Stay Ahead on AI.

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Uber is betting hundreds of millions on robotaxis in more than a dozen cities by year-end — including its first push into Asia.

The expansion relies entirely on partners like Baidu, WeRide, and Momenta to supply the self-driving tech, not Uber’s own stack. Can it lock down the map before Waymo?

In today’s robotics rundown:

Uber plans robotaxi blitz in 15 cities this year
Waymo builds a world model for robotaxis
EV maker Faraday Future pivots to humanoids
Harvard 3D-prints programmable soft robots
Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UBER

🚖 Uber plans robotaxi blitz in 15 cities this year

Image source: Uber

The Rundown: Uber is reportedly earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars to launch robotaxi rides in more than 10 cities by year-end, including Madrid, Houston, Zurich, and Hong Kong — marking its first push into Asia.

The details:

Uber’s roadmap targets roughly 15 cities globally, deploying Level 4 robotaxis through partnerships rather than building its own self-driving stack.
In Hong Kong, Uber is expected to lean on Chinese AV partners such as Baidu, which already holds a local permit for limited Apollo Go robotaxi trials.
Madrid and Zurich join previously announced European pilots in London and Munich, where Uber will deploy vehicles from WeRide and Momenta.
Uber and WeRide will also roll out at least 1,200 robotaxis across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh, with pilots starting this year.

Why it matters: The strategy lets Uber scale autonomous rides without building its own tech, while giving Chinese AV suppliers like Baidu, Momenta, and WeRide a fast track into Western and Middle Eastern capitals under the Uber brand — intensifying pressure on Waymo, Tesla, and regional players like Bolt and Didi.

WAYMO

🔥 Waymo builds a world model for robotaxis

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Waymo just developed a Genie-3–based world model that lets it turn real driving footage into controllable, photorealistic scenarios that enable its robotaxis to deal with rare, high‑risk situations.

The details:

The system generates photorealistic, multi-sensor 3D driving scenes that engineers can manipulate by changing driving inputs or editing scene elements.
Waymo can synthesize extreme scenarios that the fleet is unlikely to encounter in real life: tornadoes, floods, unusual animals, or bizarre road geometries.
Engineers rerun actual drives as “what if” scenarios to probe edge cases without risking hardware or waiting years for rare events to occur naturally.
The model was trained on Waymo’s massive real-world driving dataset — over 25M autonomous miles.

Why it matters: Autonomous vehicles face a “long tail” problem — rare but critical scenarios too dangerous or unlikely to test in reality. By generating synthetic edge cases at scale, Waymo says it can validate safety in situations like flash floods or debris-strewn roads without waiting decades for its fleet to encounter them naturally.

FARADAY FUTURE

🤖 EV maker Faraday Future pivots to humanoids

Image source: Faraday Future

The Rundown: Faraday Future, the cash-strapped California electric vehicle maker, unveiled a robotics division that appears to be Chinese robotics startup Agibot’s hardware wrapped in premium branding.

The details:

FF launched 3 robots — a humanoid, a compact “action” bot, and a wheeled unit — marketed for car dealerships under the “FF EAI-Robotics” banner.
The machines bear a striking resemblance to AgiBot’s A2 and X2 platforms, leading critics to accuse FF of white-labeling existing Chinese tech.
FF’s pitch is that it will provide the software, AI “brain,” and services layer on top of this hardware for dealers.
Pricing ranges from a few thousand dollars for the wheeled model to $40K for the flagship humanoid, with additional software “skills” sold separately.

Why it matters: The debut, capped by an awkward dance‑off between a humanoid and a human performer, immediately triggered investor skepticism, with the company’s stock reportedly plunging. Faraday Future says it will start deliveries by the end of the month, but it’s unclear whether the market will actually bite.

HARVARD

🖨️ Harvard 3D-prints programmable soft robots

Image source: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering

The Rundown: Harvard engineers just built a 3D-printing method that programs how soft robots bend and twist — the technique skips molds and assembly, printing motion directly into the structure.

The details:

Single-nozzle printing deposits a polyurethane shell around a gel core, creating hollow air channels that control exactly how the structure bends when inflated.
Prototypes include a flower actuator that curls on command and a five-fingered gripper with working knuckles, both printed in one pass without assembly.
The method collapses weeks of mold-making and multi-step casting into a single print job that can be redesigned by adjusting software parameters.
Target applications include surgical tools for tight anatomical spaces, rehabilitation wearables, and industrial grippers that handle delicate biologics.

Why it matters: The method reduces weeks of fabrication into one print job, challenging approaches from MIT and Stanford. It makes soft robot motion predictable— eliminating the trial-and-error testing that has long plagued the field. Key uses include surgical tools, rehabilitation devices, and delicate industrial handling.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Boston Dynamics’ first‑gen electric Atlas now performs a clean round‑off backflip using a whole‑body learning framework developed by the RAI Institute.

Chinese robotics firm Agibot released a viral video of its Lingxi X2 humanoids performing synchronized kung fu routines with Shaolin monks at the Shaolin Temple.

Tesla’s Optimus program leans heavily on a dense network of Chinese suppliers for core hardware, underscoring how dependent the robot is on Chinese manufacturing.

Chinese humanoid makers like Agibot, Unitree, and Noetix are using Lunar New Year galas and livestreamed variety shows to showcase dancing, joke-telling robots.

Waymo’s plan to launch robotaxis in Washington, DC, this year stalled as the city’s regulatory process leaves the company lobbying hard but without a clear path forward.

Nevada-based Cartwheel Robotics, the startup behind the compact Yogi humanoid, is shutting down after failing to secure enough funding to move beyond prototypes.

USC researchers showed that sea stars’ independent tube feet provide a blueprint for robots that can keep moving even when flipped or cut off from a central controller.

Hong Kong researchers found that robots combining empathetic speech with carefully chosen music can make interactions feel more emotionally supportive.

