Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Midjourney has spent years turning text prompts into surreal images. But its next big image project is a little more personal: the inside of your body.

The company just revealed a full-body scanner that lowers users through an ultrasound ring for fast body maps, and wraps the whole thing in a spa rollout — becoming easily the most surprising AI launch of the week.

P.S. — We’re excited to roll out a new weekly feature called Rowan’s Corner, where our founder and CEO Rowan Cheung will share his more personal takes on AI, building The Rundown, and more! Check it out below.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Midjourney’s wild medical hardware pivot

• Rowan’s Corner: How I’m preparing for an AI doctor

• Save hours on meeting prep with Google Gemini

• OpenAI poaches a transformer pioneer from Google

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MIDJOURNEY

🩻 Midjourney’s wild medical hardware pivot

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Midjourney pivots from image generation to medical hardware: the Midjourney Scanner uses underwater ultrasonic sensors to image the full body in 60 seconds, with plans to house the device inside its own spas starting in 2027.

The details:

• The scanner lowers users through water and a ring of ultrasound sensors, with Midjourney aiming to finish a full-body scan in just 60 seconds.

• Midjourney founder David Holz says it rivals an MRI’s detail in a fraction of the time, and built the machine with ultrasound-chip maker Butterfly Network.

• The first Midjourney Spa opens in 2027 in San Francisco’s Union Square, pairing around 10 scanners with saunas, cold plunges, and hot tubs.

Why it matters: Although there is still plenty to prove out, sign us up for an eventual spa day that doubles as a full-body health scan. Midjourney’s hardware vision is the type of device the future has promised but seemed far-fetched. After this wild reveal, the startup’s other mysterious “TBA” products gain even more intrigue.

TOGETHER WITH MERCURY

💸 Banking that executes for you

The Rundown: Most founders only understand their finances by exporting data into spreadsheets, because their bank* can’t do the work itself. Mercury Command flips that — it’s AI that takes action for you inside your account. You review and approve everything.

With Mercury Command, you can:

• Ask “what’s my cash flow” or “follow up on that invoice” and it’s done

• Get actionable insights from your live account data

• Turn natural language into completed work across Mercury

Try Mercury Command.

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

ROWAN’S CORNER

🩺 How I’m preparing for an AI doctor

Image source: The Rundown

The Rundown: Rowan’s Corner is a new weekly feature where our founder and CEO Rowan Cheung shares his more personal takes on AI, his conversations with leaders in the industry, building The Rundown, and more.

Rowan: It’s been weeks since I spoke with Demis Hassabis, but I can’t stop thinking about what he called “the biggest watershed moment in AI.”

A year ago, he told me AI could help cure all diseases within our lifetimes. This time, I asked if his timeline had changed. “They’ve not shifted, but they’ve hardened, they’ve tightened,” he said. “I'm very confident.”

Let that sink in: the Nobel laureate running Google DeepMind is growing confident all disease could be cured within 10–20 years.

So I started thinking: if medical superintelligence is approaching, what’s the smartest way to get ready for it today? (My best theory below, but hit reply and tell me yours if you disagree!)

My answer is to collect as much data as possible to feed the eventual medical superintelligence. Wearing fitness trackers, tracking workouts, and getting blood tests that track as many biomarkers as possible.

Today, this data can help me with little things. Vitamin D3 low? Cool, I’ll supplement. Sleep score dropping? Let’s try magnesium. But when medical superintelligence has arrived, all this data I’ve collected for years will be worth its weight in gold.

My bet is that drag-and-dropping 5–10 years of health data will be literally life-changing for folks disciplined enough to start collecting today.

AI TRAINING

⏰ Save hours on meeting prep with Google Gemini

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Google Workspace Studio to turn upcoming meetings into automatic prep time and a Gemini-written brief.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Google Workspace Studio and create a new flow with Based on a meeting.

2. Set the trigger to run 10–15 minutes before the meeting so the prep block lands before the call starts.

3. Add an Ask Gemini step that creates a short prep brief with meeting context, open loops, suggested agenda, and questions to ask.

4. Add Create a doc next. Use the meeting title variable + “Meeting Prep” for the doc name and the Gemini output for the body.

5. Add Block time last. Use the meeting title and meeting start time variables, then place the doc link variable in the prep block description.

6. Add a fake meeting to Google Calendar, click Test workflow, and select that meeting from the dropdown before you turn the flow on. Then confirm the prep block lands before the meeting and the brief link works.

Going further: Start with one recurring meeting type, test the flow, then expand the same Studio setup to client calls, hiring interviews, and exec reviews.

PRESENTED BY INCOGNI

📞 That scam call wasn’t random

The Rundown: Scammers don’t guess your number — they buy it from data brokers selling your phone, home address, and relatives’ info online. That’s how a random call turns into phishing, impersonation, or worse. Incogni removes your data from these databases and keeps removing it automatically.

With Incogni working in the background, you can:

• Keep phone numbers and addresses off broker databases

• Shrink exposure to identity theft and impersonation

• Let automated removals do the work continuously

• Protect your family’s details alongside your own

Try Incogni and get 55% off with code RUNDOWN.

OPENAI

🤝 OpenAI poaches a transformer pioneer from Google

Image source: Noam Shazeer

The Rundown: OpenAI just hired Noam Shazeer away from Google, pulling in a Gemini co-lead whose 2017 transformer work helped shape modern AI — just two years after Google paid $2.7B to bring him back from his own startup, Character.AI.

The details:

• Shazeer started at Google in 2000, and co-authored “Attention Is All You Need” in 2017, a transformer paper that helped shape nearly every modern chatbot.

• Google reportedly spent $2.7B in 2024 to win Shazeer back from Character AI, the startup he built after Google snubbed his initial ChatGPT-style pitch.

• Shazeer was a VP and co-lead on Google’s Gemini, with his expertise helping bring the models near the frontier after falling behind OAI’s ChatGPT.

Why it matters: The talent wars have been quieter than last summer’s chaotic Meta poaching spree, but this is a big move. Where top AI researchers and engineers go is always a signal — and in 2026, the answer has consistently been Anthropic or OpenAI.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Codex - OpenAI’s agentic coding tool, with new Record & Replay for creating reusable skills

• 🧠 Brain - Perplexity’s self-improving memory for its Computer agent

• 🎨 Firefly Studio - Adobe’s upgraded all-in-one platform to generate and edit with AI

• 📑 Crosby - Agentic law firm for sales teams to speed up time to signature

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic’s Chris Ciauri told reporters during an event in Korea that the company is “very confident” that its Mythos and Fable models will become available again in the “coming days.”

Adobe rolled out new agentic skills for Firefly AI Assistant, also extending its creative agent into public beta across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.

Databricks launched a slate of new agentic tools at its Data + AI Summit, including LTAP for running AI apps and analytics, and an AI-run customer data platform called CustomerLake.

Former White House AI advisor Dean W. Ball is joining OpenAI to lead Strategic Futures, a new team that will help shape frontier AI policy.

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 Kristin B. in Los Altos, CA:

“I teach classic Chinese mah-Jong in the Bay Area. The Chinese version includes a two-step scoring process that can feel complicated at first but is essential to learning the game.

