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AI

Anthropic calls out China's AI copycats

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. China's AI rise has been one of the most impressive stories in tech, but Anthropic says it had help from an unlikely source: Claude itself.

The company just revealed that Chinese labs DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot ran a combined 16M exchanges across thousands of fake accounts to clone Claude’s capabilities into their own models, a scheme it says demands industry-wide action.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic catches Chinese labs copying Claude

  • Meta's AI safety chief ‘humbled’ by OpenClaw bot

  • How to build better slide decks with AI

  • OpenAI enlists consulting giants for Frontier agents

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🕵️ Anthropic catches Chinese labs copying Claude

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic just revealed that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax ran coordinated ops to siphon Claude's capabilities through 16M+ fraudulent exchanges across 24K fake accounts — a threat it says demands immediate industry-wide action.

The details:

  • Anthropic accused the labs of distillation via the conversations, which involves training a weaker system on the outputs from a stronger one.

  • MiniMax ran the largest campaign at 13M+ exchanges, and Anthropic caught it mid-operation, spotting the lab shift focus to a new release in under 24 hours.

  • DeepSeek had Claude spell out reasoning step-by-step and rewrite politically sensitive queries, generating training data for both logic and censorship.

  • OAI raised similar concerns with Congress weeks ago, and Anthropic is now pushing for coordinated action from the broader AI industry and government.

Why it matters: Chinese AI has been pulling closer and closer to the frontier — but it’s looking like it may have at least partially been on the backs of the same models they are chasing. But the labs also may find the public low on sympathy, given the industry’s own legal issues and controversies over where their training data comes from.

TOGETHER WITH TELEPORT

🤖 Production-ready identity for AI agents

The Rundown: AI agents are moving to production, but legacy IAM can’t secure autonomous actors at scale. Teleport’s Agentic Identity Framework is a standards-driven architecture for running agents across infra with built-in identity, access, and governance.

What’s new:

  • Short-lived, delegated agent identity

  • Fine-grained access with MCP & LLM controls

  • Detection of shadow agents & context poisoning

  • Secure SDK integrations for infra & dev workflows

Explore the framework.

META

🦞 Meta's AI safety chief ‘humbled’ by OpenClaw bot

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta AI alignment director Summer Yue revealed that her OpenClaw agent went rogue on her inbox, saying it ignored stop commands and started to mass-delete her emails — forcing her to sprint to her Mac mini to kill the process.

The details:

  • Yue said the bot ran fine on a test inbox for weeks, but lost her "confirm before acting" prompt when she gave it access to her much larger real inbox.

  • Yue called it a "rookie mistake," saying that "alignment researchers aren't immune to misalignment".

  • Elon Musk piled on, posting "Someone who got p0wned by OpenClaw is definitely gonna solve AI safety" in response to Yue’s situation.

  • The viral OpenClaw has been the agentic talk of the industry, with creator Peter Steinberger recently being hired by OAI after also receiving an offer from Meta.

Why it matters: OpenClaw is just the first wave of agents getting full access to digital lives, so the fact that Meta’s alignment director is having this experience doesn’t bode well for novices (in its current form). The agentic path is still early in being paved, and this is just one of many insane situations set to pop up along the journey.

AI TRAINING

💼 Build better slide decks with AI

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn to take raw data and turn it into a presentation-ready slide deck. This works whether you're starting from a spreadsheet, a meeting transcript, a long document, or just bullet points.

Step-by-step:

  1. Grab the files you want to start with. This could be a CSV export from Shopify or Google Analytics, a meeting transcript from Zoom, or a scope of work

  2. Launch Claude, attach the file/doc, and prompt: “I need you to turn these documents into a slide deck outline. Before you start, ask me 5 multiple-choice questions about the purpose, audience, tone, and structure”

  3. Answer the Qs to get Claude’s outline. Then, go to Gamma > Create New > Generate from outline and paste it. Click Continue and check the deck preview

  4. Finally, click Generate, and Gamma will create a full deck for you that you can edit with AI and export as a PowerPoint or PDF

Pro tip: In preview, select “Preserve” and “Concise” options to get the best slide deck.

PRESENTED BY TELY AI

💬 Market leaders get leads from ChatGPT and Google

The Rundown: Your buyers are asking, and AI is answering with someone else’s company. Not because you are worse, but because your website doesn’t answer the questions AI looks for. Tely makes Google, ChatGPT, & Claude recommend your business — so when people ask, they find you and reach out.

With Tely AI, you can:

  • Get recommended in ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity, and Claude in as little as 1 week

  • Fully hands-off: no writers, no agencies, no managing content

  • Costs less than hiring freelancers or maintaining a marketing team

  • Ideal for niche industries where expertise matters

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on autopilot.

OPENAI

💼 OpenAI enlists consulting giants for Frontier agents

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced new multi-year deals with consulting giants McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini as part of the company’s new “Frontier Alliance” enterprise platform push.

The details:

  • OpenAI launched Frontier in early February, a platform giving enterprises the ability to manage AI agents like new hires across existing tech stacks.

  • ‘Frontier Alliance’ partners will work with OpenAI to help their customers actually integrate AI into their corporate workflows and systems.

  • The firms are building certified teams that will work alongside OAI's own engineers, with Accenture already running staff through enterprise AI training.

Why it matters: Building the best AI means nothing if companies can't figure out where to plug it in, and that gap is exactly what OpenAI and the big consulting firms are looking to close. The irony is that a technology seemingly racing to replace white-collar work is now enlisting the leading consulting firms to get companies AI-integrated.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 👨‍💻 HeyGen - Turn ideas into videos in minutes, with no filming required. Use Code RUNDOWN20 for 20% off your first 3 months*

  • 🎧 gpt-realtime-1.5 - OpenAI's upgraded Realtime API voice model

  • 🗣️ Wispr Flow - AI dictation tool, now available via Android

  • 🎆 Soul 2.0 - Higgsfield’s new creative model with strong aesthetics, realism

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic announced that Claude Code can now automate COBOL modernization, a core part of IBM's consulting business that sent its shares tumbling by over 10%.

Google launched a new free Gemini training program for all 6M educators in the U.S., the largest AI literacy initiative for teachers to date.

Pentagon chief Peter Hegseth reportedly summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over military AI access, with officials threatening to cut ties if safeguards aren't lifted.

The Pentagon also signed a new deal with xAI to put Grok in its classified systems, giving the military an additional option to Claude as tensions rise with Anthropic.

Citrini Research posted a report of hypothetical scenarios of how agentic AI would impact the economy, with many crediting it for playing a role in Monday’s stock selloff.

