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Tech

Air taxis to fly in 26 states

Jennifer Mossalgue • 6 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. This summer, electric air taxis from startups like Archer, Joby, and Beta will hit the skies in federally backed trials, shuttling passengers and cargo across 26 states.

The results could show whether urban air mobility is finally ready for liftoff, or still years away from escaping the hype cycle.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Electric air taxis to take flight in 26 states

  • Apple preps high-end ‘Ultra’ line

  • Bluesky CEO Jay Graber steps down

  • Palmer Luckey’s gaming startup seeks $1B valuation

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

EVTOL

🚀 Electric air taxis to take flight in 26 states

Image source: Beta Technologies

The Rundown: This summer, Americans in 26 states will get their first taste of “flying cars,” as federally backed pilot programs send electric air taxis from startups like Archer, Joby, and Beta skimming over city traffic under tightly controlled FAA trials.

The details:

  • Startups including Archer, Joby, Beta, Wisk, Electra, and Reliable Robotics will run passenger, cargo, and emergency flights with state and local partners.

  • The three-year program, created by a Trump executive order, lets these aircraft operate under tight supervision before full FAA type certification.

  • Officials say the aircraft will be quieter, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper than helicopters, and aimed at cutting congestion and linking smaller cities.

  • Beta CEO Kyle Clark said the program will let Beta start flying a year early; its shares jumped nearly 12% Monday, with Archer and Joby stock rising too.

Why it matters: Partnering with state and local governments, flying car startups get a chance to gather real‑world data across dozens of operation scenarios, from Manhattan heliports to routes over the Gulf Coast, access that could boost stock prices and validate their business models — or reveal just how far the tech still has to go.

APPLE

🍎 Apple preps high-end ‘Ultra’ line

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly getting ready to seriously crank up the luxury dial, prepping a $2,000‑ish foldable iPhone, a touchscreen MacBook Pro, and camera‑toting, AI‑smartened AirPods aimed squarely at the ultra‑high‑end crowd.

The details:

  • Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that at least three ‘Ultra’-tier devices are in the pipeline for 2026, including a foldable iPhone with a large inner display.

  • The Ultra tier is built around a $2,000‑class foldable iPhone that sits well above today’s Pro models, as well as a higher-priced MacBook Pro.

  • Apple is also said to be working on new AirPods with built‑in computer‑vision cameras that can feed visual “intelligence” straight into Siri

  • The new MacBook is expected to pair the first touchscreen ever on a Mac with an OLED panel, at a price beyond today’s M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro.

Why it matters: The budget MacBook Neo may have grabbed headlines, but Gurman says Apple’s real play this year is at the other end of the price spectrum. A foldable iPhone, AI-camera AirPods, and a touchscreen OLED MacBook are all expected before year’s end — and none of them will be cheap.

BLUESKY

🪜 Bluesky CEO Jay Graber steps down

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down to hand longtime tech operator Toni Schneider the reins — just as the Jack Dorsey-founded Twitter alternative finally hits its stride at 40M users, and its first real growing pains.

The details:

  • Venture capitalist and ex-Automattic CEO Toni Schneider is taking over as interim CEO while Bluesky’s board searches for a permanent replacement.

  • Graber says Bluesky has matured to the point where it needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution.

  • Bluesky has grown into a decentralized social network with more than 40M users and an ecosystem of over 500 third-party apps.

  • The shake-up lands as Bluesky runs into new state age‑verification rules, forcing it to cut off Mississippi and start checking users’ ages in other states.

Why it matters: Graber became CEO of Bluesky in 2021, as it spun off from Twitter into its own company. As she shifts back toward Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol — the open social framework she has worked on since the project’s early days —Schneider will have to face a growing wave of age-assurance regulation.

PALMER LUCKEY

🕹️ Palmer Luckey’s gaming startup seeks $1B valuation

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: Palmer Luckey, the Oculus co-founder turned defense-tech billionaire, is now reportedly chasing a $1B valuation for his retro gaming startup ModRetro, betting that there’s serious money in high-end nostalgia hardware.

The details:

  • ModRetro’s Chromatic is a handheld built in the mold of the original Game Boy, with support for original GB and GBC cartridges. Price starts at $199.99.

  • Luckey has described the Chromatic as the product of “hundreds of irrational decisions” intended to create a worthy tribute to the original Game Boy.

  • The Financial Times reports ModRetro is already developing additional hardware, including a device meant to replicate the Nintendo 64.

  • Luckey’s defense startup Anduril, whose autonomous weapons vision has been embraced by Trump, is also seeking a new funding round at a $60B valuation.

Why it matters: Luckey is testing whether premium nostalgia gadgets can earn a unicorn valuation in a handheld market already crowded with Analogue, Anbernic, AyaNeo, and a dozen retro rivals. The same engineer perfecting Game Boy clones is also racing firms like Palantir and Shield AI to automate warfare.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Meta AI chief Yann LeCun’s new startup, AMI, raised about $1B to build world-model systems that understand and reason about the physical world.

Apple reportedly delayed the launch of its long‑planned J490 smart home display because the overhauled Siri and on‑device AI assistant are still not ready.

AT&T said it plans to pour more than $250B into U.S. network infrastructure over the next five years.

Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz are backing Nexthop AI, a fast-growing AI data center supplier now valued at about $4.2B.

Uber is rolling out its “Women Drivers” feature nationwide in the U.S., allowing women and teens to request female drivers, expanding a safety-focused pilot.

XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis is offering $3.5M for upbeat sci‑fi films that cast AI as the hero, not the villain.

Apple now produces 25% of all iPhones in India — around 55M units produced in 2025 — as it accelerates a shift away from China to dodge US tariffs.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi is reportedly exploring vehicle-integrated solar tech to add photovoltaic panels to future EVs and extend their driving range.

Samsung told CNBC that its first AI smart glasses, featuring an eye-level camera that connects to a smartphone for AI processing, are planned for launch later this year.

Startup Cortical Labs is building test data centers in Melbourne and Singapore that swap server racks for “biocomputers” made from lab‑grown human brain cells.

OSHA is investigating the death of a 61-year-old contractor who was fatally pinned between a tractor-trailer and a loading dock at a Rivian warehouse in Illinois.

Bezos-backed EV startup Slate Auto replaced CEO Christine Barman with ex-Amazon VP Peter Faricy, just months before the launch of its first electric truck.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is reportedly close to closing its fourth growth fund with about $6B in commitments.

Nintendo is suing the U.S. government to claw back Trump-era import tariffs that courts have ruled unlawful.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

Anthropic takes U.S. government to court

Zach Mink • 6 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A few months ago, Anthropic was one of the Pentagon's most prominent AI partners. Now it's suing the government in federal court.