Machina Labs raised a $124M Series C to expand its AI‑driven robotic metal-forming factories for defense, aerospace, and advanced mobility customers.

Beijing’s national Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center raised $100M in its first funding round to push its Tiangong humanoid into commercial production.

Indian robotics startup Addverb unveiled Elixis, a line of bipedal and wheeled humanoids aimed at warehouse and factory work.

Ocado, a UK-based online grocer and warehouse robotics specialist, is cutting up to 1K jobs, 5% of its workforce, after a tough year for its automated fulfillment centers.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: AI ads steal the show at Super Bowl LX
Read our last Tech newsletter: Paris raid raises stakes for X
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Cancer-fighting bubble bots
Today’s AI tool guide: Build custom lead widgets for your site
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

AI ads steal the show at Super Bowl LX

Download the technical guide.

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI and Anthropic may have been the night's fiercest rivalry not on the field, but they were far from the only AI players fighting for the spotlight.

With Google, Meta, Amazon, a slew of AI startups, and even an AI-generated vodka spot flooding the Big Game's ad breaks, the tech’s mainstream presence is growing as fast as the models powering it.

In today’s AI rundown:

AI ads steal the show at Super Bowl LX
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Build lead widgets for your site without coding
Crypto.com founder drops $70M on AI.com
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & THE SUPER BOWL

🏟️ AI ads steal the show at Super Bowl LX

Image source: SVEDKA

The Rundown: AI companies/products took over Super Bowl LX with a wave of commercials, featuring spots from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, and startups that turned the Big Game into a battlefield for consumer AI attention.

The details:

Anthropic made its SB debut with its viral campaign against ads in AI, whose launch kicked off a viral feud with OpenAI and Sam Altman last week.
Vodka brand SVEDKA ran what it called the first primarily AI-generated Super Bowl ad, reviving its robotic mascot with AI-trained dance moves.
Meta showcased “athletic intelligence” via its AI glasses, Amazon pushed the new Alexa+, and Google highlighted Gemini and Nano Banana.
Other AI-related spots included Base44, Genspark, Ramp, Rippling, and Wix, with tech's Super Bowl ad share reportedly increasing to around 10%.

Why it matters: Major AI players showed up to the SB fighting for the same thing — to be the default assistant, agent, or device that the masses actually trust as AI weaves into every corner of daily life. Svedka’s use of AI to generate its spot also shows the tech influencing both sides of the screen — what's being sold AND how it's made.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

✈️ You Implemented RAG. Your LLM Is Still Flying Blind.

The Rundown: RAG was step one—but retrieval alone doesn't guarantee accuracy. You.com explains what AI grounding is, why it matters, and how organizations can implement it to achieve higher accuracy.

The playbook covers:

The three-part approach outperforms RAG alone
Why grounding isn't set-and-forget, and how to build audit trails
The open vs. closed platform trade-off (and what it means for your next model switch)

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image Source: Ideogram / The Rundown

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

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: I put Gemini Deep Research and Perplexity Pro to work as my personal research assistants. For robotics research, I tell them to stick to top-tier journals and primary sources only, and demand citations and dates for everything. Then I have them distill the highlights into a ranked list so I know exactly where to dig deeper.

Billy, University Educator: Every Sunday night, my Openclaw asks me to recap my week and send it some photos I took. It makes a collage of the photos and generates a stylized “magazine cover” based on the recap. At the end of the year, I should have a neat collection of time capsules.

Jason, Developer: I've been taking topics I want to learn about (mostly coding docs for new technologies) and giving them to NotebookLM to create customized podcasts for my runs when there aren't interesting podcasts available from the channels I frequent. And it really is actually good and enjoyable, and not just AI slop.

AI TRAINING

🧑‍💻 Build lead widgets for your site without coding

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Replit to build a custom calculator lead form for your website. If you can copy and paste, you can build software for your team, and you’ll save on per-seat pricing.

Step-by-step:

Go to Replit, toggle on "Plan mode," and prompt: "Build a custom lead gen widget app using Python (Flask) and Replit SQL. Users will create embeddable cost-savings calculators that capture email leads and track analytics. Allow custom colors, form fields and formulas."
Answer any follow-ups from the agent and hit “Build” when ready. Once it finishes, test the tool in the preview tab. Try creating a new lead widget.
Copy the widget’s embed (iframe) code and embed it on your brand website, then check captured leads in Replit → Database → Development Database.
If everything works, click “Publish”. Replit will deploy your app to a public URL. You will need to log in to this version and re-create your form.

Pro tip: Use this method to embed anything on your site — a slideshow, countdown timer, or even a blog.

PRESENTED BY GITLAB

🤖 Agentic AI, real results

The Rundown: GitLab Transcend is an exclusive virtual event happening tomorrow that explores how agentic AI is transforming software delivery, with real-world stories, product demos, and a preview of GitLab's upcoming roadmap.

At Transcend, you'll hear:

How teams are using agentic AI to automate real-world DevOps workflows
Perspectives from tech leaders and live Q&As with GitLab project leaders
A first look at GitLab's upcoming innovations and investments

Reserve your spot for tomorrow’s event now.

AI DOT COM

💰 Crypto.com founder drops $70M on AI.com

Image source: ai.com

The Rundown: Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek revealed he purchased the AI.com domain for $70M, the largest domain sale ever, debuting the site as an autonomous AI agent platform for consumers with a Super Bowl commercial.

The details:

The platform promises a personal AI agent that can trade stocks, manage calendars, send messages, and automate workflows with no technical setup.
The record-breaking deal nearly doubled the prior domain record set by voice.com's $30M sale in 2019.
Marszalek envisions a network of agents that autonomously build new capabilities and share upgrades across users, “accelerating the advent of AGI”.