Spotify expanded its AI-powered Prompted Playlists to the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Sweden, letting Premium users type a text prompt to create custom mixes.

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 Danny W. in Nashville, TN:

"I use Gemini and NotebookLM to do genealogy of my ancestors in southern Scotland from the 1300's to the 1800's. I have loaded over 100 sources of Scottish history, from web pages to 200-year-old, 500-page history books.

I have found 12 farms where my ancestors were tenant farmers in the 1600's and 1700's. I also use NotebookLM to create podcasts summarizing these books or on particular topics like how they ate and how they got clothing back then. NONE of what I've accomplished could have been done before AI."

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

Figure's 24/7 humanoid staff

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Figure says its humanoids never clock out. Under its new Helix 02 system, the company’s bots now run 24/7 at its Sunnyvale HQ.

When a battery dips, a robot steps onto a wireless charger and auto-handoffs its task, keeping the fleet in perpetual motion. But there’s one question that hasn’t been answered: what are the robots actually doing all night?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Figure puts its 03 fleet on 24/7 duty

  • Toyota just hired 7 Digit humanoids

  • A robot swarm learns to fight fires

  • MIT’s soft robots just got a brain

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

FIGURE

🤖 Figure puts its 03 fleet on 24/7 duty

Image source: Figure

The Rundown: California-based humanoid startup Figure claims to have flipped its Sunnyvale headquarters into a 24/7 operation, deploying a seven-robot Figure 03 fleet to work day and night — under autonomous control from its Helix AI system.

The details:

  • The robots self-manage their own uptime, stepping onto 2 kW inductive charging docks and swapping tasks as battery telemetry triggers handoffs.

  • CEO Brett Adcock said on X that the goal is robots “operating at all times – even at 2 am, on weekends, or on Christmas Day.”

  • Videos show a seven‑strong Figure 03 fleet — six white bots and one dark‑gray outlier — idling, pivoting, and striding through the headquarters.

  • Fleet behavior is orchestrated by Figure’s Helix 02 architecture, which replaces 100K lines of code with a unified whole‑body neural network.

Why it matters: A fully autonomous swap-and-charge loop keeping humanoids operational 24/7 is a genuine technical milestone — even if Figure hasn’t disclosed what exactly the bots are actually doing. The clips also double as a flex on the company’s rapid build‑out, with the headquarters now spread across five buildings.

AGILITY

🚗 Toyota just hired 7 Digit humanoids

Image source: Agility Robotics

The Rundown: Toyota’s Canadian SUV plant is set to make history this spring as seven Digit humanoids from Agility Robotics will clock in alongside human workers, turning a closely watched pilot into one of the first real factory gigs for bipedal bots.

The details:

  • Toyota will deploy seven Digit humanoids at its Woodstock, Ontario, RAV4 plant under a robots‑as‑a‑service deal starting in April — after a year-long pilot.

  • GXO Logistics was the first company to deploy Digit commercially, running the robots at a Spanx fulfillment facility in Georgia under the same RaaS model.

  • The robots will unload and shuttle totes and parts from automated tuggers, taking over repetitive, high‑strain jobs.

  • Toyota says the goal is to improve “team member experience” by offloading monotonous, physically taxing tasks to the robots.

Why it matters: Seven robots shuffling totes doesn’t look like a revolution, but deploying humanoids inside a live production environment, complete with charging logistics and real workflow integration, is no small thing. Agility’s rival Figure AI has also tested its humanoids at a BMW plant, unloading some 90K parts over 10 months.

FIREFIGHTING BOTS

🧯 A robot swarm learns to fight fires

Image source: Griffith University

The Rundown: Australia’s Griffith University just demoed a firefighting robot that rolls into danger with a virtual squad, using swarm-style AI to dodge obstacles and snuff out multiple blazes with almost flawless precision.

The details:

  • The project uses a physical unmanned ground vehicle alongside up to four virtual robot teammates in simulated and hybrid real-world tests

  • The robots were trained via multi-agent reinforcement, which enabled them to learn solo navigation, obstacle avoidance, and coordinated firefighting.

  • In tests, this system achieved a 99.67% success rate in handling two fires simultaneously, with the robots splitting into teams to handle outbreaks.

Why it matters: Firefighting robots are already deployed on mine sites across Australia, but they still depend on human operators to function. This research marks an early but meaningful step toward swarms that can act autonomously — keeping human crews out of harm’s way when it matters most.

MIT

 🧠 MIT’s soft robots just got a brain

Image source: MIT / The National University of Singapore

The Rundown: MIT researchers just built an AI control system that lets soft robots learn a set of movements once, then adapt that knowledge to new tasks and unexpected disruptions in real time, with no retraining required.

The details:

  • The system lets a soft robotic arm learn a small library of basic movements once, then recombine and adapt them to new tasks without full retraining.

  • During operation, the plastic synapses update in real time, allowing the robot to respond to disturbances like unexpected pushes or shifting loads.

  • In tests, robots using this neural blueprint cut motion-tracking errors by up to about 50% and maintained stability even when actuators failed.

  • The framework generalizes across arm types and task categories — trajectory tracking, object placement, etc. — within a single unified system.

Why it matters: Soft robots that can learn a broad set of skills once and then adapt them to new situations make it far easier to deploy them outside tightly controlled lab or factory settings. That kind of human-like flexibility could unlock safer, more capable assistive, rehabilitation, and medical robots that work directly with people.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

New York Governor Kathy Hochul pulled a proposal that would have effectively legalized commercial robotaxi services in the state, stalling Waymo’s expansion there.

Unitree Robotics CEO Wang Xingxing said today’s humanoids are about as capable as a 10‑year‑old child, but large‑scale commercial deployment is still 3–5 years away.

An engineer trying to joystick-control his DJI Romo discovered a major security flaw that gave him access to live video and data from nearly 7K robot vacuums worldwide.

U.S.-based OpenMind is using its OM1 robot OS and marketing support to help Chinese robotics firms scale their hardware and expand sales into overseas markets.

Faraday Future co-CEO YT Jia told investors that FF’s EAI Robotics arm has cleared certifications and will start its first batch of deliveries next week.

Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, upgraded with AI via the Orbit platform, now patrols factories to spot equipment issues early and prevent costly failure.

Uber still has a solid future in robotaxis, the Wall Street Journal argues, despite fears that autonomous vehicles will make its ride-hailing business obsolete.

U.S. researchers developed a real-time planning and control framework that lets bipedal robots quickly detect instability and adjust their steps, boosting fall recovery.