With two new lawsuits challenging the “supply chain risk” label and White House directive to cut ties, Anthropic is arguing it’s being retaliated against for speaking up on safety — and now 30+ employees from OpenAI and Google are lining up behind them.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic takes U.S. government to court

  • Microsoft’s Claude-powered Copilot Cowork

  • Auto-generate videos from content with Manus

  • a16z releases new consumer AI Top 100

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

⚖️ Anthropic takes U.S. government to court

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic fired back at the Trump administration with two lawsuits, challenging the Pentagon's 'supply chain risk' label and White House directive for all federal agencies to drop Claude — a move it calls punishment for its AI safety positions.

The details:

  • Anthropic filed lawsuits in two separate courts, asking judges to throw out the blacklist label and block the government from forcing agencies to cut ties.

  • The suits argue the ‘supply chain risk’ label was designed to counter foreign adversary threats, not punish a U.S company over policy disagreements.

  • They also claim the Pentagon violated free speech rights by retaliating for publicly advocating AI safety limits on weapons and surveillance.

  • 30+ OAI and Google staffers signed a legal brief backing Anthropic's Pentagon lawsuit, warning that the blacklisting threatens U.S. AI leadership.

Why it matters: Whatever side you take on who controls AI in warfare, the federal response (Hegseth's blacklist, Trump's Truth Social posts) has looked a lot like retaliation. Win or lose, the case could decide whether the gov. can move against a domestic company for speaking up on safety — a precedent all labs will be watching.

TOGETHER WITH TELEPORT

🤐 Your AI agents shouldn’t share secrets

The Rundown: Autonomous agents can’t rely on API keys or long-lived credentials anymore. Teleport’s Agentic Identity Framework replaces static secrets with verifiable, cryptographic identity for machine actors at scale.

With Teleport, you get:

  • Zero standing privileges for autonomous agents

  • Ephemeral, certified machine identities

  • Policy-based access control

  • Reliable, auditable workflow orchestration

If agents can act, they must be identified. Explore the framework.

MICROSOFT

🤖 Microsoft’s Claude-powered Copilot Cowork

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft just introduced Copilot Cowork, a new M365 feature built on Anthropic's Claude system that runs tasks in the background across apps — launching alongside a $99 enterprise bundle and a new platform for governing AI agents at scale.

The details:

  • Cowork operates in the cloud, pulling from emails, meetings, files, and chats across M365 — a contrast to Claude Cowork's current desktop-only approach.

  • Microsoft built Cowork directly with Anthropic, using Claude Cowork’s tech but wrapped in M365's enterprise security and compliance layers.

  • Users describe an outcome, and Cowork breaks it into steps, producing deliverables like decks, briefing docs, and workbooks across apps.

  • Cowork is available in a limited research preview, coming with a new $99/user E7 tier that bundles Copilot with agent management and security tools.

Why it matters: If you can't beat the thing that scared your investors, absorb it. Embedding Anthropic's agent tech inside M365's security boundaries gives Copilot Cowork something Claude Cowork can't easily match (yet) — deep, integrated enterprise context across 450M users’ worth of emails, calendars, and files.

AI TRAINING

📹 Auto-generate videos from content with Manus

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Manus to script, generate, and assemble a short promotional video from any written content you already have — with no video editing experience required.

Step-by-step:

  1. Start with a blog post, a press release, or even a news story. Download it as a PDF or Markdown file, and log in to Manus.im

  2. Create a project with instructions: “You are a video producer for [my brand]. Your job is to transform written content into branded videos”

  3. In the project task, click the plus button > Use Skills > video-generator, and prompt: “Create a 15–20 second teaser video based on the attached post. The CTA is to read the full blog. Generate it in portrait orientation for Instagram Reels. Give me four script options before you generate. Use default mode”

  4. Carefully review Manus’s script options and pick the best one. Video generation should take 5–10 minutes and use between 499–800 credits

Pro tip: Save tokens by uploading B-roll videos and music into a Google Drive folder and connecting it to Manus.

PRESENTED BY GALILEO

⚙️ Expert guide to building RAG systems in 2026

The Rundown: RAG isn't dead, it's evolved: from basic vector search to today's agentic architectures with self-correction and adaptive retrieval.

Read Galileo's new 240+ page guide to learn how to build RAG systems that work in 2026, including:

  • Mastering chunking, embedding, and reranking strategies

  • Building evaluation frameworks using retrieval and generation metrics

  • Implementing advanced patterns like query decomposition and adaptive retrieval

Get the free eBook.

AI RESEARCH

📊 a16z releases new consumer AI Top 100

Image source: a16z

The Rundown: a16z released the sixth edition of consumer AI Top 100, expanding the list to include traditional apps with AI like Canva and CapCut for the first time, along with data showing ChatGPT still dominates overall usage, but rivals are gaining ground.

The details:

  • ChatGPT crossed 900M weekly users and still dwarfs every rival, but the gap is tightening — with Claude and Gemini growing paid subs over 200% last year.

  • The new list included “AI-enhanced” consumer apps for the first time, with CapCut, Canva, Notion, Grammarly, and others now slotting into the rankings.

  • The report found three distinct AI ecosystems forming: Western, Chinese, and Russian, with sanctions accelerating the split as local alternatives fill the gaps.

  • Agents are gaining ground, with Manus (#44) and (#47) Genspark making the cut, while OpenClaw is absent due to the report’s time frame.

Why it matters: a16z's consumer reports have become one of the best pulse checks on where AI adoption is actually heading, and this edition is no different. Given the recent OAI Pentagon drama, cancellations, and Claude surge, the battlefield for consumers’ ‘default AI’ could be even more competitive in the next release.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔒 Incogni - Remove your personal data from the web so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off*

  • 🤖 Copilot Cowork - Microsoft's Anthropic-powered AI for M365 tasks

  • 🧠 GPT-5.4 - OpenAI's flagship reasoner with native computer use, 1M context

  • 🗂️ Claude Marketplace - Anthropic's hub for Claude-powered partner tools

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic rolled out Code Review for Claude Code in Team and Enterprise accounts, which uses teams of AI agents to deep-read code and flag bugs.

OpenAI announced the acquisition of Promptfoo, an AI security and red-teaming platform, to embed native agent testing into its Frontier enterprise platform.

Andrew Ng released Context Hub, a free tool that gives AI coding agents access to current documentation to prevent them from using outdated or hallucinated code.

OpenAI is further delaying its "adult mode" feature for ChatGPT, shelving the verified-users-only option to focus on intelligence, personality, and proactive capabilities.

Anthropic launched Claude Marketplace in limited preview, letting enterprises apply existing spend commitments toward partner tools from GitLab, Harvey, and others.

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 Tina J. in Farmingdale, NY:

"I’m working towards a promotion at the end of the year and used Copilot to evaluate my resume against real work artifacts and a competency framework. Copilot analyzed my work output and identified where I was already operating at the next level and where I could strengthen my visibility and framing.

Then I asked it to generate promotion-aligned custom instructions to reinforce strategic, executive-level behavior in future work."

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

DJI pays $30K for mass robot vacuum hack

Jennifer Mossalgue • 6 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. DJI is paying a French hobbyist $30K after he accidentally hijacked thousands of Romo robot vacuums — and the live camera feeds and microphones that came with them.

