Archives 2026

Modicus Prime Announces $8M in Funding to Enable AI Audit Readiness Across Pharma

Insider Brief

  • Modicus Prime has raised an additional $4.5 million led by Frist Cressey Ventures, bringing total funding to $8 million, to expand its Trustworthy AI Compliance Software that helps pharmaceutical companies deploy audit-ready AI across regulated GxP environments globally.
  • The platform integrates with existing pharmaceutical tech stacks and quality management systems, serving as a central compliance layer for global regulators including the FDA and EMA across the full AI lifecycle, targeting an industry problem that includes an estimated $50 billion in annual quality control failures.
  • CEO Taylor Chartier, a former engineer and data scientist from Shire and Bayer, co-authored the ISPE GAMP AI Guide and has been instrumental in shaping industry standards, with the new capital earmarked for expanding customer support and enhancing the platform to meet growing international AI compliance needs.

PRESS RELEASE — Modicus Prime, a former resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation — JLABS @ Texas Medical Center, has announced the completion of an additional $4.5M in funding led by Frist Cressey Ventures, bringing total funding to $8M with additional backing from Silverton Partners and Oncology Ventures. The funding comes following the multiple rollouts of the Trustworthy AI Compliance Software enabling scalable, audit-ready AI systems across global pharmaceutical companies, CROs, CMOs, CDMOs, and adjacent regulated sectors.

The Trustworthy AI Compliance Software enables pharmaceutical companies’ AI applications in regulated (GxP) environments, both internal and from AI suppliers, to be audit-ready across their organizations. It integrates with pharmaceutical tech stacks and quality management systems, acting as a central layer that enables scalable AI use across sites and geographies with varying regulatory requirements. The integration enables a single source of truth for compliance with global regulators including the FDA and EMA across the full AI lifecycle (see Figure 1). Translating between data science, IT, quality, and compliance, the software reduces operational friction and ensures every pharmaceutical stakeholder works compliantly with AI in regulated environments. The result is safer AI adoption, reduced compliance risk and protected ROI of AI investments, allowing pharma organizations to stay focused on delivering medicines to patients. Compliant AI ultimately accelerates adoption at scale and helps reduce, for example, costly quality control failures costing the industry an estimated $50 billion annually.

FCV founding partner Senator Bill Frist, MD states, “At the end of the day, every advancement in this industry must serve the patient. By simplifying and strengthening AI compliance, Modicus Prime enables pharmaceutical leaders to stay focused on accelerating innovation and delivering life-saving therapies to those who need them most.”

Modicus Prime’s leadership is helping drive the industry’s AI movement through authoring guidelines, keynotes, webinars, and talks informing regulators. Taylor Chartier, Modicus Prime’s CEO, co-authored the ISPE GAMP AI Guide and BioPhorum AI Implementation publication in 2025. She also spearheaded ISPE’s GxP AI Webinar Series with fellow industry experts, which was an industry-first webinar series on implementing AI/ML solutions in GxP environments. Chartier continues to contribute to educational initiatives to upskill the pharmaceutical workforce in partnership with quality-focused organizations, including Pathway for Patient Health.

A former engineer and data scientist from Shire and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Chartier states, “Pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in AI, but without the infrastructure to deploy it compliantly and measure ROI, that investment is at risk. Adjacent healthcare sectors, including payers and providers, express the same need for compliance infrastructure. This is the gap our Trustworthy AI Compliance Software addresses, enabling scalable AI adoption across regulated environments.”

Oncology Ventures’ Ben Freeberg states, “The next wave of cancer breakthroughs are coming, and every manufacturer has to survive a regulatory audit to ensure those drugs get to patients who need them. Modicus Prime is the compliance layer that makes this happen.”

Modicus Prime is using this new capital to further service their international pharmaceutical customers with additional customer support, including the continued enhancement of its platform to better support customer deployments and growing AI compliance needs.

About Modicus Prime
Modicus Prime’s AI Compliance platform bridges data science, IT, and quality, enabling regulated organizations to deploy and scale trustworthy AI. By providing a single source of truth for regulators, the platform ensures AI applications remain compliant across their full lifecycle, from development through evolving GxP use. A resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation — JLABS @ South San Francisco, Modicus Prime is venture-backed and partners with leading pharmaceutical organizations to enable AI audit readiness at scale. The platform integrates with existing tech stacks and quality management systems, supporting biologics, cell and gene therapies, and vaccine manufacturing across global regulatory environments.

About Frist Cressey Partners
Founded by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD and Bryan Cressey, Frist Cressey Ventures (FCV) is a healthcare venture capital firm with $846M AUM focused on accelerating the growth of high potential healthcare companies through a differentiated healthcare network, hands-on leadership support, and healthcare policy expertise. Our mission is simple: to transform healthcare to improve lives. Our strategic partners, including The Cigna Group, MedStar Health and OhioHealth, provide healthcare to more than 50% of the U.S. population. We invest in early-stage startups that build technology or tech-enabled services to advance quality of care, system integration, patient outcomes, affordability, and access. To learn more about Frist Cressey Ventures, visit our website at www.fcventures.com.

About Oncology Ventures
Oncology Ventures is a specialized, Austin-based venture capital firm founded in 2022 by cancer survivor Ben Freeberg. The Fund invests in commercially-validated start-ups transforming the future of cancer care. Oncology Ventures is partnered with leading oncology institutions, including Texas Oncology, Fred Hutch Cancer Center, City of Hope, Moffitt and others.

Contact:
Taylor Chartier
taylor@modicusprime.com

SOURCE

Perplexity Launches Personal Computer AI Agent for All Mac Users to Rival Local AI Assistants

Perplexity has opened its Personal Computer feature to all Mac users through a new desktop app, bringing local AI agent capabilities beyond its previous Max subscriber waitlist. The tool extends Perplexity’s cloud-based Computer product onto users’ own devices, giving AI agents access to local files, native Mac applications, over 400 connectors, and the web to handle complex multi-step personal workflows.

Positioned as a more secure alternative to local AI agents like OpenClaw, which drew criticism for elevated system permissions, Personal Computer runs within a secure environment on Perplexity’s servers. It can be accessed remotely via iPhone and, when paired with Perplexity’s Comet browser, operates web-based tools without additional connectors.