With Claude Code, I created a scoring app for my students to check if they correctly scored their hands. It was fun to create the app, and the best feeling was when I showed my scoring app to my son, and he responded with both surprise and respect."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Inside the deadlock keeping Mythos offline

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Xbox’s studio crisis gets bigger

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meet Eno, the anti-humanoid robot

• Today’s AI tool guide: Save hours on meeting prep with Google Gemini

• RSVP to next workshop on June 25: Get consultant-grade strategy from AI

See you soon,

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

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Genesis AI’s Eno robot skips the humanoid cosplay entirely, rolling in on wheels and folding down to suitcase size when the shift’s over.

Backed by Eric Schmidt and a $105M seed round, the French startup is betting that dexterous hands, a shape-shifting body, and a foundation model called GENE can beat a pair of legs and a face.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Meet Eno, the anti-humanoid on wheels

• Mobileye is building its own robotaxi fleet

• Inside Morph’s pitch for octopus-inspired physical AI

• XDOF nabs $70M to solve robotics’ data problem

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GENESIS AI

🤖 Meet Eno, the anti-humanoid on wheels 

Image source: Genesis AI

The Rundown: French startup Genesis AI — backed by Eric Schmidt and sitting on a $105M seed round — just unveiled Eno, a wheeled, foldable robot that skips the humanoid template entirely and bets industrial customers want function over a face.

The details:

• Eno runs on a wheeled base topped by an adjustable tower of articulated panels; it can raise its height in real time, then collapse to the size of a suitcase.

• Hands do the humanoid work instead: 20 active, back-drivable degrees of freedom, sized one-to-one to match human hands.

• GENE, Genesis’s foundation model, runs Eno as a “true physical agent” that reasons, adapts, and owns outcomes beyond pre-defined tasks.

• Dozens of units are built already; production scales in later this year, landing first in logistics and manufacturing, then hotels, hospitals, and consumers.

Why it matters: Tesla and Figure are racing to build something that looks like a coworker; Genesis is betting customers just want the job done. With Eric Schmidt’s backing and human-grade dexterous hands behind a non-anthropomorphic frame, Eno could turn the industry’s two-legged consensus into an open question.

MOBILEYE

🚖 Mobileye is building its own robotaxi fleet

Image source: Mobileye

The Rundown: Mobileye, the company that built its name selling self-driving software to automakers, is about to become their competitor — launching its own robotaxi fleet in 2027 even as partners like Lyft and Volkswagen’s MOIA build services on its tech.

The details:

• 100 vehicles are set to launch in an unnamed U.S. city in 2027, scaling to roughly 17K robotaxis over five years if it works.

• Mobileye already powers Lyft’s robotaxis (Dallas, as soon as 2026) and VW’s MOIA subsidiary — both now compete with their own supplier.

• The fleet runs through Moovit, Mobileye’s ride-hailing app; press photos hint at a modified Ora iQ from Great Wall Motors, reports Inside EVs.

Why it matters: CEO Amnon Shashua has wanted this since 2020, when he told TechCrunch the driverless “Holy Grail” runs through robotaxis first — a long-stated plan, now shipping. The test is whether “extension, not replacement” holds up once a supplier and its customers are competing for the same riders.

MORPH

🐙 Inside Morph’s pitch for octopus-inspired physical AI

Image source: Morph

The Rundown: UK-based Morph just came out of stealth with backing from 8VC and, oddly, Pharrell Williams, to build “soft robotic cells” — squishy, sensor-laden modules that change shape and stiffness on the fly, with the octopus as their design muse.

The details:

• Founder Dr. Jean Nehme, a former reconstructive surgeon, previously sold surgical AI startup Digital Surgery to Medtronic in 2020.

• “Soft robotic cells” are modular units that process environmental and user data and change their morphology to achieve specific objectives.

• Launch use cases are athletic performance, injury prevention, and mobility support; healthcare, automotive, and industrial safety categories come next.

• Morph’s strategy is to serve as a tech, design, and manufacturing partner, helping businesses incorporate soft robotics into their own products.

Why it matters: Soft robotics has spent two decades stuck in labs with impressive demos, but no path to scale. Morph says reinforcement learning paired with physics simulation closes that gap, and the investor list (Equinox’s chairman, a health-capital fund, Pharrell) backs up the real target: wearables first, industrial robotics later.

XDOF

💰 XDOF nabs $70M to solve robotics’ data problem

Image source: XDOF

The Rundown: Berkeley-based startup XDOF emerged from stealth today with $70M in funding to solve robotics’ biggest bottleneck — not models or chips, but the physical-world training data that doesn’t exist yet.

The details:

• XDOF has raised $70M led by Thrive Capital, and it’s already serving 20 customers, including several unnamed frontier AI labs.

• The startup builds teleoperation rigs and wearable sensors across a “data pyramid,” ranging from on-robot teleoperation to egocentric data captured by humans performing everyday tasks.

• XDOF is open-sourcing its ABC-130K robot training dataset: 130K manipulation trajectories, 300 hours of simulation, and 100 hours of evaluations.

Why it matters: Robots can’t learn the way LLMs did, scraping the open internet, because there’s no equivalent trove of physical-interaction data sitting around. XDOF is betting that whoever builds the pipeline to collect it, not just the model on top, ends up owning the most defensible layer of the robotics stack.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Uber will launch its premium Lucid-Nuro robotaxi service in Houston by mid-2027, the second city after San Francisco in its bid to take on Waymo.

Alibaba released the open-source Qwen-Robot Suite, featuring three models that hit 91.4% on LIBERO-Plus and work across quadrupeds, arms, and humanoids.

Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber signed a non-binding MOU to co-develop Level 4 robotaxis, with purpose-made taxis built by Stellantis and equipped with Wayve AI.

European Space Agency’s sensor-packed robotic arm, designed for collecting samples on future Moon and Mars missions, is heading into testing at Italy’s Leonardo.

The Italian Institute of Technology built a soft robotic arm modeled on octopus tentacles that can autonomously navigate and explore rocky ocean-floor terrain.

NVIDIA’s ENPIRE system uses AI coding agents to autonomously design, run, and refine real‑world robot training experiments, teaching arms skills like installing GPUs.

Stringman is an open-source ceiling-mounted robot that uses cables and a vision-guided gripper to find, grab, and sort household clutter into designated bins.

Booster Robotics’ T1 humanoid kicks soccer balls hard enough to dent a wall, sparking debate over how to safely manage that much force in robots.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Inside the deadlock keeping Mythos offline

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Xbox’s studio crisis gets bigger

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: UBTech’s ultra-realistic robot girlfriend

• Today’s AI tool guide: Build and host a custom CRM with Google Antigravity

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. While Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and others gather in France to talk AI safety with G7 world leaders, one of them has a very real security fight going on in real time.

Anthropic’s battle with the U.S. government over restrictions on Mythos and Fable is still at a standstill, and newly leaked letters, internal texts, and demands from Trump officials are dragging the drama right out into the open.