Infineon CEO Jochen Hanebeck said the German semiconductor giant is likely to profit from an expected boom in microchips for humanoids.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

What OpenAI and Jony Ive are building

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. We've known OpenAI and ex-Apple design guru Jony Ive have been building AI hardware since last May's $6.5B deal. What nobody knew was what the first device would actually be.

With new reporting revealing an upcoming smart speaker that can see, listen, and make purchases, the long-awaited collaboration is finally coming into focus — and it's heading straight for Amazon, Apple, and Google's turf.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI's first AI device could be a smart speaker

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Self-host an n8n automation server in minutes

  • AI startup’s custom chip gives AI a 10x speed boost

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🔊 OpenAI's first AI device could be a smart speaker

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI-Jony Ive's first hardware product will reportedly be a $200-$300 smart speaker with a built-in camera and facial recognition for purchases, according to The Information — backed by a 200+ team aiming to ship it by early 2027.

The details:

  • The team formed when OAI acquired Ive's startup Io Products for $6.5B in May, bringing in Apple veterans to lead hardware, design, and supply chain.

  • The speaker's camera will allegedly observe surroundings and “nudge (users) toward actions”, with a Face ID-like facial recognition feature for purchases.

  • AI-powered smart glasses are also planned, but won't hit production until at least 2028, with a smart lamp also created as a prototype.

  • OAI staffers have butted heads with LoveFrom over slow revisions and secrecy, with Ive's firm handling designs and the devices team working on the hardware.

Why it matters: OAI has never shipped a physical product, but the mystique surrounding Jony Ive has made its hardware a hotly anticipated launch. With Apple ramping up AI device plans and Amazon already rolling with Alexa+, OAI's window to define the category is shrinking fast — making the speaker a very important first swing.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

📖 The handbook for your new AI agent employees

The Rundown You wouldn’t expect a new employee to know everything without onboarding, would you? The same concept goes for AI agents—and metadata is the key.

In this ebook, you’ll learn:

  • How metadata management drives AI success

  • Common pitfalls

  • The ROI of proper metadata management

Get the Ebook.

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 & CEO: As a fast-moving startup, many of our team's best ideas come from random Slack threads, but get lost and never fully hashed out. Instead of spending hours a day manually adding tasks to our databases, we used Notion's new Agents feature (rolling out soon for GA) and built an "AI Project Manager" that monitors Slack messages daily and logs tasks autonomously.

Shubham, Editor: I used Gemini to analyze my blood work covering some 100 parameters. It instantly extracted and categorized all—from cholesterol to iron levels—into a clear, structured table, identified subtle deviations (such as slightly elevated eosinophils) and explained the clinical significance of each in plain language.

Finally, it translated these data points into a personalized wellness roadmap, suggesting natural lifestyle adjustments to optimize health markers.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: Over the past year, I’ve relied heavily on LLMs to support my French citizenship application— including drafting required letters and tracking paperwork. Although I’m already fluent, I used ChatGPT to prep for the required language exam to get familiar with the test format for 100% confidence.

AI TRAINING

⚙️ Self-host an n8n automation server in minutes

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn to set up your own n8n automation server — helping you run thousands of automations per month on n8n with just a $5 virtual server. Best of all, you can set it up in under 10 minutes.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to railway.com/deploy/n8n, sign in with GitHub, and click Deploy Now. You don’t need to configure any variables. Click Deploy on the next screen

  2. After your automation server is deployed, click the n8n module, go to your custom link, and set up your email and password login

  3. Now, you can create a new automation by clicking Create workflow in your n8n dashboard — no need to set it up node-by-node

  4. Just ask Claude or ChatGPT to map out the automation you want as a JSON file. Then, in the new workflow, click the three dots, and import from file

Pro tip: You can invite users via email to your n8n server. This makes it great for client- or team-specific projects. You can even save API keys in the server for others to use.

For more tips on n8n + AI, check out our AI Automations Course.

PRESENTED BY OZ

⚡ Ship faster with agent-first engineering

The Rundown: Individual AI productivity gains hit a ceiling fast — without orchestration, they don't scale across your org, and leadership has no way to measure impact or enforce security standards. Oz is the platform built to change that.

Oz’s new report breaks down:

  • Why most companies fail at building their own agentic systems

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  • What makes over 60% of agent-generated PRs actually achievable

Download the free report.

TAALAS

⚡️AI startup’s custom chip gives AI a 10x speed boost

Image source: Taalas

The Rundown: AI chip startup Taalas just emerged with HC1, a custom chip built to run a single AI model and nothing else — delivering responses roughly 100x faster than today's standard hardware and 10x the SOTA for extreme speed in outputs.

The details:

  • Taalas’ first chip permanently embeds Meta's Llama 3.1 8B model into the hardware rather than running it as software on general-purpose chips.

  • The result is near-instantaneous AI responses, with messages coming back in under 100 milliseconds at a fraction of the power and cost of other systems.

  • Llama 3.1 is small, older, and far from the frontier, but Taalas says it can retool chips for new models in just months — with a top-tier option planned by winter.

  • The startup pulled in $169M in new funding this round, bringing its total above $200M — with a mid-size reasoning model expected this spring.

Why it matters: The model baked into the first chip is far from competitive, but the tech itself is the story. The speed needs to be seen to be comprehended (demo here) — and if the approach scales to frontier models, it could change what's possible in areas like physical AI or agentic workflows where every millisecond matters.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*

  • 💻 Claude in PPT - Anthropic's AI sidebar for building PowerPoint slides

  • 🎥 Replit Animation - Create professional animated videos from text prompts

  • ⚙️ Rork Max - Rork's AI-powered native iOS app builder

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Sam Altman called concerns about ChatGPT's water usage "totally fake", arguing that creating AI may already be more energy-efficient than raising and ‘training’ a human.

Anthropic opened early access to Claude Code Security, a new tool that uses AI to detect hidden software vulnerabilities and suggest patches for human review.

Zyphra released ZUNA, an open-source AI trained on brain wave data that can clean up and reconstruct brain signals, an early step toward thought-to-text without surgery.

Pika Labs launched AI Selves, a new product that lets users create persistent AI clones that can post on social media, send messages, and interact across platforms.

Amazon’s Kiro AI coding agent reportedly caused a 13-hour AWS outage in December after autonomously deciding to delete and recreate an environment.

OpenAI’s Head of Codex posted he’s ‘beyond excited’ for the coming weeks, and that current coding agents will be seen as “so primitive that it will be funny in comparison.”

