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AI

Washington wants a piece of OpenAI

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The government taking ownership stakes in private companies used to be a hard line in U.S. politics, typically reserved for bailouts. Under Trump, it's becoming a habit — and the AI giants could be next.

Washington and OpenAI are reportedly discussing a deal that would hand the government an equity stake in the lab, with shares routed into a public fund built to give average Americans a cut of a tech revolution many aren’t feeling included in.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Washington eyes an ownership slice of OpenAI

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Find five prospects a day with this agentic framework

  • OpenAI’s ‘superapp’ revamp is coming soon

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & THE GOVERNMENT

🏛️ Washington eyes an ownership slice of OpenAI

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The White House and OpenAI are reportedly in talks over the U.S. government taking an equity stake in the company, with the shares potentially going towards a "Public Wealth Fund" built to hand Americans a cut of the AI boom.

The details:

  • Axios reported that industry backers have discussed a 1-5% stake, far below U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders' proposed one-time 50% stock tax on AI labs.

  • CEO Sam Altman met with both Sanders and Trump officials last week to discuss the idea, which was also detailed in OpenAI's April policy paper.

  • U.S. President Donald Trump said, "It almost becomes a partnership with the American public… and that would be a beautiful thing... It would make 'em rich."

  • Former U.S. AI czar David Sacks came out against the move, calling it a way to "accelerate the corporate-government fusion we're already sliding toward."

Why it matters: Spreading the wealth sounds good in theory, especially as public opinion on AI keeps sinking. But a government that owns a piece of OAI, profits from it, and regulates it feels ripe for the typical conflicts of interest. Until the checks actually land in the average American's hands, we’ll believe it when we see it.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

🧠 Why most AI isn't scaling

The Rundown: Slack is the connected AI platform that brings together conversations, relationships, business data, and systems of record — giving AI the context it needs to act. 88% of organizations have introduced AI, but only 31% are scaling it effectively. The missing piece? Context. When AI lives where work happens, intelligence turns into action.

In this guide, you'll discover:

  • Why context is the key to scaling AI

  • How to connect AI to the systems where work actually lives

  • What it looks like when AI and people operate in the same environment

Get the guide.

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.

Rowan, Founder and CEO: My calendar is wall-to-wall meetings, so I built a Scheduled Claude Cowork task that automatically preps me for all of them (sort of like an AI Chief of Staff). Every morning, it scans my calendar, then pulls past emails, Slack, and my Granola notes for each call to build a context brief that takes 30 seconds to read before each meeting. It's simple and keeps me sharp for every meeting.

Jamie, Growth: My favorite hockey team hired a new assistant manager, and none of my 3-4 go-to podcasts had dropped an episode covering the news yet. I created an app with Claude Code that scans 30 hockey podcasts, transcribes their latest episode, and lists which topics were covered.

Topics covered by more than one podcast get ranked higher. Now I can hear how much my team sucks from a wider range of sources.

AI TRAINING

🔎 Find five prospects a day with this agentic framework

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to build a Codex prospecting system that finds five qualified prospects a day, ranks them, and drafts the next outreach step — giving you a daily report with fit reasons and a running prospect log.

Step-by-step:

  1. Download Codex, sign in, create a folder, and open it inside the app. Now ask it to set up reports/, prospects.csv, burned_sources.csv, and source_queue.md

  2. Have Codex interview you by prompting: “Here is my company, offer, and URL: [COMPANY], [OFFER], [URL]. Interview me about my ICP and sales process”

  3. Run a dry prospecting pass: “Use my ICP brief to find five qualified prospects today. Inspect sources first. Build a longlist, reject weak matches, return the best five, create a dated report in reports/, append accepted leads to prospects.csv, and update burned_sources.csv”

  4. Turn this into a Prospect Finder skill, scheduled for weekdays. Create another skill that runs after Finder to rank prospects and draft personalized outreach

Pro tip: Add a weekly source-refresh automation so Codex keeps finding fresh public sources instead of mining the same lists forever.

PRESENTED BY AWS SUMMIT NYC

📅 Step into AWS Summit NYC on June 17

The Rundown: Connect, learn, and dive deep with AWS experts, developers, and industry leaders shaping the future of cloud and AI.

Explore:

  • 200+ technical sessions and demos

  • Keynote from VP, Agentic AI, Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian

  • Interactive activations like 8-bit Agents Activation

  • Real-world customer stories

Register here.

OPENAI

🚀 OpenAI’s ‘superapp’ revamp is coming soon

Image source: OpenAI / iSpot

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly planning its biggest ChatGPT revamp yet “in the coming weeks”, which will rebuild ChatGPT into an agent-and-coding "superapp" that prioritizes pushing its nearly 1B users toward paid products ahead of its upcoming IPO.

The details:

  • The reorganization will place greater focus on its agentic coding platform, Codex, with a senior OAI member telling the Financial Times that “Chat is dead”.

  • The move will combine coding, images, and third-party apps into one interface, believing model advances will now understand user intent across functions.

  • The company also recently ran a new TV ad spot with the tagline “It’s time to fly”, pushing Codex and AI agents over simple ChatGPT-type interfaces.

  • Codex has seen a 6x increase in users to over 5M since February, with OAI pushing to increase the number of paying business users as its IPO nears.

Why it matters: Claude Code was Anthropic’s breakout product, which was then simplified for its broader audience (albeit a bit awkwardly) with Cowork. OAI has now seen similar success and upgrades for Codex, and the “side quest” retreat is on full display via a superapp path that gets more paid users into its agentic coding product.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🎬 Frames.md - HeyGen’s format to create branded, consistent AI videos

  • 🎆 Reve 2.0 - Reve's new 4K AI image model with new layout-based editing

  • 🤖 ChatGPT - OpenAI’s AI assistant, with new ‘Dreaming’ memory upgrade

  • 🌌 Ideogram 4.0 - Ideogram's new top-rated open-weight image model

📰 Everything else in AI today

Microsoft Azure's Copilot Migration Agent turns complex migration data into clear answers using natural language prompts. Read the whitepaper.*

Anthropic’s Mythos model started showing up in Dev Mode and across social media, with speculation of a public release coming this week.

Apple held a “top secret” meeting in early 2025 on the company’s AI crisis that led to Tim Cook taking the overhaul more seriously and becoming more involved in it.

Anthropic poached Clive Chen from OpenAI, who was an early hire on the company’s chip design team, coming amid rumors of Anthropic considering its own chips.

OpenAI introduced Lockdown Mode, a ChatGPT setting that disables features like live browsing, agent mode, and deep research to protect from prompt-injection attacks.

*Sponsored Listing

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 Laura S. in Dallas, TX:

"I built an automated workflow that creates personalized talking-dog videos as gifts. I love dogs and wanted a fun project to experiment with vibe coding. I asked friends and family for photos of their dogs and descriptions of their personalities. Then, I used AI tools to generate the script, voice, visuals, and final video.

