant with its own phone number

• Pew study shows how teens are using AI

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🍌 Google's Nano Banana 2 claims No. 1 at half the cost

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just rolled out Nano Banana 2, the upgraded version of its viral image model with enhanced resolution, consistency, text rendering, and speed at half the price of its predecessor — taking the #1 spot on text-to-image leaderboards.

The details:

• The model beat both NB Pro and GPT Image 1.5 for the No.1 text-to-image spot on Artificial Analysis and LM Arena, also coming in at No. 3 on editing tasks.

• Output resolution scales to 4K across aspect ratios, with up to five characters and 14 objects staying visually consistent throughout a scene.

• At ~7 cents per image, it undercuts both Nano Banana Pro and OAI's GPT Image 1.5 by nearly 2x — while providing speed at Gemini Flash levels.

• Nano Banana is now integrated as the default image generator across Gemini and Google’s tool ecosystem, with Pro still available for paid subscribers.

Why it matters: The Nano Banana models have been on the frontier of image gen since the original launch in August, and this latest version brings new SOTA capabilities at the speed and price points of a flash model. With the release, the tradeoff of having to choose between best quality and affordability appears to be on its way out.

TOGETHER WITH GENSTORE

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The Rundown: Genstore gives you an AI agent team that works around the clock — handling research, operations, marketing, and analytics in the background so you can focus on building your brand.

With Genstore, you can:

• Wake up to competitor insights and product recommendations

• Save dozens of hours per week on research, pricing, and customer replies

• Boost conversions with AI-optimized checkout flows and loyalty rewards

Get started with your AI team and wake up to progress.

OPENAI & META

🔄 OpenAI snags Meta's $200M+ AI hire after 7 months

Image source: Ruoming Pang on X

The Rundown: OpenAI pulled Ruoming Pang away from Meta's Superintelligence Labs after barely seven months, according to The Information — the same AI infrastructure lead that Meta had previously poached from Apple with a reported $200M+ pay.

The details:

• Pang jumped to Meta last summer during its all-out poaching spree, previously running Apple’s models group and helping shape Apple Intelligence.

• OpenAI reportedly spent months courting Pang before he finally left, even after he'd assured colleagues that Meta's infrastructure was on solid ground.

• OpenAI also hired Riley Walz, the engineer behind viral projects like Jmail and Find My Parking Cops, to join a new team prototyping AI interfaces.

Why it matters: While the AI talent wars aren’t as intense as they were this summer, there is still plenty of movement underway — most of it coming from xAI and Meta. But the quick departures of some of the splashiest poaches in less than a year show that company fit and direction might ultimately matter more than the pure dollars.

AI TRAINING

☎️ Create an AI Assistant with its own phone number

The Rundown: In this guide, you'll set up your own AI personal assistant that you can call from your phone — using ElevenLabs for the voice agent and Twilio for the phone number. The whole process takes about 10 minutes and is free to test.

Step-by-step:

1. In Elevenlabs, go to Agents → New Agent → Personal Assistant. Pick a voice, time zone, and first message. Then, add your website and calendar to it

2. Go to Twilio, create an account ($15 free credits), and buy a phone number (~$1). Copy the number, account SID, and auth token from the dashboard

3. Back in Eleven Labs, go to Phone Numbers → Import from Twilio. Paste your SID, auth token, and phone number. Assign your agent and done

4. Call the number. Your AI assistant picks up and can answer questions about your calendar, your business, whatever you put in the agent’s knowledge base

Pro tip: The knowledge base is static — great for business info. For live data, add a webhook to Make.com/n8n, so your agent can pull real-time calendar events.

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Try SerpApi for free today — Rundown readers can get 50% off for 3 months via chat or email.

AI RESEARCH

📚 Pew study shows how teens are using AI

Image source: Pew Research

The Rundown: Pew Research Center published a new study investigating how teens use AI, finding that the age group leans heavily on the tech for school work, reporting massive AI-fueled cheating, but viewing its overall impact positively.

The details:

• The survey of 1,458 U.S. teens and parents shows adoption at mainstream levels, with primary uses ranging from info, schoolwork, and purely for fun.

• Around 60% of those polled believed AI-assisted cheating is widespread among their classmates, rising to 75% among teens who use the tech.

• Teens tended to see AI as a personal positive, with responses including making life easier, learning, and efficiency, with negatives citing job or creativity loss.