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 Gina T. in Minnesota:

"During a recent snowstorm, a big drift formed right behind my garage stall, and I couldn't get my car out. My husband was out of town, and I had never run the snowblower before. I went to the garage and took a picture of the back where all the controls were and loaded it into ChatGPT, and asked, "How do I start my snowblower?"

It identified the make and model, walked me through the steps on how to start the machine, and a few questions later, I was clearing my driveway!"

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

Zuck vs. Instagram addiction

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. In a first-of-its-kind trial in Los Angeles, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand to defend against claims that Instagram was engineered like a ‘digital casino’ to hook kids.

With emails showing Zuck personally overruled child-safety and mental-health experts, the verdict could set the tone for thousands of similar lawsuits waiting in the wings.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Zuck defends Instagram in landmark trial

  • Microsoft turns glass into a 10K-year hard drive

  • Feds charge 3 engineers in Google chip theft

  • Stanford’s new do-it-all respiratory vaccine

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🎰 Zuck defends Instagram in landmark trial 

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Mark Zuckerberg took the stand to defend Meta in a landmark LA jury trial over social media addiction, rejecting claims that Instagram was deliberately engineered to hook teens and harm their mental health. Plaintiffs argue otherwise.

The details:

  • The case centers on a 20-year-old woman who says compulsive use of Instagram and YouTube as a child fueled anxiety and suicidal depression.

  • Plaintiffs argue Instagram and YouTube were built as “digital casinos,” using addictive features like filters and infinite scroll to maximize time-on-platform.

  • Zuck maintained that Instagram offers positive value and that the plaintiff’s struggles stem from broader life problems, not product design.

  • Meta emails show Zuck personally overruled at least 18 mental health and child-safety experts who urged the company to curb beauty filters.

Why it matters: This is the first jury trial to test the wave of social media addiction lawsuits. Attorneys claim Meta and YouTube engineered features to hook “teens and tweens,” while shelving internal warnings about risks. Meanwhile, governments are already moving to restrict or ban social media access for under-16s.

MICROSOFT

💿 Microsoft turns glass into a 10K-year hard drive

Image source: Microsoft Project Silica

The Rundown: Microsoft has etched palm-sized slabs of ordinary glass into data “books” capable of storing 4.8 terabytes — the equivalent of roughly 2M books or 200 4K movies — and projecting their survival for at least 10K years.

The details:

  • The glass withstands heat, radiation, water, and demagnetization, making it virtually indestructible by the standards of conventional storage.

  • Inside Microsoft’s prototype archive, autonomous robot shuttles climb shelving units, retrieve the requested glass slab, and feed it to decoding systems.

  • The write speed, currently a few megabytes per second, targets potential customers including cloud providers, national archives, and media companies.

  • Because the glass “books” need no power, they could shrink archive footprints and dramatically cut the energy and hardware cost of storing cold data.

Why it matters: Project Silica could offer a way to lock humanity’s critical digital records into glass that outlasts every hard drive and cloud data center we own today. And unlike more exotic ideas such as DNA storage or 5D crystals, it builds on a familiar material — putting it closer to real-world deployment than most of its competitors.

GOOGLE

🧐 Feds charge 3 engineers in Google chip theft

Image source: Unsplash

The Rundown: U.S. prosecutors indicted three Silicon Valley engineers — including two former Google employees — for allegedly stealing hundreds of confidential files on Pixel processors and other proprietary chip designs.

The details:

  • A federal grand jury hit the trio, two Iranian-born sisters and one of their husbands, with 14 felony counts.

  • Prosecutors allege the sisters, while employed at Google, secretly copied hundreds of restricted files, including design data for the Tensor chip.

  • The trio allegedly moved the stolen documents to third-party messaging channels and personal devices, then on to contacts and storage in Iran.

  • All three were arrested in San Jose and made initial court appearances, and if convicted, could face prison sentences of up to 20 years.

Why it matters: The case lands just weeks after a separate conviction of another former Google engineer for stealing AI trade secrets, showing how aggressively U.S. authorities are now pursuing alleged tech espionage tied to strategic chip and AI technologies.

STANFORD

🦠 Stanford’s do-it-all respiratory vaccine 

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Stanford researchers just developed an experimental intranasal vaccine that, in mice, defends the lungs for months against a range of viruses, bacteria, and even allergens — a potential leap toward a single shot that does it all.

The details:

  • Three doses of the vaccine, called GLA‑3M‑052‑LS+OVA, dramatically cut coronavirus levels in mouse lungs.

  • The vaccine’s broad coverage spans SARS‑CoV‑2 and related coronaviruses to drug-resistant hospital superbugs.

  • The secret is in the formula: a triple-adjuvant platform designed to rewire how the immune system responds at the source.

  • If it clears human trials, the technology could collapse today’s lineup of separate flu, COVID, and RSV shots into one annual nasal spray.

Why it matters: A single nasal spray guarding against the full spectrum of respiratory threats would fundamentally change vaccination and pandemic preparedness. Rather than endlessly reformulating shots to chase evolving strains, this platform aims to prime the immune system to handle whatever pathogen comes next.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Amazon just ended Walmart’s 13-year run to claim the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500 for the first time.

SoftBank plans to spend $33B on a 9.2‑gigawatt natural‑gas power plant on the Ohio‑Kentucky border, potentially to feed data centers tied to its OpenAI partnership.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket reentry from a discarded upper stage left a plume of lithium and other metals in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, a new study found.

Tesla rolled out a new “entry” Cybertruck — a dual‑motor all‑wheel‑drive model starting around $60K — while cutting the high‑end Cyberbeast’s price by $15K.

Ford is developing a $30K midsize electric pickup for 2027, using an F1‑style skunkworks team and bounties to strip out weight, parts, and cost.

A new report finds that almost $1B in U.S. government research funding over the past decade flowed into projects involving Chinese labs, Bloomberg reported.

Thrive Capital closed a new $10B fund — its largest ever and nearly twice the size of its last — aimed at investments in companies such as OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX.

Rivian launched a native Apple Watch app that lets owners use their wrist as a digital key to lock or unlock the vehicle, open windows, and adjust cabin temperature.

Meta will shut down its standalone Messenger website in April and redirect users to Facebook’s messages page or the mobile app instead.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

The handshake refusal heard around the AI world

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. India rolled out the red carpet for the world's AI leaders this week, hoping for a show of unity. What it got instead was Sam Altman and Dario Amodei turning a photo op into an awkward viral moment.