Today, the workflow handles almost everything automatically, with just two human approval checkpoints: organizing photos, creating a recognizable source image, drafting the dog’s dialogue, generating the talking-dog video, polishing the edit, and delivering the finished product. The workflow is powered by Codex, ChatGPT, HeyGen, and Remotion working together behind the scenes.

What started as a fun experiment is now a repeatable workflow that can produce custom videos in under 30 minutes. It has become a creative way to combine my love of dogs, AI, and automation into personalized gifts that make people smile."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

Tech

Google turns search into creator hubs

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Google is handing creators and publishers a claimable Search profile that turns the top result for their name into a self-curated hub of their work and links.

The move answers Google’s AI Overviews, which have been eating into the traffic creators used to get from search. The catch is you need 100K followers to qualify — and Google’s sign-off on your changes.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Google built a Linktree for creators

  • Block’s $25 wand pays by wave

  • 23andMe returns with genome moonshot

  • Researchers solve space laundry problem

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🔗 Google built a Linktree for creators

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google is rolling out claimable Search profiles for high-follower creators and publishers in the U.S., turning the top result for their name into a self-curated hub of their content and links.

The details:

  • Eligibility requires a public account with at least 100K followers on Instagram, YouTube, or X — or 300K on TikTok-only — and an owner who’s 18 or older.

  • Each profile aggregates videos, articles, and posts into one feed, paired with a bio, avatar, website, cross-platform links, and the option to pin individual posts.

  • A Follow button wires the profile into Google Discover, nudging the creator’s content toward followers’ personalized feeds.

  • Google pitches it as a creator-run heir to the knowledge panel, though any edit to a name, bio, or link sits in “Pending” until Google signs off.

Why it matters: The rollout lands as AI Overviews siphon clicks off the open web, with Seer Interactive logging a 61% drop in organic click-through when an Overview surfaced on a query between June 2024 and September 2025. A Google-hosted Linktree keeps that discovery — and the audience — parked inside Google’s own walls.

BLOCK

🪄 Block’s $25 wand pays by wave

Image source: Block / X

The Rundown: Jack Dorsey’s Block just launched a sparkly, wand-shaped Cash App device with an embedded chip that lets customers make contactless in‑store payments, much like tapping a card or phone.

The details:

  • The $25 NFC “Wand” — a pearlescent, star-shaped keychain charm — pays by tapping it against a checkout terminal.

  • It’s the first of “Cash App Tags,” a hardware line that Block says it will stretch into clothing, jewelry, and other form factors.

  • Users get instant spend alerts and can lock, unlock, or deactivate a lost tag from the app.

  • Cash App says on X that the “first drop of The Wand = SOLD OUT,” with more NFC tags “coming soon.”

Why it matters: Apple Pay and Google Wallet won the contactless market, but Block is betting the opposite — that Gen Z wants a flashy object to wave around — and only dropping a small number to build appeal. Whether a $25 charm becomes a must-have or a novelty depends on whether the follow-up Tags do anything a phone tap can’t.

23ANDME

🧬 23andMe returns with genome moonshot 

Image source: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: 23andMe is back from bankruptcy as a nonprofit, with founder Anne Wojcicki having repurchased the company and its 13M-person DNA database, and a stated ambition to reach 100M users to fuel AI-driven health research.

The details:

  • Wojcicki bought back the company’s assets, including its massive DNA database, for about $305M in a court-approved auction.

  • The institute holds DNA from 13M people and wants to push that to 100M, the scale Wojcicki argues an “AI world” demands for meaningful medical discovery.

  • Some 2M customers deleted their data amid the bankruptcy fallout, forcing new limits on how the company can use sensitive genetic information.

  • A partnership with HealthEx will let members fold their electronic medical records in alongside DNA, labs, and lifestyle data — for now, only in beta.

Why it matters: The relaunch of 23andMe, paired with its HealthEx deal to plug genetic data directly into medical records, could create one of the richest datasets for AI-driven drug discovery and personalized care. But bringing that much data into a single ecosystem also raises the stakes on privacy, consent, and governance.

SPACE TECH

🧺 Researchers solve space laundry problem

Image source: Gabe Xu et al.

The Rundown: Researchers have shown that a jet of cold plasma can disinfect fabric on spaceships without water-intensive washing — a possible fix for one of the grubbier problems of long-duration space missions.

The details:

  • The handheld device fires a room-temperature plasma plume that floods fibers with reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, rupturing bacterial cells on contact.

  • On cotton seeded with skin microbes, treatment dropped colony counts from roughly 250K to about 60K per mL, outperforming the ISS’s current process.

  • The University of Alabama in Huntsville team imagines a plasma washer plus combined jet-and-vacuum tools for clothes, suits, and cabin surfaces.

  • It kills microbes but won’t lift stains, plus it still needs wider microbial testing and fabric-durability work before any mission counts on it.

Why it matters: Water and cargo mass are scarce on the way to the Moon and Mars, and astronauts currently just wear the same few pieces of clothing on repeat. A plasma “wash” could stretch garment life and cut resupply, making a permanent off-world presence a little more livable.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Data center developer Switch is in talks to raise billions of dollars in new funding at a valuation of at least $50B, The Information reports. 

Google has reportedly been laying off staff across its Cloud division, including key cybersecurity teams such as the Threat Intelligence Group and parts of Mandiant.

Netflix is rolling out generative AI and voice-based tools to help viewers cut through content overload with more tailored recommendations.

Waymo will send its retired robotaxi batteries to B2U to reuse them as grid storage for renewable-heavy power in California and Texas.

AI research startup Lila Sciences is reportedly in talks to raise about $2B in a Series B round that would value the company at $8.5B pre-money.

Apple will start requiring App Store users in Texas to verify their age to comply with the state’s new app store law.

Amazon is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit in Seattle alleging that Ring’s facial-recognition feature unlawfully captures images of people passing by doorbell cameras.

Revolut began a limited beta rollout of its India app, onboarding thousands of users from a 450K-strong waitlist for UPI-enabled wallets and cards.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Anthropic confronts the RSI clock

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Recursive self-improvement used to sound like a far-off sci-fi phrase. Now, frontier labs say the signs are showing up internally faster than anyone expected.

Anthropic's new report shows AI already accelerating the work that builds its own successors, and lays out the risks of systems that improve themselves… While also floating the jarring scenario of a coordinated development pause across the industry.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic charts path to self-improving AI

  • OpenAI’s memory overhaul lets ChatGPT ‘dream’

  • Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

  • Rival AI labs unite behind bioweapons risks

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🔁 Anthropic charts path to self-improving AI

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just published "When AI builds itself," a report on recursive self-improving (RSI) systems — citing internal data on Claude's coding takeover and cautioning that fully self-improving AI could arrive before institutions are ready.