A single cloud permission flaw turned a wacky PlayStation controller experiment into an accidental mass surveillance incident. Patches are out, but the bigger question lingers: can we ever make smart devices truly private?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • DJI pays $30K for robot vacuum hack

  • Alphabet’s delivery drones now work nights

  • Ex-Googler launches robotics startup in Tokyo

  • Tesla’s Full Self-Driving hits 8B miles

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

DJI

💵 DJI pays $30K for robot vacuum hack

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: DJI is reportedly paying $30K to the French hobbyist who accidentally seized control of 7K Romo robot vacuums, flagging a bug that turned an AI-assisted weekend hack into a global home‑surveillance scare.

The details:

  • Sammy Azdoufal accidentally gained remote access to 7K robot vacuums worldwide while trying to control his own unit with a PlayStation controller.

  • The flaw let him tap into live camera feeds, microphones, and detailed home floor maps from strangers’ devices via DJI’s cloud infrastructure.

  • After he reported the issue and it went public, DJI pushed rapid backend fixes and automatic updates, saying the main vulnerabilities are now patched.

  • DJI has agreed to pay Azdoufal $30K, positioning it as a bug-bounty style reward and vowing more third-party security audits and certifications for Romo.

Why it matters: This story is a test of how much trust we put in AI-powered gadgets that can see, hear, and map our homes, in the same line as Roomba test vacuums leaking intimate photos and Ring cameras letting strangers talk to kids in their bedrooms. It’s more proof that one bad cloud permission can go terribly wrong at scale.

WING

🥡 Alphabet’s delivery drones now work nights

Image source: Wing

The Rundown: Alphabet’s Wing just won the FAA’s approval to extend its drone delivery hours to 9 p.m. in parts of Dallas–Fort Worth and Charlotte, pushing on-demand aerial logistics firmly into the evening routine.

The details:

  • Alphabet’s Wing now has FAA approval to run drone deliveries after sunset, extending operations into nighttime hours.

  • Wing’s service for Walmart and DoorDash customers runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at select sites in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex and the Charlotte region.

  • The drones use near-infrared “headlights” to see in the dark without adding visible light pollution, and can still pick safe landing spots, avoiding obstacles.

  • Rival Zipline has now crossed 2M commercial deliveries, while Wing has logged roughly 350K drops and aims to cover 270 Walmart stores by 2027.

Why it matters: Amazon and Zipline are also chasing drone delivery at scale, but approvals for fully automated, after-dark flights are still rare enough that each new waiver quietly resets the bar for everyone else. Knowing when Wing slips into the night shift is also a useful tell for how fast regulators are loosening the reins.

INTEGRAL AI

🇯🇵 Ex-Googler launches robotics startup in Tokyo

Image source: Integral AI

The Rundown: Ex-Google researcher Jad Tarifi is turning Integral AI from a split SF–Tokyo business into a Tokyo‑first startup, betting Japan’s factory‑robot giants are the fastest way to put his AI “brains” into the real world.

The details:

  • Tarifi has built a 15-person startup in Tokyo to plug advanced AI models into Japan’s huge industrial robot ecosystem.

  • Integral AI has worked with auto parts giant Denso since 2021, using imitation learning so factory robots can pick up new tasks by watching human demos.

  • The company is in talks with Toyota, Sony, Honda, and Nissan to show how language prompts let robots teach themselves complex workflows on the fly.

  • Integral has raised about $5.5M so far and is seeking roughly $10M more to scale its models and launch its Genesis system later this year.

Why it matters: Japan controls a huge slice of the world’s industrial robots but still depends on foreign AI and cloud providers to run them, which is exactly the gap Integral AI is trying to fill. The company’s goal is to provide the “Silicon Valley brains” that sit on top of Japanese hardware to power next-gen factory automation.

TESLA

🚘 Tesla’s Full Self-Driving hits 8B miles

Image source: Tesla

The Rundown: Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) crossed 8B cumulative miles this year, a staggering data haul that inches Elon Musk’s long-promised robotaxi future closer to technical plausibility even as it remains stuck in regulatory and safety limbo.

The details:

  • Tesla is pursuing autonomy using a camera-only perception stack, in contrast to Waymo’s lidar sensors and detailed 3D mapping.

  • FSD has evolved into a supervised driver-assist suite that can change lanes, navigate routes, steer, park, and drive itself across parking lots to the owner.

  • The company’s expanding fleet, software rollouts, and periodic free FSD trials have accelerated usage from just 6M miles five years ago to billions today.

  • Musk has said about 10B miles of training data are needed to justify large-scale autonomous deployment, a threshold Tesla could hit within the year.

Why it matters: Tesla’s 8B FSD miles are huge, but those miles still come from a supervised Level 2 system rather than a true robotaxi network. That leaves Tesla with a massive data advantage over rivals in training volume, while Waymo retains the edge in fully driverless deployment, regulatory approval, and real-world commercial autonomy.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

OpenAI’s robotics chief, Caitlin Kalinowski, resigned over what she says is a rushed, poorly safeguarded Pentagon deal to put the company’s AI on military systems.

A London surgeon remotely controlled a Toumai robot to remove a prostate 2,400 km away with only 48 ms latency, showcasing long-distance telesurgery’s viability.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will host an autonomous vehicle safety forum on Tuesday with the CEOs of Waymo, Zoox, and Aurora.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s new equity package, worth up to $692M over three years, is reportedly tied to boosting the valuations of Waymo and Wing.

Mirai Robotics raised a €4.2M ($4.9M) pre-seed round to develop autonomous maritime systems aimed at both civilian and defense applications.

Agility Robotics is dropping “Robotics” from its name to become Agility, saying the rebrand reflects its readiness to scale humanoid deployments and lead adoption.

Ukraine is rolling out remote-controlled and autonomous armed ground robots against Russian forces, raising fresh ethical and legal concerns about AI-driven warfare.

Dexterity introduced Foresight, a physics-consistent world model that powers its Mech robot to autonomously load trucks using a 4D box-packing agent.

Ouster said demand for its lidar-powered software is taking off, with 2025 orders doubling and its systems now booked for more than 1,200 sites worldwide.

China’s new 5-year plan doubles down on rare earths and advanced robotics to secure supply chains and keep its edge as a high-tech industrial powerhouse.

NASA’s 1.8-meter Valkyrie humanoid is heading back to Johnson Space Center after a decade at the University of Edinburgh.

China’s WeRide is deepening its partnership with Geely’s Farizon unit to mass-produce 2K upgraded GXR robotaxis in 2026.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

OpenAI's robotics lead exits over Pentagon deal

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The consumer backlash over OpenAI's Pentagon deal was loud, but this weekend marked an internal escalation: the company's robotics hardware lead resigned on principle.