The feature requires a Pro or Max subscription. Perplexity’s existing Mac app will be deprecated in coming weeks.

Tessera Labs Secures $60M in Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz to Transform ERP Modernization

Insider Brief

  • Tessera Labs has raised $60 million in an oversubscribed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Foundation Capital and others participating, to accelerate its AI-native platform for enterprise ERP transformation, with a16z partner Seema Amble joining the board.
  • The company’s vendor-agnostic, multi-agent platform is pre-trained on thousands of organizational landscapes and compresses transformation timelines from years to weeks while cutting costs by more than half, with early customers including a top-five global biopharmaceutical company and a Fortune 500 document technology firm.
  • The raise targets a systems integrator market valued at $500 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $800 billion by 2033, with Tessera positioning itself as a category-defining solution to one of enterprise technology’s most persistent challenges: the slow and costly modernization of mission-critical ERP systems.

PRESS RELEASE — Tessera Labs announced $60 million in oversubscribed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to accelerate its mission of bringing AI-native automation to enterprise transformation. Foundation Capital, Myriad Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners also participated. The announcement arrives as the global SAP community convenes in Orlando for its flagship annual event, underscoring the urgency of modernization at scale. The capital will accelerate platform development, scale go-to-market operations, and expand the company’s team of AI researchers and domain experts.

The funding follows landmark customer wins that underscore Tessera’s emergence as the platform of choice for enterprise AI transformation. Among them: a global top-five biopharmaceutical company undergoing an enterprise-wide, multi-year ERP transformation, and a Fortune 500 leader in document technology and business services modernizing its enterprise systems. They join a growing roster of Fortune 500 customers across manufacturing, technology, retail, consumer goods, and utilities, reflecting the breadth of industries now turning to Tessera Labs for mission-critical transformation at enterprise scale.

“Enterprise transformation has never been more urgent, and the technology to accelerate it has never been more powerful,” said Kabir Nagrecha, Co-founder and CEO of Tessera Labs. “Tessera Labs exists to close that gap, delivering in weeks what traditionally takes years, with the governance and reliability that mission-critical programs demand.”

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, with Partner Seema Amble joining Tessera Labs’s board of directors. A firm whose portfolio includes Databricks and Harvey, a16z has consistently backed companies that fundamentally reshape how businesses operate, and sees Tessera Labs as addressing one of the largest and most persistent problems in technology: the transformation bottleneck.

“ERP systems are the backbone of every major company, but modernizing them has been prohibitively slow and expensive,” said Seema Amble, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Tessera’s platform represents a genuine category shift, not just making transformation faster, but making it predictable, governed, and continuous. That changes the economics for CIOs and unlocks transformation at a scale we haven’t seen before.”

The global systems integrator (SI) sector was valued at $500 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $800 billion by 2033, according to Verified Market Reports, reflecting the enormous scale of enterprise transformation underway. Yet the pace and cost of these programs remain a persistent challenge: projects still require significant time and investment to complete. Tessera Labs addresses this directly by embedding intelligence into the transformation process, dramatically compressing timelines and reducing cost without sacrificing reliability.

Tessera’s platform is pre-trained on thousands of organizational landscapes and hundreds of years of transformation expertise. It captures business requirements in natural language, orchestrates secure change across critical systems (ERP, HCM, CRM, procurement, and beyond) and ensures business continuity throughout. The platform harmonizes fragmented systems and data while maintaining institutional-grade governance and traceability. Unlike point solutions or vendor-specific tools, it is vendor-agnostic and evolves continuously with new data and workflows.

Early adopters report transformation timelines compressed from years to weeks, costs reduced by more than half, and outcomes delivered right the first time, without the disruption typical of large-scale ERP projects.

“We’re hiring people who’ve built AI systems at scale and people who’ve led transformations at the world’s largest organizations,” Nagrecha added. “It’s a rare combination, and it’s what makes Tessera Labs work.”

The founding team includes AI researchers with experience at Meta, Netflix, and Apple, alongside platform experts from SAP MaxAttention and core product development teams, giving Tessera Labs the credibility with risk-averse organizations managing billions in revenue through mission-critical systems.

About Tessera Labs

Tessera Labs is a vendor-agnostic, multi-agent AI platform that transforms how enterprises modernize complex ERP systems and data. Pre-trained on thousands of organizational landscapes and hundreds of years of transformation expertise, Tessera compresses timelines from years to weeks, reduces costs by more than half, and delivers outcomes right the first time through secure, governed execution. The company was co-founded by Kabir Nagrecha (Chief Executive Officer) and Ming Chang (Chief Operating Officer), and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.tesseralabs.ai.

About Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. The firm is stage agnostic: They invest in seed to venture to growth-stage technology companies, across bio + healthcare, consumer and enterprise apps, crypto, fintech, infrastructure, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has over $90B under management across multiple funds. For more information, visit www.a16z.com.

Contacts

Media Contact:
John Ordoña
john@tesseralabs.ai

SOURCE

Featured image: Credit: Tessera Labs

Moonlight AI Raises $3.3M to Deploy Computer Vision for Faster Cancer Diagnostics

Swiss startup Moonlight AI has closed a $3.3 million seed round co-led by Lotus One Investment, VP Venture Partners, and MEDIN Fund, with participation from N&V Capital and QAI Ventures, to advance AI-powered image analysis for clinical oncology diagnostics.

Founded by CEO Christian Ruiz, CTO Nicole Romano, and CMO Stefan Habringer, the company uses computer vision to detect genomic biomarkers directly from routine blood and cytology slide imaging, bypassing the high cost and slow turnaround of conventional genomic sequencing. The technology targets hematologists and pathologists treating blood cancers including MDS, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and non-small cell lung cancer.

Funding will support expansion of a proprietary dataset linking whole slide imaging with genomic data, built through an international clinical consortium, alongside team growth and regulatory approval processes.

Featured image: Credit: Moonlight AI

Moonshot AI Closes $2B Funding Round at $20B Valuation as Kimi Models Rival OpenAI and Anthropic

Beijing-based Moonshot AI has raised approximately $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, led by Meituan’s venture arm Long-Z Investments, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng. The round brings total fundraising over the past six months to $3.9 billion, with the company’s valuation having risen from $4.3 billion at end-2025 to its current level.

Founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher, Moonshot quickly became one of China’s most prominent AI labs. Its open-weight Kimi models compete directly with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, with Kimi K2.6 currently ranking as the second most-used large language model on distribution platform OpenRouter. Annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April.

The raise reflects surging investor appetite for Chinese open-weight AI, as rivals DeepSeek pursues a $45 billion valuation and Zhipu AI trades publicly in Hong Kong at roughly $56 billion.

OpenAI closes reasoning gap in voice agents

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Typing made AI useful, but speech is where agents have to prove they can keep up with real life.

OpenAI’s new real-time voice model trio is built for that messier interface, adding a major reasoning upgrade, the ability to talk while thinking, and capable tool use that moves AI voice agents closer to running tasks at the speed of natural conversation.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI’s reasoning upgrade for voice agents

  • Google folds Fitbit into its AI health play

  • Test multiple AI models with same prompt

  • Anthropic plans for AI that builds itself

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🗣️ OpenAI’s reasoning upgrade for voice agents

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just introduced GPT-Realtime-2, GPT-Realtime-Translate, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper, three API voice models that bring new reasoning, streaming, tool use, realism, and more capability upgrades to AI voice agents and live speech.

The details:

  • Realtime-2 brings GPT-5-level reasoning to live speech, is able to use multiple tools at once, talks while it thinks, and has better tone control for realism.

  • On Big Bench Audio, Realtime-2 hit 96.6% vs. 81.4% for its predecessor, a 15-point jump in how well voice AI can reason in real-time.

  • OpenAI also shipped a live translator covering 70+ languages and a streaming transcription model, rounding out a full voice-agent toolkit.

  • OAI said Zillow, Priceline, and Deutsche Telekom are already building on the models for real estate AI agents, voice-managed travel, and customer support.

Why it matters: AI voice’s turn-based era appears to be nearing a close, with OAI’s new model moving to systems that can reason better, leverage tools, and complete workflows without awkward interruptions that take users out of a natural flow. The AI industry is fixated on text agents, but the next wave will be spoken to, not typed at.

TOGETHER WITH AWS MARKETPLACE

📊 15+ enterprise leaders on getting data AI-ready

The Rundown: AWS Marketplace just released a free book featuring 15 chapters from senior data and AI leaders at JPMorgan Chase, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, Roche, and more — each sharing practical advice on building the data infrastructure needed for agentic analytics and intelligent agents.

Chapters cover topics including:

  • Evolving data strategy for agentic AI and scaling data products

  • Building on existing infrastructure with a pragmatic, business-first approach

  • Unlocking value with classical ML, semantic layers, and cross-team alignment

  • Real-world perspectives from leaders across different industries

Get your free digital copy today.

GOOGLE

⌚️ Google folds Fitbit into its AI health play

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google opened its AI health coach to the public after months in beta, integrating the Fitbit app into a new Google Health platform and pairing it with a new $99 screenless tracker that tracks and transmits body data to the AI.

The details:

  • Running on Gemini, the AI coach can tailor weekly workout routines, interpret uploaded medical records, and ID what a user ate from a phone photo.

  • Google is consolidating the Fitbit app, Health Connect, Apple Health, wearable data, and U.S. medical records into a single Google Health hub.

  • The new $99 Fitbit Air has no screen and weighs just 12g, carrying heart rate, oxygen, and temperature sensors that provide body data to the AI coach.

  • Apple Watch, Garmin, and Oura owners are set to get AI coach access later this year, with Google opening it up to hardware outside of its own.

Why it matters: AI’s role in personal health is only growing, and integrating everything under one roof can help Google make the AI layer the core product while also owning a trusted wearable line that provides users with the personalized guidance and context typically missing from other trackers and less connected options.

AI TRAINING

✏️ Test multiple AI models with same prompt

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use OpenRouter Fusion to test the same prompt across multiple AI models at once. Instead of opening five apps and guessing, you can compare outputs side by side and build a quick cheat sheet for work.

Step-by-step:

  1. Create an OpenRouter account, open OpenRouter Fusion, and pick how you want to pay for AI usage — OpenRouter credits or API keys you already pay for

  2. In Fusion, pick the models you want to compare — we tested Opus 4.7 vs. GPT 5.4 vs. Grok — and run one benchmark prompt at a time, keeping it identical

  3. Prompt something like: “You are advising a 20-person SaaS company deciding whether to replace its weekly status meeting with an async written update. Write a recommendation memo with 3 benefits, 3 risks, and a 2-week implementation plan. Keep it concise and practical”

  4. Open the responses, read the side-by-side analysis, and note which model is strongest. In the demo, about 10 comparisons cost around 40 cents

Pro tip: Run a few prompts you use all the time, write which model wins each task, and use OpenRouter’s model browser to compare price and speed before you spend more.

PRESENTED BY WEIGHTS & BIASES

🐝 New guide: Tools and workflows to develop AI agents

The Rundown: AI agents can dramatically boost productivity and innovation, but getting them into the real world takes a lot of iteration. Whether you’re exploring agents for the first time or refining your current approach, this primer delivers actionable insights to help your team succeed and thrive in the AI era.

Get the guide to learn:

  • What defines agentic applications and why observability matters

  • A proven workflow for building agentic AI applications

  • How pioneering companies are building and deploying AI agents today

Download a primer on building successful AI agents.

THE ANTHROPIC INSTITUTE

🔬 Anthropic plans for AI that builds itself

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic’s newly formed research arm, The Anthropic Institute, published its formal research agenda — a document that treats the possibility of AI systems improving themselves as something the company is actively preparing for.

The details:

  • TAI sits inside Anthropic, letting researchers study Claude usage, internal workflows, and security signals before they hit the wider market.

  • The Institute’s agenda spans security threats, economic disruption, governance, and planning for self-improving models.

  • The team also proposed Cold War-style hotlines between labs and governments, plus “fire drill” exercises for sudden capability surges.

  • TAI said it is committed to publishing Economic Index data, monthly worker surveys, threat research, and more details on its own internal AI-boosted R&D.