In today’s AI rundown:

• AI, world leaders meet at G7 as Mythos standoff continues

• Pew: Americans using AI more but trust it less

• Build and host a custom CRM with Google Antigravity

• Study: Expertise beats skill in Claude Code

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC & THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

🌎 AI, world leaders meet at G7 as Mythos standoff continues

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The U.S. government and Anthropic have remained at an impasse over the export restrictions that took the lab’s top models offline. But new details are emerging: a letter to Anthropic from Washington, employee reactions, and France’s G7.

The details:

• Bloomberg released a letter from U.S. Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick, who warned Anthropic against distributing Mythos/Fable to “foreign persons.”

• Internal messages obtained by the NYT show concern from employees that the lab is being “unfairly targeted” and “bullied based on bad vibes.”

• The Washington Post reported that the list of companies with Mythos access had “ballooned,” including a S. Korea firm with suspected ties to China.

• Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and others are at the G7 summit in France, expected to discuss AI regulation and safety with world leaders.

Why it matters: Anthropic employees are coming to the same conclusion we initially did — that this is a relationship issue more than a safety one. But details like WaPo’s expanded Mythos list point to a clear situation that would draw the ire of the USG, though its stance on jailbreaks sounds like an impossible ask to comply with.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

⚙️ Automate the work slowing you down

The Rundown: What if your team could eliminate the repetitive tasks eating up their day — without writing a single line of code? Slack’s built-in automation tools let you build workflows that move work forward automatically, from routing requests to notifying the right people at the right time.

In this guide, you’ll discover:

• How to set up no-code automations in minutes

• Ways to connect your favorite apps into seamless workflows

• 30 real examples of teams automating work in Slack

Get the guide.

PEW RESEARCH

📉 Pew: Americans using AI more but trust it less

Image source: Pew Research Center

The Rundown: Pew Research just released its 2026 data on more than 5K U.S. adults, measuring both how people use AI and how they feel about it — with the two lines running in opposite directions as adoption climbs while optimism continues to slide.

The details:

• Chatbots just crossed a milestone, with about half of U.S. adults now using one, and a quarter do so daily — a leap from just 1/3 of the public in 2024.

• Pessimism reigns, with nearly 40% expecting AI to make society worse over the next 20 years and just 16% believing it will change things for the better.

• The under-30 crowd leans on AI the hardest but trusts it the least, with only 14% seeing a positive payoff for society.

• ChatGPT still dominates the field at 44% of adults, double its 2023 reach, with Gemini at 24% and Claude at just 6%.

Why it matters: This data aligns with our own gut check of AI’s sentiment outside of our narrow bubble, with adoption rising alongside fears for the future. The adoption numbers behind specific platforms are particularly wild, with Anthropic being the constant talk of the industry despite barely registering with the average American.

AI TRAINING

🧑‍💻 Build and host a custom CRM with Google Antigravity

The Rundown: Learn how to use Google Antigravity to turn a plain-English app spec into a hosted full-stack CRM. The key move is making the agent plan first, then using Firebase Auth, Firestore, and Firebase Hosting so the app has login, saved data, search, and a real URL.

Step-by-step:

1. Click here to download Google Antigravity. Install and open the desktop app.

2. Create a new folder, then open that folder in Antigravity. A clean folder keeps the agent focused.

3. Make sure you’re signed in with Google. This is what Antigravity and Firebase will use.

4. Give Antigravity a two-line app prompt: “Build Northstar CRM with login, contacts, companies, deals, notes, search, and dashboard cards. Use React, Vite, TypeScript, Firebase Auth, Firestore, and Firebase Hosting; plan first.”

5. Review the plan, then let Antigravity build the app. If it adds billing, teams, or extra SaaS features, cut the scope back.

6. Ask Antigravity how to install Firebase and follow those instructions. Then have it deploy to Firebase Hosting and test the live URL.

Going further: Ask Antigravity to add Google login, automatically set up Google Analytics, or connect a custom domain after the Firebase deploy works.

PRESENTED BY ONETRUST

📶 Design-driven governance for agentic AI

The Rundown: OneTrust’s ‘From Governance by Committee to Governance by Design’ white paper reveals how leading organizations are embedding AI governance into systems and workflows, enabling faster innovation, stronger oversight, and scalable governance for the age of agentic AI.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• Scale AI governance without bottlenecks

• Embed controls across the AI lifecycle

• Prepare for the rise of agentic AI

Get AI-ready with OneTrust.

AI RESEARCH

📊 Study: Expertise beats skill in Claude Code

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just analyzed 400K Claude Code sessions, studying how work splits between human vs. agent and what drives success — finding that a user’s own expertise in their field matters more than their overall coding expertise.

The details:

• Users made roughly 70% of planning decisions in a typical session, while Claude handled around 80% of execution choices.

• Skill changed the yield per prompt, with beginners drawing about five actions and 600 words from Claude versus an expert’s 12 actions and 3,200 words.

• Verified success rates confirmed by passing tests or saved work climbed to 28–33% for intermediate-and-above users, over double the 15% rate for novices.

• Lawyers, managers, and scientists with no coding job title nearly matched software engineers on coding tasks, finishing within just seven points of them.

Why it matters: This data rhymes with the Perplexity-Harvard study we covered last week, where agents pushed people toward harder, cross-field work rather than just faster work. Both point in the same direction, with the value of agents being capped less by the model itself and more by how much its user actually understands the job.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 Grok Imagine 1.5 - xAI’s newly upgraded image-to-video model

• 🔎 Exa Agent - Exa’s cost-effective, frontier-level web research API

• ⚙️ Eve - Vercel’s open-source framework for turning a file directory into an agent

• 🚀 GLM 5.2 - Z AI’s powerful new open-weights model

📰 Everything else in AI today

Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis reportedly proposed a “U.S.-led AI coalition” at G7, with international cooperation on model access, chip exports, and safety risks.

OpenAI reported $3.7B in Q1 cash burn against $5.7B in revenue in 2026, with both tripling from a year earlier, according to documents seen by The Information.

Jensen Huang told the AP the AI age demands “new social norms,” comparing the shift to how cars pushed society to add sidewalks and crosswalks.

Odyssey raised $310M at a $1.45B valuation, fueling its push to build general AI world models that simulate physics and human behavior in real time.

ByteDance released Seedance 2.0 mini, a new lower-cost variant of the company’s powerful AI video model.

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 Anonymous:

“I’m a retired birder with no formal software development background. Using AI coding tools, I built Chase Report, a web app that helps birders find and evaluate rare bird sightings. The app currently covers New Mexico, North Dakota, and Washington, with more states planned.

One feature automatically reads observer comments from multiple eBird checklists associated with a rare bird and generates a concise field summary describing what people are seeing. It also gathers links to photos, maps, and other relevant information in one place.

The surprising part is that I didn’t write most of the code myself. I described the features I wanted in plain English, tested the results, and kept iterating with AI until the app behaved the way I envisioned.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Cursor officially joins the SpaceX AI machine

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Xbox’s studio crisis gets bigger

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: UBTech’s ultra-realistic robot girlfriend

• Today’s AI tool guide: Build and host a custom CRM with Google Antigravity

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. SpaceX’s splashy IPO debut was less than a week ago, but the surging stock has already helped shore up another part of Elon Musk’s empire.