Caitlin Kalinowski's departure is the first senior-level exit tied directly to the deal, and her public statement citing concerns over surveillance and lethal autonomy hits a bit harder than any App Store chart.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OAI's robotics lead exits over Pentagon deal

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • How to build an AI case study generator

  • Claude digs up 22 Firefox security flaws in two weeks

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🚪 OAI's robotics lead exits over Pentagon deal

Image source: Lovart / @kalinowski007 on X

The Rundown: OpenAI robotics director Caitlin Kalinowski just announced her resignation over the company’s controversial Pentagon deal, calling it a rushed move that skipped the guardrails on AI surveillance and lethal autonomy.

The details:

  • Kalinowski joined OAI from Meta's AR glasses team in November, spearheading the rebuild of its robotics division that had previously shut down in 2020.

  • She called the decision "about principle, not people", saying the deal was pushed through "without the guardrails defined" on AI in warfare.

  • Kalinowski marks the first public “resignation” over the Pentagon deal, though VP of Research Max Schwarzer also departed last week for Anthropic.

  • The backlash has hit fast on the consumer end, with Claude climbing to No. 1 on the App Store and ChatGPT cancellations soaring.

Why it matters: Plenty of users have ditched ChatGPT and spoken out since the Pentagon deal dropped — but Kalinowski is the first senior OAI voice to walk over it on principle. OAI can weather angry tweets and App Store slides, but a big resignation letter that name-drops "lethal autonomy" and "surveillance" hits a bit differently.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

📖 AI Agents are your new employees

The Rundown AI agents are entering the workforce, but you wouldn’t expect a new employee to know everything on day one, would you? AI agents need onboarding too—in the form of metadata.

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.

Rishi, Growth: We’re always looking for A/B test ideas for our landing pages and new ways to improve conversion rates while creating a better user experience. Recently, I tried an interesting AI workflow after coming across a public CRO skill on Twitter.

I installed it in Claude Code and then fed Claude screenshots of our landing page along with behavioral data from Microsoft Clarity, including scroll depth, heatmaps, and which buttons people were clicking most.

Using the CRO scorecard framework and the Clarity data, Claude generated a detailed analysis of the page and recommended five A/B tests we should prioritize, along with the reasoning behind each one. The insights were genuinely useful, and we have already taken action by launching one of the recommended tests.

Adrian, Developer: I’ve basically had the exact same haircut since high school, so this year I finally decided to experiment a bit with Nano Banana 2 and see what a different look might feel like. I uploaded my own portraits and started merging them with different models’ hairstyles. After 10+ rounds of virtual makeovers, I found out that the hairstyle that suited me best was… my current one.

AI TRAINING

⚙️ Build an AI case study generator

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Claude to turn those old project files, like client emails, metrics exports, or memos, into information-rich case studies you can use to win more proposals.

Step-by-step:

  1. Write project wrap memos when a project ends. Give an overview of results and key KPIs. If you’re busy, even a quick voice memo is better than nothing

  2. Create a “Case Study Generator” project in Claude’s PC app with instructions: "You are a case study writer for [industry]. Your job is to take raw data and turn it into a case study using the challenge → solution → results framework"

  3. Upload your project memo and prompt: “Generate a case study from these docs. Lead with strongest results in the headline. Use the challenge → solution → results framework. If any section is missing data, flag it with [NEEDS INPUT]”

  4. Claude should generate a PDF case study for you. We found that it did a great job turning the memo into a slide deck or social media carousel post

Pro tip: We can pack a lot more into our system instructions, including a style guide and example cases. You can grab the templates here.

PRESENTED BY IBM

💪 How to build a strong AI-ready data foundation

The Rundown: IBM explains how unified, secured, and governed data access can help organizations move promising AI pilots to reliable enterprise scale.

In this guide, you’ll:

  • Understand barriers that prevent AI pilots from scaling

  • Learn why unified access to structured and unstructured data matters

  • Explore a framework for building AI-ready data foundations

Download the guide.

ANTHROPIC & FIREFOX

🔒 Claude digs up 22 Firefox security flaws in two weeks

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic revealed that Claude Opus 4.6 spent two weeks tearing through Firefox's codebase alongside Mozilla's team, turning up 22 vulnerabilities (14 high-severity) — with patches already live for hundreds of millions of users.

The details:

  • Claude took just 20 minutes to flag its first flaw, and racked up 50 more by the time Anthropic's team finished confirming its initial find was real.

  • Anthropic filed 112 reports across ~6K files in total — 14 rated high-severity by Mozilla, accounting for nearly 20% of Firefox's most serious patches all year.

  • Claude also tried writing exploits, but only managed two working attacks in hundreds of attempts — both needing Firefox’s sandbox removed to function.

Why it matters: Firefox isn’t some new app; it’s a deeply tested open-source project with decades of audits and bounty programs — making Claude’s quick findings even wilder. While Claude wasn’t as strong at weaponizing its own exploits, Anthropic said that gap won’t last… Meaning the window to lock down codebases feels pretty urgent.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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

  • 🔒 Codex Security - OpenAI's security agent to scan repos and patch bugs

  • ⚙️ autoresearch - Andrej Karpathy's tool for AI-driven LLM training

  • 🎆 Uni-1 - Luma’s model that reasons and generates across text and images

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Luma unveiled Uni-1, its first model that combines reasoning and image generation in one architecture — in a major shift from the video-focused startup's roots.

Anthropic rolled out scheduled tasks in Claude Code, letting the coding agent run prompts on a loop to monitor builds, check logs, and auto-file PRs on a set cadence.

Cluely CEO Roy Lee admitted to fabricating the startup's revenue figures in a 2025 interview, publicly retracting claims after the AI ‘cheating’ tool pivoted to meeting notes.

The WSJ shared more on AI's role in the Iran conflict, reporting that the Army's 18th Airborne matched its Iraq-era targeting with 20 people instead of 2,000 with the tech.

Andrej Karpathy released autoresearch, an open-source repo that lets AI agents autonomously run and iterate on LLM training experiments in a loop on a single GPU.

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 Julie H. in Kyle, TX:

"I made a day planner agent connected to my calendar and task lists. Every morning, I start by asking, “How does my day look?”, and the agent pulls all my meetings, uses my tasks list to schedule projects in between meetings, gives me time for deep focus and email catch-up, and even makes sure to schedule a lunch break.

It flags things I may have missed the day before. If I have big gaps in the day, it looks ahead and suggests items I can get ahead on, like tasks due the next day or meetings needing prep time. I can give feedback on things I want to add, move, or remove, and it adjusts until I have a solid plan for my day. If I move things in my schedule, it will also update my calendar and task list for me so everything stays aligned."

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

AI will make engineering more human, not less

Shubham Sharma • 8 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. A week ago, Spotify’s co-CEO claimed their best devs haven’t written a “single line of code” this year — echoing a wave of execs that describe AI coding agents as the future of software. 

The shift is happening – there’s no doubt about that. But bringing AI into real engineering workflows is more nuanced than hitting a switch and going on autopilot.