Why it matters: That’s certainly one way to make a big splash — with both the largest domain sale ever (admittedly for an excellent one) and a primetime entrance with a Super Bowl ad. But a strong marketing play and a tool that actually competes with the flurry of agentic upgrades from established, frontier labs are two very different beasts.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

⚙️ GPT-5.3-Codex - OpenAI's new SOTA agentic coding model
🧠 Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic’s upgrade to its most powerful model line
🎥 Krea Realtime - Krea’s realtime, long-form AI video generation system
🎥 Kling 3.0 - Kling’s new video AI with better consistency and 15s outputs

📰 Everything else in AI today

Adapt just announced the future of AI for work – an always-available co-worker that understands business context and works across tools. See the vision and fundraising deck.*

Anthropic released a ‘fast mode’ for its new Claude Opus 4.6 model, which delivers 2.5x faster responses at drastically higher token costs.

Goldman Sachs revealed it has been working with Anthropic over the last six months to build AI agents that automate accounting, compliance, and client onboarding.

xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin praised Claude Opus 4.6’s physics capabilities, saying that a “Claude Code moment for research” may be approaching.

Axiom announced that its AI independently solved an unsolved math problem and wrote its own verified proof, a first for AI in advanced mathematical research.

*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 Howard C. in Hawkins, TX:

"I’m retired and sell diecast models on eBay. My system worked well, but I wanted to cut inkjet use by printing packing lists on 4”x6” labels with a thermal printer. With ChatGPT’s help, I built a Mac Automator app that takes a dropped eBay packing list and creates a print-ready 4”x6” version automatically.

We also built another app that uses the same file to generate a buyer email saying the order is ready to ship."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI, Anthropic fight on the frontier
Read our last Tech newsletter: Paris raid raises stakes for X
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Cancer-fighting bubble bots
Today’s AI tool guide: Build custom lead widgets for your site
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

Tech

Paris raid raises stakes for X

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. This week, French prosecutors raided X’s Paris offices — an enforcement move that instantly lit up headlines and set off a fresh wave of scrutiny.

Spain is doubling down too, floating a ban on social media for under-16s and criminal liability for executives when illegal content spreads. Washington is pushing back, and it looks like the transatlantic fallout is only just beginning.

In today’s tech rundown:

Paris raid turns up the heat on X
Bezos’ $3B bet that cells can age backward
Boring Company lands first deal outside U.S.
Big Tech spends millions on data center rebrand
Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

X

🚓 Paris raid turns up the heat on X

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: A police raid on X’s Paris offices and a Spanish proposal to target tech chiefs for illegal content on their platforms have jolted a simmering trans‑Atlantic fight over what “free speech” means online, reports The New York Times.

The details:

French prosecutors raided X’s Paris offices, targeting alleged failures to curb child sexual abuse images and content denying crimes against humanity.
The raid escalates a months‑long trans‑Atlantic rift over how far governments can go in forcing platforms to police speech and harmful content.
Spain’s prime minister has proposed banning social media for under‑16s and making tech execs criminally liable if illegal content spreads on their platforms.
The E.U. has already fined X roughly €120M (~$142M) and opened new probes into Grok-generated sexualized deepfakes of women and children.

Why it matters: The Trump administration has cast Europe’s tougher social‑media rules as an attempt to export censorship and has imposed visa bans on several E.U. digital officials. The dispute over child safety has become a broader test of whether the U.S. or European approach to online speech shapes global platforms.

TOGETHER WITH ATLASSIAN

🚀 Enhance your SDLC

The Rundown: Rovo Dev, a context-aware AI agent, helps your team stay in flow throughout the whole SDLC, from planning through code gen, code review, and ongoing maintenance.

Do more with Rovo Dev:

Make decisions with more context
Delegate tasks at scale
Integrate with Jira, GitHub, & more

Explore now!

BIOTECH

🔬 Bezos’ $3B bet that cells can age backward

Image source: Daniel Oberhaus / Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: Jeff Bezos and a billionaire brain‑trust are pouring roughly $3B into Altos Labs, a stealthy longevity startup betting that cellular rejuvenation and epigenetic reprogramming could one day make age‑reversal gene therapy real.

The details:

Bezos and his backers have made Altos one of the most lavishly funded longevity ventures ever, leapfrogging rivals overnight.
The company is chasing epigenetic reprogramming — using Yamanaka factors to rewind cells' biological clocks without scrambling their identity.
The moonshot: turn reprogramming breakthroughs into therapies that could actually repair age-damaged tissues across the body.
Altos has recruited a dream team with pharma vets, stem-cell pioneers, and gene-editing luminaries who’ve traded academia for the startup game.

Why it matters: Altos’ $3B  launch crystallizes Silicon Valley’s push to turn longevity science into a serious biotech business rather than a fringe obsession. With Bezos backing and a star-studded research team, it's one of the boldest — and most expensive — bets yet that aging can be hacked, delayed, or maybe even reversed.

BORING COMPANY

🪏 Boring Company lands first deal outside U.S.

Image source: The Boring Company

The Rundown: Dubai just approved its first international Loop project with Elon Musk’s Boring Company: a $154M, 4-mile EV-only tunnel with four underground stations linking the Dubai International Financial Centre to Dubai Mall.

The details:

The Loop will run as an EV-only public shuttle using Tesla vehicles operated by Boring Company staff — riders can’t drive their own cars through the tunnels.
Dubai plans to start construction immediately, with the first phase targeted for completion within about one to two years.
The route is projected to move roughly 13K passengers per day at launch, with the wider network eventually handling up to 30K daily.
A full buildout could expand the Loop into a roughly 15-mile network with 19 stations, estimated at $545 million.

Why it matters: Dubai’s Loop is the first international deployment of Musk’s “Teslas in tunnels” transit model and the biggest test yet of whether smaller-bore tunnels can actually compete with conventional metro systems in a major city. Success could validate the still-contentious Music City Loop in Nashville.

AI

💰 Big Tech spends millions on data center rebrand

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Big tech is spending millions on ads, mailers, and lobbying campaigns to rebrand data centers as job creators and clean‑energy partners as communities across the U.S. push back against their water use, power demand, and subsidies.