The details:

  • Anthropic noted that RSI is not here yet or even inevitable, but said that Claude is advancing AI development “faster than we thought”.

  • More than 80% of Anthropic's merged code was Claude-authored as of May, with engineers pushing 8x as much code per day in Q2 2026 as in 2024.

  • "Each new version of Claude could be built by the version before it, without human involvement," co-author Jack Clark wrote of where the trend leads.

  • OpenAI flagged the same loop this week in its “Democratic Governance of Frontier AI” blueprint, pointing to RSI's first sparks in today's systems.

  • Anthropic said it would slow or pause frontier AI if peer labs did too, and plans policy talks in the coming months to discuss research, systems, and scenarios.

Why it matters: Anthropic and OpenAI aren't alone in feeling the RSI, with labs like MiniMax saying its M2.7 model helped build itself and new startups dedicated to the self-improvement loop popping up everywhere. The unknowns of RSI are scary, but it's also hard to fathom a feasible pause scenario that hinges on global coordination.

TOGETHER WITH LIGHTFIELD

💨 The fastest-growing AI-native CRM

The Rundown: Lightfield is the CRM used by over 4,000 companies that updates itself and does the work for you. Teach it how you sell with Skills, and watch it go to work for you.

Ask it anything, like:

  • "Write follow-up emails to everybody I spoke with.”

  • "Tell me why do we keep losing to our biggest competitor."

  • “Find companies that look like my best customers and reach out to them.”

Try it for free at lightfield.app.

OPENAI

😴 OpenAI’s memory overhaul lets ChatGPT ‘dream’

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced a new memory update within ChatGPT centered around "dreaming," a background system that turns past chats into a running, category-sorted profile of who you are for better personalization and evolving context.

The details:

  • ChatGPT now keeps a running written summary of each user, grouped into areas like travel, hobbies, and work, replacing the previous list of one-off facts.

  • Users can review memories, make corrections, add details, or ask ChatGPT not to bring up certain topics, with memory automatically updating over time.

  • OpenAI says factual recall rose from 41.5% to 82.8% in its evals with dreaming, while preference-following climbed from 31.4% to 71.3%.

  • Dreaming is rolling out to Plus and Pro users in the U.S., with Free and Go, and more countries getting the upgrade over the next several weeks.

Why it matters: Memory is one of the stickiest AI features in theory, but it’s been long overdue for an upgrade. Sam Altman frequently talks about the future of hyper-personalized AI, and dreaming may become a big part of forming that continuity and proactivity for users — and keeping them from switching to rivals in the process.

AI TRAINING

🤔 Stress test business ideas with Perplexity

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Perplexity Deep Research to stress test any business idea. Save the prompt below once and rerun it on every idea you have to see what’s feasible to build.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open Perplexity and switch to Deep Research mode. This works on the free plan (5 queries/day) and is basically a hidden version of Perplexity Computer

  2. Paste this prompt with your idea in the chat, hit run, and walk away for 5 to 6 minutes. Perplexity does the research and builds the slide deck in the same run

  3. Save the prompt somewhere you will actually use it again, like in a dedicated Perplexity space

  4. Then, every Saturday morning, take one idea off your list and run it. You will burn through a year of half-evaluated ideas in a month

Pro tip: Build variants. A 6-slide version for a co-founder pitch, a version that compares two ideas, or a 90-day MVP plan for ideas that already cleared validation.

PRESENTED BY GITLAB

📡 GitLab Transcend goes live

The Rundown: GitLab Transcends is a live event streaming from London June 10-11, with an agenda built for developers – featuring live demos, real-world agentic AI use cases, and developer-first sessions.

With GitLab Transcends, you’ll get:

  • Live demos of the Duo Agent Platform

  • Agentic AI use cases from your peers

  • The Developer Show, hosted by Snerio Developer Advocate, Colleen Lake

Come see intelligent orchestration, now with context. Register free.

AI & SAFETY

🧬 Rival AI labs unite behind bioweapons risks

Image source: Open letter to Congress

The Rundown: CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft just signed an open letter pressing Congress to make synthetic-DNA sellers vet every buyer/order, warning that AI can now enable bad actors to create bioweapon designs.

The details:

  • Signees include Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mustafa Suleyman, Alexandr Wang, and Demis Hassabis, alongside DNA-synthesis industry leaders.

  • The letter said, “AI systems now outperform PhD-level virologists… about highly technical lab procedures in their own domains of expertise.”

  • The signers urge Congress to make U.S. synthetic-DNA and RNA sellers screen orders, verify buyers, and log sales to keep dangerous sequences traceable.

  • They also warned that "knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode."

Why it matters: Like RSI, biological weapons concerns have been outlined for years as one of the steps up the ladder of AI improvement — and this one’s concerning enough to even unite Altman and Amodei. It’s clear that laws and regulations are going to have to adapt quickly to a changing AI-accelerated world, but the question is if they can.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🌌 Reve 2.0 - 4K image model with new layout-based editing

  • 🗣️ Miso One - Open TTS model that reads tones for expressive responses

  • 🧾 Stack - Ramp's AI accounting OS for monthly bookkeeping

  • 🧠 Nemotron 3 Ultra - Nvidia’s open 550B reasoning model for agents

📰 Everything else in AI today

The U.S. and Japan announced a $1B AI research partnership, becoming the first country to join the U.S. Genesis Mission’s push to double science output using AI.

Nvidia released Nemotron 3 Ultra, a fully open 550B reasoning model that runs 5x faster and up to 30% cheaper for agents, with performance similar to top open rivals.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced AI for All, a new five-year national strategy surrounding the tech that targets $200B in growth and 250,000 AI jobs.

Gopuff launched Go, an AI shopping assistant built with SpaceXAI that predicts users’ carts using Grok, real-time signals from X, and order data.

CloudFlare co-founder Matthew Prince revealed that bot traffic on the internet has now surpassed humans, with the milestone coming a year ahead of his expectations.

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 Anonoymous:

"I have 2 small kids at toddler age, and at times that can be very, very challenging. I have a scheduled task to run a pre-set prompt a couple of times a week to provide tips and tricks that can help me manage the day-to-day.

Sometimes it suggests an activity that I can try on the weekend, other times it suggests how to handle poor behaviour, time-outs, or how to handle bedtime routine. In sum, it helps expand the options available to me on how to deal with lots of different sides of parenting, helping me become a better father."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

Robotics

Sam Altman's stealth robotics bet

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly backing Alfred, a stealth startup building software to speed up the slow, grinding R&D behind robots and cars.

Alfred co-founder Ankit Ukil, an ex-Tesla designer, says automakers, defense, and robotics firms are already circling. As OpenAI hires to push robots into the physical world, Alfred is focused on the chaotic stack of tools slowing engineers down.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Sam Altman backs stealthy robotics startup

  • BYD wants to sell humanoids like cars

  • Study finds robotaxis don’t cut traffic

  • Serve’s delivery robots now do laundry

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ALFRED

🤫 Sam Altman backs stealthy robotics startup

Image source: Getty Images / Images 2.0

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly backing Alfred, a stealthy nine-month-old startup out of Hawthorne, California, that’s building software to compress the brutally slow R&D cycles behind robots and cars.