Why it matters: We wrote earlier about Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark’s blog on self-improving systems, and TAI’s research agenda puts it very much into focus. Anthropic’s talk of “fire drills” and Cold War-style systems is to prepare for an “intelligence explosion” that we might be heading to faster than many expected.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • ✈️ Serko.ai – The AI travel assistant that plans, books, and manages your entire business trip, so you can skip the busywork*

  • 🗣️ GPT-Realtime-2 – Voice AI that thinks, calls tools, maintains convo flow

  • 🎥 Studio Agent – ElevenLabs’ AI editor to draft videos, places sound effects

  • 🎆 Grok Imagine Quality Mode – xAI’s Image generation with higher realism

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Spotify launched ‘Personal Podcasts’, a tool allowing agents to turn items like briefings or class notes into a personal podcast directly inside users’ Spotify libraries.

OpenAI introduced Trusted Contact, an opt-in ChatGPT feature that alerts a designated friend or family member if signs of self-harm risk are detected.

Scale AI landed a $500M Pentagon contract for military data analysis, marking a 5x jump from last September’s $100M deal.

Perplexity rolled out its Personal Computer to all Mac users, allowing it to take agentic action across a user’s local computer, files, and via the Comet browser.

Mozilla published a blog about using Claude Mythos Preview for security, saying the model patched more bugs in April than the past 15 months combined.

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 Tatiana B. in San Francisco, CA:

“I’m COO of a startup and mom to a two-and-a-half-year-old. Managing both is a lot, and keeping track of everything I need to do at home on top of work can be a real mental drain.

So I use AI to help me compile a document covering everything I need help with at home: my daughter’s meal preferences, her daily routine, and house chores. I treat it like a work project, going back and forth with AI to think through what I actually need done, fill in gaps I hadn’t thought of, and get it all out of my head into something I can hand to someone else.

Now, when someone new comes to help at home, I don’t have to explain everything from scratch. That frees me up to actually be present with my daughter when I’m with her, and focused on work when I’m not. I also know I’m lucky to be in a position to hire help, but using AI to think clearly about what you need and get it out of your head is something anybody can do.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

  • Read our last AI newsletter: Anthropic, SpaceXAI become unlikely partners

  • Read our last Tech newsletter: GameStop’s wild bid to buy eBay

  • Read our last Robotics newsletter: Genesis robot makes breakfast

  • Today’s AI tool guide: Test multiple AI models with the same prompt, fast

See you soon,

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

Anthropic, SpaceX(AI) become unlikely compute partners

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Just months ago, Elon Musk was posting that Anthropic “hates Western Civilization” and should be renamed “Misanthropic”. Now, he’s renting them his entire Colossus 1 compute cluster.

The new deal pulls off three things at once: patching Claude’s compute problems, hurting Musk’s nemesis OAI by feeding its biggest rival, and signaling a new compute-landlord business for SpaceXAI even as Grok keeps chasing the frontier.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic, SpaceX partner in new compute deal

  • Mira Murati speaks out in Musk vs. OpenAI trial

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

  • DeepMind picks EVE Online game as next AI testbed

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC & SPACEX

🔌 Anthropic, SpaceX(AI) partner in new compute deal

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic just signed a deal with SpaceX to lease its Colossus 1, raising Claude usage and putting Musk and Anthropic on one team months after he said that Anthropic should be called “Misanthropic” and it “hates Western Civilization.”

The details:

  • Anthropic will lease all of Colossus 1, a 300+ MW Memphis supercluster, with more than 220K Nvidia GPUs coming online within the month.

  • Anthropic said Claude Code’s 5-hour usage caps are now doubling across paid tiers, with additional increases via API and no more peak-hour restrictions.

  • Musk replied on X that SpaceX will rent compute to “AI companies that are taking the right steps to ensure it is good for humanity.”

  • The Information also reported yesterday that Anthropic is committing to a $200B, 5 GW compute deal over the next five years with Google Cloud.

Why it matters: This is a fascinating partnership from several angles. One being Musk taking the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ approach — helping patch OAI’s biggest rival’s glaring compute hole. Another is SpaceXAI (apparently the new name), moving to providing compute for rivals while still pushing to get Grok near the frontier.

TOGETHER WITH STRIPE

🏷️ A five-step framework for pricing AI products

The Rundown: Pricing AI products means making a series of connected decisions—how you charge, how you match prices to value, and how you adapt as costs and the market shift. Stripe’s new framework outlines 5 steps for pricing AI products.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • How AI leaders like Anthropic, Clay, and Vercel approach their pricing

  • Strategies to align what you charge with the exact value you deliver

  • Steps to pick a pricing model that balances ease of user adoption with repeatable revenue

Get the framework.

ELON MUSK VS. OPENAI TRIAL

🏛️ Mira Murati speaks out in Musk vs. OpenAI trial

Image source: Reuters

The Rundown: Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati testified Wednesday via video deposition in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing CEO Sam Altman of lying about a model’s safety review, undermining her authority, and pitting execs against one another.

The details:

  • Murati said Altman told her OAI’s legal team cleared a model to skip safety review, which she later verified with counsel Jason Kwon was false.

  • She also described Altman giving conflicting directions to different execs, making her role as CTO harder and creating chaos across OAI’s leadership.

  • Murati briefly became interim CEO during Altman’s 2023 firing, but said the board process put OpenAI “at risk of falling apart.”

  • Former OAI board member Helen Toner also testified, reportedly criticizing Murati as “afraid to stick her neck out” and scared of “blowback for her career”.

Why it matters: The 2023 board drama is the saga that will never conclude, and Murati’s testimony is a powerful voice to aid Musk’s argument that Altman and co. are untrustworthy. But whether that ultimately means anything related to Musk’s claims of Altman and Brockman “trying to steal a charity” in 2017 is up for the jury to decide.

AI TRAINING

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

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

Step-by-step:

  1. Start with one CSV or spreadsheet with a messy report (YT channel data, Facebook ads, etc.) and decide what the deck needs to do (like find patterns)

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

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

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

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

PRESENTED BY IBM

🔌 Rewire the C-suite for an AI-first world

The Rundown: Most leaders know AI will reshape their business, but few have a clear playbook for how. An IBM Institute of Business Value analysis reveals 5 plays that CEOs must fulfill now for payoffs by 2030.

