Tootfinder

Anthropic details the AI Fluency Index, tracking 11 behaviors that represent human-AI collaboration and measure how people collaborate with AI (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-fluency-index

Anthropic Education Report: The AI Fluency Index
Anthropic's AI Fluency Index measures 11 observable behaviors across thousands of Claude.ai conversations to understand how people develop AI collaboration skills.

Essential AI is an interesting company, their Rnj-1 model illustrates another approach compared to the large AI companies.
#AI

[OT] Dilbert? Salesforce steps back from AI: Executives reveal overconfidence in LLMs, pivot to deterministic automation https://opentools.ai/news/salesforce-steps-back-from-ai-executives-reveal-overconfidence-in-ll…

"A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision. " - IBM 1979 #ai
https://www.theverge.com/ai-…

'Meta’s director of safety and alignment at its “superintelligence” lab, supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue..., had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox against her wishes'
https://www.

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox
Meta Superintelligence Labs’ director of alignment called it a “rookie mistake.”

Will AI Kill Open Source?
Will AI kill Open Source? Is it already happening? Or is this just another clickbait title? Well, let’s see. First of all, I am writing this by hand without the help of any artificial intelligence. There is only human intelligence involved here. […]
⚛ https://www.agilejava.eu/…

Will AI Kill Open Source?
Will AI kill Open Source? Is it already happening? Or is this just another clickbait title? Well, let’s see. First of all, I am writing this by hand without the help of any artificial intelli…

NIST, MITRE announce $20 million research effort on AI cybersecurity
https://cyberscoop.com/nist-mitre-announce-20-million-dollar-research-effort-on-ai-cybersecurity/

Taking action against AI harms - Anil Dash
https://anildash.com/2026/02/23/taking-action-ai-harms/
What Anil said.

Taking action against AI harms
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Wer wissen möchte, wieso Agentic AI grundsätzlich ein Problem bleiben wird, bitte hier entlang (auf englisch):
"AI Agent, AI Spy"
(Meredith Whittaker und Udbhav Tiwari beim #39c3)

Reading Tim O'Reilly's essay on the economic future of #AI, one sentence stands out:
"By product-market fit we don’t just mean that users love the product or that one company has dominant market share but that a company has found a viable economic model, where what people are willing to pay for AI-based services is greater than the cost of delivering them"
/Continued

What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond
The market is betting that AI is an unprecedented technology breakthrough, valuing Sam Altman and Jensen Huang like demigods already astride the world. The

Okay, so I've been talking about the ways that Big AI directly harms kids. But what can we *do* about it? Here are some things you can do, at work and and your kid's school, to take action today, complete with scripts to follow: https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/23/taking-action…

Taking action against AI harms
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Google says replacing some article headlines with AI-generated ones is now a feature in Discover, but they can be false or fail to highlight new, relevant info (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/865168/google-says-ai-news-he…

Google won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI
Google now says its AI news headlines are a feature, not an experiment — its ‘trending topics’ in Google Discover keep us from accurately marketing our journalism.

Character.ai is cutting off access to ongoing chats for users under 18 over mental-health concerns, after adding a two-hour daily limit on October 29 (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/character-ai-t

Teens Are Saying Tearful Goodbyes to Their AI Companions
Chatbot maker Character.AI is cutting off access, citing mental-health concerns. Teens are distraught: ‘I cried over it for days.’

The UK must act quickly to position itself as the world's leading hub for environmentally sustainable "Green AI", according to a new report from the country's AI industry body.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/uk-has-…

UK has narrow window to lead global green AI race, report says
The UK must act quickly to position itself as the world's leading hub for environmentally sustainable "Green AI", according to a new report from the ...

"Briggs and his Goldman Sachs colleagues recently said that investment spending on AI made “basically zero” difference in U.S. economic growth last year."
As Robert Solow was saying ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/a…

This economic idea transfixed Wall Street and Washington. It may be a mirage.
Massive investment in AI contributed “basically zero” to U.S. economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated.

AI is McDonald’s. That Will Be Good, Bad, and Catalytic for Civil Rights Advocacy. | TechPolicy.Press https://techpolicy.press/ai-is-mcdonalds-that-will-be-good-bad-and-catalytic-for-civil-rights-advocacy

AI is McDonald’s. That Will Be Good, Bad, and Catalytic for Civil Rights Advocacy.
The current trajectory of AI may have similar effects on how people engage with computers as fast food has on how we engage with eating, writes David Brody.