The details:

  • The startup is run by Ankit Ukil, a former Tesla designer, and Dömötör Gulyas, an ex-Meta Reality Labs engineer, with a team from Tesla, Ford, and Honda.

  • Alfred builds tools for engineers, not the machines themselves — automating grunt work so they can chase the features Ukil says Chinese EVs already have.

  • Ukil told Business Insider that talks are underway to sell to automakers, defense firms, and robotics companies, none of which he’d name.

  • Physical AI startups pulled in roughly $5.3B in April alone, per Crunchbase, and Altman spent the weekend on X sketching his robotics vision.

Why it matters: While a heap of physical AI money has gone to hardware, Alfred is targeting the software that those machines rely on. But the lane is already crowded with rivals like Siemens and Dassault and startups like Leo AI adding a similar kind of AI tooling, so a nine-month-old company will have to show it can actually do this better.

BYD

🤖 BYD wants to sell humanoids like cars

Image source: Paxini (BYD-backed humanoid)

The Rundown: Chinese EV giant BYD confirmed it’s building humanoids in-house, expects to be one of the biggest buyers of them itself, and may eventually sell them through the global dealer network that already moves its EVs.

The details:

  • EVP Stella Li said the EV giant is developing humanoids, arguing automotive AI and robotics spring from the same roots.

  • BYD’s “Yao‑Shun‑Yu” program has already reportedly reached a seventh‑gen prototype, with some 150 humanoids running trials on its production lines.

  • The plan is an open platform: BYD would build its own machines while hosting partners’, mirroring the supplier-heavy model it runs in cars.

  • It’s already wired in — strategic stakes in PaXini and AgiBot, plus UBTech’s Walker robots hauling parts across its factory floors.

Why it matters: BYD is testing humanoids on its factory floors, building in-house models, and eyeing its 4S dealer network as a future channel for robotics sales and demos. The dealer angle is still speculative, but BYD has the manufacturing base, internal demand, and retail footprint to scale fast if humanoids go commercial.

WAYMO

🚖 Study finds robotaxis don’t cut traffic

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Robotaxis were sold as a fix for urban gridlock, but the first rigorous look at Waymo’s California operations finds they reproduce the same empty-mileage problem that already plagues Uber and Lyft, reports Ars Technica.

The details:

  • The study finds that robotaxis generate about the same overall traffic load as Uber and Lyft, including a large share of miles driven without passengers.

  • The two-year study tracked roughly 14M Waymo trips and 86M vehicle miles reported to regulators, finding only 54% of those miles carried a passenger.

  • Because most robotaxi trips are short, solo rides that often replace transit, walking, or biking rather than cars, their net effect on congestion is minimal.

  • The results mirror earlier findings on Uber and Lyft, indicating autonomy alone does little to ease gridlock without policy intervention.

Why it matters: Robotaxis are being permitted on the promise they’ll reduce traffic, but early data shows they inherit ride-hailing’s congestion problem rather than solve it — and unless regulators cap deadheading and tie permits to occupancy, cities risk locking in a more car-dependent grid under a high-tech veneer.

SERVE ROBOTICS

🧺 Serve’s delivery robots now do laundry

Image source: Serve Robotics

The Rundown: Serve Robotics is putting its sidewalk delivery bots to work on laundry, launching an LA pilot with on-demand service NoScrubs to wring more revenue out of robots that mostly haul dinner.

The details:

  • NoScrubs users in LA can now schedule pickup and drop-off by Serve robots, which handle the runs during the dead hours between meal rushes.

  • The pilot leans on Serve’s existing fleet — roughly 2K robots nationwide, 500 of them in LA — so the company adds a revenue line without new hardware.

  • Laundry is Serve’s first move beyond food, a test case for the dry cleaning, pharmacy, and grocery runs it could target next.

  • Sidewalk bots are facing backlash from LA residents, who say they clog sidewalks and threaten delivery jobs; nearby Glendale is pursuing tighter rules.

Why it matters: Serve is still burning cash, and stacking more deliveries onto idle robots is the cleanest way to prove the unit economics hold up. Rivals like Starship, Nuro, and Kiwibot are chasing last-mile and campus deals, so Serve needs laundry to show that life after food delivery can actually scale.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Tesla launched an unsupervised robotaxi service across the Austin metro area, after nearly a year of testing in the city.

China is reportedly pushing a slate of robotics companies, including Unitree, toward IPOs to raise R&D capital and test investor appetite for “physical AI.”

Taiwan’s military research institute demoed armed Ghost Robotics robot dogs that marines hope to deploy for patrols on Taiwan-controlled South China Sea islands.

SoftBank is reportedly in early talks to invest over $300M in an $800M funding round for German industrial robotics startup Agile Robots.

European defense AI company Helsing launched the RX-1, Europe’s first sovereign military quadruped robot, alongside a new research division called Area 9.

Chinese neurotech startup BrainCo reportedly expects sales of its dexterous robotic hands to surge as China’s fast-growing humanoid makers ramp up orders.

DARPA is soliciting proposals for swarms of robot medics capable of dragging wounded soldiers to safety, injecting drugs, and self-assembling into tourniquets.

SwitchBot’s parent company, OneRobotics, is reportedly acquiring Nanoleaf for about $40M.

Researchers used biohybrid microrobots to bridge damaged spinal cords in mice, partially restoring movement and hinting at a future spinal injury treatment.

Scientists built “paleo robots” modeled on walking fish to test how early vertebrates might have first hauled themselves onto land millions of years ago.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Ideogram and Reve rethink how AI images get made

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. How you use an AI image model is starting to change, and two back-to-back releases show where it's going.

The new (open-source!) Ideogram 4.0 and Reve 2.0 make a similar case: the prompt gets you close, but letting users edit and control typography, regions, and layout after the fact is where the next breakthrough lives.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • New image models swap text prompts for layouts

  • Meta turns business chats into AI agents

  • Automate social content calendar with Manus

  • Study: AI tutors edge out law faculty

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

IDEOGRAM & REVE

🖼️ New image models swap text prompts for layouts

Image source: Ideogram / Reve

The Rundown: Two image labs just shipped new models, with Ideogram open-sourcing Ideogram 4.0 and Reve launching Reve 2.0 — and both pushing a more layout- focused, agentic iteration process for more user input and creative control.

The details:

  • Ideogram 4.0 takes the top spot for open models and ranks behind only OpenAI and Google’s closed models on Design Arena.

  • 4.0 excels at text rendering, typography, and graphic design, preferred by professional human designers over top rivals on Contra’s testing.

