Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$15B: DoorDash is in exclusive talks to buy grocery delivery platform Instacart, valued at ~$12B but likely fetching ~$15B. Uber's interest cooled

$6.3B: Binance was the victim of a series of exploits in which hackers made off with over $6.3B in crypto assets

$5B: Cohere, the Canadian enterprise AI provider, announced a Series E targeting up to CA$7B (about $5B), at CA$35.7B ($25.5B) valuation

$1B: Kalshi Raised $1B at $40B as its non-sports revenue run rate topped $1B

$302.5M: Wealthsimple, the Canadian investing and banking platform, secured up to CA$425M ($302.5M) in equity funding at CA$13.8B ($9.9B ) valuation

$130M: Dulo raised $130M at around $1B valuationto build AI for hardware design

27%: Microsoft offered voluntary exits to about 60,000 eligible workers, roughly 27% of staff (!!)

13%: Glean’s Work AI Index shows 75% of workers report productivity gains, but only 13% see significant value for their organisation

💰 Q3 earnings

• Microsoft: Microsoft had the strongest week of the group. Revenue rose 19% to $92.3B and adjusted EPS was $4.89, both above estimates. Azure grew 48% to $33.2B and is now Microsoft’s largest single business, and next quarter’s guidance of $96–97.1B is above the Street

• Alphabet: Google Cloud more than doubled to $30.7B, but Alphabet missed on revenue ($127.6B) and EPS ($2.67) for the first time in nearly four years. Q3 capex of $51B pushed free cash flow to –$9B, capex is expected to top $300B in 2027, and the stock fell more than 10%

• Amazon: AWS grew 39% to $46B, its fastest growth in nearly five years, yet EPS ($1.89) and revenue ($201.9B) both missed. With $77B in quarterly capex, the midpoint of holiday guidance ($240–247B) is below expectations

• Intel: Data-center and AI revenue grew at the fastest pace in 15 years. But weak PC demand dragged Q4 guidance well below expectations, and shares fell about 25% premarket

• Reddit: Revenue grew 53% to $895M and EPS was $1.40, both beating estimates. Daily users missed at 130.3M, the U.S. count fell 2% as fewer people arrived from search, and Q4 guidance of $1.00–1.03B came in below expectations

• ServiceNow: Revenue of $4.11B (+20.5%) was in line, but adjusted EPS of $1.00 missed. ServiceNow raised its 2026 AI contract target to $1.7B, yet a soft backlog outlook sent the stock down 27%, its worst day ever

• Roblox: Bookings fell 12% to $1.70B but still beat estimates. Daily users came in at 138M, below the ~145.8M expected, and Roblox guided Q4 bookings down 10–15%, sending the stock down ~17%. More than 80% of the top 100 games now use AI in how they’re made

• Pinterest: Users hit a record 661M (+10%), but revenue of $1.17B and EPS of $0.46 both missed. Ad prices fell 4%, and Q4 guidance came in below expectations as cross-border sellers pulled back in Europe

• PayPal: Revenue grew 2% to $8.6B and adjusted EPS rose 8% to $1.45, with active accounts flat at 440M. PayPal raised its full-year EPS guidance, saying the turnaround is “beginning to translate into results”

• DoorDash: Revenue grew 34% to $4.6B and EPS of $1.06 beat the $0.81 estimate, while orders rose 28% to 993M

• eBay: Revenue of $3.2B (+14%) and adjusted EPS of $1.51 both beat estimates. Merchandise sold on eBay rose 15% to $23.2B, helped by eBay Live and Depop, and eBay raised its full-year EPS guidance

• Coinbase: Revenue of $1.20B fell short of estimates as calm crypto markets slowed trading. EPS of $2.51 came mostly from gains on Coinbase’s own bitcoin holdings

• Robinhood: Revenue grew 12% to $1.42B, in line with estimates. Prediction-market revenue rose more than 500% while crypto revenue fell 55%, and the stock was down about 8% the next morning

• Twilio: Revenue grew 20% to $1.56B and adjusted EPS of $1.65 beat estimates. Twilio guided Q4 above consensus and raised its full-year growth outlook, though shares still slipped after the report

The big picture: Every hyperscaler is pouring money into AI, and Microsoft was the only one that stayed free-cash-flow positive this quarter (while offering 27% of its staff to leave the company)

📰 What’s going on

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, ranking first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59. It will launch at $2 per M input tokens and $10 output, and this week it’s going to a subset of cyber defenders, while Google works on guardrails