• 40% of parents reported never having a conversation about the tech with their child, with a disconnect in knowledge of their child’s chatbot use.

Why it matters: Sam Altman recently said that this generation of kids will grow up in a world where AI’s intelligence and use will just be normal. But current teens are caught in an awkward moment where both the education system and society are struggling to adapt to the change, bringing both serious challenges and massive opportunities.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Scrunch - See how AI interprets your site, run a free audit, and unlock the new way to reach customers*

• 🎆 Nano Banana 2 - Google's new image generation model

• 💠 Arrow 1.0 - QuiverAI's top-ranked SVG generation model, now in public beta

• ⚙️ Cursor Agents - Virtual computer control to build, test, and ship code

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei released a statement rejecting Pentagon’s ‘final offer' to allow Claude’s safeguards to be removed, saying threats “do not change our position."

QuiverAI emerged from stealth and opened public beta access to Arrow 1.0, an SVG model that hit No. 1 on Design Arena's SVG leaderboard just one day after launch.

Nous Research open-sourced Hermes Agent, an OpenClaw-style agent that lives on Telegram, Slack, Discord, and CLI — learning and building reusable skills over time.

Burger King is rolling out an OAI-powered chatbot called "Patty" inside employee headsets, tracking whether workers say "please" and "thank you" as a coaching tool.

Cursor upgraded its cloud agents with their own virtual machines and desktop control, letting them build, test, and validate code autonomously before shipping PRs.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Jamie T. in Massachusetts:

"My daughter is having trouble learning to read, so I had Claude create an app to help. I gave it the feedback I was getting from her teachers on what needed improvement, and it created a fun speaking app with colors and themes catered to her tastes.

It has 3 games around spelling and word/letter recognition. It even counts "stars" that equate to correct answers, and each game has a streak counter, too. I've already edited the words a bit, and I can continue to do so as she improves. Repeating the sounds the computer makes helps too! It's an HTML app, so she can use it on a phone, PC, or tablet, so it's all touch-screen fun for her!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Perplexity’s 19-model AI ‘computer’

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple goes big on ‘Made in America’

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Unitree’s most powerful robot dog yet

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create an AI Assistant with its own phone number

• RSVP to our next workshop on March 12: AI Coding Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Unitree is in a scaling mood: 20K humanoids this year, plus talk of autonomous humanoid “clusters.”

Now it’s launched a robot dog for the dirtiest work — promising 11 mph speed, 143-lb. payload capacity, and hours of runtime in harsh conditions. An industrial workhorse, sure. But also the kind of capability set that isn’t likely to stay confined to worksites.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Unitree robot dog runs 11 mph, hauls 143 lb.

• Honor teases humanoid alongside robot phone

• Audi brings robot hands to the assembly line

• UK’s Wayve nabs $1.2B for $8B valuation

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UNITREE

🐾 Unitree’s robot dog runs 11 mph, hauls 143 lb.

Image source: Unitree

The Rundown: Chinese robotics powerhouse Unitree just unveiled the As2, a 40 lb. quadruped that it says can sprint at 17 km/h, haul up to 143 lb., and keep running for hours in conditions that would sideline lesser machines.

The details:

• The As2 supports a continuous payload of 33 lb. for more than 2.5 hours and a maximum load of 143 lb., powered by a 648Wh, 15,000mAh lithium battery.

• Unloaded, Unitree claims it can run for more than four hours and cover distances beyond 20 km on a single charge.

• Ruggedization includes IP54 protection and an operating range from −20 to 50°C, plus the ability to climb 25cm stairs and handle 40-degree slopes.

• Higher-end PRO and EDU variants add GPS, 4G, ISS 3.0 side-follow, LiDAR options, dual joint encoders, and optional NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX compute.

Why it matters: Unitree is pushing hard on payload, runtime, and ruggedness to win real deployments, and on paper, the As2 is a knockout. Boston Dynamics still sets a high bar for mobility and system polish, but competition is widening fast — and the next phase will be decided by who can ship at scale and keep robots running all day.

HONOR

🤖 Honor teases humanoid alongside robot phone

Image source: Honor / YouTube

The Rundown: Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker spun out of Huawei, dropped a teaser video confirming it will use the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week to unveil not just its experimental Robot Phone but a full humanoid as well.