  • Reve 2.0 surpasses Nano Banana 2 on Arena’s Text-to-Image leaderboard to take the No. 2 overall spot, trailing only GPT-image-2.

  • The model’s outputs include labeled segments, allowing users to tweak specific parts of an image rather than regenerate it entirely.

  • Reve creates the image ‘like code’, editing it by rewriting the layout rather than the prompt, while Ideogram uses a similar technique via JSON.

Why it matters: Image models have come a long way from the slot-machine days, when the only move was to re-roll the prompt. The real step change now is the granular control and editing that people used to jump to other apps for. With Ideogram, the open weights are the story: proving open source is not far behind the frontier.

TOGETHER WITH FUNCTION HEALTH

🩺 Your body has receipts

The Rundown: Function gives you access to 160+ lab tests, personalized insights, and ongoing tracking in one place — so you can see what's happening inside your body before symptoms show up.

A Function membership gives you:

  • 160+ lab tests run annually across key health markers

  • Private AI Chat trained on your individual results

  • Clinician-reviewed insights to put your data in context

  • Continuous tracking so you can see what changes over time

Own your health and use code RUNDOWN50 for $50 off your membership.

META

💬 Meta turns business chats into AI agents

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta just launched Meta Business Agent globally, rolling out AI agents across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger that can answer questions, book appointments, and close sales for any business on the platform.

The details:

  • Meta first floated the feature in October as a free test in international markets, with over 1M businesses already utilizing the tool.

  • Agents can close sales, recommend items, qualify leads, and book appointments across languages, with human takeover available at any point.

  • A standalone Business Agent Platform plugs agents into outside tools like Zendesk and Shopify, with broader business operations abilities coming later.

  • The agent is free to start, though Meta said it will be rolling out paid subscription tiers across different business sizes.

Why it matters: Meta’s sprawling social media empire is already a major driver for businesses, so embedding agents for them is a sharp move. The question will be trust. Stories like hackers fooling Meta's own support bot this week won’t help, as the tech giant hopes businesses will trust its agents with their own customers.

AI TRAINING

🤳 Automate social content calendar with Manus

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to build a custom content calendar in Manus that updates, plans, and generates each week of social posts for you. It will automatically save generated posts in your Google Drive so you can easily access them.

Step-by-step:

  1. Sign up for Manus and get its desktop app, then create a Google Drive folder and add your brand documents, briefs, example posts, or product notes

  2. Open the Manus Connectors page, choose Google Drive, authorize your account, then create a new project for this calendar

  3. Prompt: “Build a one-page HTML content calendar I can use as a visual planning dashboard for one week of content. Use the brand documents in my Google Drive folder to generate post titles, captions, and assets for [Instagram, LinkedIn, X, email]. Show each post and asset in the calendar page, and save the generated posts and assets back into Google Drive”

  4. Tell Manus to generate the first week of posts based on the brand assets you added to Google Drive, then turn that planning process into a reusable skill

Pro tip: Once the skill is working, ask Manus to make it a weekly automation that refreshes the next seven days of posts and updates the calendar.

PRESENTED BY VANTA

👋 Find your Calm-pliance

The Rundown: Your employee just added their 67th AI tool. Congrats. You also just created your 67th security blind spot. The Vanta Agent is the sharpest GRC engineer you’ve never had to hire, working tirelessly across the platform to draft policies, complete questionnaires, and flag issues before they escalate.

Here's what Vanta Agent takes off your plate:

  • Continuous policy drafting as your tool stack grows

  • Security questionnaires completed automatically

  • Compliance gaps flagged before they become audit findings

  • Always-on coverage across your existing Vanta workflows

Don't be the last one scrambling before an audit — watch the on-demand demo to learn more.

AI RESEARCH

⚖️ Study: AI tutors edge out law faculty

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: A new study led by Stanford ran a blind test of AI legal tutoring, asking 16 contract professors to judge anonymized answers from their peers and from two of Google's AI systems — with the faculty siding with the AI outputs 75% of the time.

The details:

  • The study tested contract-law office-hours questions, a setting where strong answers need judgment and critical thinking instead of just one correct answer.

  • Sixteen professors from 14 schools blindly judged 2,918 matchups between their own answers and those of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and NotebookLM.

  • Faculty chose Gemini 2.5 Pro and NotebookLM responses 75% of the time, with only a single top professor staying level with the models in evaluations.

  • Extending the testing with an AI stand-in judge, the team ranked nine more systems, with Claude Opus 4.7 on top and all models beating the professors.

Why it matters: Early models like GPT-4 were already passing the bar exam, but this study puts AI in tougher, more subjective judgment situations on office hours contract law questions. AI’s rollout into the education world is still controversial and jagged, but areas like on-demand tutoring can help change the learning process for the better.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ⚡ CData Connect AI - Give Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or any AI tool live, governed, read & write access to your business data in one unified layer.*

  • 🎆 Ideogram 4.0 - Ideogram's new top-rated open-weight image model

  • 👋 Meta Enterprise Agent - Meta’s AI agent for customer sales and support

  • 💻 Personal Computer - Perplexity’s local orchestrator, now on Windows

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Suno raised over $400M at a $5.4B valuation, with the AI music startup rolling out its first model built in partnership with the music industry “in the coming months.”

Google released Gemma 4 12B, a new multimodal model able to run on a 16GB laptop, and the first Gemma variant of this size built for native audio.

xAI rolled out Grok Imagine 1.5 Preview, the company’s latest image-to-video update, which brings upgraded realism, audio syncing, and prompt following.

Microsoft and the Mayo Clinic are building a frontier healthcare AI, trained on anonymized patient data and owned by the clinic, with Azure handling distribution.

Google Labs launched a new experiment called Dreambeans, connecting to users’ Gmail, Calendar, Photos, and Search to generate a feed of personalized daily stories.

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 Jeff M. in Great Falls:

“A simple but surprisingly useful use of AI came while shopping for a used vehicle. I had a browser page open with hundreds of listings and asked Gemini in Chrome to extract the data and plot it by price, model year, and mileage. Within seconds, it generated a visualization showing the distribution of asking prices across different years and mileage ranges.

The chart made it easy to see how much value was gained or lost by moving one model year newer or older, and quickly highlighted listings that deserved further investigation. It also exposed suspicious outliers, such as unusually low-priced vehicles that appeared to be stale or bait listings designed to generate leads and encourage buyers to contact the dealership.

What would have taken hours became digestible in a matter of seconds.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Microsoft paves its own AI way at Build

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. For years, Microsoft's AI story was really OpenAI's story. At Build 2026, it felt like the tech giant was finally writing its own path.