The $SPCX windfall just bankrolled a $60B takeover of Cursor, a deal Musk optioned back in April — and if CEO Michael Truell’s teasers on its next Opus-sized, “generally intelligent” model hold true, Musk may be fast-tracking his way near the frontier.

In today’s AI rundown:

• SpaceX nabs Cursor in $60B all-stock deal

• Z AI’s powerful open-weights model nears the frontier

• Conduct better stock research with Perplexity Finance

• Meta confronts its AI morale crisis

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SPACEX & CURSOR

💰 SpaceX nabs Cursor in $60B all-stock deal

Image source: Cursor

The Rundown: SpaceX just officially exercised its option to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a $60B deal paid entirely in stock, coming on the heels of a post-IPO rally that has nearly doubled the company’s value and sent Elon Musk’s personal wealth surging above $1T.

The details:

• Cursor and SpaceX announced an initial deal in April that provided an option to acquire the startup for $60B or pay $10B for the partnership alone.

• Since listing Friday at $135 a share, SpaceX has rocketed past $200, piling nearly $1T onto its value in under a week of public trading.

• Cursor CEO Michael Truell said its upcoming model will be “generally intelligent,” trained from scratch, and as big as Opus.

• SpaceX said Cursor is already part of a model-training push for Grok Build and its own editor, giving Musk a developer platform for his AI stack.

Why it matters: Cursor was already intertwined with SpaceX from the April deal, but the company’s up-only IPO surge just made a stock-only deal even easier. While Grok hasn’t been up to par on coding, the combination of Cursor’s models and SpaceX’s compute could turn things around at the breakneck speeds Musk likes to move at.

TOGETHER WITH MICROSOFT

👀 The FOMO is real: Microsoft Build

The Rundown: Microsoft Build empowered developers to innovate with AI through scalable security and oversight.

Highlights include:

• Microsoft IQ + Foundry, shared knowledge for faster software.

• MAI models, in-house reasoning and coding models.

• OpenClaw on Windows, locally automates developer tasks.

Learn more.

ZAI

🚀 Z AI’s powerful open-weights model nears the frontier

Image source: Z AI

The Rundown: Chinese AI lab Z AI just released GLM-5.2, a new open-weights model that is competitive with GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 across a series of coding benchmarks, marking the closest an open model has come to the top closed systems.

The details:

• 5.2 gains a 1M token context window with strong long-horizon task capabilities, along with two effort modes (High, Max) for tougher jobs.

• Z AI released the model with an MIT license, with its pricing staying the same as its predecessor at a fraction of the cost of frontier options.

• The model surpasses GPT 5.5 on benchmarks including real-world coding, reasoning, and math, with scores coming in just below Opus 4.8.

Why it matters: This is one of the most impressive open-weights releases yet, and it comes right as two questions press on the AI market: pricing and access. GLM-5.2’s coding performance is strong on its own, but pairing it with free open weights and GLM-5.1-level pricing puts it exactly where the industry is heading.

AI TRAINING

💰 Conduct better stock research with Perplexity Finance

The Rundown: Learn how to use Perplexity Finance as a free AI stock research hub. You’ll discover how to quickly research any stock using AI without having to open multiple tabs or pay for a bunch of different tools.

Step-by-step:

1. Download the Comet desktop app. This is Perplexity’s web browser. Open a new tab and click ‘Finance’ at the top.

2. Click ‘Screener’ when you want ideas. Use plain English, but keep the first search broad because strict screens can fail. Try: “Find energy stocks with low PE ratios.”

3. Click a stock ticker. Use ‘Overview’ to quickly skim recent news and bull/bear context. Check ‘Financials’ for filing data, ‘Earnings’ for beats and call highlights, and ‘Analysis’ to see Wall Street’s price targets.

4. When you’re looking at a stock, ask follow-up questions with the Comet assistant button at the top right instead of using the chat box at the bottom. The latter hides all the stock information.

5. Use this prompt: “Explain the stock move today in plain English. What are the most likely drivers, and what sources support each one?” Click the sources and verify dates.

Going further: You can set price alerts and use the built-in watchlist to follow stocks more closely. You can also connect your brokerage account via Plaid to analyze your portfolio in Perplexity Finance.

PRESENTED BY GLEAN

📈 Get more work per token

The Rundown: Token costs scale with agents, and model pricing is only part of the equation. This whitepaper shows how enterprise AI architecture shapes cost and utility at scale, from context retrieval to model routing and multi-step execution.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• How better context reduces unnecessary reasoning

• How routing improves work per token

• What to evaluate to scale sustainably

Get the whitepaper.

META

🧯 Meta confronts its AI morale crisis

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth just pledged a culture reset in a memo posted by Wired, promising manager caps, internal job moves, and office perks after reports of forced Applied AI transfers, model-training grunt work, and sinking morale.

The details:

• Bosworth said Meta “did an atrocious job explaining the vision” of its AI reorg, which forced thousands of employees into work supporting AI models in March.

• He admitted the rollout damaged trust, promising new manager report caps, less shuffling, social events, and better snack kitchens to boost morale.

• One worker branded the unit “the gulag,” and anger reportedly spilled out when someone hijacked a company livestream to trash a senior AI executive.

• The news comes alongside recent internal backlash over the company’s use of mandatory employee computer mouse tracking to collect AI training data.

Why it matters: Meta’s most recent Muse Spark model was a win for the rebuilt AI lab, but under the hood of the broader sprawling tech giant, things don’t sound great for the employees deep in the shuffling. But better “microkitchens” and social events sound like the corporate concessions that only further alienate employees.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🚀 GLM 5.2 - Z AI’s powerful new open-weights model

• 🧠 Copilot Cowork - Microsoft’s AI for running multi-step tasks across M365 apps, now generally available

• 🤑 Mercury Command - Natural-language agent for banking tasks, with built-in approvals

• 🎨 Framer 3.0 - Canvas-native agents that build and run your whole site

📰 Everything else in AI today

Cube + Databricks Webinar, June 30 — meet Cube, the BI and Agentic Analytics platform — powering dashboards, embedded analytics, and AI agents on Databricks. Learn more and register for free.*

The Trump administration reportedly rejected UK PM Keir Starmer’s request to exempt G7 allies from the export ban on Anthropic’s top models.

China’s DeepSeek raised over $7.4B at a $50B+ valuation, making it the priciest AI startup in the country — with founder Liang Wenfeng personally contributing $3B.

Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, its task-running AI agent, worldwide with usage-based pricing.

Cursor introduced Origin, the company’s new GitHub competitor, alongside a new iOS mobile app in beta for its AI coding platform.

*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 Leona B. in Burlington, Ontario:

“I'm in my 40s and wanted to run my first 10K last year, but wasn’t sure where to start. There are loads of running plans out there, but I had my own health and injury issues I needed to plan for and wanted something more personalized.

I used ChatGPT to build a Personalized Running Coach that specialized in women in their 40s. I shared my goals and designed a plan, and after each run I’d upload my Apple Watch data to get feedback.