The details:

• Specifics remain thin, but Honor says the robot is designed for domestic and retail environments, like household chores and in-store shopping assistance.

• The humanoid looks to share the stage with Honor’s Robot Phone concept, first teased last October, the Magic V6 flagship, and other new devices.

• Both launches fall under Honor’s “Alpha Plan,” a five-year, $10B AI investment strategy aimed at repositioning the company as a full-stack AI hardware player.

• Honor claims first-mover status among major smartphone vendors entering robotics, as Chinese rivals also race to commercialize service robots.

Why it matters: Honor’s humanoid is a flashy, high-risk way to escape a flat smartphone market, riding the humanoid wave while rewriting its own identity before its IPO. Honor is one of the first smartphone companies to pivot to robotics, but the race is on: Xiaomi just open-sourced its robotics model, and Vivo has set up a robotics lab.

MIMIC ROBOTICS

🤘🏼 Audi brings robot hands to the assembly line

Image source: Mimic Robotics

The Rundown: Audi teamed up with Zurich spin-out Mimic Robotics to bring AI-powered, video-trained robot hands onto its assembly lines, using “pixel-to-action” control to automate tricky manual jobs like installing flexible door seals.

The details:

• The systems use a “pixel-to-action” foundation model that takes in raw visual data and directly outputs robot motions, avoiding hand-coded pipelines.

• Mimic’s video-action engine, trained on pretrained video, claims 10x better sample efficiency than conventional vision-language-action approaches.

• The robots pair 16-DoF hands with industrial arms, learning by imitation from motion data captured off human workers during normal shifts.

• The Audi deal makes Mimic’s “Physical AI” a test case for using foundation-model robots on highly dexterous, high-uptime manual jobs in car assembly.

Why it matters: Rivals like BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Tesla, and others are betting on full-body humanoids to roam factories and handle a wide mix of logistics and assembly work. Audi’s Mimic tie-up instead doubles down on high-dexterity hands plus foundation models to crack fine-motor assembly that today still belongs to humans.

WAYVE

💰 UK’s Wayve nabs $1.2B for $8B valuation

Image source: Wayve

The Rundown: London-based autonomous driving startup Wayve raised $1.2B in a Series D round — backed by Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, and three major automakers — as it prepares to launch commercial robotaxi trials in London later this year.

The details:

• The round was backed by Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis, valuing Wayve at a staggering $8.6B.

• Wayve develops an end‑to‑end “embodied AI” driving model that learns from real-world data from 500+ cities instead of relying on HD maps.

• The company plans to launch commercial robotaxi pilots with Uber in London in 2026, with a plan to expand into more than 10 global markets.

• Automaker partners aim to integrate Wayve’s software into consumer vehicles from around 2027, starting with L2+ driver assistance.

Why it matters: Wayve bets that autonomy scales through a map-free, hardware-agnostic software layer any automaker can drop into any vehicle — not through Waymo-style city-by-city buildouts. With Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, and three major OEMs all in the same round, the industry appears to agree this might work.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Alphabet is folding its former moonshot robotics software unit Intrinsic into Google to link its Flowstate robot-programming platform with Gemini, Cloud, and DeepMind.

Swiss brand On Running opened a fully robotized factory in South Korea, using 32 robots to make running shoes, and now plans similar plants in the U.S. and Europe.

DJI is suing the FCC to overturn its decision putting the firm on a national‑security “Covered List,” arguing the move unlawfully bans new DJI drones from the U.S. market.

Electric truck startup Harbinger bought autonomous driving startup Phantom AI to integrate its driver-assist software and license it through ZF Group.

Uber is launching its first European commercial drone delivery service in Ireland, partnering with local operator Manna to fly small orders to customers.

Waymo is expanding its robotaxi program by starting mapping and data collection in Chicago and Charlotte, aiming to add them to its growing list of U.S. cities.

South Korean physical AI startup RLWRLD raised $26M in a Seed 2 round to scale its robotics foundation models and expand industrial deployments globally.

Japan unveiled “Buddharoid,” an AI-powered humanoid monk built on a Unitree G1 robot and trained on Buddhist scriptures to offer spiritual advice.

China is testing ceiling-mounted robots that glide over parked EVs, drop a charger into the port, and turn any parking bay into an automatic charging spot.

Japanese researchers demonstrated what they call the world’s first autonomous robot controlled by an onboard quantum-inspired optimization computer.

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team