The first AI-assisted drive on another planet:
Claude helped NASA’s Perseverance rover travel four hundred meters on Mars.
https://www.anthropic.com/features/claude-on-mars

Claude AI Powers First AI-Planned Mars Rover Drive | Anthropic
The first AI-assisted drive on another planet. Claude by Anthropic helped NASA's Perseverance rover travel four hundred meters on Mars.

AI company which trains its models on stolen data accuses other AI companies of stealing data 🤣
Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude - Slashdot https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/23/1810225/anthropic-acc…

Planning to respond "I've already written it into MEMORY.md as a hard rule" next time I mess up.
https://www.404media.co/meta-director-of-ai-safety-allows-ai-agent-to-accidentally-delete-her-inbox/

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox
Meta Superintelligence Labs’ director of alignment called it a “rookie mistake.”

China Is Worried AI Threatens Party Rule--and Is Trying to Tame It (Stu Woo/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/china-is-worried-ai-threatens-party-ruleand-is-trying-to-tame-it-bfdcda2d?st=Dk3r4p&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
http://www.memeorandum.com/251224/p29#a251224p29

[OT] Latest Firefox browser: block generative AI features with Firefox AI controls #AI

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox https://www.404media.co/meta-director-of-ai-safety-allows-ai-agent-to-accidentally-delete-her-inbox/

Trust us they say about self driving cars and the moon and mars. this is year 10 of both and none of it is working?!?!?
https://masto.ai/@GhostOnTheHalfShell/116122965521222035

Self-learning AI releases NFL picks, score predictions every Week 17 game

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-week-17-picks-ai-score-predictions/

Heads up!
@… is sharing his thoughts on the #AI #LLM #GenAI

Moment of Gratitude, this time for GitHub.com
I have been having fun with claude-code and have been using github in ways I did not know existed (like hosting docker images), and so easy! (and, I think, for free)
Thank you GitHub!
https://brewster.kahle.org/2026/02/01…

"AI" is not yet really an AI, just a fancy auto-complete but yet all protection like asimov-type laws are completely ignored.
If one day AI become an AI for real, were fucked.

@… on the #AIbubble, why it is a #bubble and what we will get out of it after it busts:

NIST, MITRE announce $20 million research effort on AI cybersecurity
https://cyberscoop.com/nist-mitre-announce-20-million-dollar-research-effort-on-ai-cybersecurity/

Apple: working on an AI wearable
Amazon: working on AI wearable
Facebook: working on AI wearable
Microsoft: working on AI wearable
OpenAI: working on AI wearable
It's time to turn off the tech industry and turn it back on.

A look at the challenges some AI developers face in building models to extract trillions of high-quality tokens from PDFs, which are hard to parse, for training (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882891/ai-pdf-parsing…

How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?
For all of the AI industry’s advancements, the major models like ChatGPT and Claude still struggle with PDFs, one of the oldest and ubiquitous file formats.

Long article, and a couple of weeks old, so you may have seen it already. But it's worth the read, especially if you're using #AI for any aspect of creative work. #ChatGPT

The ugly truth about using AI to create images
A lot of people using AI to create images don't understand how it works and they need to so they understand the legal risk every image potentially represents.

Why does this keep happening? Grammarly recently introduced an AI chat, and also, their spell-checking service, which previously was their main product, suffers from constant reliability issues since them. I'm paying for this service, because it used to be good, I never asked for an AI chat. I can go to ChatGPT, or Google, which used to be a search engine and is now an AI chat with a worse version of the search engine attached. Not that I'd want any of that.