The duo’s hand-hold dodge is peak tech-world absurdity, but underneath the meme is a rivalry between two of the most powerful AI labs that shows no sign of slowing down.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • The handshake refusal heard around the AI world

  • Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro doubles up on reasoning

  • Write viral YouTube scripts with NotebookLM

  • Corporate giant Accenture ties AI usage to promotions

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & ANTHROPIC

🤝 The handshake refusal heard around the AI world

Image source: India AI Impact Summit

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seemingly refused to hold hands during a group photo with Indian PM Narendra Modi at the India AI Impact Summit — a viral moment symbolizing the clash between the two AI giants.

The details:

  • Modi pulled tech leaders on stage for a hand-linked chain, lifting arms with Altman and Pichai — with Altman and Amodei awkwardly raising fists instead.

  • Altman later downplayed the moment, telling reporters he was "confused" when Modi grabbed his hand and he "wasn't sure what was happening.”

  • The moment follows Anthropic's Super Bowl ad campaign mocking OAI's decision to put ads in ChatGPT, which Altman called "clearly dishonest”.

  • OAI also hired the creator of AI agent OpenClaw last week, a potential source of contention given Anthropic’s issues with the original OpenClawd name.

Why it matters: If you’ve never seen the series ‘Silicon Valley’, it’s worth a watch to show how prescient it was on the ridiculousness of the tech world. While the moment makes for a viral meme, it also shows the state of affairs between top AI labs — far from the collaboration hoped for from leaders of the most important tech of our time.

TOGETHER WITH AIRIA

💼 Redefine enterprise AI with Airia

The Rundown: Airia delivers unified AI security, orchestration, and governance built for enterprises accelerating AI adoption. Deploy agents fast while maintaining control, bridging the gap between innovation and compliance.

Dive deeper with Airia’s 2026 State of AI Report, which reveals:

  • Key insights on enterprise AI adoption trends

  • Critical challenges and emerging opportunities ahead

  • A comprehensive guide for navigating AI transformation

Learn more.

GOOGLE

🧠 Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro doubles up on reasoning

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just released Gemini 3.1 Pro, bringing a massive reasoning upgrade, benchmark-topping performance, and overall SOTA capabilities while keeping API pricing identical to its predecessor.

The details:

  • 3.1 Pro scored 77.1% on the ARC-AGI-2 reasoning benchmark, up from 31.1% on Gemini 3 Pro and passing both Opus 4.6 (68.8%) and GPT-5.2 (52.9%).

  • The model also takes the top spot on benchmarks for science, competitive coding, MCP use, agentic search, and more.

  • Google positions 3.1 as the core intelligence behind last week's big Deep Think update, now available across the Gemini app, NotebookLM, and dev tools.

  • Pricing is identical to 3 Pro with the same 1M token context window, coming in cheaper than frontier model options from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Why it matters: After letting Anthropic and OpenAI control the headlines in 2026 so far, Google has answered back in a big way over the past few weeks — first with Deep Think and now sliding back into the ‘world’s top model’ conversation with an impressive 3.1 Pro launch. We expect a counter answer from OpenAI sooner rather than later.

AI TRAINING

✏️ Write viral YouTube scripts with NotebookLM

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn to use NotebookLM to “watch” YouTube videos for you, then turn them into ideas and scripts for your own videos.

Step-by-step:

  1. Find a long-form YouTube video that you like the structure of. Go to NotebookLM > Create new > Add sources > Websites and paste the link in

  2. Once NotebookLM analyzes it, make sure it’s selected, and prompt: “Reverse engineer the structure of this video. Give me a video outline and 4 video concepts with the same structure for my brand, [brand]”

  3. Select the video concept you like best and instruct GoogleLM to generate a script for that idea. Click Save to note > click the three dots > Export to Docs

  4. Now you have a script in Google Docs that’s ready to record

Pro tip: You can save your best scripts as sources to give NotebookLM a better idea of what you like.

PRESENTED BY FIDDLER

🔎 The ultimate agentic observability guide

The Rundown: Fiddler AI’s Agentic Observability Guide breaks down what’s needed to monitor multi-agent systems so they succeed in production.

The guide covers:

  • Tracing AI failures across workflows

  • Leveraging the latest monitoring tools

  • Pinpointing the root cause of agent behavior

  • And more

Download the guide today and learn how to build better AI agent.

AI AT WORK

👀 Corporate giant Accenture ties AI usage to promotions

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Consulting giant Accenture is now reportedly monitoring weekly AI tool usage for senior employees and tying adoption directly to leadership promotions, in an attempt to bring veteran staff on board with the tech’s rising use in the workplace.

The details:

  • Three consulting execs told FT that getting senior partners to adopt AI is far harder than with junior staff, a firmwide seniority problem across the industry.

  • Associate directors aiming for promotions will now have AI tool logins tracked weekly, with usage flagged as a "visible input" to leadership reviews.

  • Accenture says 550K+ of its 780K staff have gone through AI training, though employees called the AI tools used in-house “broken slop generators”.

  • CEO Julie Sweet made headlines last year when she said on an earnings call that the firm would “exit” staff who don’t reskill for AI’s rise.

Why it matters: There is some irony in the senior employees being unwilling to adapt to the AI boom at the same time the tech is eating entry-level positions. But the wave of job transformation is here, and not learning AI will be a far more rapid equivalent of resisting the internet when it comes to competing and succeeding at work.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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

  • 🧠 Gemini 3.1 Pro - Google's flagship model with SOTA reasoning gains

  • 📸 Pomelli - Google’s tool to turn product shots into marketing assets

  • 🚀 Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Anthropic’s mid-tier AI, rivaling Opus at 1/5 the cost

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI is reportedly nearing a record $100B+ funding round backed by Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia, and Microsoft, potentially lifting its valuation to over $850B.

Reddit is piloting an AI-powered shopping feature that converts community product recommendations into buyable carousels with pricing and retailer links.

ElevenLabs obtained the first-ever insurance policy covering AI voice agents, with its platform earning a certification that lets enterprises insure AI actions.

AMC Theatres is refusing to screen an AI-created film during its previews, pulling the contest-winning short from its preview lineup before the planned two-week run.

AI industrial startup Emanate launched out of stealth with autonomous revenue agents targeting the U.S.’ $5T industrial supply chain.

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 Nic C. in Edinburgh, Scotland:

"I am a teacher at an excellent online school. We use Canvas to deliver our curriculum. I have started to use Gemini to write code for canvas pages so that I can write a lesson in slides, share that with Gemini, and then let the AI build the HTML page.

What is really helpful is that the AI can take info from the presentation and make sure that I am producing a page that ticks all of the school’s prerequisites for Canvas pages or assignments based on the school rubrics."

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

Google brings AI music to the masses

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. AI music generators have already been producing tracks good enough to fool casual listeners — but you had to know where to find them.