With seven new in-house models, an OpenClaw-based agent, agent-first hardware, and more, Microsoft stopped looking like a distribution partner and started looking like the company rebuilding the agent era around its own rails.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Microsoft kicks off Build with models, agents, and qubits

  • Trump softens AI executive order into voluntary review

  • Use Claude Design’s slide decks feature like a pro

  • Legendary Hollywood director opens the door to AI

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

🏗️ Microsoft kicks off Build with models, agents, and qubits

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just made a full-stack agentic AI push at Build 2026, releasing new models, its first always-on agent, a quantum chip, a platform for “agent-first” devices — positioning Windows and Microsoft 365 as the control layer for agents.

The details:

  • Microsoft AI released seven new MAI in-house models spanning reasoning, coding, image, voice, and transcription, with access through Microsoft Foundry.

  • Microsoft Scout, its first "Autopilot" agent built on OpenClaw, runs in Teams and takes proactive actions like scheduling meetings and prepping materials.

  • Majorana 2, a quantum chip AI agents helped design, shows a 1,000x reliability improvement, speeding timelines for a usable machine to as soon as 2029.

  • The company previewed Project Solara, an upcoming platform for agentic devices, with hardware concepts including a badge and desk companion.

  • On the heels of its Surface Laptop Ultra reveal, Microsoft also introduced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a new mini-PC built for AI workloads.

Why it matters: Build is a timely piggyback off of Nvidia’s big day, with Microsoft following the agentic theme and even partnering with the chipmaker for AI laptops and PCs. With in-house models, an OpenClaw agent, and agentic hardware, Microsoft is paving a bold new path in the first year of independence from OpenAI’s shadow.

TOGETHER WITH TELEPORT

🚫 Don’t give AI agents standing access

The Rundown: AI agents are touching your production systems without an identity. Teleport gives every autonomous agent a unique, cryptographic identity with least-privileged, JIT access that expires automatically.

With Teleport, you get:

  • 4.5x fewer security incidents

  • An audit log of every prompt, query, and tool call

  • A unique cryptographic identity per agent

Ready to Teleport?

AI & THE GOVERNMENT

⚖️ Trump softens AI executive order into voluntary review

Image source: The White House

The Rundown: U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order asking AI labs to voluntarily hand frontier models to the government for a 30-day security review before release — retreating from the previously expected 90-day requirement.

The details:

  • Trump scrapped a 90-day draft hours before a planned May 21 ceremony, telling reporters it would "get in the way of" the U.S. AI race with China.

  • Labs are asked to share “covered frontier models” flagged by a classified process as capable of finding security flaws in a 30-day window before launch.

  • Former AI czar David Sacks, who reportedly fought the first draft, came around once the review window shrank from 90 days to 30.

  • The order also rules out any mandatory licensing or permits for new models, and directs the DOJ to go after AI-powered hacking of computer systems.

Why it matters: With Anthropic’s Claude Mythos nearing a public release and GPT-5.6 likely to have similar capabilities, the cybersecurity threats are becoming very real, very fast. But this EO looks more like the government pushing for a (voluntary) front-row seat to the frontier AI action more than a fix for a potential security concern.

AI TRAINING

👨‍💻 Use Claude Design’s slide decks feature like a pro

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Claude Design to turn your raw data into a useful strategy deck complete with actual insights. Claude Design analyzes what is working and gives concrete recommendations your team can use.

Step-by-step:

  1. Start with a messy CSV report (YT data, Facebook ads, etc.) and decide what the deck needs to do (like find patterns and turn it into a repeatable system)

  2. Open claude.ai/design, choose Slide deck, skip the design system, toggle on speaker notes, and upload your data

  3. Prompt: “Turn these files into a strategy deck on performance. Analyze the results by item and extract best practices from the data and assets. Use charts, rankings, and concrete recommendations. Match images or creative files to CSV using the filename or matching field. Keep it presentation-ready”

  4. Generation will take 10-15 minutes. You can export to PowerPoint or Google Slides when it's ready

Pro tip: Duplicate the project and upload more data sources for Claude to incorporate into the presentation.

PRESENTED BY GITLAB

🚀 The future of agentic AI dev

The Rundown: Agentic AI is reshaping software development, and the leaders adopting it early are setting the pace. GitLab Transcend streams live from London on June 10 with unfiltered insights from peers deploying it now — plus an early look at where GitLab is taking it next.

With GitLab Transcend, you'll get:

  • Unfiltered insights from peers deploying agentic AI

  • An early look at GitLab's roadmap

  • New research and live demos

  • All virtual, streaming from London

Register for free today.

AI & HOLLYWOOD

🎬 Legendary Hollywood director opens the door to AI

Image source: Black Forest Labs

The Rundown: Martin Scorsese just went public as an adviser to AI image startup Black Forest Labs, with a new video detailing the Academy Award-winning director using the company’s FLUX model to help storyboard a new film.

The details:

  • Scorsese signed on last year as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, utilizing its FLUX AI image models for preproduction of a new film.

  • His use is for storyboarding only, with no generated actors, sets, or footage — calling being able to share a storyboard instantly "creatively freeing."

  • Scorsese also said that “Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve”.

Why it matters: This is going to ruffle some anti-AI Hollywood feathers, but a figure of Scorsese’s level coming out in support of an AI tool is a big deal. It’s also a good example of using the tech in a way that aids the creative process without replacing it, a more stomachable entry point for skeptical filmmakers than full AI films or studios.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🤖 MAI - Microsoft AI’s in-house model family, with seven new models

  • 🖥️ Holo3.1 - H Company’s upgraded computer use model, running fully locally

  • 💻 Hermes Desktop - Nous Research's agent as a native desktop app

  • 🚀 Codex - OpenAI’s agentic coding tool with new Sites, role-specific plugins

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic expanded Project Glasswing, giving 150 new organizations across 15 countries access to its powerful Claude Mythos Preview model.

OpenAI launched new Codex updates, including Sites that allow users to create and share hosted websites and apps, alongside new role-specific plugins across domains.

Cognition rebranded its Windsurf IDE as Devin Desktop, a single surface for running agents locally or in the cloud, with support across agents like Codex and Claude.

Famed investor Elad Gil said humanity is “likely in very early lift off and exponential”, saying the models released in December crossed a major technological threshold.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is selling $80B in stock to fund its AI infrastructure expansion, with the company planning up to $190B in spending this year.

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 An in Cape Town, Africa:

"I wanted to analyse the income and expenses of our Airbnb properties to see trends and if Claude could give me some recommendations. So I used Cowork and pointed it to my folder where all income and expenses info (including the agent, property management costs, and income, rates and taxes, internet costs, etc.) is stored.

Claude analysed all the files and came up with a Five Tab Dashboard: Overview, Net Income & Trends, Expenses, Occupancy & ADR, and Recommendations. It is fully interactive, and I can look at each property individually and all together, see trends over the years, and look at how low season impacts our income.

I used to have to go through every single invoice and put it into a spreadsheet, which took a lot of time, and therefore, I did not do it as often as I should or wanted to. Now, with all the graphs and everything included, it makes it much easier to analyse the data.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

Tech

Microsoft's first AI-native laptop

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Microsoft just dropped its most powerful Surface ever — and it could actually give the MacBook Pro some real competition.