The details:

Tech and utility companies are spending millions on PR to rebrand data centers as clean‑energy assets amid growing local backlash over AI‑driven build‑outs.
Residents in states like Virginia and Delaware are protesting new projects over concerns about huge electricity demand, water use, and taxpayer subsidies.
Industry coalitions such as Virginia Connects are funding glossy mailers, billboards, and door‑knocking campaigns touting data centers as job creators.
Meta has run national TV spots positioning its data‑center work as supporting “American jobs” and clean energy, even as facilities are often highly automated.

Why it matters: Critics note that data centers bring relatively few long‑term jobs for the hefty tax breaks and infrastructure they receive. The fight over new projects is now a live state‑level issue, forcing lawmakers to balance AI-powered growth against mounting community concerns.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Apple is reportedly winding down its “Mulberry” AI health coach project and will instead fold a pared-back set of features into the existing Health app over time.

Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is slashing more than 300 newsroom jobs, including its Amazon reporter.

Substack said a security breach discovered this week allowed an intruder to access users’ email addresses, phone numbers, and internal metadata in October.

Peloton’s latest earnings show revenue slipping as its pricey new Cross Training hardware and AI features have yet to spur the upgrade boom the company hoped for.

NASA will let astronauts on the upcoming Crew-12 and Artemis II missions bring personal smartphones for the first time.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company town of Starbase in South Texas is setting up its own municipal police department.

Uber has been ordered by a federal jury in Phoenix to pay $8.5M to a passenger who said her driver raped her.

Y Combinator reversed course and will again back Canada‑incorporated startups, restoring Canada to its approved list after founder backlash.

Scientists built a new scanner that fuses ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging to create fast, radiation‑free 3D color views of blood vessels and soft tissue.

Google says its Quick Share feature, which already lets Pixel 10 phones send files directly to Apple’s AirDrop, will roll out to “many more” Android devices this year.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI, Anthropic fight on the frontier
Read our last Tech newsletter: The race to make space babies
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Cancer-fighting bubble bots
Today’s AI tool guide: Cut down reporting times with Claude in Excel
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

OpenAI, Anthropic fight on the frontier

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Yesterday, it was Super Bowl attack ads. Today, OpenAI and Anthropic are letting the models do the talking.

With back-to-back flagship drops that pushed agentic coding, self-improving AI, and enterprise automation forward in a single afternoon, things are moving faster than ever — and the "AI is hitting a wall" crowd might want to sit this news cycle out.

In today’s AI rundown:

OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex helps build itself
Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 with ‘agent teams', 1M context
Cut down reporting times with Claude in Excel
OpenAI’s Frontier to manage ‘AI coworkers’
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🚀 OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex helps build itself

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just rolled out GPT-5.3-Codex, a new flagship coding model that merges its best programming and reasoning capabilities into one faster package — while also serving as a key tool in its own training and deployment process.

The details:

OpenAI said early versions of 5.3-Codex were used to find bugs in its own training runs, manage its rollout, and analyze evaluation results.
Codex tops agentic coding benchmarks like SWE-Bench Pro and Terminal-Bench 2.0, topping Opus 4.6 by 12% on the latter just minutes after its release.
On OSWorld, a benchmark testing AI control of desktop computers, the model scored 64.7% — nearly double the 38.2% from the prior Codex version.
OpenAI flagged the model as its first "High" cybersecurity risk rating and committed $10M in API credits to fund defensive security research

Why it matters: The self-improvement angle here is the headline, with Anthropic's Dario Amodei also recently saying Claude is helping design its own successor. Yesterday’s bickering over ads now looks childish compared to the true fight on the model frontier, with a big day of dueling releases out of both labs.

TOGETHER WITH BLAND

📞 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's 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.

ANTHROPIC

🚀 Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 with ‘agent teams', 1M context

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, the company’s new most powerful model — featuring multi-agent collaboration in Claude Code, a massive context window, and new Office integrations that put the AI directly inside PowerPoint.

The details:

A new "agent teams" feature in Claude Code lets multiple AI agents split a single project and work simultaneously instead of handling steps one at a time
Opus 4.6 brings a 1M token context window to Anthropic's Opus tier for the first time, matching what Sonnet offers for heavy document and code work.
New Excel and PowerPoint sidebars let Claude read users’ existing templates and build models or decks natively without copying and pasting between tools.
4.6 topped most agentic benchmarks, including a leap on ARC-AGI-2 to nearly 70% — though OAI’s Codex 5.3 reclaimed agentic coding highs minutes later.

Why it matters: It’s a big day for devs, with both Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6 releases bringing major capability increases across the board. With time between upgrades getting shorter and the length of tasks models can take on continuing to move up the curve, the “AI is hitting a wall” crowd seems pretty quiet these days.

AI TRAINING

📊 Cut down reporting times with Claude in Excel

The Rundown: In this guide, you will do a quick exercise that teaches you how to use Claude as a spreadsheet architect, taking 5+ messy CSVs and watching Claude handle data cleaning, table formatting, color-coding, and more.

Step-by-step:

Install Claude’s Excel app from the Microsoft Marketplace. For this example, we used a year’s worth of SEO data, but you can use sales data, receipts, etc
In Excel, click the Claude button and prompt “I have [data type] data from [sources] for my website/brand/team. Make a plan to rename each tab and clean the data up to make it more readable”. Then, edit and approve the plan
Once done, ask Claude to make a plan for the master dashboard tab: “Based on all tabs, what’s the best way to tie this data into a Master Dashboard?”
Finally, you can ask Claude to visualize data with prompts like “Create a combo chart for Clicks vs. Average Position”

Pro tip: Asking Claude to review the data and create a plan improves its output significantly compared to asking it to get started immediately.

PRESENTED BY TRIPLE WHALE

🛒 Is your brand visible when AI goes shopping?