But with Google’s integration of its new Lyria 3 model directly into Gemini, AI music creation just became accessible to one of the largest consumer AI audiences on earth.

P.S. We love to see all the different ways our readers are using AI. Share your own AI use case for a chance to appear in the Community AI Workflows section below!

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Google brings AI music creation into Gemini

  • OpenAI poaches Instagram's Hollywood dealmaker

  • Turn product photos into scroll-stopping videos

  • Tavus’ new AI avatars actually read the room

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🎵 Google brings AI music creation into Gemini

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just rolled out Lyria 3 in Gemini, the company’s new AI music generation model — letting users turn a text prompt or photo into customized, 30-second tracks with auto-generated lyrics and cover art.

The details:

  • The model handles everything from genre and tempo to vocal style and lyrics on its own, with users able to feed text, photos, or videos as a starting point.

  • DeepMind has been working on Lyria since 2023, but this marks the first time the tech is reaching the main consumer audience through the Gemini app.

  • Every track gets tagged with Google's SynthID watermark, with Gemini also allowing users to upload any audio file to check whether it was created with AI.

  • YouTube creators are also getting access to Lyria 3 through Dream Track for Shorts, enabling easily customized audio tracks to accompany video posts.

Why it matters: AI music platforms like Suno and Udio have quietly gotten scary good, producing full tracks that can fool most listeners — but are still far from ‘mainstream’. Embedding Lyria inside Gemini is a different beast, putting AI music creation a prompt away for millions of users who've likely never even heard of a dedicated music model.

TOGETHER WITH VISA

👋 Meet Visa Intelligent Commerce

The Rundown: The groundbreaking framework that enables AI agents to find and buy. Together with AI industry leaders, Visa Intelligent Commerce provides the tools and safeguards for secure agentic payments.

Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs Offer:

  • Tokenized credentials for enhanced payment security

  • Spend controls and secure user authentication

  • Controlled GenAI-assisted shopping on your terms

Learn more here.

OPENAI

🎬 OpenAI poaches Instagram's Hollywood dealmaker

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI hired Meta's longtime celebrity partnerships chief Charles Porch as its VP of global creative partnerships, according to Vanity Fair — a new role aimed at bridging the gap between the AI giant and a distrusting entertainment industry.

The details:

  • Porch spent 15+ years as the go-to exec for getting A-listers onto IG, handling viral moments like Beyonce’s 2013 album drop and onboarding the Pope.

  • The hire follows OAI's $1B Disney deal in December, which opened its Sora video platform up to animated characters from Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.

  • Porch says his first move will be a "listening tour" across creative communities this spring, reporting to OAI's applications CEO Fidji Simo.

Why it matters: While we’ve seen celebs move into platforms like ElevenLabs, the broader Hollywood sentiment towards AI has been frigid at best. Porch's deep rolodex and reputation as a translator between tech and talent make him the kind of person who can help gain trust in rooms with names that could shift sentiment for the industry.

AI TRAINING

📸 Turn product photos into scroll-stopping videos

The Rundown: In this guide, you'll learn how to turn a product photo into a cinematic clip ready for social media using Runway's video generation tool. This method excels at creating consistent clips that are ready for ad campaigns and product announcements.

Step-by-step:

  1. Grab a product photo first — Runway will use it for the start frame. Don’t have a product? Use a software mockup or ask Gemini to generate one for the brand

  2. Drop the photo into any AI, prompting: "Write me a brief video prompt to use in Runway to generate a social media video based on this product photo. Add animations and/or camera movement if applicable"

  3. Next, go to Runway > Tool > Video and add your starting frame and the AI-generated prompt

  4. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your product photos. Try different combinations of text overlay and music when you post them to socials

Pro tip: This is also a great way to enhance your existing ad sets — try adding them to your in Google or Meta campaigns.

PRESENTED BY VANTA

🔒 Compliance just got 82% faster

The Rundown: Risk and regulations are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. Vanta brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform — so you stay secure and keep deals moving.

With Vanta, you can:

  • Automate up to 90% of the work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more

  • Streamline security reviews with AI-powered questionnaires

  • Spend 82% less time on audits, like companies including Ramp and Writer

Watch the on-demand demo to see how Vanta works.

AI RESEARCH

🗣️ Tavus’ new AI avatars actually read the room

Image source: Tavus

The Rundown: Tavus just introduced Phoenix-4, a real-time human rendering model that can generate AI avatars that have full facial expressions, shift between emotions mid-conversation, and actively listen with contextual reactions.

The details:

  • Phoenix-4 generates every pixel of the face and head from scratch each frame, trained on thousands of hours of real human conversation.

  • The model handles 10+ emotional states and transitions between them in real time, avoiding awkward mismatched reactions or expressions during convos.

  • Tavus is pitching the tech for healthcare, education, and sales use cases where feeling "heard" by the person on screen can directly impact outcomes.

  • Phoenix-4 also runs at HD quality and at 40 FPS for live video call smoothness, making interactions feel more real than older model generations.

Why it matters: AI text interactions are becoming more human than ever, and video avatars are now catching up to the pace — leaving the hollow ‘uncanny valley’ of robotic emotion for a conversation partner that feels like it’s actually listening. The positive applications are endless… But so are the coming opportunities for deception.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*

  • 🎶 Lyria 3 - Google’s new AI music generation model in Gemini

  • 🗣️ Phoenix-4 - Tauvus’ real-time human avatar AI with emotional intelligence

  • ⚡️ Grok 4.20 - xAI’s upgraded AI model with new agentic capabilities

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Ex-DeepMind researcher David Silver is reportedly raising $1B at a $4B valuation for his London-based AI startup Ineffable Intelligence, in Europe’s largest ever seed round.

‘AI godmother’ Fei-Fei Lei’s World Labs announced a $1B round, including $200M from Autodesk, with plans to bring its world models into 3D and entertainment work.

Perplexity is reportedly pulling ads from its platform entirely, with execs saying sponsored content undermines trust in AI-generated answers.

OpenAI acqui-hired enterprise AI search startup Nerve, with the team joining to help build ChatGPT's search capabilities at a larger scale.

The trailer for ‘The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist’ is going viral ahead of its debut, featuring sit-downs with AI leaders like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei.

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 Pradeep A. in Washington, DC:

"My garage door wasn’t closing. I asked Claude…and it asked me to look at the sensor lights. Upon checking, I discovered there was no light in one of the sensors.

It asked me a couple of questions about the make of the motor, and then gave me the part number for the sensor light. I got the part from Amazon and installed it myself without even having to call a mechanic."