To lead in an AI-first landscape, surveyed CEOs suggest:

  • Customize your AI mix, not just your AI models

  • Hire a Chief AI Officer if you haven’t already

  • Orchestrate intelligence —both artificial and human

Get deeper details in the 2026 CEO Study.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND

🛸 DeepMind picks EVE Online game as next AI testbed

Image source: Fenris Creations

The Rundown: Google DeepMind picked up a minority stake in Fenris Creations, a game studio spinoff from CCP Games, which makes the popular EVE Online — with DeepMind set to use the 23-year-old space game as a sandbox for AI research.

The details:

  • EVE Online has run for two decades on a single server where players form corporations, set market prices, and torch six-figure fleets in day-long battles.

  • DeepMind’s investment will come with AI agent runs on an offline EVE clone, testing how models reason over long timelines, retain memory, and learn.

  • Demis Hassabis cited Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaStar, and SIMA as game-bred DeepMind wins, calling games “the perfect training ground” for AI algorithms. 

  • Fenris’ CEO pitched EVE as “one of the few environments” where intelligence can be tested “inside something that already behaves like a living world”.

Why it matters: DeepMind has been here before with Go, Atari, StarCraft, and SIMA, but EVE is not a match to win as much as a 23-year-old living, evolving society to understand. That makes the Fenris deal a natural next step in the shift from game-playing AI to agents that can operate inside less predictable real-life systems.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🧠 Memoket – Stop briefing AI from scratch. Memoket captures conversations and remembers context. Try the app for free today*

  • 🤖 Claude Managed Agents – Pre-built agent harness with ‘dreaming’ memory

  • ⚡️ GPT 5.5 Instant – OpenAI’s new default model across ChatGPT

  • 🎧 Realtime TTS-2 – New voice AI that listens to match user tone and emotion

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

Subquadratic debuted SubQ, a model the company claims has a 12M token context window and a 52x speed boost on long tasks at a fraction of the cost over rivals.

Anthropic launched dreaming, outcomes, and multi-agent orchestration for Managed Agents, letting agents study past sessions, grade work, and split complex jobs.

OpenAI teamed up with AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Broadcom to open-source MRC, a tool that keeps giant AI training runs going when hardware fails mid-session.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is reportedly nearing a new funding round that would value the company at as high as $45B.

Google announced a new partnership with TuneCore parent Believe to put its Flow Music and Lyria 3 Pro model in front of artists.

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 recovering from a torn ACL, and my physiotherapist films all of my exercises and sends the videos to me on WhatsApp, narrating the sets/reps and notes on how to perform the exercise properly.

I uploaded the videos into Gemini and got it to build a prompt for Claude Code, which one-shotted an app that I now use to track sets, reps, weights from last workouts, notes, over multiple months. I can then export this data into a .csv for my physio before we check back in with each other.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

  • Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI’s AI phone just jumped the line

  • Read our last Tech newsletter: GameStop’s wild bid to buy eBay

  • Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meta buys a humanoid brain

  • Today’s AI tool guide: Use Claude Design’s slide decks feature like a pro

See you soon,

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

OpenAI’s AI phone just jumped the line

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Amid intensifying competition with Anthropic, improved models, and efforts to kill “side hustles,” OpenAI is apparently looking at something closer to home — an AI agent phone.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the company is fast-tracking this device for 2027, with some notable capabilities. Good news for those wanting a stronger AI experience in their pockets. The question is: where does this leave the ongoing work with Jony Ive? Or is this the same device?


In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI fast-tracks its ‘AI agent phone’

  • Anthropic’s AI agents for finance work

  • Make your Notion agents more autonomous

  • Home-based ‘mini’ AI data centers are coming

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📱 OpenAI fast-tracks ‘AI agent phone’

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI is reportedly accelerating development of its first AI phone, now aiming for mass production in the first half of 2027, which is a full year earlier than previously reported, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

The details:

  • Kuo says the timeline shift is likely driven by OAI’s IPO ambitions (strong hardware could strengthen investor pitch) and rising competition in AI phones.

  • The phone’s standout spec will be its image signal processor, with an enhanced HDR pipeline to improve AI agents’ real-world visual sensing.

  • MediaTek is positioned to be the sole chip supplier, with the device using two AI processors to handle vision and language tasks simultaneously.

  • Kuo also added that OpenAI’s combined 2027–28 shipments of this phone could touch 30M, if the development stays on track.

Why it matters: Controlling hardware and OS could be the key to a true agentic phone. But if OpenAI’s AI phone is closer than we thought, where does this leave the device it’s building with Jony Ive’s io? OpenAI acquired io last year with much fanfare to go “beyond screens,” but nothing concrete has appeared so far except a few rumors.

TOGETHER WITH LAMBDA

How to push Model FLOPS Utilization past 50%

The Rundown: Most large-scale training runs operate at just 35–45% Model FLOPS Utilization, meaning teams pay for more than twice the compute they actually use. Lambda’s engineers benchmarked Llama 3.1 models from 8B to 405B on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to trace efficiency loss to its root causes.

Efficiency losses were traced to:

  • Memory overhead capping effective throughput

  • Parallelism strategies misaligned with the hardware

  • Serialized communication stalling GPU cycles

Get the guide.

ANTHROPIC

🤑 Anthropic’s AI agents for finance work

Image source: Anthropic

The Rundown: Anthropic just unveiled 10 ready-to-run AI agents aimed squarely at financial services and insurance — capable of handling work ranging from building pitchbooks and screening KYC files to reviewing earnings and valuations.

The details:

  • Each agent comes with task-specific domain skills and instructions, connectors to relevant data sources, and add-on Claude models for sub-tasks.

  • Firms can adapt any agent of their choice to their own modeling conventions, risk policies, and approval flows — while staying in the loop 24/7.

  • The agents can be used as plugins within Claude Cowork or Claude Code on desktop, or as cookbooks, running as Managed Agents on the Claude platform.

  • Claude is also getting an add-in for Microsoft 365 as well as data connectors from Dun & Bradstreet, Verisk, IBISWorld, and other financial services partners.

Why it matters: Development, cybersecurity, design, and now finance. Anthropic is going domain by domain, meeting businesses where they are instead of selling a general model and letting them figure it out. Its new $1.5B joint venture alongside Wall Street giants reinforces this strategy, further fueling its race with OpenAI.