The new Surface Laptop Ultra pairs Nvidia’s freshly announced RTX Spark superchip with up to 128GB of unified memory and a petaflop of AI compute. Microsoft’s just first in line, with a whole wave of Nvidia-powered Windows laptops landing this fall.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Microsoft’s first truly AI-native laptop

  • BYD will cover costs if its self-driving crashes

  • Apple delays AI glasses to late 2027

  • New pill moves the needle on pancreatic cancer

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

💻 Microsoft debuts its first truly AI-native laptop

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra at Computex — the first laptop built on Nvidia’s new RTX Spark platform, shipping this fall with pricing still TBD, and gunning straight at the MacBook Pro.

The details:

  • The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is an RTX Spark machine offering up to 128GB of unified memory, “aimed at creators, developers, and AI builders.”

  • Spark “superchip” packs 20 ARM CPU cores, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, and up to a petaflop of AI compute.

  • The unified memory pool is dynamically allocated between CPU and GPU, enabling AI creation, 3D rendering, and multi-model workflows.

  • The 15-inch chassis features a mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen, hitting up to 2K nits of peak HDR brightness — Surface’s brightest display so far.

Why it matters: No price has been confirmed, but analysts expect it to land in MacBook Pro 16 territory — around $3K at entry, potentially hitting $7K fully loaded. With Asus, Acer, Dell, and others already lining up RTX Spark devices, the race for the Windows on ARM premium segment is just getting started.

TOGETHER WITH GITLAB

🚀 GitLab’s AI dev event is here

The Rundown: GitLab Transcend streams live from London June 10-11 with an agenda built for developers — packed with live demos of Duo Agent Platform, agentic AI use cases from your peers, and The Developer Show hosted live by Colleen Lake.

With GitLab Transcend, you’ll get:

  • Live demos of Duo Agent Platform

  • Agentic AI use cases from your peers

  • The Developer Show with Colleen Lake

  • An agenda built for developers

Register today.

BYD

🚙 BYD will cover costs if its self-driving crashes

Image source: BYD

The Rundown: Chinese EV powerhouse BYD said it will pay for crash damage when drivers in China are using its God’s Eye 5.0 driver-assistance system, positioning itself as the first automaker to take financial responsibility for an autonomous-driving feature.

The details:

  • BYD will cover repairs, third-party property damage, and injuries if Urban Navigate on Autopilot is used legally and still triggers an at-fault crash.

  • The company backs the pledge with a fleet of more than 3.15M ADAS-equipped vehicles, over 124M miles of God’s Eye driving data logged daily.

  • When BYD rolled out a similar guarantee for its smart parking feature last year, usage jumped from 21% to 93%.

  • Tesla, meanwhile, has repeatedly contested liability for Autopilot crashes, as Chinese EV makers gain ground on range, charging speed, and features.

Why it matters: BYD taking on crash liability marks a pivotal shift from marketing autonomy to seriously underwriting it, that too at an impressive scale of 3.15M vehicles. If the move pays off, it could reset consumer expectations and pressure rivals like Tesla, which still puts the onus of crash liability on the driver.

APPLE

👓 Apple delays AI glasses to late 2027

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple has pushed its AI-powered smart glasses back by about a year, with the iPhone-tethered “N50” eyewear now targeting a late-2027 debut, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.

The details:

  • Apple shifted the roadmap from a late-2026 reveal and early-2027 ship date after development delays caught up with the project.

  • The Ray-Ban Meta-style frames are designed as lightweight, screenless AI companions — cameras, mics, and an on-device assistant with no display.

  • The delay buys Apple time to get the multimodal AI right, the difference between a wearable that feels inevitable and one that is experimental.

  • In the meantime, Meta, Google, and several wearable AI upstarts get more time to entrench themselves before the Cupertino giant arrives with its own version.

Why it matters: Siri looks on track to debut at the end of this year, but Apple is conceding that the visual AI may not be ready to make the glasses feel truly magical. The year-long wait, though, could hand Meta and every other face-worn AI upstart a wide-open runway to own the category before the company even shows up.

BIOTECH

💊 New pill moves the needle on pancreatic cancer

Image source: Anne Weston, The Francis Crick Institute (micrograph of pancreatic cancer cells)

The Rundown: A once-daily oral pill called daraxonrasib just became the first drug to nearly double survival in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, offering a rare glimmer of progress against one of the deadliest malignancies.

The details:

  • In the phase 3 trial of 500 patients, daraxonrasib extended median overall survival to 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months on chemotherapy.

  • The once-daily RAS(ON) inhibitor cut the risk of death by 60% and nearly doubled progression-free survival to 7.2 months vs. about 3.6 months on chemo.

  • Patients on daraxonrasib tolerated side effects better than those on chemo, and about a third saw their tumors shrink by 30% or more on imaging.

  • Already on an FDA fast track with expanded access open, the drug targets KRAS‑driven tumors that underlie most pancreatic cancers.

Why it matters: Pancreatic cancer has resisted targeted therapies for decades. A 60% reduction in the risk of death is a number oncologists have never seen in any phase 3 trial in this indication. The same KRAS mutation drives other major cancers, meaning daraxonrasib just validated an entirely new therapeutic path.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Malaysia started enforcing its Online Safety Act, barring under-16s from social media and forcing platforms to implement mandatory ID checks or face fines up to $2.5M.

Google is opening its first international flagship Google Store in Tokyo this summer, marking its first directly managed retail location outside the U.S.

NASA chief Jared Isaacman told CNBC that repairing Blue Origin’s damaged New Glenn launch pad will take “serious time,” with a 2028 recovery plausible.

Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant, based on tech from its 2025 acquisition of wearable startup Limitless, The Information reports.

Apple is reportedly building a new Apple Cash tool that lets iPhone users snap a photo of a receipt to split the bill with friends via Wallet and Messages.

Ultrahuman’s new Photon is a $249 handheld red-light therapy device that syncs with its smart rings to turn your data into personalized recovery or skin treatments.

GLP‑1 weight‑loss drugs were linked to markedly slower progression to stage 4 disease in several major obesity‑related cancers in a large Cleveland Clinic study.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Nvidia corners the AI agent stack

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a simple but bold statement at COMPUTEX in Taiwan to open his keynote: “Agentic AI has arrived.” He then pointed his whole ecosystem at backing that claim up.

The chipmaker's latest reveals stretched from the laptop to the data center to the factory floor, unified by the bet that AI agents will dominate future compute demand far more than the people using them.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Nvidia threads agents across the stack

  • Bernie Sanders seeks a public AI stake with new bill

  • Turn Claude sessions into skills with a daily audit

  • Hackers access IG accounts by… asking Meta AI?