Claude AI reluctant [to] obey Hegseth's commands to kill enemies - National Zero
https://nationalzero.com/2026/02/24/claude-ai-reluctant-obey-hegseths-commands-to-kill-enemies/

I am not against AI. I am against technology built on copyright violation and sweatshop labor that is actively undermining our ability to save the planet from baking so that people can produce more propaganda and pollute the common well.
If the Venn Diagram seems like a circle, that's not my fault.
#AI #LLM

IBM crashes because we’re gonna YOLO a replacement for banking and credit-card back-ends, replacing billions of lines of COBOL with vibe code. Uh…
https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/ibm-crashes-11-as-anthropic-threatens-cobol-empire

IBM Crashes 11% as Anthropic Threatens COBOL Empire
Anthropic's AI disrupts IBM's mainframe business, sending shares down 11% on threat

The LIBER AI Taskforce has launched a series of short seminars! Friday's first seminar is very much a listening exercise to learn where European research libraries are with AI in libraries from participants https://libereurope.eu/article/liber-l

LIBER Launches a Webinar Series on Artificial Intelligence: AI Pulse - LIBER Europe

Profound, which tracks how AI models recommend brands across millions of prompts, raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $155M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusi

Exclusive: As AI threatens search, Profound raises $96 million to help brands stay visible
The Lightspeed-led round values the 18-month-old startup at $1 billion as marketers race to understand how ChatGPT and other AI systems describe them.

AI companies are raising at valuations that require them to grow at rates that are only achievable by chasing the broadest possible market with the most generic possible product.
A company that raises at a $500M valuation needs to show a path to billions in revenue,
which means it can't afford to be a niche tool that does one thing brilliantly for a specific audience.
It has to be a platform, horizontal, aimed at enterprise, built for no one in particular.
Ever…

Everyone in AI is building the wrong thing for the same reason
Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off. There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone stopped and

Letter AI, whose sales software provides personalized, deal-specific guidance, raised a $40M Series B, four months after a $10.6M Series A (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/letter-ai-pitch-deck-raises-sales-software-2026-2…

Sales startup Letter AI snags $40 million Series B four months after its last raise. Read its pitch deck.
Letter AI raised $40 million four months after its Series A, underscoring investor appetite for AI tools aimed at reshaping sales.

"What I’m saying is generative AI is a deeply expensive edging machine, but for your life."
Garbage Day nails it.
(Original title: Generative AI is an expensive edging machine)
https://www.garbageday.email/p/generative-ai-is-an-expensive-ed…

Generative AI is an expensive edging machine
Read to the end for insider trading and money laundering

When Meta released its new AI-enhanced smart glasses last October, many minds travelled back to Google Glass, the search giant’s abortive venture into the same territory a decade previously. A lot has changed in 10 years.
https://www.computing.co.…

When AI goes hands-free: The rise of smart glasses and humanoid robots
In the fourth part of our coverage of IT trends in 2026, we look at the return of smart glasses and the rise of humanoid ...

NFL player props, 2026 AFC, NFC Championship picks, odds, AI predictions: Puka Nacua Over 92.5 receiving yards

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-player-prop…

AI is dangerous and bad etcetera But people that are suprised that people get into trouble using OpenClaw shouldn''t blame the technology this time, it is just sheer stupidity or a very large risk appetite. It is like handing your keys and all your login credentials to a complete stranger and hope everything will be allright.
#AI

Meta says it is pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps as it develops a special version of an AI character for teens (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/meta-pau…

Meta pauses teen access to AI characters as it develops a specially tailored version | TechCrunch
Meta will developed new versions of AI characters that will give age-appropriate responses

Google says AI music generation platform ProducerAI is joining Labs and will be powered by a Lyria 3 preview version; ProducerAI was developed alongside artists (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/883307/google-producerai-deal-music

This Chainsmokers-approved AI music producer is joining Google
The AI-powered music-making platform ProducerAI is joining Google. As part of the deal, ProducerAI will use Google’s Lyria AI model.

"We have to build industrial-level security for AI agents in that particular area. To me, that's still a gap that somebody needs to work on," Raj Sharma, EY's global managing partner of growth and innovation said.
Execs at Davos say AI's biggest problem isn't hype — it's security

Execs at Davos say AI's biggest problem isn't hype — it's security
EY and KPMG executives at Davos said that AI security is a big risk, especially AI agents and, looking ahead, quantum computing.

Beijing-based DP Technology, which develops AI tools used by researchers for tasks like computer-aided drug design and battery design, raised a ~$114M Series C (Eunice Xu/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/ar

AI-for-Science start-up DP Technology raises US$114 million in Series C round
The Beijing-based AI-for-Science firm said the Series C round would fund hiring and R&D, as interest grows in using AI to speed up scientific discovery.