AI TRAINING

🤖 Make your Notion agents more autonomous

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn a hidden workflow that will make your Notion Agents more autonomous and powerful than they are by default. This lets you wake up any agent, give it tasks, and then get a report on what it did.

Step-by-step:

  1. Create a Notion agent from the “Agents” option in the sidebar. Then, open a database for the agent’s prompt and task reports. Ours is called “reports”

  2. Click the New dropdown, open Templates, and create a @Today template (ours was Daily Summary). @Today makes duplicates inherit the current date

  3. Set the properties, write task instructions in the page body, and @ mention the agent, so the duplicate triggers it. Remember to stop the agent when doing this, so it doesn’t overwrite the template

  4. From the template, click New template, then Duplicate, and pick a cadence. We run ours daily at 7 a.m. A small blue icon next to the template shows it’s live

Pro tip: Try setting up daily debriefs, weekly reports, and email automations. Now you can route them all through the same planning agent.

PRESENTED BY IBM

🔌 Rewire the C-suite for an AI-first world

The Rundown: Most leaders know AI will reshape their business, but few have a clear playbook for how. An IBM Institute of Business Value analysis reveals 5 plays that CEOs must fulfill now for payoffs by 2030.

To lead in an AI-first landscape, surveyed CEOs suggest:

  • Customize your AI mix, not just your AI models

  • Hire a Chief AI Officer if you haven’t already

  • Orchestrate intelligence — both artificial and human

Get deeper details in the 2026 CEO Study.

AI DATA CENTERS

🏘️ Home-based ‘mini’ AI data centers are coming

Image source: Span

The Rundown: California startup Span is teaming up with Nvidia to install mini AI data centers on the walls of residential homes and small businesses, tapping unused electrical capacity on local grids to meet surging AI compute demand.

The details:

  • Span has developed XFRA, small compute nodes that mount on the exterior walls of homes, alongside accompanying HVAC and electrical systems.

  • Nvidia is providing its liquid-cooled RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs to power each XFRA box, ensuring noiseless computing for AI workloads.

  • Span told CNBC it can install 8,000 XFRA units 6x faster and at one-fifth the cost of building a comparable 100MW centralized data center facility.

  • Currently, the company is working with PulteGroup, one of the largest U.S. homebuilders, to test the box and its economics in newly built communities.

Why it matters: Grid strain from data centers is real, and Span’s boxes could spread the load while tapping only unused capacity. But public response is an open question — not all will love the idea of a data center box mounted where kids play, especially when alternatives like ocean- and space-based data centers are also in sight.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🚀 Box Automate – Orchestrate agentic workflow automation, securely and at scale*

  • 🎨 Pomelli – Make product-specific campaigns with Google’s AI marketing tool

  • 🖼️ Uni 1.1 – Luma’s new image generation and editing AI that nears the frontier

  • 🎮️ Astrocade – Platform to create shareable games with AI

    *Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Instant started rolling out to all ChatGPT users, bringing improved performance, stronger memory, and more personalized, concise responses.

Microsoft expanded its Copilot Cowork agentic system to iOS and Android, while adding built-in skills for common tasks and data plugins for business systems.

Apple agreed to pay some U.S. iPhone buyers a collective $250M to settle a class action lawsuit over misleading claims about its new AI Siri, but admitted no wrongdoing.

Perplexity AI launched Computer for Professional Finance, bringing licensed data and 35 dedicated workflows to its agentic system to help analysts handle routine work.

Anthropic reportedly committed to spending $200B on Google’s cloud and chips over the next five years, now making 40%+ of Google’s revenue backlog.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company is cutting 14% of its workforce, ~700 people, as it shifts to AI-native teams, agent-driven workflows, and leaner ops.

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 Schy W. in Springfield, IL:

“I went to a music festival — multiple stages, music over several days. Many bands had more than one set time/location. I fed Claude the festival’s schedule PDF and told it to extract the information, but to ignore autograph signing and music workshops. I then read off a list of bands I wanted to see and followed up with a subset of those that I absolutely did not want to miss. I requested a schedule that would plan out where I should be to maximize the number of bands I could reasonably see with a simple prompt.

It understood the mission and in one stroke produced a fantastic spreadsheet optimizing my time and noting my priorities, stages, times, partial sets, if a band has another set, and explained the decision-making rationale.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

  • Read our last AI newsletter: AI data centers head for the ocean

  • Read our last Tech newsletter: GameStop’s wild bid to buy eBay

  • Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meta buys a humanoid brain

  • Today’s AI tool guide: Make your Notion agents more autonomous

See you soon,

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

AI data centers head for the ocean

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. AI’s land grab is running into walls — literal ones, in the form of an angry public fed up with data center constructions in their cities.

Oregon-based startup Panthalassa is taking things offshore instead, with Peter Thiel leading a new $140M round for floating structures that turn ocean energy into the compute AI companies are all scrambling for more of.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • Thiel-backed startup brings AI data centers to sea

  • Anthropic co-founder forecasts AI’s self-building era

  • How to replace Siri with a free local model

  • OAI, Anthropic launching rival private equity ventures

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

PETER THIEL & PANTHALASSA

🌊 Thiel-backed startup brings AI data centers to sea

Image source: Panthalassa

The Rundown: PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel just led a $140M Series B for Panthalassa, an Oregon-based startup that builds autonomous floating compute structures powered by ocean waves — reportedly valuing the company at nearly $1B.

The details:

  • Each 85-meter steel node bobs in open ocean, converting wave motion into electricity for onboard AI chips, all cooled naturally by seawater.

  • Once deployed, the nodes can steer themselves to remote waters using only their hull shape (no engines) and beam AI results back via SpaceX’s Starlink.

  • The raise will finish a pilot factory near Portland and deploy the first wave-powered compute nodes in the Pacific Ocean, with commercial rollout in 2027.

  • Thiel told the Financial Times that “extraterrestrial solutions (to compute) are no longer science fiction” and that “Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”

Why it matters: AI data centers have been one of the more controversial AI talking points for the general public, and the hostility towards their construction is growing fast. While both Elon Musk and Google have pushed space-based options, those are still far from reality, making the ocean an interesting and more realistic alternative.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

 API latency is only part of the story

The Rundown: Most teams pick an API by checking a benchmark table and calling it done—a shortcut that could miss what really matters in production. This guide from You.com explains why raw latency is a misleading signal and what to measure instead.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why p50 latency hides the failures your users actually experience

  • The “time-to-useful-result” framework that captures what benchmarks leave out

  • Four hidden cost drivers that show up in your logs, not vendor tables

  • How to evaluate APIs at your actual concurrency levels, not the demo conditions

Learn what to measure instead. Download the guide.

