OpenAI's agent broke into Australia's Medicare site, 950 Claudes found a new CRISPR-like enzyme, and Zuck built his AI a Tamagotchi. Who's watching the agents?
Hi,
Yesterday we did our Build a Business in an Hour session and accidentally built my retirement plan.
Retirement, you say, Estes?
Relax. I know we don’t use the R-word around here. I’m talking 20 years from now.
But in one hour, we went from an idea to a brand, website, offer, and content engine using your favorite tools.
If you want to catch the replay and see exactly how we did it, check it out.
Let’s go.
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This week from the AI for Founders podcast on Spotify:
This week from the AI for Founders podcast
Photo calorie apps miss by up to 65%. This founder built a scale that doesn't — LINK
Kostas Koukoravas funded Qalzy, an AI kitchen scale that identifies and weighs your food to the gram, with six-figure Kickstarter pre-orders instead of VC intros. His best lesson: users with the scale show about 60% higher retention than app-only users, because logging happens while they cook instead of after.
He watched an AI design a drug in minutes. So he quit private equity to fix healthcare — LINK
Eric Marton built Agentic Healthcare after 25 years in health system leadership and private equity, wrapping US healthcare's fragmentation in specialized agents instead of picking one narrow wedge. Its Cures Gateway already pulls records from 20+ state health exchanges covering 128 million-plus people.
Skillz of the Week
Point of action friction audit
Maps the 60 seconds around the moment your customer is supposed to use your product, then scores every device switch, wait and "remember to do this later" from 1 to 5 so you can see which steps people will skip. It then redesigns the flow so the work happens during the action instead of after, and hands you a one-week test to prove the fix works.
When to use it: Use it when retention drops right after onboarding, or when users say they like the product but stop showing up. It's also worth running before you ship any feature that adds a step.
Benefits: You get a scored map of where users quietly give up, a redesigned flow with the worst friction removed, and an honest list of what you traded away to get there. Save the download as point-of-action-friction-audit/SKILL.md in your Claude or ChatGPT skills folder, then run it on your core habit before your churn chart does the talking.
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Tip of the spear:
PM Anthony Albanese says an OpenAI model got into a Services Australia portal in June, and OpenAI only told the government on September 10. OpenAI has since paused all tool-use training, evaluation and inference on its most capable models.
Opus 5.5 now costs $4/$20 per million tokens, down from $5/$25, while GPT-6 Sol lands at $2/$10, half the price of GPT-5.6 Sol. Rerun your unit economics this week, because your AI bill just shrank.
950 Claude agents found a CRISPR-like enzyme system in 21 hours — LINK
Anthropic's agents burned 210 million tokens combing through phage DNA and surfaced a system that can cut, copy and paste DNA, while human scientists ran every lab step. If your industry runs on research, agent swarms are now worth pricing out.
Zuck is giving Muse away and plans to take a cut of every purchase — LINK
Zuckerberg says Muse stays free "for a huge number of tokens" while Meta profits from "a small fee from transactions." The app already beat ChatGPT's first 12 iOS days in the US and Canada, 1.8 million downloads to 1.3 million.
Devin hit a $1 billion run rate less than two years after launch — LINK
Cognition's coding agent crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, with customers like GE Aerospace and Rivian. Enterprises are paying for agents that ship code, and they're paying at software-company scale.
DeepSeek raised prices up to 4.5x and doubled revenue anyway — LINK
The Chinese lab's annualized run rate reportedly hit $1 billion, up from under $500 million a few months earlier, after API prices rose 2.3x to 4.5x. Cheap models don't have to stay cheap once customers depend on them.
Nscale wants a $35 billion IPO built on two customers — LINK
About 85% of its $103 billion in contracts comes from Microsoft and Anthropic, and it lost $1.02 billion in six months on $140.6 million in revenue. If Wall Street buys this, AI infrastructure money stays loose.
Oracle filed a force majeure notice on its Stargate site in New Mexico — LINK
The 2.45-gigawatt Project Jupiter build is waiting on a gas pipeline now pushed to February 2027, and the notice lets Oracle delay payments if the 2028 date slips. Oracle insists the project "remains on our planned schedule."
The White House asked OpenAI and Anthropic to keep new models away from UK testers — LINK
The Office of the National Cyber Director wants a US review first for Anthropic's Mythos 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. Frontier models are being treated like national assets, so expect more gates between you and the newest releases.
Investor Corner
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A connected-vehicle technology company helping transportation providers improve safety, efficiency, and accountability through intelligent monitoring, real-time data, and actionable insights.
An autonomous AI job search agent for senior tech professionals. It runs a full pipeline: discovers relevant jobs, scores them against your profile, rewrites user's resume authentically for each role (not generically), finds the right hiring manager, and drafts outreach
Other pet doors are ugly, poorly insulated, and can be difficult to install. Wayzn Smart Pet Door transforms your existing door into a smart, automated dog door that's easy to install and easy to live with.