[OT] This economic idea transfixed Wall Street and Washington. It may be a mirage. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/ai-economic-growth-gdp-mirage/ (archived at

This economic idea transfixed Wall Street and Washington. It may be a mirage.
Massive investment in AI contributed “basically zero” to U.S. economic growth last year, Goldman Sachs has calculated.

How did we exchange information before photography,
before print,
even before writing?
How was truth represented in a world of stories, myths and oral traditions?
For most of human history,
truth wasn’t a fixed point;
it was negotiated within a tribe,
verified by proximity,
and sustained by trust.
In that sense,
we may be returning to an ancient condition:
truth as local, not universal.
This isn’t necessarily the apoc…

AI photo art raises question: What comes after ‘seeing is believing’? 
In the age of AI, photographs no longer express truth. That doesn’t make them any less meaningful.

Koah, which embeds sponsored ads directly into AI chatbots and aims to build an AdSense for AI, raised a $20.5M Series A led by Theory Ventures (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/koah-adsense-for-chatgpt-series-a/

Koah Raises $20.5M to Build a AdSense for AI as Chatbots Scutter for Revenue
The two-sided marketplace connects AI apps with advertisers, betting that native ads–not subscriptions– will fund generative AI’s future.

Since the topic came up in the whole "I run models locally so it's all fine" conversation:
"Open Source AI" does not meaningfully exist. It's just openwashing proprietary shit
https://tante.cc/2024/10/16/does-open-source-ai-really-exist/…

Does Open Source AI really exist?
The OSI has presented their definition of Open Source AI and a closer reading only shows that "Open Source AI" probably just isn't a thing that can exist.

I am all for human-made podcasts and they will never disappear but still this app is a nice demonstrator about the added value AI podcasts can have, I listen to it now and then.
#ai

Nimble, whose AI agents structure real-time web data into tables that can be queried like a database, raised a $47M Series B, bringing its total funding to $75M (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/24/nimble-way-raises-47m-to-giv…

Nimble raises $47M to give AI agents access to real-time web data | TechCrunch
Nimble uses AI agents to search the web, verify and validate the results, and then clean and structure the information into neat tables that can then be queried like a database.

What the White House is calling the
"Genesis Mission" is to speed research and scientific discovery
by analyzing massive science, engineering, energy and health care data sets in the federal government, university and private sector
with supercomputing technology.
It's an AI initiative the White House hopes will result in quicker breakthroughs in areas of research including disease therapies. 
Michael Krastios, science adviser to the president, t…

Trump signs executive order launching "Genesis" mission to expedite scientific discovery using AI
A White House official called Genesis "the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program."

Profound, which tracks how AI models recommend brands across millions of prompts, raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $155M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusi

Exclusive: As AI threatens search, Profound raises $96 million to help brands stay visible
The Lightspeed-led round values the 18-month-old startup at $1 billion as marketers race to understand how ChatGPT and other AI systems describe them.

AWS launches Elemental Inference, an AI tool that lets networks convert live video into vertical clips for mobile and social media use in real time (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Amazon Gives Entertainment Giants a New TikTok-Fighting Tool: AI-Powered Vertical Video Tech
AWS Elemental Inference will let networks and studios convert live sports, news and other content into vertical video in real-time.

Happy Saturday! Metacurity offers our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection covers
--The untouchable hacker god who destroyed psychotherapy patients,
--AI prompt injection is an unsolvable problem,
--Deepfakes are messing up Canada's justice system,
--What the hack of Russia's Unified Military Registry revea…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 1/17/26
The untouchable hacker god who destroyed psychotherapy patients, AI prompt injection is an unsolvable problem, Deepfakes are messing up Canada's justice system, What the hack of Russia's Unified Military Registry revealed, The US military needs to accelerate its tests of AI trustworthiness

Slang AI, which develops voice-based software for the hospitality industry that answers inbound calls, manages reservations, and more, raised a $36M Series B (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/all-deals/2026/02/24/slang-ai-hospitality-voic…

Exclusive: Slang AI lands $36M for hospitality voice tech
The NYC-based hospitality platform helps restaurants manage calls and bookings.