To better understand what’s changing (and what isn’t), we sat down with Rajeev Rajan, CTO of Atlassian, the company behind popular collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Loom. We got insights on their recent software development agent Rovo Dev and discussed how human roles evolve in an AI-native world.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • The non-negotiable cost of coding with AI

  • When AI writes code, what will an engineer do?

  • Building agentic AI for developer joy

  • What happens when AI makes a mistake?

  • Truth about the “death of SaaS” theory

  • Quick hits with Rajeev

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WORKFLOW REDESIGN

🤖 The non-negotiable cost of coding with AI

The Rundown: As more enterprises adopt coding agents, Rajan says teams will have to redesign their workflows with both human ownership and safety systems, so that AI moves faster without sacrificing consistent, production-grade quality.

Cheung: AI is generating more code than ever, but research shows 45% of it still contains security flaws. How exactly should teams leverage AI coding agents without trading quality for speed?

Rajan: There’s an undeniable trend toward an AI‑native software development lifecycle. But if you let quality slide, you’re just moving faster toward incidents and customer pain. It’s less about “AI vs. quality” and more about “how do we redesign the workflow on the assumption that AI is in the loop by default?”

In code review, we are entrusting AI to catch bugs, enforce coding standards, and explain complex changes. For example, Rovo Dev helped reduce PR cycle time by 45% and auto-resolved 51% of potential security vulnerabilities. The nature of review is changing here: instead of humans reading every line of a peer’s code, it’s about a human owner reviewing an agent’s work.

Rajan added: At deployment, if AI is helping you generate and ship more code, your safety systems have to keep pace. Think: smaller batches, heavier CI, stronger observability, and fast rollbacks. You can’t operate in a black‑box scenario.

Why it matters: Speed only becomes an advantage when the system behind it is airtight. The right approach with AI coding agents is to treat them as core enterprise infrastructure — which means designing workflows around them, building in safety from day one, and holding output to the same standards as human-written code.

ROLE SHIFT

❓️ When AI writes the code, what will an engineer do?

Image: Kiki Wu / The Rundown

The Rundown: With writing code no longer the bottleneck, Rajan believes that the next big opportunity for engineers is stepping into more strategic functions (like planning to execution) and designing better systems with AI in the loop.

Cheung: How much of code will be AI-written by 2028, and what does the role of a software engineer look like with that change?

Rajan: By 2028, I would not be surprised if most new code in large companies is AI-generated. I say that as someone who fell in love with writing code early in my career and still remembers the joy of seeing something work for the first time.

We’re seeing a shift where every engineer is a tech lead, orchestrating systems and agents. Engineers now spend more time driving clarity and owning what happens “left of code” and “right of code” – from planning and design on one side to testing, rollout safety, and operations on the other.

Cheung: What about new grads entering the field — does AI help them or hurt them?

Rajan: Focusing on the right fundamentals and adopting the AI-native way of working will give new grads a big advantage — potentially allowing them to leapfrog senior developers who haven’t adopted AI ways of working yet. Your edge will come from judgment: knowing when to trust the AI and when to challenge it.

Why it matters: As AI writes more code, the moat for engineers moves from actually typing to instead framing problems, designing systems, and maintaining oversight. Rajan’s leapfrog point is especially interesting: the advantage may not go to the most senior person, but to whoever learns to orchestrate AI fastest.

DEVELOPER JOY

⚙️ Building agentic AI for developer joy

The Rundown: Atlassian kicked off its internal journey to improve “Developer Joy,” raising developer satisfaction scores from 49% to 83%. With teams moving faster and feeling more empowered to make changes, Rajan shared how this renewed sense of ownership led to direct product improvements with Rovo Dev.

Cheung: Why did you decide to focus on developer joy, and how did you actually measure it?

Rajan: When I joined Atlassian, we chose to frame developer productivity as ‘Developer Joy’. If developers are frustrated, blocked, or taken out of their flow, it doesn’t matter what productivity metric you pick — you’re not going to get great outcomes.

We track this with regular satisfaction surveys and hard metrics tied to pain points. Developer satisfaction has gone from 49% to 83%, and we see that show up in the work. For example, by focusing on one of the biggest friction points, the Confluence backend team cut its full server build time by more than 60%. We see these kinds of investments as core to our ability to ship value to customers.

Cheung: When you tested early versions of Rovo Dev internally, what did engineers push back on?

Rajan: Early on, the feedback we got on Rovo Dev was that parts of the experience felt like ‘magic’ in the wrong way. It would do something useful, but you could not see enough of the work it did to get there.

We actually scrapped and reworked an early ‘one click, do it all’ flow because our own teams would not touch it without more transparency and control. They wanted a way to understand each step the agent took, how their instructions led to different outcomes, and the ability to steer the agent. That pushed us hard toward agent sessions you can inspect and experiences that keep developers in the loop.

Why it matters: Rajan’s early Rovo Dev story highlights how critical internal feedback loops are when adopting agentic AI. The more teams listen to users (and iterate on what feels opaque, risky, or frustrating), the stronger and more trustworthy the system becomes. Iteration goes hand-in-hand with developer trust in an AI-native world.

ACCOUNTABILITY

🧠 What happens when AI makes a mistake?

The Rundown: Rajan says powerful AI agents should be deployed to production only when there’s clear human ownership and a way to track, monitor, and steer the system’s behavior, creating an accountability layer that moves as fast as the AI itself.

Cheung: As AI agents take on more autonomous work, how do you maintain accountability, and why can’t “the AI did it” ever be an excuse?

Rajan: When something goes wrong, ‘the AI did it’ can’t be the answer, because AI doesn’t own customer trust – we do.

As we bring autonomous AI into our workflows, we have to be explicit about accountability: every AI-assisted decision or action has to have a clear human owner. If we can’t understand or observe how an AI is behaving, it doesn’t belong in a critical path.

We put guardrails and observability around AI, we log and audit its actions, and we make sure teams treat it like any other powerful tool: you understand failure modes, you monitor it, and you don’t ship without ownership. AI can help move faster, but it doesn’t replace judgment and responsibility.

Why it matters: With something as powerful as agentic AI, accountability is non-negotiable. If you get it right, you unlock speed, trust, and durable customer confidence. But if you get it wrong, the consequences can be massive — because autonomous systems can amplify mistakes just as quickly as they amplify progress.

SAAS STORY

⚡️ Truth about the “death of SaaS” theory

The Rundown: Despite the rise of AI coding agents, Rajan argues SaaS tools aren’t going anywhere. In fact, he believes these tools will get stronger — with AI working across projects and controls by tapping contextual insights.

Cheung: What’s your take on the whole “saaspocalypse” narrative that AI agents will kill SaaS altogether?

Rajan: The idea that one person in your team can vibe code an in-house solution over a weekend and replace a mature SaaS solution you’re paying for, in my view, is overrated.

When customers buy software-as-a-service, they are not just buying the code; they buy workflows, shared context, security, compliance, and reliability. That is where well-designed SaaS products still matter a lot. What AI actually does is make great SaaS even more valuable.