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

NVIDIA

💻 Nvidia threads agents across the stack

Image source: Nvidia

The Rundown: Nvidia just introduced a series of new AI releases across hardware, robotics, models, and more at COMPUTEX 2026, all built around the idea that agents will soon be the biggest consumers of compute power.

The details:

  • The new RTX Spark supercomputer chips built with Microsoft run AI agents directly on PCs, with Nvidia saying it takes Windows “from tool to teammate.”

  • Nvidia called Vera the “CPU for agents”, a processor that finishes tasks 1.8x faster than rivals and is now being used by Anthropic, OpenAI, and the NYSE.

  • Cosmos 3 is a new open robotics model, giving robots and self-driving cars the ability to plan ahead and anticipate moves instead of just reacting.

  • Nemotron 3 Ultra is a new 550B parameter model that moves to the top of U.S. open-source and competes with Chinese rivals like Qwen3.5 and Kimi K2.6.

Why it matters: Nobody builds across the entire tech stack quite like Nvidia, but the central theme in the chipmaking giant's latest moves is the prioritization of AI agents themselves as the consumers of compute — with a company worth $5T+ now organizing its entire lineup around enabling software that didn't exist two years ago.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🔍 What makes a good web search API?

The Rundown: If you’re looking for hallucinations and unpredictable failures, pick a search provider by running a few test queries and hoping for the best. If you’re looking for accurate, reliable, fresh data, this technical guide from You.com gives you access to an exact framework to evaluate AI search and retrieval.

What you’ll get:

  • A four-phase framework for evaluating AI search

  • How to build a golden set of queries that predicts real-world performance

  • Metrics and code for measuring accuracy

Go from “looks good” to proven quality. Learn how to run an eval.

AI & THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

🏛️ Bernie Sanders seeks a public AI stake with new bill

Image source: Erik Carter / The New York Times

The Rundown: In an NYT op-ed, Bernie Sanders previewed the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, an upcoming bill proposal that would route half the stock of the largest AI companies into a public fund and pay the gains back to Americans.

The details:

  • Sanders framed it as a one-time tax collected in equity, with the government gaining voting power and a board seat at OAI, Anthropic, and xAI.

  • Sanders cites the AI labs themselves as precedent, with each already pitching public funds or "universal high income" to spread AI's gains.

  • He pointed to Norway’s $2T oil fund and Alaska’s oil dividends to residents as examples of “ensuring ordinary people benefit from national wealth”.

  • Sanders said, “A.I. is being built on a public resource far more valuable than oil: the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and labor of mankind.”

Why it matters: With public AI sentiment at a low and mega IPOs from top AI labs coming at valuations that leave little room for the average investor, Sanders’ concerns that ordinary people are not benefiting are real. Getting the AI labs on board to give up 50% of their equity, despite the posturing, is another question.

AI TRAINING

✍️ Turn Claude sessions into better skills with a daily audit

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to make Claude Cowork look through dozens of session files and improve the skills you use. It will also suggest new skills and help you turn the audit into a repeatable skill and automation.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open Cowork, start a chat, and prompt to scan sessions from the past 7 days and suggest with evidence if any personal skills should be created or improved

  2. Review the suggestions and approve the ones with repeated friction, repeated corrections, or a workflow you will reuse. Reject anything that feels one-off

  3. Tell Claude to turn the audit process itself into a skill, and then tell it to set up an automation to run the audit weekly or daily

  4. You can open the "Scheduled Task" tab to adjust timing or move it to a lower-cost model like Sonnet

Going further: Run the same audit on automations. Ask which scheduled tasks are noisy, stale, expensive, or missing approval steps, then improve the ones with evidence.

PRESENTED BY UNWRAP

⚡ See how Oura automates customer feedback analysis

The Rundown: Oura was sitting on thousands of signals (surveys, app reviews, support tickets, social comments) with no way to connect them fast enough to act. Issues hid in the noise until they became problems. With Unwrap, they turned that fragmented data into a single source of truth. Analysis that took days or weeks now happens instantly.

Unwrap's customer intelligence platform gives you:

  • All feedback automatically categorized across every channel

  • Alerts that surface the most actionable insights straight to the right owner

  • Natural language queries via Assistant or your favorite tools using Unwrap’s MCP

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META & AI SECURITY

🔓 Hackers access IG accounts by… asking Meta AI?

Image source: 404 Media

The Rundown: Meta just fixed an Instagram security flaw that allowed hackers to use its AI help tool to take over prominent profiles by simply asking the chatbot to use a different email address and gaining the codes needed to access the accounts.

The details:

  • Meta gave its AI the power to handle password resets on Facebook and Instagram starting in March, with the exploit reportedly active for months.

  • Accounts hacked include a dormant Barack Obama account, Sephora, and Space Force head John Bentivegna, with accounts then resold in minutes.

  • Hackers switched a VPN near a target’s region and asked AI support for a password reset and email change, and AI sent a code to the new email.

  • Meta told 404 Media that the exploit “has been resolved and we are securing impacted accounts.”

Why it matters: This isn’t the first AI support story gone wrong, and won’t be the last — but the bigger issue might be the reach of a company like Meta (which has frontier AI ambitions) turning its entire support process over to a tool so easily exploited. Hackers might not need Mythos-level capabilities… Sometimes you just have to literally ask.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 💡 AhaCreator 3.0 - Your 24/7 AI agent for influencer marketing*

  • 🚀 M3 - Minimax’s new open-weight model with 1M context and computer use

  • 🎥 Aleph 2.0 - Runway’s SOTA video editing model

  • 🤖 Claude Opus 4.8 - Anthropic’s newly updated top model class

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic announced it has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public, officially pushing forward on the race with OpenAI to hit the open markets.

Apollo’s chief economist shared data claiming “zero evidence of job losses because of AI”, saying that “cheaper technology is creating more demand and more jobs.”

MiniMax released M3, an open-weight model it claims tops GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding benchmarks while approaching Anthropic's Opus 4.7.

OpenAI started construction on ‘The Barn’, a 1 GW Stargate data center campus in Michigan, promising 2,500 union jobs and $45M in Codex credits for in-state students.

Florida’s AG brought the first state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging ChatGPT played a role in planning mass shootings and instances of self-harm.

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 Johannes P. in Ilomantsi, Finland:

"I turned The Rundown into a personal AI idea bank. I saved many of your newsletters into one email folder, downloaded them to my computer, and asked an LLM to analyze the archive. I wanted to find the most useful ideas and AI use cases.

I also gave the model a simple “about me” markdown file, explaining what I do, what I care about, and what kinds of AI tools are useful for my work and everyday life. Then I asked it to rank the Rundown examples based on what would be relevant to me.

This made the newsletter much more useful. Instead of reading each issue once and forgetting many good ideas, I can now ask: “Which of these examples should I try?” or “What use cases are most useful for my research, coding, and writing?”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

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