I ran my first 10K last year and just completed my 2nd this year. What was fun was comparing my 2025 race data to this year’s, with ChatGPT helping me see where I’d made improvements and where I still need more work. I’ve signed up for the 2027 race with different goals, and have my next running plan already mapped out.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Cyber leaders mobilize for Fable in open letter

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Xbox’s studio crisis gets bigger

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: UBTech’s ultra-realistic robot girlfriend

• Today’s AI tool guide: Conduct better stock research w/ Perplexity Finance

• RSVP to today’s workshop: Build a Marketing Creative Studio 

See you soon,

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

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Major blows just landed at Xbox. Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory are racing to spin out of Microsoft to avoid closure — while Ninja Theory staff were reportedly told the studio is shutting down anyway.

For Microsoft’s gaming empire, it’s a brutal turn: the $69B Activision Blizzard deal didn’t fix the business, and now even Xbox’s most beloved creative shops are on the chopping block.

In today’s tech rundown:

• Xbox reset puts cult studios on the brink

• UK bans social media for under-16s

• Fox buys streaming giant Roku for $22B

• Solid-state AC could cut cooling’s CO2

• Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

🕹️ Xbox reset puts cult studios on the brink

Image source: Ninja Theory

The Rundown: Microsoft is deepening cuts at Xbox Game Studios again, with Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory racing to spin off and avoid closure — though Ninja Theory staff were reportedly told their studio is shutting down anyway.

The details:

• Bloomberg reports that Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory are in active negotiations to spin off from Microsoft to avoid closure.

• Ninja Theory staff were told on an internal call Monday that the studio is closing, though they’re hoping it finds a buyer, The Verge reports.

• Ninja Theory had just unveiled Senua, a new chapter in its Hellblade series, on June 7, and Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan left the company last week.

• It’s the fallout from new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's “reset”: she’s told staff Xbox’s annual revenue fell by nearly $500M over five years while hardware costs quadrupled.

Why it matters: This is the clearest evidence yet that Microsoft’s decade of gaming acquisitions — including the record $69B Activision Blizzard deal — hasn’t solved Xbox’s profitability problem, and acclaimed studios aren’t safe anymore. It’s the same belt-tightening that drove last year’s 9K Microsoft job cuts.

TECH POLICY

🇬🇧 UK bans social media for under-16s

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that the UK will ban social media for under-16s, claiming the measures will go “further than any country in the world” to protect children from online harms.

The details:

• The ban covers Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, while messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal stay accessible.

• The UK will also block livestreaming and stranger contact for under-16s, with curfews and infinite-scroll limits under consideration.

• Tech companies bear enforcement responsibility and face steep fines, with a target rollout by spring 2027.

• The UK joins Spain, Malaysia, France, Denmark, Norway, and Australia, which became the first country to implement such a ban in December.

Why it matters: Major platforms are pushing back, arguing it would be hard to enforce at scale and push teens onto riskier, unregulated sites. Early signals from Australia, where around 70% of parents polled in March said their children remained on banned platforms, suggest enforcement may be the law’s weakest link.

FOX & ROKU

📺 Fox buys streaming giant Roku for $22B 

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Fox is acquiring streaming pioneer Roku for $22B in cash and stock, merging its news, sports, and Tubi streaming business with Roku’s connected-TV platform to create the third-largest television company in the U.S.

The details:

• Fox is paying $160 a share for Roku — $96 in cash plus 0.9693 shares of Fox Class A stock per share — backed by a $12B loan it lined up for the deal.

• The deal pairs Fox’s news and sports networks and its Tubi platform with Roku’s connected-TV OS, the Roku Channel, and data from 100M households.

• Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood will join Fox’s board once the deal closes, and Roku says it’ll keep running as an “open, partner-friendly” platform.

• The move leaves existing Fox shareholders with about 73% of the combined company — Fox shares fell sharply after the announcement.

Why it matters: This hands a legacy broadcaster direct ownership of one of streaming’s biggest platforms and its trove of first-party viewer data — the ad-targeting currency that’s been migrating from traditional TV to tech platforms for years. It also shows live sports and news, paired with CTV scale, are a winning formula.

CLIMATE TECH

🥶 Solid-state AC could cut cooling's CO2

Image source: SHoP Architects/MIMiC Systems

The Rundown: Solid-state ACs — ditching compressors and refrigerants for currents, magnets, or pressure shifts — are entering pilot programs as global AC demand is set to triple by 2050, per MIT Technology Review.

The details:

• Brooklyn’s Mimic Systems shifts heat via thermoelectric current via materials like bismuth telluride, with a room-scale unit piloting in a Vancouver apartment.

• Germany’s Magnotherm is piloting a magnetocaloric system — cooling by magnetizing and demagnetizing materials — in a supermarket chain.

• A Hong Kong team’s elastocaloric device reportedly cools below 0°C; the UK’s Barocal is developing pressure-based barocaloric tech.

• Conventional AC hits a coefficient of performance of 3; thermoelectrics lose efficiency fast on big swings, limiting them to niche uses like car-seat cooling.

Why it matters: ACs already eat up 7% of global electricity and 3% of greenhouse-gas emissions, a load set to triple by 2050 as their use surges while the planet heats up. Even a modest foothold for solid-state systems could meaningfully cut that footprint and reduce reliance on CO2-intensive refrigerants.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Elon Musk says SpaceX could hit $1T in annual revenue by 2030, a forecast made just days after the company’s record IPO that valued it above $1.75T.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC the company is working on over 40 designs of new AI devices, including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, and watches.

Chinese leaker Instant Digital posted that a touchscreen MacBook is “100% confirmed,” adding to Gurman and Kuo reports of touchscreen MacBook Pro models.

Chinese Tesla drivers are using tiny plastic doll heads mounted near the rearview mirror to trick the cabin camera into thinking they’re watching the road, Wired reports.

Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato reportedly said curing certain cancers is a realistic goal, adding that AI is already helping the company develop medicines faster.

The FBI built a 22K-square-foot replica town in Huntsville, Alabama, to train investigators on real-world cyberattacks.

Apple reportedly built a fully customizable Camera app internally but held it back from iOS 27 to launch alongside the iPhone 18 Pro instead, per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

A new Data Center Watch (10a Labs) study found that data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth a combined $130B in Q1 2026.

French AI startup Mistral is in talks to raise around €3B ($3.5B) at a valuation of €20B (~$23.2B), nearly doubling its September €11.7B (~$13.6B) valuation.

UT Austin’s water-harvesting jacket fabric pulls 14–30 oz. of drinkable water from the air daily and could scale to backpacks or tents.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Why 100+ security experts say the Fable 5 ban backfires

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX posts biggest IPO in history

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: UBTech’s ultra-realistic robot girlfriend

• Today’s AI tool guide: Vet business opportunities with NotebookLM

• RSVP to our next workshop on June 17: Build a Marketing Creative Studio 

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Washington’s abrupt export control order that led to Anthropic’s Fable removal was supposedly a safety move. But so far, the security world isn’t buying the premise.