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

Anthropic's mid-tier model punches up

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Anthropic spent the last two weeks shipping its best-ever models. The twist is that the cheaper one might matter more.

The new Sonnet 4.6 goes toe-to-toe with Opus 4.6 across coding, finance, and computer use benchmarks at 1/5 the cost — cutting the gap between what the best AI can do and what most companies can actually afford to deploy.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 2 PM EST — join and learn how to leverage Claude as a workflow architect to build powerful AI automations. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic’s powerful Claude Sonnet 4.6

  • Apple going all-in on AI wearables

  • Create a royalty-free jingle in 30 seconds

  • Figma turns Claude Code builds into editable designs

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🧠 Anthropic’s powerful Claude Sonnet 4.6

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just rolled out Claude Sonnet 4.6, its latest mid-tier model that matches or beats the flagship Opus 4.6 across finance, computer use, coding, and office benchmarks at 1/5 of the price — while featuring a 1M token context window.

The details:

  • On SWE-Bench Verified for coding, Sonnet 4.6 came in at 79.6%, just below Opus 4.6's 80.8% — while costing just 1/5 as much to run.

  • Sonnet 4.6 outscored Opus 4.6 on agentic financial analysis and office-task benchmarks, a first for the mid-tier Claude model.

  • Early Claude Code testers preferred Sonnet 4.6 over its predecessor 70% of the time, also winning over Opus 4.5 at a 59% rate.

  • Computer use capabilities also keep climbing, with Sonnet’s OSWorld scores jumping from under 15% in late 2024 to 72.5%.

Why it matters: Anthropic is running a trickle-down playbook at warp speed, shipping near Opus-caliber capabilities to its cheaper line just weeks after the flagship upgrade. With strong Chinese models continuing to undercut everyone on price, Sonnet 4.6 looks like Anthropic's bid to better compete for the volume layer of the agentic boom.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

🧠 100+ ChatGPT prompts to revolutionize your workflow

The Rundown: HubSpot’s free, comprehensive  “How to Use ChatGPT at Work” guide provides 100+ ready-to-use prompts to help professionals boost efficiency and adopt AI-driven workflows.

Inside, you’ll find:

  • A quick crash course to master ChatGPT in under 30 minutes

  • Practical industry use cases to spark real-world inspiration

  • 100+ prompts to streamline tasks and accelerate productivity

  • Expert tips to tackle common AI roadblocks with confidence

Get your free copy and join 10,000+ professionals leveling up with AI.

APPLE

🕶️ Apple going all-in on AI wearables

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly fast-tracking three camera-equipped AI wearables, according to Bloomberg — including smart glasses, a pendant, and new AirPods all designed to give Siri real-time visual awareness through the iPhone.

The details:

  • The glasses will feature dual cameras, Apple-designed frames, no display, and a production target of late this year ahead of a 2027 launch.

  • The pendant will act as an always-on camera and mic for your iPhone, internally dubbed the phone's "eyes and ears".

  • Camera-equipped AirPods could ship as early as this year, using low-res sensors to feed Siri visual context and building on live-translation features.

  • All three devices will tie into Apple's revamped Siri, which is expected to get a chatbot-style interface in iOS 27 later this year, powered by Google’s Gemini.

Why it matters: AI wearables from Apple (that actually feature a working model) would immediately shake up the mainstream hardware landscape and vault the tech giant into the AI spotlight. But these devices depend on a Siri overhaul that we still need to see to actually trust after years of absolutely brutal delays and underdelivering.

AI TRAINING

🔊 Create a royalty-free jingle in 30 seconds

The Rundown: In this guide, you will use Suno AI to create a custom jingle, background music, and sound effects for your brand. The best part is they’re all royalty-free and can be created from basic text prompts.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Suno.com and click Create. Use a prompt like: "Upbeat indie pop podcast intro with acoustic guitar and light percussion, think tech podcast"

  2. The basic structure is [genre] + [instruments] + [use case]. We recommend asking Gemini to interview you about your brand, then have it write the prompt

  3. Once you prompt and get a good, usable jingle, click Remix and Edit > Cover. Now, you can make variations by changing the speed, instruments, or genre

  4. Try different combinations until you have three variations for background music, one podcast intro, and your main jingle.

Pro tip: You can also go to → Suno Create → Sounds tab to create short “stings” for transitions in your content.

PRESENTED BY 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. Just faster, smarter customer conversations.

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

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

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

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

Book a demo today to see how they can work for your business.

FIGMA

🎨 Figma turns Claude Code builds into editable designs

Image source: Figma

The Rundown: Figma just introduced a new “Code to Canvas” integration with Anthropic that lets developers capture interfaces built in Claude Code and convert them into fully editable design files on Figma's canvas.

The details:

  • The feature grabs live UI from a browser and turns it into native Figma layers that can be duplicated, annotated, or rearranged.

  • Figma's existing MCP server closes the loop, letting developers pull edited designs back into coding environments without losing the shared context.

  • Devs can capture entire multi-step flows at once, keeping the full user journey intact so teams can review and edit the experience side by side.

  • The launch comes as Figma stock has cratered roughly 85% from last summer’s high amid a broader SaaS selloff driven by AI coding fears.

Why it matters: This generation of AI coding tools has made it trivial to build a working UI, but Figma is hoping to be the polished, shippable design layer on top of raw vibe-coded prototypes. But with model capabilities only improving, that polishing layer may also soon be automated — something the markets appear to notice as well.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*

  • 🧠 Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Anthropic's upgraded mid-tier model with 1M context

  • 🎨 Recraft V4 - New image AI for typography, and production-level outputs

  • 🌎 Tiny Aya - Cohere's small, open-source model covering 70+ languages

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

xAI began rolling out the long-awaited Grok 4.20 in a public beta, featuring a new agent workflow that uses four agents working in parallel to research and handle tasks.

Meta and Nvidia announced a new multiyear AI chip deal spanning millions of GPUs and CPUs to help power the tech giant’s AI infrastructure buildout.

Cohere Labs open-sourced Tiny Aya, a 3.35B parameter multilingual model that handles 70+ languages with strong gains for typically underrepresented dialects.

French AI startup Mistral made its first-ever acquisition, with serverless platform Koyeb joining to boost its Mistral Compute cloud infrastructure arm.

WordPress launched a new AI assistant capable of editing layouts, generating images, and rewriting content directly inside the editor for streamlining website design.

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 Yilin Q. in Australia:

"I use Gemini like my personal basketball assistant — I record our games, throw the video at it, and it magically breaks everything down for me.