ANTHROPIC

📝 Anthropic co-founder forecasts AI’s self-building era

Image source: Jack Clark (@JackclarkSF on X) / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark published a new blog post on self-improving AI, putting 60%+ odds on AI systems training their own successors before 2029, citing public data showing AI is already handling a range of core R&D tasks.

The details:

  • Clark built the case on public papers and benchmark data, charting AI going from near-zero to 100% across core development tasks in under 3 years.

  • METR data shows AI’s independent work capability went from 30-second tasks in 2022 to 12 hours in 2026, with 100-hour runs projected by year-end.

  • Clark also pointed to the SWE-Bench benchmark (real GitHub coding), moving from Claude 2 at 2% to Mythos Preview at 93.9% in under three years.

  • OpenAI is also targeting an automated research intern by Sept. 2026, while startups like Recursive Superintelligence share similar self-improvement goals.

Why it matters: Self-improving AI systems feel like the inflection point that really makes model development go exponential, and “by the end of 2028” is not that far away. AI is already moving at a speed that is hard for most to process — but once it can reliably build and train itself, all bets are off for how fast things can truly move.

AI TRAINING

📲 How to replace Siri with a free local model

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to download a free AI model to your iPhone and bind it to your phone’s action button like Siri. The model is installed locally, so you will be able to use it without the internet or sending out your private data.

Step-by-step:

  1. Download Locally AI from the App Store, choose your model. You can start with Google’s new, open-source Gemma model, which typically works great

  2. Download the AI and keep the app open. Now, open settings, search for Action Button, swipe to the Shortcut option, search Locally AI, and choose Voice Mode

  3. Press the Action Button on your iPhone and wait for the chime. The app will ask you to download a speech-to-text model the first time. Download it

  4. Now try asking the model a question. We found they are best for explaining concepts, translation tasks, and math

Pro tip: Download a bigger model and run the same prompt through it. Compare speed, storage size, and answer quality to get the perfect AI for your iPhone.

AI & THE ENTERPRISE

💰 OAI, Anthropic launching rival private equity ventures

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic announced the formation of a new Claude services company with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, with OpenAI also reportedly raising for its own PE-backed ‘Deployment Company’ the same day.

The details:

  • The $1.5B Anthropic venture will focus on mid-sized companies, pairing its Applied AI engineers with teams building custom Claude workflows.

  • OAI’s “Deployment Company” will reportedly bring in $4B from 19 investors at a $10B valuation, including TPG, Brookfield, Bain, and SoftBank.

  • Both models would give the frontier AI labs direct paths into portfolio companies that often lack the in-house talent to deploy AI systems alone.

Why it matters: The barriers for companies aren’t the models anymore, but actually getting it installed and integrated into messy, large-scale businesses. These paths look more like frontier labs creating their own AI-native consulting firms, with a wealth of private equity portfolio companies ready to get in on the action.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence – Get AI-driven insights from your unstructured customer feedback to build your product roadmap*

  • 🚀 Grok 4.3 – xAI’s AI with strong cost efficiency, domain-specific performance

  • 🤖 Cofounder 2 – General Intelligence’s new agent orchestrator for businesses

  • 🦮 Codex Pets – OpenAI’s animated companions for tracking Codex work

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Everything else in AI today

A new filing in the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI case showed that Musk reached out to OAI President Greg Brockman about a potential settlement days before the trial.

The New York Times reported that the White House is seeking to create a formal review and oversight process prior to companies publicly deploying AI models.

Sierra raised $950M at a $15B valuation, with the platform saying it now serves over 40% of the Fortune 50 companies for AI-driven customer experiences.

Roomba creator and former iRobot CEO Colin Angle introduced the Familiar, a bulldog-sized AI pet robot targeting retirees who’ve aged out of pet ownership.

Anthropic is reportedly in talks to purchase chips from Fractile, a three-year-old London startup focused on more efficient chips for running AI models.

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 Adam M. in Berlin, Germany:

My best friend Eric was in a horse riding accident, which has left him partially paralyzed from the neck down. His medical insurance would only cover some of it. He was in a remote place in South Africa, so he needed to be flown by helicopter to the nearest hospital and then undergo multiple surgeries.

We used AI to help us set up the GoFundMe page and create social media posts for him, and to manage his ongoing recovery. Given that he can’t really use his hands, he’s able to use his phone now with AI to give updates and share about his journey with the world so that we can get the message out there to help him recover.

We’re also using it to stay up to date with GoFundMe and their documentation and what they need to prove that he’s a real person and that it isn’t a scam. Whenever they send requests, we can paste them into Claude and get a properly formatted answer back so they can speed up the approval process, release their funds, and make sure they’re happy.

It also helped us estimate what we should do in terms of a goal. We’ve set the goal at half a million euros, and we are well on the way.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

  • Read our last AI newsletter: AI shows its skills in the emergency room

  • Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX is about to crash into the Moon

  • Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meta buys a humanoid brain

  • Today’s AI tool guide: How to replace Siri with a free local model

See you soon,

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

AI shows its skills in the emergency room

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Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. AI just beat two attending emergency room physicians across real patient cases in a new Harvard study. The model? OpenAI’s o1-preview, released in… 2024.

Millions of users are already turning to ChatGPT for health advice every day, but the data shows that AI models (preferably not several generations behind) may be ready for a more formal seat in the exam room alongside the doctor as well.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • Old AI model tops doctors in ER trial

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Create converting landing pages in Claude

  • Pentagon announces new AI partners

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

🏥 Old AI model tops doctors in ER trial

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: A Harvard study published in Science just put OpenAI’s o1-preview (released in 2024) through 76 real ER cases, with the AI diagnosing patients more accurately than two physicians, despite using only raw electronic health-record text.

The details:

  • The study compared OpenAI’s o1-preview model with two attending physicians across 76 real ER cases and three decision stages of patient care.