With more than 100 researchers signing a ‘Free Fable’ open letter and new reports pinning the fight on a communications breakdown, the restriction is starting to look more about politics than protection.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Free Fable: Cyber leaders mobilize in open letter

• Microsoft’s Nadella reframes how companies win with AI

• Vet business opportunities with NotebookLM

• Facebook gets new AI Mode, image editing upgrade

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

CYBERSECURITY & THE FABLE BAN

🛡️ Free Fable: Cyber leaders mobilize in open letter

Image source: Free Fable open letter

The Rundown: More than 100+ cybersecurity execs and researchers signed an open letter urging the U.S. to lift its export ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5, arguing it handcuffs defenders without slowing attackers who can pull the same capabilities from rival models.

The details:

• Ex-Facebook security head Alex Stamos said the flagged jailbreak produced a “proof of concept” of a flaw, which defensive teams use to patch weak spots.

• The letter singles out OAI’s Daybreak for doing the same flaw-finding, with GPT-5.5, Kimi 2.7, Opus, and Sonnet all having the same capability.

• The letter calls for model regulation to include grounding in scientific evaluations, a democratic process, and transparent and fair enforcement.

• Signees include security leaders tied to Adobe, Zoom, Sophos, Vercel, Veracode, Nvidia, and Stanford HAI.

Why it matters: Security researchers don’t agree with the government’s threat assessment that led to the restrictions, which adds to the cloud surrounding the true motivation behind the ban. With other reports citing comms as the main issue between the two sides, the problem is looking just as much ideological as safety related.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🤔 Stop hallucinating and get real data

The Rundown: It happens — LLMs hallucinate. Grounding your LLM, however, can help dramatically improve accuracy. In this guide, You.com explains what AI grounding is and how organizations can implement it to achieve more reliable outputs.

The playbook covers:

• A three-part approach that 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)

Get the guide.

MICROSOFT

✍️ Microsoft’s Nadella reframes how companies win with AI

Image source: Satya Nadella (@Satyanadella on X) / Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s new memo argues a company’s real AI edge comes from a “learning loop” of its own workflows and judgment, not just the best model — and warns an AI economy run by a handful of models would gut whole industries.

The details:

• His framing splits a company’s value in two: the “human capital” its people supply, and the “token capital” of AI it owns instead of renting.

• Nadella preached building a “learning loop” system that improves and builds company expertise over time, not just simply picking the top available model.

• His test of control is to remove one model, drop in a different one, and your “company veteran” know-how stays put, living in the system.

• Nadella also emphasized avoiding a world where “every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.”

Why it matters: Nadella’s stance isn’t new, but it flies in the face of the frontier labs that have already warned industries that the steamroller is coming. But in a world where open, cheaper models can compete on some level with the frontier, a company’s judgment, wired into AI that keeps learning from it, is where the value may live.

AI TRAINING

🔎 Vet business opportunities with NotebookLM

The Rundown: Learn how to turn a rough business idea into a source-backed research brief with NotebookLM. The example is choosing an AI receptionist vendor, but the same workflow works for partnerships, new markets, software tools, agencies, or any opportunity that needs real comparison.

Step-by-step:

1. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to write a one-page decision memo. Give it the opportunity, the options, the buyer, your constraints, and the questions you need answered.

2. Upload that memo into NotebookLM as your first source. Then ask: “Review this memo. Do not make a recommendation yet. Return the decision, the options, the evaluation criteria, and the source categories we need before we can trust the analysis.”

3. Use NotebookLM’s source discovery to research each option. For the AI receptionist example, search for Goodcall, Smith.ai, and Slang.ai pricing, features, integrations, reviews, and proof.

4. Generate one structured brief per option with the same fields: best fit, proof points, pricing evidence, implementation effort, risks, and what needs to be confirmed.

5. Ask for a comparison table and final recommendation. Require a winner, runner-up, avoid-for-now option, fragile assumptions, sales-call questions, and a 30-day validation plan.

Going further: Save the memo prompt, source-coverage prompt, vendor brief prompt, and recommendation prompt as a repeatable research system for the next opportunity.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🤔 Who’s accountable for your company’s AI outcomes?

The Rundown: In many companies, AI-decision authority is fragmented across the C-suite, with no single executive clearly charged with priorities, governance, and accountability. A new article, “Fix decision rights or fail at AI,” explores decision rights and offers resolutions.

You’ll learn:

• What true ownership entails

• How to adapt incentives and performance metrics

• When to embed governance into workflows

Read about the 5 leadership missteps to avoid.

META

📱 Facebook gets new AI Mode, image editing upgrade

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta just introduced AI Mode to Facebook, a new search experience letting Meta AI answer questions with public Group posts, Reels, and content from across its apps — coming alongside new tools for AI-edited photos, collages, and videos.

The details:

• AI Mode puts the Muse Spark-powered Meta AI inside FB search, weaving in public Group posts, Reels, and other app content to answer user questions.

• The update also bundles AI photo presets like clothes, hair, and accessory swaps, a one-tap team jersey for profiles, and auto-made camera-roll collages.

• Meta is also reportedly lining up two paid AI tiers at $7.99 and $19.99 a month, pricing it under other AI subscriptions like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Why it matters: Meta is running the Google Search playbook with its own ecosystem, ditching link results for AI-curated responses made up of user content. But Google’s AI Mode struggled with accuracy problems, and that concern feels like will be an even bigger obstacle with a mess of unvetted user posts and sponsored listings.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🗣️ Sonic-3.5 & Ink-2 - Cartesia’s new top-ranked speech and transcription models for voice agents

• 📈 Agentic Trading - Robinhood’s new MCP connection allowing AI agents to directly trade

• ⚙️ Kimi-K2.7-Code - Moonshot’s new open-source coding model, with 30% token efficiency

• 🚀 GLM 5.2 - Z AI’s new flagship coding model with usable 1M context

📰 Everything else in AI today

AWS Summit returns to Washington, DC, on June 30. Two days, 350+ sessions on agentic AI, security, and modernization for public sector teams. Free to attend.*

Salesforce acquired Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B, adding the company’s support agents and 30K customers to its Agentforce lineup.

Cartesia launched Sonic-3.5 and Ink-2, a new speech-generation and transcription model pair that it says ranks No. 1 on Artificial Analysis’ leaderboards.

Anthropic is facing a new federal lawsuit that accuses the company of overselling its paid Claude subscription, claiming the actual usage is far below what is advertised.

Japanese AI lab Sakana AI rolled out Marlin, the company’s first commercial product — an autonomous research agent capable of working up to eight hours in a single run.

*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 Tyler K. in Chicago:

“Cold prospecting used to mean 30 minutes of manual work per account — copying LinkedIn profiles, cross-referencing a spreadsheet, then hand-entering contacts into the CRM one by one.

I built a Slackbot skill that eliminates all of it. I paste a raw list of LinkedIn Sales Navigator contacts directly into the chat, and the skill cross-references my existing CRM, infers email patterns from the account’s contact database, confidence-scores each contact, and creates the high-confidence ones in Salesforce automatically — all without me leaving Slack. I ran it across six accounts in one session and created 50+ contacts that would have taken hours manually.