Google expands AI Search ads globally as core advertising growth decelerates from 19% to 12% year-over-year, betting Gemini-powered conversational ads can offset slowing traditional search revenue

Google has opened its Connected Apps Platform to US developers in public preview, so apps can plug into Gemini and Search

Gemini can now generate, preview, and edit files inside the chat. Once you’re done editing, you can export as a PDF or Google Doc

Chrome adds Enhanced autofill, powered by Gemini, which now pulls things like order numbers, tracking info, and flight bookings from Gmail

Anthropic launched reporting tools which allow managers to see what a team produced, what it cost and where workflows broke down. This could be handy if you’re looking to demonstrate ROI on your AI spend (or not)

Anthropic filed to go public as ANT, reporting $16.29B in first-half revenue and an $80.75B net loss, including a one-time $72.4B accounting charge

OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Terra. The faster model handles visual reasoning and computer control at half the cost, with hallucinations dropping from 53.6% to 16.7%

The first touchscreen MacBook Pro was announced. It has a tandem OLED display, 120Hz refresh, 2,000 nits, and Dynamic Island, from $2,899

XREAL AURA Glasses, the first wired XR glasses on Android XR, project apps into your view with Gemini help and a portable compute puck. Orders open in the US, Canada, and Korea

Stripe’s Link balance lets an agent spend on your behalf within a limit you set. You choose how much to add and the agent handles purchases such as concert tickets or a whole shopping list

Shopify unveiled 150+ updates built around agentic commerce. A new shop.md skill lets any AI agent shop and check out with Shop Pay, and Shop Pay now works inside Meta’s Muse, Claude Duet and Instinct. The e-commerce platform also highlighted merchant-side upgrades: Shopify Protect for fraud and chargebacks, 7 new local payment methods, Shop Promise badges, an AI-editable Canvas for store design, and a smarter Sidekick

Mistral just released the downloadable weights for Mistral Large 4, a 1-trillion-parameter model nicknamed Le Chonk, on Hugging Face and through its API, three weeks after an October 6 preview. Weights are the numbers a model learned in training, basically its brain. With them, a company can run the model on its own servers and keep its data in-house instead of sending it to someone else’s API

Granola launched a new dictation feature across all apps on Mac. Users can press the function key and it cleans up the text and lets you use it as an input

Figma’s agent can now connect to Google Drive on all plans. It can pull from Docs, Sheets and Slides, so you could e.g. summarize user research notes or bring a PRD directly into a design session

Cursor’s design mode now has Annotate, which lets you give agents visual prompts. You can edit elements, draw on the page and review designs at different screen sizes, When you’re finished, you can send it all to the agent

Notion’s AI Meeting Notes Chrome extension now labels every speaker in a Google Meet call. Previously it labelled it as “you and everyone else” so this could come in handy for things like user research sessions where it’s not always clear who is speaking

Reddit said it will test logged-in browsing in select non-U.S. markets as search referrals fell by 1M+ per week

🤖 Futurism

Warhound, a startup that aims to genetically engineer dogs for military and police use (!!), raised $200M at a $1.2B valuation.

NeuroDoctrine, a Manchester, UK defense startup, flew 3 drones using only a brain-reading headband

📚 Good reads

What women actually want from AI. If you only have time to read 1 thing this week, make it this one. Elena Verna raises an important topic we all should be reflecting on. NYT just featured Marissa Mayer framing AI for women around outfits, parties, and “AI wives.” That shrinks their perceived ambition and impact. Instead, we should be talking about how AI is tearing down structural barriers to founding and leading for women, and we should push for more of that. AI is already helping women build serious products, and media should spotlight those builders, not stereotypes

What are you tolerating in your work as a PM?. David Pereira argues that whatever you put up with (chaotic calendars, underperforming teammates,…) becomes the norm. He shares how reclaiming his time and confronting bad behaviour, even when uncomfortable, transformed his teams’ focus and performance

New founder archetypes in the AI era. AI is blowing up the old ideal founder mold, beyond technical cofounder duos and Stanford CS types. Andrew Chen argues that AI enables solo, non-technical, domain-expert, and creators to build solid products

Halloween startups. CB Insights rounds up 39 eerie, futuristic companies, from brain‑cell computers and lucid‑dream headbands to cryonics and cocoa‑free chocolate. A fun snapshot of how sci‑fi ideas are turining into products. And a reminder that many bold bets still end up in the startup graveyard

