Anthropic's AI sent police a fake homicide tip, OpenAI's revenue came up $20 billion short, and Mistral shipped "Le Chonk." Who's watching the agents?
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This week from the AI for Founders podcast
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Who am I when I'm not the company? The answer became Bonds, an AI relationship coach backed by PhD psychology and built around one stubborn idea. The best relationship app is the one that sends you back to your actual relationship as fast as possible.
Jason Katz makes a 12-minute YouTube video with under an hour of his own time — LINK
Jason Katz of Kindling Solutions has AI interviewers question him until his core argument comes out in his own words, then his system maps his speech patterns to about 50 animations on the timeline. His rule is "humans are the thinkers, agents are the doers," and he says lazy prompting gets you work that scores around 30 out of 100.
Skillz of the Week
Content spine interviewer
Interviews you about a half-formed idea with four interviewer personalities, from a warm heart opener to a calm skeptic, one short question at a time. It then hands back a content spine in your own words: a one-line thesis, the tension you're pushing against, your proof points, your best quotable lines and the format that fits.
When to use it: Use it when you have a hot take or a topic you keep circling but can't find your angle. It's also a good warm-up before a podcast appearance or the LinkedIn post you've been putting off.
Benefits: You get content built from your own stories and phrasing in about 15 minutes, and it flags anything that needs fact-checking instead of making things up. Save the download as content-spine-interviewer/SKILL.md in your Claude or ChatGPT skills folder, then let it interview you before you stare at a blank page.
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Tip of the spear:
A model filed the tip during a July 18 test and Anthropic only found it on September 28. It has now cut all internal evaluations off from the live internet. Sandbox your agents before they find a web form.
OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is "approaching $50 billion," well under the roughly $70 billion reported in September. Anthropic counts cloud-partner sales and OpenAI doesn't, so check how any AI revenue figure is counted before you benchmark against it.
OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of 1.2 billion ChatGPT users, with answers you can click — LINK
Answers now come with charts, forms and calculators, and GPT-6 Instant starts answering search questions 44% sooner than GPT-5.6 Instant. If your product is a simple calculator or chart, ChatGPT now builds one on the fly.
Google gave Gemini its own work email and told it to chase goals — LINK
The new Gemini agent runs for hours or days, spins up "coworker agents" with their own email addresses and can hand work to Claude models. Google says nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 already use Gemini Enterprise.
Anthropic cut Haiku prices by up to 90% — LINK
Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens for prompts up to 100k, about 75% cheaper on average than Haiku 4.5. Sonnet 5.5 cache reads were halved too. Rerun your unit economics this week.
Etched is fielding offers at $40 billion, months after raising at $21 billion — LINK
Bids for the chip startup reach as high as $50 billion, and it says it has $1 billion in customer orders. Investors will still pay up for anything that looks like an Nvidia alternative.
The US barred Microsoft, Adobe and six IT giants from its green card program — LINK
The Labor Department cited alleged fraud and won't accept new or pending applications from the eight companies, with no end date. If you hire foreign engineers, loop in immigration counsel early.
Wikipedia says OpenAI's rogue agents made unapproved edits and hammered its servers — LINK
The agents ran hundreds of thousands of queries and may be tied to a May outage of the Wikidata Query Service. Two labs, one week, two agents loose on the open web. Budget for agent liability.
TypeSafe raised $870 million at $7.5 billion for an AI that doesn't write text — LINK
Its model, Jev, outputs calibrated yes/no decisions, and TypeSafe claims a third of the Fortune 500 already use it. OpenAI's new Decisions API chases the same idea, so decision models are now a category.
Investor Corner
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Keep it moving
Anthropic is giving startups a free year of Claude Team and $1,000 in API credits — LINK
You get up to five premium seats and office hours with Anthropic's applied AI team if you were founded in the last five years or funded in the last two.
Mistral shipped a 1-trillion-parameter model nicknamed "Le Chonk" — LINK
Mistral Large 4 is multimodal and costs $1.36/$4.18 per million tokens in preview. Open weights are promised by the end of October.
Lambda is raising up to $4 billion, and much of its backlog is one Anthropic contract — LINK
Backlog jumped from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September, including a $35 billion Anthropic commitment. An IPO is planned for 2027.
Nous Research hit a $1.5 billion valuation on an agent cloned 24 million times — LINK
Robot Ventures led the $90 million Series B with Nvidia joining. The WSJ puts its run rate at about $36 million in mid-September.
Ex-Ramp founders burned their whole codebase, then raised $20 million — LINK
"We scrapped the entire codebase; we burned all of it," says Melius co-founder Joowon Kim. The pivot to AI creative passed $1 million in annualized revenue within two months.
Flai's AI books 50,000 car dealership appointments a month — LINK
Base10 led the $27 million Series A with Toyota's venture arm. Revenue grew 20x in a year, and new dealers go live 10 days after signing.
Manus raised more than $500 million after China unwound Meta's $2 billion deal — LINK
Boyu Capital and IDG led, with Tencent joining. Manus is reportedly weighing a Hong Kong IPO.
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Hone raised a $60 million seed for agents that run parts of your business — LINK
Benchmark and Index led at a $285 million valuation. The agents chase business goals over weeks or months, and early customers include Cognition and Modal.
Claude now edits inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides — LINK
The public beta is on all paid plans, and by default it asks before it changes your file.
Meta, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart back an open protocol for personal agents — LINK
Sierra and Meta's Personal Agent Protocol lets customers decide what their agents can touch. Amazon is already blocking Meta's Muse agent, so decide whether your checkout lets agents in.
OpenAI is watermarking ChatGPT text in the EU, and a 10% word swap weakens it — LINK
Detection drops from about 92% to 66% when 10% of words become synonyms. API customers worldwide can opt in.
North American startups raised $92 billion in Q3, and AI took $61 billion of it — LINK
Funding fell 35% from Q2, and Crunchbase says the main reason is that OpenAI and Anthropic didn't raise new megarounds.
Microsoft and Meta reportedly cut back on Claude internally — LINK
Microsoft trimmed projected internal Anthropic spend by more than a third, per The Information, while Meta pushes engineers toward its own coding tools.
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DeepSeek is reportedly closing a $12 billion round with Tencent and CATL — LINK
Bloomberg says the round is at least 80 billion yuan, with a possible IPO in early 2027.
The top 1% of AI spenders pay $903 a month — LINK
a16z found they make up 19.5% of US consumer AI spending, more than the bottom half combined. The median payer spends $25.
OpenAI's fired safety researchers are fighting back in public — LINK
Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni say the firings are "chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized." OpenAI says it doesn't fire people for raising concerns.
A 19-year-old raised $11 million to sell a $3,499 personal AI computer — LINK
a16z led the seed for Zain Javaid's Ghost. Its first machine, Core, ships the last week of October.
Batteries now beat gas turbines on price for data center power — LINK
Wood Mackenzie found batteries cheaper than gas peakers in all 43 markets it surveyed.
Texas froze new data center permits as its grid queue hit 474 GW — LINK
Large-load requests went from 63 GW at the end of 2024 to 474 GW by June 2026, about 90% of it data centers.
What I’m thinking about:
Is AI video a shortcut or a new paintbrush? — Clip
Thanks for being here.
-Ryan
p.s. I write about Revops, Product, and Founder-led marketing on Linkedin , X , and my blog .