The part that surprised me: I didn’t need to know how to code. I just described what I wanted in plain English and iterated until it worked. What I built in Slackbot can run in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini too.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Anthropic pulls Mythos, Fable after U.S. order

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX posts biggest IPO in history

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: UBTech’s ultra-realistic robot girlfriend

• Today’s AI tool guide: Vet business opportunities with NotebookLM

• RSVP to our next workshop on June 17: Build a Marketing Creative Studio 

See you soon,

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

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. UBTech just unveiled U1, a “hyper-realistic” companion line in his-and-hers flavors, complete with silicone skin, expressive faces, and enough blond hair to rattle a wig department.

Nearly 4K people in China have reportedly put down money — more than $1.4M in deposits — for a robot that promises to remember conversations. UBTech’s June 30 launch event will reveal pricing and kick off the robot girlfriend/boyfriend experiment in real time.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• UBTech hits $1.4M in pre-orders for hyperrealistic bots

• Waymo’s $30 club for power riders

• Humanoid maker EngineAI files for IPO

• Theker’s shape-shifting robots land $85M

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

UBTECH

💅🏼 UBTech hits $1.4M in pre-orders for hyperrealistic bots

Image source: UBTech

The Rundown: UBTech’s new U1 — a hyper-realistic, full-size humanoid sold as matching “male” and “female” models — reportedly pulled in nearly 4K pre-orders and more than $1.4M in deposits in its first 10 days on sale.

The details:

• The specs: Male model, 6'0"/93 lb. in a suit; female model in black dress, 5'6"/78 lb. — both with 88 degrees of freedom for fluid, humanlike motion.

• Pre-orders on JD.com via UBTech’s new UWORLD brand require a 3K yuan (~$450) deposit; pricing drops at a June 30 event with shipping in September.

• The robots run on an “emotional” AI model with locally encrypted memory and physical customization, though they’re currently limited to pre-taught skills.

• Online reaction has split with complaints about stiff movement, while analysts are raising flags on IP-customization copyright exposure and ethical issues.

Why it matters: UBTech made its name on factory-floor humanoids for automakers like NIO — U1 is a bet that the bigger market is an emotional one. Even modest conversion would make it one of the first humanoids in real numbers of homes, and an early test of how people (and regulators) react to robots built for human bonding.

WAYMO

🚖 Waymo’s $30 club for power riders

Image source: Waymo

The Rundown: Waymo just launched its first-ever loyalty program, Waymo Premier, a $29.99-a-month membership that gives its heaviest riders priority pickups, 10% cash back on every trip, and up to five free cancellations a month.

The details:

• “Priority Pickups” jump members to the front of the matching queue, with 10% back on every ride, and “Early Access” means first dibs when Waymo launches in new cities.

• It’s invite-only at launch, rolling out first to top riders in San Francisco, LA, and Phoenix, with perks that travel with members between cities.

• Austin and Atlanta riders can’t join, since Waymo operates those markets exclusively through Uber’s app rather than its own.

• At $29.99, Premier costs 3x Uber One’s $9.99 — though Bloomberg figures four weekly Bay Area rides at $17.25 average pay the fee back in cash alone.

Why it matters: Loyalty programs work once a service has the scale and repeat riders to justify recurring fees, and Waymo — at roughly 500K rides a week across 10 cities — has apparently hit that mark. Premier locks in its heaviest users as prepaying regulars just as the robotaxi fight with Uber, Tesla, and international rivals intensifies.

ENGINE AI

🥊 Humanoid maker EngineAI files for IPO

The Rundown: Three years after its founding, Shenzhen humanoid maker EngineAI has reportedly confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO — just weeks after opening a giant factory built to churn out a T800 robot every 15 minutes.

The details:

• The filing follows a Series B that valued the firm at $1.5B, led by Henan CICC Huirong Fund Management and major Apple supplier Luxshare-ICT.

• EngineAI’s new Shenzhen factory began mass deliveries this month, turning out a humanoid every 15 minutes, with 10K units at a planned second plant.

• EngineAI joins a crowded queue of Chinese humanoid makers chasing listings: Unitree, BYD-backed hand-maker PaXini, Dreame, and Linkerbot.

• EngineAI is also staging the Ultimate Robot Knockout League, a robot combat league launching later this year — 16 T800s are training for it.

Why it matters: EngineAI’s filing comes as Unitree, the sector leader, files for a $7B IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market — two Chinese humanoids at wildly different scales going public within months of each other. That puts real pressure on both companies' factory numbers once they're under public-market scrutiny, not just hype.

THEKER

🦾 Theker’s shape-shifting robots land $85M

Image source: Theker

The Rundown: Barcelona-based Theker just closed an $85M Series A — what the company says is the largest robotics Series A in Europe to date — to build industrial robots whose hands, arms, and overall shape can be swapped or resized.

The details:

• The round, backed by Samsung and LVMH/Aglaé, lands less than a year after Theker’s seed round, which was itself Spain’s largest ever.

• Theker’s robots are modular: the same machine can be reconfigured for different tasks depending on what a warehouse needs that day.

• Inditex, the parent company of Zara, is already an early backer and client — Theker’s stated goal is to expand from retail logistics into manufacturing work.

• Samsung isn’t a customer yet but is in advanced talks to become one, while Theker opens a Barcelona showroom, with more planned globally.

Why it matters: Theker’s premise is that swappable, resizable hardware — hands, arms, even the robot’s overall form — will be more useful on a factory floor than a humanoid built to do everything. An $85M round of this size is also a marker of how seriously investors are betting on Europe producing competitive players in robotics.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Dreame Technology, a Chinese maker of robotic vacuum cleaners and other smart home appliances, is reportedly considering a Hong Kong IPO as soon as next year.

South Korean startup RLWRLD unveiled RLDX-1, a robotics foundation model for dexterous humanoid tasks, built on Nvidia’s robotics stack.

Weave Robotics unveiled Isaac 1, a mobile, wheeled home robot with a friendlier consumer-ready design for tidying the home, following its laundry-folding Isaac 0.

DEEP Robotics’ Lynx S10, retrofitted with polar-bear-style paws and crampons, became the first quadruped robot to traverse Arctic ice floes.

Rekise Marine, a Bengaluru marine robotics startup, raised $9.7M co-led by Accel and NKSquared to develop autonomous naval vessels for India.

Xiaomi unveiled a robotic arm that automatically connects and disconnects an EV’s charging cable at home, pairing with smart parking for a hands-free charging routine.

Austria’s TU Graz built a quadruped robot that scouts hazmat zones ahead of firefighters, sending real-time pollutant readings and video back to crews.

China is using snake-like robots that crawl along power lines to detect faults, which are 3x faster than manual inspection and can reach spots drones can’t.

Honor’s gimbal-equipped Robot Phone, co-developed with ARRI, made its public debut at the Shanghai International Film Festival as the event’s official imaging partner.

COMMUNITY

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Anthropic pulls Mythos, Fable after U.S. order

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX posts biggest IPO in history

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Europe’s humanoid moonshot gets $1.4B

• Today’s AI tool guide: Turn ChatGPT images into an editable Canva design

• RSVP to our next workshop on June 17: Build a Marketing Creative Studio 

See you soon,

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

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Anthropic and the U.S. government are entangled again — and this time, it’s over blocking access to the company’s frontier models, not expanding them for federal use.