The UK actors union Equity boycotts the BBC's charter renewal survey due to concerns over its use of AI and "airbrushing" workforce concerns (Max Goldbart/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/02/bbc-charter-renewal-survey-equity-b…

Actors Union Boycotts BBC Charter Renewal Survey Over AI & “Airbrushing Workforce” Concerns
The BBC Charter Renewal survey has been boycotted by actorsunion Equity over artificial intelligence and freelancer concerns.

OpenAI and longtime US government contractor Leidos announce a partnership to roll out generative and agentic AI tools for specific missions at federal agencies (Miranda Nazzaro/FedScoop)
https://fedscoop.com/openai-chatgpt-le

OpenAI, Leidos partner to deploy AI for federal agency missions
While AI is increasingly used in agencies already, company leaders say the collaboration will help tailor the technology to specific missions.

Amazon plans to invest $12B in new data centers in Louisiana and says it worked with the local utility "to ensure we pay 100% of the costs" tied to the campus (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/amazon-louisiana-ai-data-centers.html

Amazon to spend $12 billion in Louisiana on AI data centers
The project comes as Amazon has committed up to $200 billion this year on AI investments, which include data centers, chips and networking equipment.

Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and 800 creatives launch "Stealing Isn't Innovation" to protest unauthorized AI training, backed by RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and others (Mia Sato/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int…

Hundreds of creatives warn against an AI slop future
The Stealing Isn’t Innovation campaign — supported by artists like Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and George Saunders — warns of a future filled with AI slop.

Google Antigravity users say their paid Google AI accounts were banned after linking Gemini models via OpenClaw; Peter Steinberger says he may "remove support" (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)
https://www.implicator.ai/google-restricts

Google Restricts AI Ultra Subscribers Over OpenClaw OAuth, Days After Anthropic Ban
Google AI Ultra subscribers report account restrictions for OpenClaw OAuth use. Anthropic banned third-party access days earlier.

Samsung will add Perplexity to Galaxy AI on the upcoming S26 series; users can launch the Perplexity agent by saying "Hey Plex" or with a physical helper button (Cheyenne MacDonald/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/ai/samsung-is-add

Samsung is adding Perplexity to Galaxy AI for its upcoming S26 series
Samsung says Perplexity's AI agent will be integrated with Galaxy AI in its upcoming flagships.

Google says AI music generation platform ProducerAI is joining Labs and will be powered by a Lyria 3 preview version; ProducerAI was developed alongside artists (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/883307/google-producerai-deal-music

This Chainsmokers-approved AI music producer is joining Google
The AI-powered music-making platform ProducerAI is joining Google. As part of the deal, ProducerAI will use Google’s Lyria AI model.

Spotify expands its AI-powered Prompted Playlists beta to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada, following initial testing in New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/spotify-brings-ai-powered-prompted-pla…

Spotify brings AI-powered Prompted Playlists to the U.S. and Canada | TechCrunch
Now available in the US and Canada, Spotify's AI-powered Prompted Playlists let users describe what they want to hear using natural language commands.

A look at Clawdbot, an open-source personal AI agent that runs locally on the user's computer and integrates with multiple LLMs and messaging services (Federico Viticci/MacStories)
https://www.macstories.net/stories/clawdbot-sho…

Clawdbot Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like
For the past week or so, I’ve been working with a digital assistant that knows my name, my preferences for my morning routine, how I like to use Notion and Todoist, but which also knows how to control Spotify and my Sonos speaker, my Philips Hue lights, as well as my Gmail. It runs on...

Adobe rolls out Firefly Foundry, which creates AI-generated "commercially safe" images, video, and more grounded in a brand or franchise's creative universe (Dade Hayes/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/01/adobe-firefly-foundry-ai-caa-wme-1236692649/…

Adobe’s Firefly Foundry AI Offering Draws Support From Talent Agencies, Filmmakers, VFX Houses & Others
Adobe is rolling out a new AI offering backed by major talent agencies, filmmakers and visual effects houses focused on preserving human creativity.

Analysis: scientists who appeared to use LLMs posted 33% more papers on arXiv than those who didn't, as concerns grow over AI slop in scientific publishing (Ross Andersen/The Atlantic)
https://www.

Science Is Drowning in AI Slop
Peer review has met its match.