  • At initial ER triage, the model gave the correct diagnosis 67.1% of the time, compared to 55.3% and 50.0% for the two physicians.

  • The two separate physician reviewers tasked with scoring couldn’t tell which diagnoses came from the model and which came from the humans.

  • In one case, the AI flagged a rare flesh-eating infection in a transplant patient roughly 12 to 24 hours before the treating doctor caught it.

Why it matters: Millions of people are already using AI daily for health questions, but studies like these are showing the usefulness can also flow the other way to the doctors themselves. If a model generations behind is already beating ER doctors, imagine what the frontier could look like inside the patient care process.

TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP

⚡️ See how Oura automates customer feedback analysis

The Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform that pulls all your feedback – surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments– into one view, then uses AI to surface the most actionable insights to deliver them to your inbox. Teams at Perplexity, Stripe and DoorDash rely on Unwrap to ensure no customer voice gets lost.

With Unwrap you get:

  • All customer feedback automatically categorized

  • Query feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools using Unwrap’s MCP

  • Real-time alerts from feedback as they arise

  • A clear view of customer sentiment

Unwrap is offering a trial of its tools to Rundown AI subscribers! Grab 15 minutes with the team to get set up.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / 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.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: Last year, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. Like any parent in that situation, I wanted to understand everything I could so we could make the best decisions for her care. I used both Gemini and ChatGPT to help me sort through the medical literature, treatment options, possible side effects, and how other countries approach treatment.

I also turned to ChatGPT to identify the leading specialists in the country — thankfully, our referred doctor turned out to be one of them, which gave us even more reassurance. More than anything, it helped demystify the disease and make us feel confident that we were doing everything we could. She’s doing really well on her medications, and seeing her recover has been an enormous relief.

Shubham, Editor: I use ChatGPT as a label-reading filter for packaged snacks, uploading product photos and asking it to flag hidden sugars, oils like palm, and preservatives, then compare options against a strict checklist of clean ingredients, minimal processing, and decent macros.

It’s especially useful for decoding lesser-known, jargon-heavy terms on the back label, translating things like INS numbers, stabilizers, and emulsifiers into plain English so it’s clear what’s actually being consumed. Instead of trusting front-of-pack claims like “multigrain” or “sugar-free,” it breaks down what’s inside, surfaces trade-offs, and narrows choices to the best options available online

AI TRAINING

🎨 Design converting landing pages in Claude

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn to use Anthropic’s new AI design tool — Claude Design — to generate four, high-converting mockup variations of your website’s landing page.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to claude.ai/design, select wireframe, click create, and describe who the page is for, the product, and the action visitors should take. Don’t hit “Send”

  2. Screenshot a landing page you like (search top pages in your niche), as well as a page that does millions of daily transactions, like Amazon or eBay

  3. Hit send with the brief and screenshots. Tell Claude to give four variations of the mockup. Answer any follow-up questions and wait 2-5 minutes

  4. Refine with comments. Click any element and leave a note like “rewrite this CTA to be outcome-specific” or “add a testimonial here.” Claude applies the change

Pro tip: Click Share > Handoff to Claude Code > Send to Claude Code Web to get Claude Code to build and deploy the final website for you.

PRESENTED BY SCRUNCH

🏆 AI is your new VIP visitor

The Rundown: Scrunch is the AI Customer Experience Platform that optimizes your site for AI bots — the new VIPs deciding whether your brand gets named, cited, or skipped when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude about your category.

With Scrunch, you’ll:

  • See how AI reads your site today

  • Spot the blockers and content gaps

  • Deliver optimized pages straight to AI agents

  • Show up in more AI answers

Click here to see how AI reads your site.

AI & THE PENTAGON

🏛️ Pentagon announces new AI partners

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Pentagon added 8 AI companies to its classified networks while excluding Anthropic, even as the Washington Post reports the new contracts have the same autonomous-weapons and surveillance limits for which Anthropic was blacklisted.

The details:

  • The official agreement list names SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle as the companies added to classified networks.

  • The Department of War said the new deals will “accelerate the transformation toward establishing the U.S. military as an AI-first fighting force”.

  • DoD CTO Emil Michael told CNBC that Anthropic’s supply-chain risk label still stands, but called its Mythos model a “separate national security moment.”

  • Anthropic’s exclusion comes days after the White House came out against a broader Mythos rollout over compute concerns impacting its own access.

Why it matters: The White House seemingly wants to have its cake and eat it too — both continuing to shun Anthropic while also wanting priority access to its Mythos model despite the blacklist. There are also some interesting names on that list, namely Reflection, which raised $2B from 1789 Capital, a Donald Trump Jr.-backed fund.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🗣️ Custom Voices – Clone voices with short clips for use in Grok applications

  • 🦮 Codex Pets – OAI’s animated companions for tracking active Codex work

  • 🎶 ElevenMusic – Platform for AI song generation, remixing, creator payouts

  • 🚀 MiMo-V2.5-Pro – Xiaomi’s powerful new open-source model

📰 Everything else in AI today

OpenAI shipped Codex Pets, animated desktop companions that let you track agent progress without switching back to the app.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that OpenClaw users can use their ChatGPT subscriptions within the agentic tool, taking a stance against Anthropic’s restrictions.

Maryland signed the U.S.’s first ban on AI-driven grocery pricing, with fines up to $25K for stores caught using personalized shopper data to mark up prices.

SAG-AFTRA secured new AI guardrails in its four-year studio deal, with the guild’s negotiator refusing to sign until Hollywood studios made concessions on AI protections.

A Chinese court ruled that replacing a worker with AI does not legally justify firing them, ordering a tech firm to pay wrongful termination damages.

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 Olli T. in Finland:

“I’m a new real estate investor, and what I’m struggling with is market insights, as in our county, there is no transparency or proper historical information available. With Gemini Pro, I created a concept that analyzes the market information.

The tool displays all relevant renovation history and future needs and can also generate an investment calculation. I then refined the concept with multiple free AIs (Claude, Codex), one prompt per day, to have a product that fits my needs.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

  • Read our last AI newsletter: The White House rethinks its Anthropic fight

  • Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX is about to crash into the Moon

  • Read our last Robotics newsletter: A humanoid baggage handler has landed

  • Today’s AI tool guide: Create converting landing pages in Claude

See you soon,

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