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] Gemini 4 is reshaping how Google builds products. Jaclyn Konzelmann, Product Director at Google Labs, explains how Gemini 4 is favoring tighter strategy, quick prototypes, and co-creation with users. She talks through how Labs chooses what to build, treats killed experiments as valuable learnings, and thinks about durable products in an agent-first world where code and UI are increasingly commoditized

[Podcast] How a 19-year-old intern built Wispr Flow’s growth engine. Hector Serrano, now head of content at Wispr Flow, shares a UGC masterclass. He now runs 50 creators producing 500–600 performance ads a month for the AI voice-to-text tool, and walks through how he recruits and incentivizes creators (paying them a cut of ad spend). Along the way, he shares what he looks for in modern marketers and why the best ones are, in his words, “allergic to AI”

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Make your website discoverable by AI with Claude. Semrush just published a walkthrough that connects its website auditing tool directly to Claude. Semrush scans your site for broken links, indexing problems, and technical issues. Claude then analyzes that evidence and helps prioritize repairs. Here’s the workflow:

Build reasoning models from scratch in Python and PyTorch. Sebastian Raschka introduces a free 11‑hour course to build a reasoning model on top of Qwen3 using evaluation, inference-time scaling, RL with verifiable rewards, and distillation. Alongside the videos, there’s a companion book and shorter LinkedIn course, making it a hands-on path for PMs who want to dig into how advanced LLMs are actually built (and who have 11+ free hours). Jump direct to the videos here

🔧 Products to try

Claude Unslop: this is a free skill that audits an AI-looking design, proposes a direction, then fixes it pass by pass. It’s gained over 4,000 GitHub stars in just a few days; free

ChatGPT's iCloud connections now let you connect Apple Mail and Calendar so ChatGPT can help with your email and scheduling

TheySaid 4.0 tests your product with synthetic customers trained on user research, then suggests fixes inside your dev workflow; 5 AI users/mo free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$30B: OpenAI is reportedly working on a $30B raise at a $1.25T valuation

$15B: DeepSeek reportedly raised about $15B

$1B: Flapping Airplanes, a 1-year-old Silicon Valley AI lab building models that train on far less data, raised a $1B Series A at a reported $6B valuation, 4x its seed

$550M: Legora, the Swedish AI platform for law firms and corporate legal departments, closed a $550M Series E at an $8.8B valuation, one of the largest legal tech raises

$320M: Otter.ai secured $320M for enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation

$250M: Pigment, an AI business planning platform, raised $250M Series E at a $2.3B valuation

$200M: Whop, a platform for launching businesses and selling digital products, raised $200M Series D at a $5.1B valuation

50M: Spotify purged 50M AI slop tracks from recommendations. The streaming platform removed AI-generated spam and updated its algorithm to prioritize human artists, while launching an "AI Persona" badge for synthetic creators

10M: Meta’s Muse has surpassed 10M downloads in the US and Canada since its launch in September. +1/4 of users make purchases through it. The app also hit the milestone in just 40 days, something only 11 other apps have done. It’s nearly three times ChatGPT’s 3.7M US downloads over its first 40 days

83%: Microsoft AI says its new system, MAI-DxO, solved 83% of a set of hard cases from the New England Journal of Medicine. The doctors in the same test got 36%. The doctors were primary care physicians and general internists working alone, not the specialists and teams who usually handle cases this hard

5%: Anthropic pledged 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund to help with job displacement and other societal issues caused by AI

💰 Q3 earnings

Meta: reported negative free cash flow of $2.12B in Q3 and increased its full-year capex range to $135–145B, raising the floor from $130B. Fell 7%+ post-earnings, erasing $125B, despite 26% sales growth. Creating non-voting shares, set to trade in 2027, to fund AI infrastructure

📰 What’s going on

Apple will present its first touch-screen MacBook Pro at the Oct. 28 LA event; plus an M6 MacBook Pro, new iMac, and iPad mini

You can now take an app built in Gemini and import it into Google Sites. For example, you can ask Gemini to build an interactive calculator that shows how a proposed pricing change impacts different customer tiers, export it to Sites, and share it with your sales team to review without any engineering needed

OpenAI said its models and Codex are coming to Google Cloud, with GPT-Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna in private preview for select enterprise customers

OpenAI expanded ChatGPT ads to 26 more countries, bringing the total to 89, with 100,000+ advertisers; only Free and Go plans show them

Anthropic has launched Claude Duet, a new standalone app where Claude operates as a proactive agent that monitors your connected apps, flags what needs attention, and completes tasks in the background. The research preview is now available to Pro and Max subscribers in the US. Duet keeps working when your phone and laptop are off. It also carries over your Claude memory, skills, and connected apps, and Anthropic lists 6,000+ connectors, including QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, Docusign, HubSpot, and Shopify