Rajan added: Your projects, docs, tickets, and conversations live in those systems, and AI can now move across them, automate the boring parts, and orchestrate agents around trusted workflows and controls. So I am more interested in SaaS that becomes AI-native than in hot takes that SaaS is dead.

Why it matters: The debate is still on, but one thing’s clear: as AI agents grow more capable, the foundation of SaaS will become even more important. AI will evolve the platforms that already hold an organization’s workflows and institutional knowledge, serving as trusted systems of record.

LIGHTNING ROUND

⚡️ Quick hits with Rajeev

Most underrated AI trend right now?

Rajan: Lots of AI products today are designed for a single-player system. We see much greater potential in how AI helps entire teams work better together — allowing important context to flow across a team of humans and agents.

Something you believe about AI that most people in tech would disagree with?

Rajan: I think AI will make engineering more human, not less. A lot of people worry we will lose the craft — I believe we will spend less energy on repetitive implementation and more time on strategic, creative work and collaboration.

Advice for teams struggling with developer burnout?

Rajan: Start by fixing one concrete, high-friction problem that impacts your team. You’d be surprised by how quickly chipping away at issues like slow build times and noisy tooling can multiply and have a greater impact.

You worked at Microsoft for 20+ years, then led engineering at Meta. What did each teach you about building great teams?

Rajan: Microsoft taught me the value of deep technical rigor and building platforms that stand the test of time. Meta taught me how powerful it is when you pair strong engineering talent with a bias for fast iteration and learning. At Atlassian, I try to combine both: long-term architecture with a culture that ships, learns, and adapts quickly.

See you soon,

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

Tech

Meta sued over Ray-Ban privacy

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are at the center of a nightmarish privacy lawsuit: a proposed U.S. class action alleges the company let human reviewers access users’ intimate recordings, despite marketing that suggested stronger protections.

The case is raising a simple, unsettling question for smart-glasses users: when the camera is on, who might really be watching?

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Meta’s AI glasses hit with privacy suit

  • Apple’s $599 MacBook for Chromebook crowd

  • Oura acquires gesture-recognition startup

  • Science Corp nabs $230M for brain implant

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

👓 Meta’s AI glasses hit with privacy suit

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta is facing a proposed U.S. class-action lawsuit alleging that its Ray-Ban Meta AI smart glasses secretly routed intimate user videos to low-paid human reviewers, violating the company’s own privacy promises.

The details:

  • A proposed U.S. class-action lawsuit accuses Meta and Luxottica of misleading buyers about the privacy protections of Ray-Ban smart glasses.

  • Plaintiffs say Meta failed to disclose that contractors and employees could view user recordings, including nudity, sex acts, and people using the bathroom.

  • The case follows reports that low-paid reviewers in Kenya were required to watch and label intimate clips as part of Meta’s safety and AI-training pipeline.

  • Regulators, including authorities in the U.K., are also probing whether Meta’s data practices for the glasses meet transparency and consent standards.

Why it matters: The complaint says Meta misled customers about this human-review pipeline and put millions at risk of stalking, extortion, and identity theft, while Meta counters that contractors review shared Meta AI content to improve the glasses’ user experience and that this human involvement is disclosed in its policy fine print.

APPLE

🍏 Apple’s $599 MacBook for the Chromebook crowd

Image source: Apple

The Rundown: Apple launched a $599, iPhone-chip-powered MacBook Neo that brings bright colors and bargain pricing to directly challenge low-cost Windows laptops and Chromebooks. It’s set to hit stores on March 11.

The details:

  • The Neo uses an iPhone‑class A‑series chip paired with up to 16GB of unified memory and fast NVMe storage, aiming for all‑day battery life.

  • Apple is offering the Neo in multiple bright colors, visually positioning it closer to iPads and older plastic MacBooks than its current pro-focused lineup.

  • The machine targets students and first-time buyers who currently gravitate toward Chromebooks and cheaper Windows laptops.

  • By undercutting traditional MacBook prices, Apple is moving aggressively into a segment long dominated by PC OEMs and Google’s education partners.

Why it matters: Apple is putting real pressure on bargain Windows laptops and Chromebooks with a $599 MacBook that still feels like a “real” Mac. By pairing an iPhone-class chip with a colorful, fanless design and long battery life, the MacBook Neo aims to hook first-time buyers without undercutting its pricier line.

OURA

👊🏼 Oura acquires gesture-recognition startup

Image source: Oura

The Rundown: Smart ring maker Oura just acquired Helsinki-based gesture-recognition startup Doublepoint to fuse voice and micro‑hand movements into its rings, turning the health tracker into a discreet control hub for next‑gen wearable AI.

The details:

  • The deal is designed to layer gesture recognition and voice controls on top of Oura’s continuous health sensing to trigger features without screens.

  • All of Doublepoint’s team, including its four co-founders, will join Oura, forming a new hub for interaction design inside the Finnish wearable company.

  • Oura, valued at $11B, has sold more than 5.5M rings and expects sales to top $1.5B in 2026 as smart ring shipments jumped about 51% last year.

  • This is Oura’s fourth recent acquisition, following Sparta Science, Veri, and Proxy, each adding a new layer to what was primarily a sleep tracker.

Why it matters: Oura CEO Tom Hale said gesture controls, paired with voice inputs, could become central to future versions of the ring, though meaningful implementation isn’t happening right away. Still, the acquisition helps Oura defend its smart ring lead in the category, as wearables start moving toward a post-screen interaction model.

SCIENCE CORPORATION

🧠 Science Corp nabs $230M for brain implant

Image source: Science Corp (PRIMA retinal implant)

The Rundown: Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak’s neurotech startup Science Corporation closed a $230M Series C, valuing the company at roughly $1.5B and putting serious fuel behind its bid to restore sight to patients blinded by retinal disease.

The details:

  • The funds will accelerate clinical trials and regulatory approvals in the U.S. and Europe for PRIMA, a subretinal chip paired with camera-equipped glasses.

  • In early trials with 47 patients, PRIMA has helped people with advanced macular degeneration recognize letters, numbers, and short words.

  • Science Corp. is seeking a CE mark in the EU, aiming for mid‑2026 approval with Germany as its first launch market, while it continues talks with the FDA.

Why it matters: Science Corporation’s side projects — from cortical interfaces to organ-preservation tech — show it’s thinking beyond implants to a neurotech platform. That puts it in more direct competition with Neuralink and Precision Neuroscience, which are also racing to own the hardware layer between brains and machines.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Oracle is reportedly preparing to cut thousands of jobs as it grapples with a cash crunch caused by massive spending on AI data centers and related infrastructure.

A global Amazon outage left tens of thousands of shoppers facing failed payments and checkout glitches, with Downdetector logging around 20K problem reports.

Online retailer Quince is reportedly in talks with investors to raise a new funding round that would more than double its valuation to above $10B.

Microsoft confirmed that its next-gen Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, is a high-performance console that will run both Xbox and PC games.

U.S. defense tech firm Anduril is raising a multibillion-dollar round that could double last year’s $30B valuation to about $60B. 