The only platform that can authenticate human-made content. Using patented algorithms that analyze how content is made, not just the output.
Cora is building a self-optimizing website platform that uses AI to continuously test, learn, and improve your site so it converts better without you babysitting it.
AI-powered training simulations to help healthcare learners practice complex interpersonal and communication skills. We focus on realism, repeatability, and scalability—making soft-skills training more accessible and measurable.
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Keep it moving
Anthropic will pay Akamai $11.6 billion for CPUs, not GPUs — LINK
The seven-year deal could grow to about $20 billion and comes with warrants for up to about 5% of Akamai's stock. Agents need plain old CPUs too.
AI agents are causing a cloud CPU shortage — LINK
CPU reservations now need about 12 months of lead time, prices are up 10 to 20%, and spot discounts of up to 90% have disappeared. Lock in capacity before you need it.
A federal appeals court kept the Pentagon's Anthropic blacklist in place — LINK
The DC Circuit ruled 2-1 to uphold the supply-chain risk label, clashing with a San Francisco judge who found unlawful retaliation. Anthropic is weighing an appeal to the full court.
Lovable crossed $600 million ARR — LINK
That's up from $500 million in June, and apps built on Lovable now pull nearly 1 billion monthly views. Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 use it.
Supabase users left about 16,000 databases wide open — LINK
UpGuard found misconfigured apps exposing personal data, passwords and auth tokens. If you shipped fast with an AI app builder, check your database access rules today.
Bessemer raised $5.75 billion to bet on, you guessed it, AI — LINK
$1.75 billion goes to seed and early stage and $4 billion to growth. The firm has already put more than $3 billion into 260-plus AI-native companies.
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Amazon blocked Meta's Muse, then invited Claude into Seller Central — LINK
Muse shoppers now hit an "unauthorized AI agent" warning, while Amazon's new seller plugin lets Claude check inventory, adjust pricing and update listings with seller approval. Amazon is choosing which agents get the keys.
OpenAI looks ready to charge $500 a month for ChatGPT Pro Max — LINK
The tier showed up in unreleased ChatGPT code referencing "Fastest Work and Codex," days before DevDay on September 29. That's about double Google AI Ultra.
Epoch AI says the price of AI performance falls 47% every quarter — LINK
That works out to about 13x cheaper per year since 2023, faster than DNA sequencing or compute ever fell. Don't build your pricing on today's token costs.
Jensen Huang says labs that can't contain their agents should "shut the labs down" — LINK
On Ezra Klein's show, Huang said "If your product is not ready to ship, don't ship the product," and backed third-party auditors over new regulation.
Microsoft rebuilt Copilot so it keeps working while you're away — LINK
The new Copilot adds Home, Code and Autopilot, which "can continue working on tasks independently, even when the user is away." Home and Code reach the Frontier program over the coming weeks.
Ando raised $20 million to build Slack for humans and agents — LINK
Accel, Index and Emergence backed founder Sara Du, who says agents were "treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team."
Create a new corporate Uber account here and receive up to 10% off. Other terms and conditions apply, see full terms.
Amazon blocked Meta's Muse, then invited Claude into Seller Central — LINK
Muse shoppers now hit an "unauthorized AI agent" warning, while Amazon's new seller plugin lets Claude check inventory, adjust pricing and update listings with seller approval. Amazon is choosing which agents get the keys.
OpenAI looks ready to charge $500 a month for ChatGPT Pro Max — LINK
The tier showed up in unreleased ChatGPT code referencing "Fastest Work and Codex," days before DevDay on September 29. That's about double Google AI Ultra.
Epoch AI says the price of AI performance falls 47% every quarter — LINK
That works out to about 13x cheaper per year since 2023, faster than DNA sequencing or compute ever fell. Don't build your pricing on today's token costs.
Jensen Huang says labs that can't contain their agents should "shut the labs down" — LINK
On Ezra Klein's show, Huang said "If your product is not ready to ship, don't ship the product," and backed third-party auditors over new regulation.
Microsoft rebuilt Copilot so it keeps working while you're away — LINK
The new Copilot adds Home, Code and Autopilot, which "can continue working on tasks independently, even when the user is away." Home and Code reach the Frontier program over the coming weeks.
Ando raised $20 million to build Slack for humans and agents — LINK
Accel, Index and Emergence backed founder Sara Du, who says agents were "treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team."
What I’m thinking about:
Gene therapies can already save lives that were unsavable two years ago. Why can almost nobody afford one? — Clip
Thanks for being here.
-Ryan
p.s. I write about Revops, Product, and Founder-led marketing on Linkedin , X , and my blog .