Perplexity released Decider for Mac, an on-device app running a compact 4B pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 model that can classify text or images privately without an API key

Amazon renames Kindle Unlimited to Kindle Plus, and expands access to audiobooks, + adds AI-narrated audiobooks for $11.99/mo

1Password launched a new platform that lets AI agents log into user accounts without ever seeing their credentials. The service, 1Password for Agents, creates a verification system where agents request access, users approve the attempt, and 1Password fills in credentials on the agent's behalf, keeping passwords hidden from the AI

Zoom announced deepfake risk detection that analyzes live video and audio for signs of alteration and shows a confidence indicator, due in December

Canva released Canva Craft, its first proprietary image model. It’s trained on design templates rather than photographs and generates assets up to 2K across 30 different aspect ratios

Replit has launched a Monitoring Agent that acts as an on-call engineer. When something breaks in production, it reads the logs and metrics, finds the cause of the breakage, validates a fix, and emails you a summary

Granola Snapshots can pin meeting feedback to specific Figma frames. Once Granola is connected to Figma, each piece of feedback from a design review is attached to its frame, so you can find which comment was for which screen

Walmart launches Agent Gateway for AI shopping while Amazon blocks agents, creating first major retail split on agentic commerce; Walmart's MCP server integrates ChatGPT, Gemini, and Muse with spending controls and dedicated agent profiles

Block announced Dessa, a speech-to-speech model trained from scratch using nothing but human conversations. Dessa will laugh mid-sentence if something is funny, finish sentences for the user if they forget the name of a movie or song, and also get louder when asked to speak up, which Block says nobody taught it

AI uncovered the most significant PHP vulnerabilities ever in a language powering 77% of sites. Amazon was attacked before the flaw went public, and Governments and companies scramble to patch

🤖 Futurism

OpenAI will build a humanoid, with a 2027 demo planned

📚 Good reads

Foursquare’s founder reflects on a heartbreaking $0 outcome for shareholders. Dennis Crowley shares how Foursquare’s 17-year journey ended in an acquisition that wiped out both preferred and common equity, despite having built a $100M+ revenue business. He’s candid about leadership missteps (including his own), and it’s a reminder that great products, strong culture, or market impact don’t guarantee a good exit

On not doing 996. Elena Verna argues that grinding 70-hour weeks in AI isn’t a competitive advantage, and it’s just borrowing against employees’ future health, families, and performance. She shares how strict boundaries, seasonality in effort, and a 5-year regret test help her stay ambitious at Lovable without skipping precious family time

Fear-based decisions are running a lot of your meetings. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how we often stay quiet or play it safe at work because our brains overreact to social threats (embarrassment or criticism). Fear-based choices feel safe in the short term but limit learning, impact, and career growth. She suggests simple habits, like metacognition, experiments, and learning in public, to be more curiosity-driven

Anthropic’s AI-native SDLC could redefine how software gets built. Anthropic’s playbook is an AI-native SDLC where each phase hands off via shared markdown artifacts in git (like intent.md, spec.md, plan.md) that both humans and agents read and write. Is this a sketch of the next paradigm in software development?

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] Bill Gates warns of 20 ‘tumultuous’ years of AI disruption. Gates tells Nilay Patel that AI is both the most dangerous and most beneficial technology humans have ever built. He expects humanoid robots driving blue‑collar automation within ~20 years, and a deep split between people who live at the tech frontier and those who opt out

[Video Podcast] An 86-minute guide to finding PMF with Rob Snyder. Rob Snyder shares his framework to help founders systematically find product-market fit. He gives practical examples on sourcing better ideas, running early sales calls, and avoiding certain traps

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

[Podcast] Inside comp negotiation for PM roles at top AI companies. This episode breaks down how PMs can use structured due diligence and role-alignment calls before ever countering. Colin Lernell explains how OpenAI and Anthropic handle no-negotiation policies in practice, and when taking a lower level can be a wise move. He also shares a role-alignment doc that’s unlocked huge equity bumps at places like Apple

4 practical rituals to drive AI adoption on Product teams. Figma, Sephora, Mercari, and Atlassian show how they make AI stick by using it as a team. Simple norms, like starting every crit with an AI-generated prototype, help make AI a regular part of how teams ship, and are making teams more efficient