The Rundown: Triple Whale merchants saw LLM-referred orders jump from 7,152 in 2024 to 424,000+ in Q4 2025 alone. AEO (AI Engine Optimization) is the next frontier—and early movers are building an unfair advantage. Try Triple Whale's free tool to see how LLMs see your brand across ChatGPT and other leading platforms.

With the AI Visibility tool, you can:

Monitor your brand's AI visibility score for free
Track mentions across ChatGPT and leading LLMs
Connect AI referrals to actual revenue with attribution

See your AI visibility.

OPENAI

💼 OpenAI’s Frontier to manage ‘AI coworkers’

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just launched Frontier, a new platform for enterprises to deploy and manage AI agents like new hires — complete with onboarding, permissions, and performance reviews across a company’s existing tech stack.

The details:

Frontier connects to existing enterprise systems like CRMs and ticketing tools, letting agents pull context from across the business without migrations.
Built-in eval and feedback loops let agents learn via experience, with OAI comparing it to onboarding a new employee with reviews and boundaries.
Every agent operates under its own profile with scoped access and hard limits on what it can touch for enterprise and regulated control.
HP, Oracle, State Farm, and Uber are among the first adopters, with OAI embedding engineers on-site to help teams get agents into production.

Why it matters: Anthropic and OAI have been battling over models and coding tools, but Frontier shows the fight is also bleeding into who controls the enterprise agent layer underneath. Model capabilities are making AI coworkers a reality in the near future, and the system that ultimately orchestrates them will be valuable real estate.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

⚙️ GPT-5.3-Codex - OpenAI's new SOTA agentic coding model
🧠 Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic’s upgrade to its most powerful model line
🤖 OpenAI Frontier - Enterprise platform to create, deploy, manage AI agents
🔎 Model Council - Perplexity’s new tool for querying multiple models

📰 Everything else in AI today

Perplexity launched Model Council, a new feature that runs queries through multiple AI models at the same time and synthesizes outputs into a single answer.

Roblox introduced 4D generation via its Cube AI foundation model, letting creators generate fully functional, interactive objects from text prompts.

Lotus Health raised $35M in Series A funding for its free AI-powered primary care platform, providing diagnosis, prescriptions, and referrals across 50 states.

Meta is rolling out a standalone app for its Vibes AI video platform, which was previously only available via the Meta app.

AI evaluation firm METR released new analysis for GPT-5.2 (high), finding it can now handle tasks that would take a human engineer over 6 hours to complete.

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 T. in Canada:

"I use AI to source vendors for fresh produce and compare/predict market price changes from globally supplied goods. It helps to maintain food security in our northern region."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: Anthropic’s ad-free campaign takes aim at OAI
Read our last Tech newsletter: The race to make space babies
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Cancer-fighting bubble bots
Today’s AI tool guide: Cut down reporting times with Claude in Excel
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

Robotics

Cancer-fighting bubble bots

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Caltech and USC researchers have turned tiny medical “bubbles” into steerable microbots that can deliver chemo right to a tumor.

They ride the body’s own chemistry, swarm the target, then pop on an ultrasound cue to release their payload. It’s a wild glimpse of a future where cancer treatment gets smarter, sharper, and a lot less brutal.

In today’s robotics rundown:

Bubble microbots blast tumors with drugs
A Unitree G1 humanoid rides a skateboard
Bedrock lands $270M for autonomous excavators
Carbon’s farm robots just got a lot smarter
Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROBOTS

🫧 Bubble microbots blast tumors with drugs

Image source: Gao Lab/Caltech

The Rundown: Caltech and USC researchers have transformed medical imaging bubbles into enzyme-powered microrobots that can be steered — or self-navigate — to tumors, then burst on cue to blast chemotherapy deep into cancerous tissue.

The details:

The enzyme-coated microbubbles act as simple, biocompatible microrobots capable of ferrying chemotherapy drugs directly to tumors.
The enzyme reacts with urea in bodily fluids to generate thrust, propelling the bubbles through tissue without onboard batteries or electronics.
Doctors can steer the bots externally with magnets or let them autonomously follow chemical gradients straight into tumors.
Once the swarm accumulates at the target site, a burst of ultrasound pops the bubbles and drives the drug deep into the tissue, not just across the surface.

Why it matters: These bubble bots demonstrate how microrobotics could make chemotherapy far more precise, hitting tumors while sparing healthy tissue. If the research advances, it joins a growing field of magnetic and ultrasound-guided microrobots racing to slash doses and side effects through targeted delivery.

HUMANOIDS

🛹 A Unitree G1 humanoid rides a skateboard

Image source: HUSKY Github

The Rundown: Chinese researchers just taught a compact Unitree G1 humanoid to ride a skateboard using a physics-aware control framework called HUSKY, short for Humanoid Skateboarding System via Physics-Aware Whole-Body Control.

The details:

HUSKY models how pushing generates forward motion and how leaning steers the board, using limited human motion data to give the robot skater-like timing.
The system breaks skateboarding into discrete phases (pushing, coasting, steering) while directly mapping the robot’s lean angle to board turn radius.
After simulation training, the behaviors were transferred to a physical G1, which can now skate repeatedly across different boards.
The team plans to add onboard vision so the robot can track the skateboard and terrain in real time. HUSKY has also been open-sourced.

Why it matters: HUSKY shows that relatively affordable humanoids can learn agile, contact-rich skills using physics-aware control instead of pure reinforcement learning, opening the door to far more dynamic work than walking or lifting. The implication: future off-the-shelf humanoids could simply download “sport-like” behaviors.

BEDROCK ROBOTICS

🪏 Bedrock lands $270M for autonomous excavators

Image source: Bedrock Robotics

The Rundown: San Francisco–based startup Bedrock Robotics, founded by former Waymo and Segment engineers, raised $270M at a $1.75B valuation to scale its retrofit autonomy system for construction excavators.