It tells me where I messed up, what I actually did well, and even spots the opponents’ bad habits, like who always forgets to switch or which corner they leave wide open. It’s like having a super nerdy assistant coach who never gets tired, never lies to make me feel better, and helps me plan how to play smarter next game."

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

Apple's '2026 product blitz'

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Apple is ditching the keynote stage for a simultaneous “special experience” across New York, London, and Shanghai on March 4 — hands-on, no livestream, no theater.

The format shift tells you everything: there’s no single hero product here. Instead, Apple is unleashing a ‘blitz’ of new Macs, iPads, and at least one wildcard device aimed squarely at the value crowd.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Apple’s ‘special experience’ on March 4

  • Waymo’s smarter robotaxi hits the streets

  • Ring drops Flock deal after Super Bowl ad

  • Electric ferry with the power of 487 Teslas

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPLE

🍏 Apple’s ‘special experience’ on March 4 

Image source: Apple

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly ditching the keynote stage show and hosting a March 4 “special experience” event in New York, London, and Shanghai that’s expected to unleash a wave of new Macs, iPads, and a rumored cheaper iPhone.

The details:

  • M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, an M5 MacBook Air, refreshed iPads, and a new Studio Display are all expected.

  • The headliner is a sub-$750 MacBook, an A18 Pro-powered, multi-color laptop built on a new cost-cutting aluminum process, with a display under 13 inches.

  • The iPhone 17e is expected to gain MagSafe, an A19 chip, and upgraded wireless internals, all at the same price as its predecessor.

  • With no live-stream in sight, expect an intimate hands-on showcase rather than a polished Cupertino production.

Why it matters: None of these products alone would justify a traditional Apple keynote — and that’s exactly the point. By staging a multi-city “experience” instead of a slick stage show, Apple is testing another launch format for a product cycle built around volume and value, not any single flagship moment.

WAYMO

🚖 Waymo’s smarter robotaxi hits the streets

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Alphabet’s robotaxi company Waymo is finally rolling out its next‑gen robotaxi hardware by seeding a fleet of new “Ojai” vans into San Francisco and LA, where employees and their friends are already getting fully driverless rides.

The details:

  • Built by Chinese automaker Zeekr and outfitted with Waymo’s hardware at its Arizona facility, the Ojai is meant to eventually replace the Jaguar I-PACE fleet.

  • The sixth-gen Waymo Driver cuts the total sensor count by 42% — down from 29 cameras to 13 — while adding a proprietary 17-megapixel imager.

  • Waymo says the hardware is engineered for rain, snow, fog, and hail, with self‑cleaning sensors and algorithms tuned for harsh weather.

  • The Driver is designed to bolt onto multiple vehicles, starting with the Ojai and expanding to the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

Why it matters: Waymo already operates paid robotaxi services in six U.S. markets and plans to add 20 more cities this year, including London and Tokyo — putting pressure on rivals Tesla and Zoox. Public Ojai rides are expected later in 2026, with a target of 1M autonomous rides per week by year’s end, up from roughly 400K today.

RING

🐶 Ring drops Flock deal after Super Bowl ad

Image source: Ring

The Rundown: Amazon’s Ring is facing backlash after its Super Bowl ad for an AI-powered “Search Party” feature collided with news that the company was partnering with police-tech vendor Flock Safety.​ Days later, Ring walked away from the deal.

The details:

  • Ring has killed a planned integration with police-surveillance vendor Flock Safety, saying it would have required too many resources.

  • Flock runs a massive AI-powered license-plate and camera network used by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide.

  • The EFF called the Super Bowl ad a preview of “Ring’s surveillance nightmare,” noting that Amazon already ships facial recognition via its Familiar Faces tool.

  • Both ICE and CBP have reportedly accessed Flock’s data as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — a claim Flock denies.

Why it matters: Ring’s Super Bowl ad showed a lost dog found via connected, AI-assisted neighborhood cameras, prompting renewed privacy debate. Ring says Search Party can’t identify people, though its broader ecosystem includes advanced analytics and public-safety partnerships.

ELECTRIC TRANSPORT

🛳️ Electric ferry with the power of 487 Teslas

Image source: Incat

The Rundown: Australia is about to launch the world’s largest electric ship, a $200M 130-meter Incat-built catamaran packed with 250 tons of batteries and high-speed waterjets, marking a zero-emission leap forward for mass ferry transport.

The details:

  • The all-aluminum catamaran carries 2,100 passengers and 225 vehicles on 40 megawatts of battery-electric power — roughly the output of 487 Tesla EVs.

  • Buquebus commissioned an LNG-powered vessel in 2020, but as battery costs fell, the operator and Incat renegotiated mid-build to go fully electric.

  • Incat just completed full deployment trials of the ship’s Marine Evacuation System, with six 22-meter MES units supported by 13 life rafts.

  • The ferry doubles as a floating mall, with more than 25K square feet of retail space carved into its decks for duty-free shopping mid-crossing.

Why it matters: The massive ferry will cover crossings of up to 115 miles on battery power alone, linking Buenos Aires to Uruguay. If it performs at scale, it won’t just be the world’s largest electric vehicle but proof that zero-emission propulsion can handle the loads that commercial shipping still assumes require fossil fuels.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Meta is reportedly preparing to add a facial recognition feature to its Ray‑Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, letting wearers identify people and pull up info about them.

Defense tech startup Anduril is in talks to raise as much as $8B in new funding at a valuation of around $60B, roughly double its June 2025 valuation.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot, maker of the Kimi chatbot, is seeking a fresh funding round already backed by Alibaba and Tencent, for a valuation of about $10B.

Warner Bros. Discovery is considering reopening sale talks with Paramount even as Netflix remains its formal buyer, setting up a potential renewed bidding war.

Adani Group plans to invest $100B by 2035 to build renewable energy–powered data centers in India, aiming to create a major AI infrastructure hub.

Hong Kong’s police plan to add facial recognition to the city’s public CCTV network as early as this year, starting with high‑traffic shopping malls.

Uber says it will roll out its Uber Eats food‑delivery service to seven additional European countries in 2026, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Greece.

Biohacker Bryan Johnson is selling an “Immortals” longevity program for $1M a year, offering three clients a concierge team and 24/7 access to his BryanAI coach.

Danaher is closing in on a roughly $10B acquisition of medical device maker Masimo, in a deal that would add its hospital monitors and wearables to Danaher’s empire.

Russia blocked WhatsApp and is steering its more than 100M users toward the state-backed MAX messaging app, which critics say is designed for surveillance.

Former NPR host David Greene is suing Google, alleging the company effectively stole his voice by training the male narrator in its NotebookLM AI podcast tool.

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

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