Anthropic details how it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/AI-resistant-technical-evaluations

Designing AI resistant technical evaluations
What we learned from three iterations of a performance engineering take-home that Claude keeps beating.

Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases GLM-4.7, an open-weight model that Z.ai says delivers significant improvements in coding performance compared to GLM-4.6 (Z.ai)
https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.7

Sources: China's AI regulations, which require chatbots to pass a 2,000-question ideological test, have spawned specialized agencies that help AI companies pass (Stu Woo/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/a…

How Meta's financing structure for its $27B Louisiana data center, which helps it keep debt off its books, hinges on some convenient accounting assumptions (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-ai-data-cent

AI Meets Aggressive Accounting at Meta’s Gigantic New Data Center
Favorable treatment off the balance sheet hinges on some convenient assumptions

Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and 800 creatives launch "Stealing Isn't Innovation" to protest unauthorized AI training, backed by RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, and others (Mia Sato/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int…

Hundreds of creatives warn against an AI slop future
The Stealing Isn’t Innovation campaign — supported by artists like Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, and George Saunders — warns of a future filled with AI slop.

Software stocks rebound as Anthropic announces partnerships integrating its AI tools with enterprise apps, including Slack, Intuit, Docusign, and FactSet (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/software-stocks-anthropic-ai.html

Software stocks rebound as Anthropic announces new partnerships
Cybersecurity and software names have sold off heavily in recent weeks as investors fretted about potential disruption from artificial intelligence.

IBM shares fall 12% after Anthropic outlined in a blog post how Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases of COBOL modernization (Pia Singh/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/ibm-is-the-latest-ai-casualty-…

IBM is the latest AI casualty. Shares tank 13% on Anthropic programming language threat
COBOL is a computer language used for business data processing and IBM is a leader in that area.

Disruptive CEO Alex Davis says Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq for $20B in cash; leaked email: Jensen Huang says Nvidia is not acquiring Groq (David Faber/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/nvidia-buying-ai-chip-startup-g…

Exclusive: Nvidia buying AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion in its largest acquisition on record
Nvidia is making its largest purchase ever, acquiring nine-year-old chip startup Groq for about $20 billion.

A look at how both small and large companies are tracking and enforcing employees' AI usage and considering it during performance reviews (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech-firms-arent-just-encouraging…

Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300M (Laura Mandaro/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/yelp-buy-ai-agent-startup-300-million<…

Yelp to Buy AI Agent Startup for $300 Million 
Recommendation app Yelp on Wednesday said it agreed to acquire AI agent startup Hatch for $300 million, or roughly 12 times the startup’s annual recurring revenue. Hatch charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments. Yelp, which has a $1.8 billion market capitalization, said it plans to operate Hatch as a standalone business as well as

Pinterest users, especially artists, says the platform has gotten worse in the past year due to AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI features (Matthew Gault/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/pinterest-is-drowning-in-a-sea-of-ai-slop-and-auto-moderat…

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation
Users are exhausted fighting AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI-first features.

Anthropic introduces "persona selection model", a theory to explain AI's human-like behavior, and details how AI personas form in pre-training and post-training (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-selection-model

The persona selection model
A theory of why AI models act like humans

Dutch startup Axelera AI, which builds power-efficient AI inference chips, raised $250M led by Innovation Industries, with investment from BlackRock and others (Charlotte Hughes-Morgan/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

US companies sold $1.7T of investment-grade bonds in 2025, nearing the $1.8T 2020 record, driven by AI infrastructure borrowing; Goldman says AI makes up ~30% (Kate Duguid/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/faa3d747-9a32-4219-93eb-a93c10502f06

AI debt boom pushes US corporate bond sales close to record
Investment-grade borrowers have issued $1.7tn of bonds this year, closing in on 2020’s Covid debt rush

Source: Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and ~7 top engineers (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-hires-hume-ai-ceo-licensing-deal-gemini/

Google Acquires Top Talent From AI Voice Startup Hume AI in Licensing Deal
Hume AI’s CEO, Alan Cowen, will join Google DeepMind along with several top engineers as part of a major licensing deal.

Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6B in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; Sakana AI gains access to Google's LLMs (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Spotify expands its AI-powered Prompted Playlists beta to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada, following initial testing in New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/spotify-brings-ai-powered-prompted-pla…

Spotify brings AI-powered Prompted Playlists to the U.S. and Canada | TechCrunch
Now available in the US and Canada, Spotify's AI-powered Prompted Playlists let users describe what they want to hear using natural language commands.

Adobe rolls out Firefly Foundry, which creates AI-generated "commercially safe" images, video, and more grounded in a brand or franchise's creative universe (Dade Hayes/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/01/adobe-firefly-foundry-ai-caa-wme-1236692649/…

Adobe’s Firefly Foundry AI Offering Draws Support From Talent Agencies, Filmmakers, VFX Houses & Others
Adobe is rolling out a new AI offering backed by major talent agencies, filmmakers and visual effects houses focused on preserving human creativity.

Anthropic's data shows software engineering accounts for ~50% of its AI agent tool calls; the remaining verticals are greenfields most founders are overlooking (Garry Tan/Garry's List)
https://garryslist.org/posts/half-the-ai-agent-market-i…

Half the AI Agent Market Is One Category. The Rest Is Wide Open.
Anthropic's new data shows software engineering dominates agentic AI. For founders, that's not a warning. It's a treasure map.

A DOD official says xAI has agreed to let the military use Grok in classified systems and agreed to the "all lawful use" standard, which Anthropic has refused (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/23/ai-defense-department-deal-musk-xai-grok

Musk's xAI and Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems
As Anthropic and the Pentagon fight, Elon Musk is moving in.

Mews, which makes AI-powered hospitality management software, raised a $300M Series D led by EQT Growth at a $2.5B valuation (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/01/22/mews-raises-300m-to-accelerate-ai-powered-hospitality-operations/<…

Bitcoin miners retooling data centers for AI have boosted their stocks; the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF is up about 90% YTD even as bitcoin has slumped (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj…

A look at Craig Federighi's approach to AI at Apple; sources say he led a push to use other companies' models to help launch a revamped Siri later in 2026 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-deal-apples-…

With Google Deal, Apple’s Craig Federighi Plots a Cautious Course in AI
Last fall, Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, delivered a warm message to a meeting of the company’s combined software and AI groups. Federighi said he was excited about deeper collaboration between his software team and Apple’s AI group. But then came Federighi’s criticism. He added that ...

Sources: Richard Socher's Recursive is in talks to raise hundreds of millions at a $4B pre-money valuation to build self-improving superintelligent AI (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-23/ai-startup…

Meta agrees to acquire up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs in a deal valued at $100B that could see Meta own up to 10% of AMD; Meta plans to deploy 1GW in 2026 (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-and-amd-a…

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says creators can generate Shorts using their AI likenesses later in 2026, but offers few details, and touts AI tools like game makers (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/864610/youtube-shorts-ai-likenesses-neal-mohan-…

YouTubers will be able to make Shorts with their own AI likenesses
YouTube is going to let creators make Shorts featuring AI likenesses starting in 2026. Creators will also be able to make AI-generated games and “experiment with music,” CEO Neal Mohan says.

Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode, providing access to users' Gmail and Google Photos for more tailored responses, for US Pro and Ultra subs (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/goog

Google's AI Mode can now tap into your Gmail and Photos to provide tailored responses | TechCrunch
The company notes that AI Mode doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, it trains on specific prompts and the model’s responses. 

Cambio, creator of AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, raised an $18M Series A led by Maverick Ventures at a $100M valuation (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/real-estat

Exclusive: Cambio Lands $18M At $100M Valuation For AI-Powered Commercial Real Estate Software
The startup, which has built AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, has raised $18 million in a Series A round at a $100 million valuation.

OpenAI details efforts to secure its ChatGPT Atlas browser against prompt injection attacks, including building an "LLM-based automated attacker" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/22/openai-say…

OpenAI says AI browsers may always be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks | TechCrunch
OpenAI says prompt injections will always be a risk for AI browsers with agentic capabilities, like Atlas. But the firm is beefing up its cybersecurity with an "LLM-based automated attacker."

Sam Altman says there is some "AI washing", where companies blame AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, alongside "real displacement by AI" of some jobs (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)
https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-wash…

Sam Altman Says Companies Are 'AI Washing' Layoffs
Hold up, let him cook.