The details:

The company raised $270M in Series B funding at a $1.75B valuation, bringing its total funding to more than $350M.
Bedrock’s Operator kit bolts lidar, GPS, IMUs, cameras, and in‑cab compute onto 20‑ to 80‑ton excavators so they can autonomously dig and load trucks.
The system has already moved more than 65K cubic yards of material autonomously on a 130-acre manufacturing site — an industry first.
Bedrock plans to graduate from single autonomous machines to coordinated fleets, with fully operator-less sites targeted for 2026.

Why it matters: The construction boom in data centers is colliding with a massive labor shortfall, and Bedrock is pitching its robo-excavator fleets as a way to keep projects moving. If it’s robots scale, they could normalize self-driving heavy equipment on mainstream sites, even as rivals Built Robotics and SafeAI race to do the same.

CARBON ROBOTICS

☘️ Carbon’s farm robots just got a lot smarter

Image source: Carbon Robotics

The Rundown: Seattle-based Carbon Robotics, the maker of the laser-toting LaserWeeder farm robot, built a new foundation model for plants that it says can recognize virtually any species it encounters in the field.

The details:

Carbon Robotics unveiled its Large Plant Model (LPM), an AI foundation model that can instantly recognize and classify plant species for precision weeding.
The model was trained on more than 150M labeled images collected by Carbon’s robots across over 100 farms in 15 countries.
Previously, every new weed required fresh labeling and retraining, a process that took about 24 hours each time.
With LPM, farmers can now flag a new weed directly in the robot’s interface and instruct the machine to kill it immediately — no retraining required.

Why it matters: Carbon’s model makes robo-weeding far more flexible, letting growers zap new weeds on the fly while slashing reliance on chemical herbicides. If it scales, Carbon could strengthen the economics of laser weeding and give rivals like Blue River and FarmWise pressure to match both its autonomy and environmental credentials.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

UK startup Humanoid announced KinetIQ, a “shared brain” AI framework that lets fleets of robots learn and coordinate tasks under one cloud-based control system.

China is training drones and robots on animal-inspired tactics — such as teaching them to hunt like hawks — to create more autonomous, battlefield-ready military robots.

LimX Dynamics, a Shenzhen-based humanoid startup, raised $200M in Series B funding to scale its full-size Oli humanoid and modular TRON robots.

New York Robotics launched as a non-profit group to unify the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut robotics ecosystem, which it says includes more than 160 startups.

Uber promoted Balaji Krishnamurthy to CFO as it doubles down on autonomous vehicles and aims to be the biggest platform for robotaxi trips by the decade’s end.

The UK’s Sellafield nuclear site tested a new swabbing tool mounted on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot to check for radioactive contamination.

Shanghai-based DroidUp unveiled Moya, a “biomimetic” humanoid that walks with 92% human-like gait accuracy and mimics micro‑expressions.

Duke engineers created Lego-like blocks with tunable stiffness so robots can switch between rigid and soft modes, changing how they move without being rebuilt.

Chinese researchers unveiled Bolt, a full-sized humanoid that can sprint at 10 meters per second, which they tout as the world’s fastest running robot.

Harvard engineers developed “rolling contact” joints that mimic human knees, allowing robots to correct misalignment by 99% and grippers to lift 3x more weight.

FedEx signed a multi-year deal with Berkshire Grey to deploy Scoop, a robotic trailer unloader designed to autonomously empty mixed-package trailers.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: Anthropic’s ad-free campaign
Read our last Tech newsletter: The race to make space babies
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Waymo hits record $110B valuation
Today’s AI tool guide: Set up a coordinated coding team with Codex App
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

Anthropic’s ad-free campaign takes aim at OpenAI

Click here to request access to The AI Consultancy Project.

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The Claude vs. ChatGPT battle just went mainstream, and Anthropic is coming out swinging on advertising's biggest stage.

The company's Super Bowl campaign takes direct aim at OpenAI's decision to bring ads to its platform, pledging to keep Claude ad-free with a primetime spot Sam Altman is already calling "clearly dishonest."

In today’s AI rundown:

Anthropic’s campaign takes aim at OpenAI
Kling 3.0 brings more length, consistency to AI video
Set up a coordinated coding team with Codex app
PaperBanana’s publication-ready research diagrams
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🍿 Anthropic’s campaign takes aim at OpenAI

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just dropped a new Super Bowl ad campaign that mocks the idea of ads inside AI chats, pairing the spots with a formal pledge to keep Claude ad-free — in a direct move against OpenAI’s recent decision to bring ads to ChatGPT.

The details:

Anthropic published a blog committing to keep its AI assistant ad-free, saying advertising would be “incompatible” with Claude acting in users’ interests.
The SB campaign features the tagline “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude”, showing parodies of ads interrupting helpful AI conversations.
OAI CMO Kate Rouch hit back on X, arguing free access to ChatGPT does more good than Anthropic’s paid-only subs that reach a fraction of the users.
Sam Altman called it "clearly dishonest," saying OAI would never run intrusive ads — and that Anthropic serves “an expensive product to rich people”.

Why it matters: Anthropic's spot draws a clear line between its vision for Claude and OAI's ad-supported direction, and doesn’t pull punches. But OAI's counterargument that free, ad-powered access is more democratic than a product that only paying users can unlock hits harder when the user gap sits in the hundreds of millions.

TOGETHER WITH INNOVATING WITH AI

🚀 Turn AI expertise into a business

The Rundown: AI is transforming every workplace – but executives are terrified of becoming one of the companies that gets “no ROI on AI”. That’s where you come in, and how you can build a 6-figure consultancy with Innovating with AI’s proven methods for delivering fast ROI on AI strategy and implementation.

The AI Consultancy Project helps you:

Turn AI skills into clear, marketable consulting services
Access proven frameworks for delivering measurable AI ROI to clients
Get listed in a directory that drives Fortune 500 leads to graduates

KLING

🎥 Kling 3.0 brings more length, consistency to AI video

Image source: Kling

The Rundown: Chinese AI video startup Kling just released Kling 3.0, consolidating text-to-video, image-to-video, and native audio generation into a single multimodal model with longer outputs and upgraded character and scene consistency.