Researchers built a stable, ultra-bright 300-nanometer OLED pixel using a nano-antenna, enabling full HD displays small enough to fit on a grain of sand.

London-based smartphone maker Nothing launched new phones and headphones in bright colors to counter what its founder calls a “boring” tech market.

Whoop, the maker of connected fitness bands, plans to increase its workforce by about 75% in 2026 by hiring more than 600 people to fuel growth ahead of a likely IPO.

Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee admitted on X that the $7M annual recurring revenue figure he gave TechCrunch last summer was a deliberate lie.

BYD unveiled its Blade Battery 2.0 pack, which can fully charge in just about 10 minutes but only when paired with its new 1.5-megawatt Flash Charging stations.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

AI

OpenAI's 'best model ever' goes live

Zach Mink • 7 minutes

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI needed a win after a rough stretch of public sentiment — and GPT-5.4 looks like a big one.

The company's new top model outperforms humans on desktop tasks and across 83% of job-specific evaluations, with new highs across math, science, coding, and reasoning to match. OAI researcher Noam Brown's take: "We see no wall."

In today’s AI rundown:

  • GPT-5.4 beats humans at their own desktops

  • Netflix acquires Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking startup

  • Turn an investment memo into a polished slide deck

  • Anthropic’s early-warning system for AI job loss

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🧠 GPT-5.4 beats humans at their own desktops

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just rolled out GPT-5.4, the company’s new top model with major upgrades on desktop tasks, coding, reasoning, science, math, and more — with VP of Science Kevin Weil calling it "our best model ever".

The details:

  • OAI shipped GPT-5.4 just two days after rolling out 5.3 Instant as the default chat model, available now as GPT-5.4 Thinking for Plus, Team, and Pro users.

  • The model scored 75% on OSWorld-V, which tests real desktop navigation — 3 points above the human baseline of 72.4% and 2x of what GPT-5.2 managed.

  • 5.4 also supports up to 1M tokens of context and a new x-high reasoning effort setting, letting agents plan and execute across longer tasks that take hours.

  • GPT-5.4 won or matched against professionals 83% of the time on GDPval, a knowledge-work benchmark across 44 jobs — up from 71% for GPT-5.2.

Why it matters: OpenAI needed a win after a rough week of sentiment, and GPT 5.4 looks like one — with performance that looks to take the next step up the frontier, particularly for desktop use cases to push forward agentic abilities. The launch also comes with a big statement from OAI researcher Noam Brown: "We see no wall”.

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.

NETFLIX & BEN AFFLECK

🎬 Netflix acquires Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking startup

Image source: Netflix

The Rundown: Netflix just acquired InterPositive, a stealth AI filmmaking company Ben Affleck started in 2022 — bringing all 16 staffers and Affleck himself aboard as senior adviser in a rare acquisition for a streaming giant.

The details:

  • InterPositive's tech trains models on a production's own footage, then handles post work like relighting, swapping backgrounds, and fixing continuity errors.

  • Affleck said he was shocked by how much engineering talent was pouring into AI video, "but no artistic, no filmmaking information whatsoever”.

  • The actor emphasized that his company’s tech is “not generating video from nothing”, instead learning from the existing filmed shots and actors.

  • Affleck appeared on the JRE Podcast last month, saying he "can't stand" what AI writes, and that the tech would be more of a tool for production workflows.

Why it matters: Hollywood has spent the AI boom either hiding the tech’s use or railing against it, but an Oscar-winning industry leader putting his reputation on a tool could go a long way to shifting sentiment. For all the “AI killed Hollywood” X posts, the real upgrades come from the production workflow aspects Affleck is addressing.

AI TRAINING

📋 Turn an investment memo into a polished slide deck

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Manus to turn a structured investment memo into a professional, ready-to-present slide deck in Google Slides. You can try this with any type of memo with structured, formulaic sections.

Step-by-step:

  1. Start with a memo PDF with sections like: market analysis, team background, business diligence, traction, SWOT analysis, and deal dynamics. We used Sequoia’s 2014 DoorDash memo for our test

  2. Go to manus.im and sign up, then click New task > Create slides, attach your PDF, and prompt: “Turn this investment memo into a slide deck”

  3. That’s it. Manus will create the deck for you, and it usually will one-shot the layout. You can edit or present the deck in Manus, or ask it to update it for you

  4. When done, you can download your slides as PPTX, PDF, or click “Convert to Google Slides,” and it will save the deck perfectly in Google Slides for you

Pro tip: Attach an example deck with your memo and tell Manus to style your new deck in the same way.

PRESENTED BY BLAND AI

☎️ How Soulja Boy automated his voice with AI

The Rundown: Soulja Boy just became the first rapper to automate his voice with AI. Bland AI, a voice AI company out of San Francisco, bought his voice to let anyone call him — generating 30M+ views in 24 hours and thousands of enterprise signups.

Even if you don't want Soulja answering your business calls, Bland allows you to:

  • Clone your best reps' voice to scale their success across your entire business

  • Deploy AI voice agents that sound human, without adding headcount

  • Get started for free on a platform trusted by thousands of enterprises

Call Soulja Boy to try it out at (415) 480-0000 or sign up free at bland.ai.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Anthropic’s early-warning system for AI job loss

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic published a study on AI’s job impact, cross-referencing what AI could automate against what people are using Claude for — finding that while mass layoffs haven't hit, the youngest workers in are already getting squeezed out.

The details:

  • The study uses "observed exposure," a metric that gauges AI job displacement by comparing tasks AI can do to what they are already automating.

  • Computer programmers top the exposure list at 75% task coverage, followed by customer service reps and data entry workers at 67%.

  • Roughly a third of the U.S. workforce sits at zero AI exposure right now, largely in hands-on roles like cooks, bartenders, and lifeguards.

  • No broad unemployment spike has appeared since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, but hiring into exposed fields for 22-to-25-year-olds fell 14% in that time.

Why it matters: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has not been subtle about what he believes is looming on the jobs front due to AI, and we’ve already seen several industry stock prices tank this year following Claude releases. But even with the warnings, the world still feels drastically underprepared for the disruption coming.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

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

  • 🧠 GPT-5.4 - OpenAI's flagship reasoner with native computer use, 1M context

  • 🎞️ Luma Agents - Luma's AI agent for scaling creative output across teams

  • 🎥 LTX-2.3 - Lightricks' video AI upgrade with more detail, cleaner audio

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

The Pentagon officially labeled Anthropic ‘supply chain risk’, which the company plans to challenge in court, coming amid reports that both sides had resumed deal talks.

Lightricks released LTX-2.3, an upgrade to its powerful open-source video model, and LTX Desktop, a free local video editor built on the same engine.

Google released an open-source CLI for its full Workspace suite, with 40+ built-in agent skills designed for easy integration into agentic platforms.

Ex-OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew is raising $70M at a $700M valuation for Arda, his startup building an AI platform to automate factory floors with robots.