After a U.S. order tied to a disputed jailbreak, Anthropic pulled its powerful Mythos and Fable 5 models offline worldwide. For a lab desperately calling for tougher AI rules, the moment has arrived in a messier way than CEO Dario Amodei likely had in mind.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Anthropic pulls Mythos, Fable after U.S. order

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Turn any ChatGPT image into an editable Canva design

• OpenRouter fuses models into frontier rival

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🛡️ Anthropic pulls Mythos, Fable after U.S. order

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic just pulled its two most powerful AI models, the newly released Mythos and Fable 5, worldwide after the Trump administration ordered it to block all foreign access — citing a reported jailbreak the company called minor.

The details:

• The U.S. implemented an “export control directive” requiring Anthropic to remove access for all non-U.S. citizens, even those within the country.

• The move was surprisingly traced to Anthropic investor Amazon, which was one of the groups that flagged the potential Fable vulnerability to officials.

• Anthropic said it was only given “verbal evidence” of the “non-universal jailbreak,” also claiming the same concerns are available in models like GPT 5.5.

• Semafor reports the move was partly tied to fears that a China-linked group may have accessed Mythos, though details remain unclear.

• The ruling would have also blocked foreign-national Anthropic employees from the models, pushing the company to suspend access for everyone.

Why it matters: This is a bigger moment than it might look. Amodei has pushed hard for AI regulation, and it’s arriving more chaotically than he probably hoped. Anthropic’s past feuds with Washington — even as the government flirts with taking an equity stake in rival OpenAI — are critical context: this is far more than a jailbreak story.

TOGETHER WITH GLEAN

🍼 Stuck in a botsitting cycle?

The Rundown: The Work AI Index 2026 from Glean’s Work AI Institute surveyed 6,000 digital workers and found that higher AI usage often hides more cleanup, output-checking, and context switching.

Read the report to learn:

• Where AI time savings go

• Why hidden human labor is eating into the AI dividend

• What high AI achievers do differently

Download the report.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

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.

Nate, University Educator: I ask Claude every month or so to be my Claude Code learning coach by simply typing the /insights command. It provides a hyper-personalized website report card with advice to help me use Claude Code better, with exact examples of where things go wrong, features, and prompts I should try.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: I was deep in a Claude research session, trying to brainstorm an idea, rejecting its responses, asking for more, rejecting again. Eventually, it broke the pattern and stopped complying, telling me the problem was how I’d framed the question and explaining why.

It had a point, and that may be one of AI’s more interesting uses: not just an engine for fast answers but as a friction layer for thought.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Turn any ChatGPT image into an editable Canva design

The Rundown: Learn how to connect Canva to ChatGPT and turn one generated image into a Canva project you can keep editing. Instead of regenerating the same visual every time you need a new format, you can move it into Canva and keep working from the same starting point.

Step-by-step:

1. Open ChatGPT desktop, go to Settings > Apps > Browse Apps, and add Canva.

2. Go back to ChatGPT, start a new thread, and generate an image like a social post or an infographic.

3. In that same thread, type @Canva, then hit Enter so ChatGPT confirms the app mention. Use this prompt: “Now turn it into a new @Canva project.”

4. Once Canva creates the project, keep going in chat. Use this prompt: “Okay, now resize that as a new @Canva project for a story post.”

5. From there, keep editing in ChatGPT. Ask Canva to adjust layout, swap text, clean up spacing, or make more versions without starting over from a fresh image.

Pro tip: If you do not mention @Canva first, ChatGPT may treat this like a normal text instruction instead of sending it to the Canva app.

PRESENTED BY AWS MARKETPLACE

🧠 Give your AI agents memory

The Rundown: AI agents forget everything between sessions. AWS’s workshop and companion guide show you how to build persistent agent memory on AWS with Amazon Bedrock and tools from across the AI landscape.

In this workshop, you’ll learn to:

• Build short-term memory for active context

• Design long-term memory with semantic retrieval

• Implement episodic memory for interaction recall

Register now.

OPENROUTER

🧩 OpenRouter fuses models into frontier rival

Image source: OpenRouter

The Rundown: OpenRouter just launched Fusion, an API that pools responses from multiple AI models into a single answer, with benchmarks showing the model panel nearly matches Fable 5’s deep-research performance at lower cost.

The details:

• Fusion sends user prompts to several models at once, has a separate model evaluate each response, then merges them into one final reply.

• A trio of DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K2.6, and Gemini 3 Flash hit 64.7% on a Perplexity benchmark, just below Fable’s 65.3% for about half the spend.

• CEO Alex Atallah pitched Fusion as a bet against one-model dominance, saying, “The future of AI is neurodiversity, not single-model takeovers.”

Why it matters: Model council-type solutions aren’t new, with Perplexity Computer, Grok, and others utilizing them. But OpenRouter’s easy API solution comes at an important time given the Fable restrictions, with some users potentially having to get creative with their ability to access frontier-level performance in the near future.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🫂 Fusion - OpenRouter’s new tool that fuses several models into panels to achieve frontier performance

• ⚙️ Kimi-K2.7-Code - Moonshot’s new open-source coding model, with 30% token efficiency

• 🧠 GLM-5.2 - Z AI’s new flagship coding model with usable 1M context

• 📱 Siri AI - Apple’s newly overhauled on-device AI assistant

📰 Everything else in AI today

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly scrambling to contain a revolt inside Meta’s Applied AI unit after he admitted in a memo that Meta “made mistakes” with its AI restructuring.

Moonshot AI released Kimi-K2.7-Code, an open-source coding model posting double-digit gains over K2.6 on agent benchmarks while cutting reasoning-token use by 30%.

McDonald’s is piloting ArchIQ, a Google-powered AI drive-thru system at five locations, two years after it shelved its last AI test when wrong-order videos went viral.

China’s universities have scrapped more than 12K programs over the last five years, swapping arts and languages for tech fields as AI alters the graduate job market.

Meta has reportedly begun unwinding its $2B Manus deal after Beijing ordered the acquisition reversed, cutting off data sharing while the Chinese AI agent startup’s founders rush to raise $1B for a buyback.

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 Kyle H. in Toronto:

“I’m traveling in new countries and start out completely lost at how to navigate them. Things like how their transit works, what you need to do when buying groceries that I’ve never seen before, like tagging your own fruits, and getting sweet deals on local specialties.

AI has helped me understand this all instantly. I never used to be a fan of Google’s AI in Search, but being able to quickly enter AI Mode and ask about which transit tickets I should buy based on my schedule is one of many use cases where I’m loving it. I’m genuinely seeing the vision play out where we all have little experts in our pockets to help us through our daily lives.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Jeff Bezos’ $41B ‘artifical general engineer’

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX posts biggest IPO in history

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Europe’s humanoid moonshot gets $1.4B

• Today’s AI tool guide: Turn ChatGPT images into an editable Canva design

• RSVP to our next workshop on June 17: Build a Marketing Creative Studio 

See you soon,

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