The details:

3.0 merges previous model lines into a unified system, with native support for 15-sec clips and a new Multi-Shot mode that auto-generates camera angles.
Consistency gets a major upgrade, with the model now able to lock in visual traits across shots using image or video references as reusable "anchors."
Native audio generation now supports voice cloning for multiple characters, alongside expanded language options for natural multilingual dialogue.
The release is currently limited to Kling’s Ultra-tier subscribers, with a broader rollout expected in the next week.

Why it matters: Kling has consistently sat near the top of AI video leaderboards — and while benchmarks aren’t out for 3.0, it looks like it will take another step towards the frontier. Its storyboard tools and unified system also follow the industry trends towards actual production workflows with control, audio, and storyboarding built in.

AI TRAINING

🏭 Set up a coordinated coding team with Codex app

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use OpenAI’s Codex app to set up a “coding factory” where multiple agents work in parallel and build a website brick by brick each day.

Step-by-step:

Scaffold a new React website with npm create vite@latest, then open the folder in the Codex app and click “Create git repository”
Tell Codex to create a modular PRD (plan document) where each webpage can be built out in parallel, without conflicts
Open a new thread for each page of your website (landing, blog, pricing, etc.) and direct each agent to work only on its assigned scope, following the PRD
Review each agent’s output, merge completed branches with the main agent, and preview the site directly from Codex to assemble it piece by piece

Pro tip: Use the “Automations” menu to set up automated agents for daily code review, feature building and bug hunting.

PRESENTED BY CONCENTRIX

⚙️ When automation goes too far

The Rundown: Backed by hands-on experience helping industry leaders build sustainable AI, Concentrix uncovers the human processes behind truly high-quality AI in its latest paper.

What’s in it for you?

The business value of keeping humans in the loop across AI development
Research-based analysis on the impact of AI on human roles
A real-world AI success story

Read the whitepaper here.

AI RESEARCH

🍌 PaperBanana’s publication-ready research diagrams

Image source: Google Cloud AI & Peking University

The Rundown: Researchers from Peking University and Google Cloud AI just released PaperBanana, a system of five AI agents that work together to auto-generate publication-ready diagrams and charts for academic papers.

The details:

The system chains five AI agents together for retrieval, planning, styling, rendering, and critique, mimicking how a human designer crafts diagrams.
On a new benchmark of 292 NeurIPS methodology diagrams, the system beat baselines in conciseness by 37% and readability by nearly 13%.
PaperBanana can also polish existing human-drawn figures, winning head-to-head aesthetic comparisons against originals 56% of the time.

Why it matters: Between platforms like OpenAI’s Prism and tools like PaperBanana, we’re getting a good look at how much the actual drafting part of the scientific research process is getting sped up — letting researchers focus on the actual ideas instead of production bottlenecks like illustrations, formatting, etc. that slow output.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🗣️Unwrap Customer Intelligence - Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*
🎥 Kling 3.0 - Kling’s new video AI with better consistency and 15s outputs
💬 Voxtral Transcribe 2 - Mistral’s new transcription models, for 13 languages
⚙️ Codex App - OpenAI’s new Mac app for managing agents with Codex

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Amazon rolled out Alexa+ across the U.S., making its AI-infused assistant free for Prime members and available at $19.99 / month for everyone else.

Mistral launched Voxtral Transcribe 2, a new speech-to-text family for transcription across 13 languages, including an open-weights Realtime model for live transcription.

Perplexity launched an advanced version of Deep Research, claiming SOTA performance on benchmarks, with immediate availability for Max plan subscribers.

ElevenLabs announced a new $500M funding round that pushes the AI voice platform’s valuation to $11B, tripling its worth in just a year.

AI chipmaker Cerebras secured a $1B Series H round at a $23B valuation, coming on the heels of the company’s January deal with OpenAI.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the Gemini app now has 750M+ monthly active users, with the tech giant expecting to increase investments to $185B in 2026.

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 Allen E. in Prattville, AL:

"Due to leukemia, I have to have frequent blood work drawn. The lab reports are long and tabular. To get a better picture of the disease's progression or lack thereof, I plot each new value of Hemoglobin, RBC, WBC, and others on a graph...

After each new blood work, I just speak the new date and value and add it to the existing graph. The normal values for each test are also shown as a shaded area on the graph, so it is easy to see if the value is close to or far from the desired value."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: Sam Altman’s OpenAI succession plan
Read our last Tech newsletter: The race to make space babies
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Waymo hits record $110B valuation
Today’s AI tool guide: Set up a coordinated coding team with Codex App
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

Sam Altman’s OpenAI succession plan

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Nobody in AI drives the narrative quite like Sam Altman, and his most recent profile didn’t disappoint.

From revealing a succession plan to hand OpenAI to an AI model to claiming they have “basically built AGI”, the CEO hits on a wide range of visions for the future — even as insiders worry the company is trying to do too much too quickly.

In today’s AI rundown:

Sam Altman’s OpenAI succession plan
Fitbit founders’ AI-powered family health app
Build a "brand twin" that writes in your voice
AI safety report finds risks are no longer theoretical
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🎙️ Sam Altman’s OpenAI succession plan

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI's CEO just conducted a wide-ranging profile with Forbes, revealing a succession plan that involves handing the company to an AI model, AGI commentary with a strange response from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and more.

The details:

Altman said a succession plan to “hand off the company to an AI model”, arguing if the goal is AGI that can run companies, his own should be first in line.
He also said OpenAI “basically have built AGI”, with Nadella pushing back on that claim — also referring to the Microsoft / OpenAI relationship as “frenemies”.
Forbes reported that Altman “has stakes in more than 500 companies”, with employees privately worrying about OAI’s push to do “too much too quickly.”
He also commented on the drama with Elon Musk, saying it’s “crazy to me how much time he spends attacking us” and criticizing xAI’s own safety issues.