Meta is being sued after an investigation found that overseas contractors reviewing Ray-Ban AI smart glasses footage were seeing nudity and other private user content.

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 Tineke B. in Auckland, NZ:

"I just created a website with AI that's clocked up 5,000 organic visits in less than a week: To find out ferry timetables in Auckland, you had to visit the Auckland Transport website, click numerous links, and then download a PDF (yes, a PDF!) to view the ferry timetables.

This was super annoying for me, so I used Claude to create a site for it. I shared it on a few local FB groups, and it's taken off. Over 5,000 visits in less than a week and 100s of comments on social media thanking me for making people's lives easier. It only took me a couple of hours and has solved a real (first-world) problem for commuters.”

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

Waymo has a big problem in Austin

Jennifer Mossalgue • 5 minutes

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Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Waymo has long been the gold standard of autonomous driving. But federal investigators are circling after a robotaxi rolled past a school bus of boarding children — and just this Sunday, another blocked an ambulance racing to an Austin mass shooting.

The code will be updated, but can the company update confidence, too?

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Waymo has a school bus-sized problem

  • Tether-backed Neura chases billion-dollar raise

  • Noble exits stealth with a heavy-lifting humanoid

  • Scientists built a farm bot that rots into the soil

  • Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WAYMO

🚌 Waymo has a school bus-sized problem

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Waymo’s driverless taxis in Austin are under intense scrutiny after one failed to stop for a school bus and another blocked an ambulance rushing to a mass‑shooting scene, raising fresh questions about how these vehicles interpret risk.

The details:

  • In January, a robotaxi illegally passed a stopped school bus while children were boarding, after a remote human agent mistakenly cleared it to proceed.

  • Austin ISD cameras have caught roughly two dozen similar Waymo school-bus violations since September.

  • NHTSA and NTSB have both opened formal investigations, with the January incident now the centerpiece of an active federal probe.

  • In a separate episode, a driverless Waymo briefly blocked an ambulance, forcing a police officer to commandeer the vehicle and move it out of the way.

Why it matters: Waymo has filed a software recall, insists it is improving performance around school buses and emergency scenes, and has declined detailed public comment on the ambulance incident even as local officials and safety advocates question whether its “safety‑first” AV stack is ready for crowded urban chaos.

NEURA ROBOTICS

🤖 Tether-backed Neura chases billion-dollar raise 

Image source: Neura Robotics

The Rundown: German humanoid startup Neura Robotics is reportedly closing in on one of Europe's largest-ever robotics financings — a €1B (~$1.1B) round backed by stablecoin giant Tether.

The details:

  • The deal would value the Metzingen-based company at roughly €4B ($4.3B), making it one of Europe’s highest valued robotics players.

  • Neura has already locked in an order book of around €1B from industrial customers for its transport robots, cobots, and robotic arms.

  • The company's edge: tight in-house integration of sensors, control electronics, and AI software into what it calls “cognitive robots.”

  • The raise follows a $130M Series B last year that pushed total funding past $200M and helped Neura double its headcount to over 300.

Why it matters: A Tether-led round would mark one of the crypto firm’s boldest moves outside digital assets, following earlier bets on Blackrock Neurotech and Italian humanoid startup Generative Bionics. For Neura, a 10-figure raise would put a European humanoid maker in the same fundraising weight class as top U.S. rivals.

NOBLE MACHINES

💪 Noble exits stealth with a heavy-lifting humanoid

Image source: Noble Machines

The Rundown: Ex‑SpaceX and Apple veterans’ startup Noble Machines emerged from stealth this week with its no‑frills, heavy‑lifting Moby humanoid already working real shifts on factory floors just 18 months after founding.

The details:

  • Noble Machines — formerly Under Control Robotics — says its robots are already deployed at an undisclosed Fortune Global 500 manufacturer.

  • Founded by engineers from SpaceX, Apple, NASA, and Caltech, the Sunnyvale-based startup is focused on real factory and construction environments.

  • Its Moby humanoid is built for hazardous, physically demanding work across manufacturing, construction, logistics, energy, and semiconductor plants.

  • Running end-to-end autonomy on a single NVIDIA Jetson Orin with an Isaac-based training loop, the robot uses whole-body control to learn new tasks.

Why it matters: Noble Machines says its Moby bot uses whole-body AI control and language-based learning to quickly pick up new jobs while hauling 60 lbs. across rough terrain, putting it in the same lifting league as Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and ahead of Agility’s Digit and Figure 3 — and a next-gen Moby is already on the way.

ROBOTICS RESEARCH

🌾 Scientists built a farm bot that rots into the soil

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Scientists just built a fully compostable soft robot designed for real-world farm use — one that monitors crops for a full growing season, then quietly dissolves into the soil it just analyzed rather than becoming e-waste.

The details:

  • The system uses biodegradable electronics and soft materials that survive real farm conditions to monitor plant health and the environment.

  • Robotic fingers or soft grippers are designed for in-field plant monitoring tasks like tracking moisture, nutrients, or pollutants at high spatial resolution.

  • When its job is done, it breaks down into benign byproducts that can act as soil nutrients, turning the sensor itself into part of the system it was monitoring.

  • The work pushes soft robotics toward “ecoresorbable” designs, where robots are treated as temporary infrastructure rather than permanent hardware.

Why it matters: Digital agriculture has long faced a tradeoff: durable sensors create e-waste, biodegradable ones can’t hack real soil conditions. This bot looks to have cracked that problem. Fully compostable components are now field-ready, moving degradable soft robotics out of the lab and into actual dirt.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Amazon cut at least 100 white-collar jobs in its robotics division, separate from the 16K corporate layoffs announced in January.

Hyundai unveiled a firefighting robot designed to navigate dangerous environments, withstand intense heat and smoke, and support human crews.

Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO, shifting its long-planned listing away from New York.

WeRide, Baidu’s Apollo Go, and Pony.ai paused robotaxi services in parts of the Middle East, pulling back from Dubai amid regional security tensions.

Next-gen Coco Robotics delivery bots are rolling out in LA, with larger, tougher, more autonomous robots designed to better handle the wear and tear of city streets.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said robotics, driven by its new Dragonwing AI chips, will become a major business for the company within two years.

Singapore-based startup Asimov opened preorders for its open-source Asimov humanoid, a roughly 1.2-meter-tall, 25‑plus‑DOF Unitree G1 rival.

Pony.ai claimed its seventh‑generation robotaxi has reached per‑vehicle profitability in Shenzhen, its second Chinese tier‑one city after Guangzhou.

Google DeepMind launched its first accelerator in Europe, a three‑month, equity‑free program for early‑stage European robotics startups.

China built a massive high‑precision 3D face database plus an AI model to give humanoids more natural, expressive faces.

The UK Atomic Energy Authority and CERN built a mouse-sized robot, PipeINEER, to crawl through LHC pipes and use AI vision to spot faults quickly and safely.

China flight-tested an 8-foot-long experimental drone built largely from bamboo, aiming to create a cheap, lightweight, and quickly deployable platform.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

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

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