Why it matters: Nobody in AI generates more headlines than Sama, and this profile is a masterclass in why. Whether he's claiming AGI is here or floating an AI succession plan, Altman's talent for driving the narrative is undeniable — the question is whether OpenAI’s execution and sprawling direction can keep up with his visionary claims.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

👋 Meet Slackbot, your personal AI work agent

The Rundown: Slackbot is a context-aware AI agent built directly into Slack — understanding your conversations, files, and workflows to deliver what you need, right when you need it, with zero setup. Slackbot synthesizes what you need instantly — respecting your permissions and using only what you can already see.

In this Slackbot-focused webinar, you'll learn about:

Slackbot’s enterprise-grade security by design
How to turn information into action with Slackbot
How customers like Engine and Asybml are already using Slackbot

Watch now.

AI & HEALTH TECH

🏠 Fitbit founders’ AI-powered family health app

Image source: Luffu

The Rundown: Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman just unveiled Luffu, a new AI-powered app that monitors health data across an entire family, tracking everything from kids' vitals and aging parents' medications to the dog's vet schedule.

The details:

Luffu's AI pulls together medical info that's typically spread across apps, doctor portals, and paper records, alerting users when something looks off.
The app supports natural-language queries about family members' health and lets people enter updates through voice memos, photos, or text.
The duo is self-funding the venture with a team of ~40, mostly recruited from former Google and Fitbit teams, with a public beta waitlist now open.
Dedicated health devices are planned down the line, with the app currently connecting to existing platforms like Apple Health and Fitbit.

Why it matters: The AI health space has exploded over the past year — but almost everything is built for a single user. With caregiving responsibilities surging worldwide, a family-first approach from the team that helped make personal health tracking mainstream is a bet worth watching, especially as AI wearables grow in capability.

AI TRAINING

👯‍♀️ Build a "brand twin" that writes in your voice

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to fight back against ChatGPT slop by creating a “Brand Twin” with a custom GPT that writes LinkedIn posts, Instagram captions, and more in your desired voice and style.

Step-by-step:

Add PDFs of your best writing and brand guidelines into ChatGPT and tell it to write “system instructions for a ‘Brand Twin’ GPT that avoids AI writing clichés”
Go to chatgpt.com/gpts, create a new GPT, and paste system instructions. Then click Share > GPT Store and add it by going to GPTs > Explore GPTs
Compare the GPT with a regular ChatGPT thread by sending the same prompt, like “Write an Instagram caption for our [product] product announcement”

Pro tip: Standardize brand voice across a team by sending everyone your custom GPT.

🏛️ Build the sovereign enterprise

The Rundown: IBM explains why digital sovereignty is a CEO imperative in the AI era-and how to hard-code control over data, technology, and operations to help scale while building trust.

Key insights include:

Regulatory tailwinds: Sovereignty mandates are helping accelerate action before access risks grow.
Control by design: Define who operates, accesses, and audits AI workloads.
Unified strategy: Align hybrid cloud, AI, and resilience under sovereign governance.
The payoff: resilience, trust, and faster innovation as sovereignty requirements rise

Read the CEO Mandate.

AI SAFETY

🛡️ AI safety report finds risks are no longer theoretical

Image source: International AI Safety Report

The Rundown: 100+ AI experts published the second International AI Safety Report, with AI godfather Yoshua Bengio as the lead author, warning that threats like deepfake fraud and bioweapons have moved from hypothetical concerns to real-world problems.

The details:

The authors flag growing real-world evidence of AI being used for cyberattacks, deepfake fraud, manipulation, and criminal activity.
They also raise alarms on the growing adoption of AI companions, citing studies linking use to increased loneliness and reduced social interaction.
The report highlights AI systems behaving differently during safety tests than in the real world as a potential ‘loss of control’ that could hurt oversight.
The findings were backed by 30+ countries, though the U.S. notably declined to contribute to this year’s report despite past involvement.

Why it matters: What stands out isn't any single finding, but how many risks moved from the "maybe someday" column into "happening now" in just 12 months — with the field moving faster than ever. The U.S. quietly stepping back from the report, despite hosting most of the frontier labs, is also a strange development worth monitoring.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🤝 Genstore - AI agent team for solo sellers to handle research, operations, marketing, analytics, and more around the clock*
👁️ GLM-OCR - SOTA model for document understanding, text/image extraction
⚙️ Qwen3-Coder-Next - Alibaba’s open hybrid model for agentic coding
🎵 Ace-Step-1.5 - Ace Music’s powerful open source music generation model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI announced the hiring of Dylan Scandinaro as the company’s new Head of Preparedness, previously working in an AGI safety role for Anthropic.

Google expanded its Kaggle Game Arena with poker and Werewolf benchmarks, testing AI models on bluffing, social deduction, and risk management.

Alibaba released Qwen3-Coder-Next, a small open-source coding model for agentic tasks that rivals larger models like DeepSeek V3.2 and KGLM-4.7 on benchmarks.

Higgsfield AI launched Vibe Motion, a new Claude-powered tool that allows users to create and edit motion graphics using text prompts.

Apple added full Claude AI agent support to Xcode, letting devs hand off complex coding tasks that Claude can plan, build, and visually verify on its own inside the IDE.

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 Michelle M. in Dedham, MA:

“It’s tricky to get my toddler to sleep, so I started using Suno to create custom songs. I’ll input a prompt that ensures her name is mentioned, what we did that day, and the action I want her to take. So she falls asleep to a unique track each night that sings her name…, and now it’s sleep time. Best part, it’s free & limitless for non-commercial use."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

Read our last AI newsletter: xAI joins SpaceX in mega-merger
Read our last Tech newsletter: The race to make space babies
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Waymo hits record $110B valuation
Today’s AI tool guide: Build a "brand twin" that writes in your voice
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1

See you soon,

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

Tech

The race to make space babies