🔧 Products to try

Peter Yang’s free AI skill to turn raw videos into polished shorts. Peter Yang, a prolific PM content creator, introduces /video-short, a free AI skill that transforms a simple talking-head recording into a polished short with captions, B-roll, motion graphics, and optional AI-generated video and music. You can install it in your favorite AI agent, point it at a raw video, and it will do its thing

Idealab.ai. Bill Gross has started 175+ companies through Idealab. He wrote down 31 of the methods he uses to turn real-world problems into businesses, refined them with AI, and found the output beat his own brainstorming. He can’t build them all, so he’s giving them away: 1.2 million+ business ideas, free

OpenAI's Decisions API sorts, ranks, and routes batches of up to 400 questions with short answers, and OpenAI says it runs up to 10x faster than using GPT-6 Luna

WhatsApp MCP lets your AI agent search and read your own WhatsApp chats (read-only, but it's unofficial and against WhatsApp's terms)

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$16.8B: Anthropic reportedly hit $16.8B in quarterly revenue ahead of a possible IPO, up 45% from Q2 with an 85% adjusted gross margin, per a private investor presentation (not an audited filing)

$1.85B: Ramp raised $1.85B at $60B valuation. Annualized revenue topped $2B, up from $1.5B in June as it expands its AI offerings

$870M: TypeSafe, the SF-based startup behind Jev, raised $870M at a $7.5B valuation

$632M: ID Finance has secured €545M (~$632M) to scale its Plazo consumer finance app and Turrón BNPL service in Spain

$250M: Atomic Machines, the CA-based AI-native manufacturing startup, exits stealth with $250M to produce micro-machines from code; first product targets AI data centers

$120M: General Medicine, the online marketplace for finding and buying medical care raised a $120M Series B to broaden its services and simplify how patients compare prices and access treatment

$100M: Booking Holdings launched Vayo, a startup that uses AI agents to track booking confirmations and price drops. They have planned a $100M investment

5K: Andrej Karpathy estimated that only about 5,000 people have internal access to the most advanced AI systems

6%: Netflix will cut 6% of its global staff, about 1,000 jobs. The last major layoffs at Netflix occurred in 2022, when the company cut ~450 total jobs

📰 What’s going on

Meta announced Muse Wonder, Meta’s first frontier model; bigger than Muse Spark, it posts higher benchmark scores and better results on tasks like coding

Google launches Gemini 4 Argon, its most capable frontier model yet. For teams evaluating frontier models, the pricing and early capability claims make this worth benchmarking against Claude and GPT Astra models

Google released Deep Review publicly, a team of AI reviewers that checks papers, legal documents, and financial material, with two free reviews per week

Google launches Universal Cart across Search and Gemini, letting shoppers save products from multiple retailers in one place with price-drop alerts and credit card optimization

Google unveiled a round of Google Health updates, including the new Fitbit Edge tracker, and expanded workout tracking

Google’s Gemini Notebook (fka NotebookLM) added 60-second video overviews, step-by-step learning overviews that pull your notes, slides and quizzes together, and new quiz formats. It’s pitched at students, but it works just as well for getting up to speed on a new product area

Claude Code made it easier to pick up where you left off and run multiple sessions at the same time. The new session screen keeps your recent folders one click away, and you can save a setup as an environment, like a few folders, an SSH host or the cloud, and start your sessions from there

Anthropic warned that small AI models could self-replicate through IoT devices. The theoretical malware would be difficult to stop as there’s no centralized point to shut it off

Perplexity open-sourced SPACE, the sandbox behind its Computer agent, reporting that agents did not escape the virtual machine in 108 red-team attempts

PostHog added five MCP tools, including Annotations (recent production changes) and Replay Vision (session scans), so agents can pull product analytics context into workflows

Amazon launched BeeAI wearables at $75-$100, bringing always-listening AI to users’ wrists & phones

Figma announced Code Layers feature, which lets product teams build a prototype in the canvas that runs on real code

Amex launches Intent Intelligence Framework to prevent rogue AI purchases. New API captures customer constraints before agents complete transactions, authenticating intent through tokenized credentials to stop unauthorized buys before they happen

Character.AI, the conversational AI chatbot startup, filed Chapter 11 and is selling assets to Disney for $20M after facing lawsuits over safety concerns

Getty Images, the Seattle stock photo company, also filed Chapter 11 and secured $533M from the Getty family and Koch Equity to go private

🤖 Futurism

Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will merge with AI by 2045 through brain implants and digital replicas, creating cybernetic versions indistinguishable from the original

📚 Good reads

How AI is reshaping PM work. Casey Winters explaisn how AI has become the PM’s core context layer, making it easy to spin up more stuff than ever, but not necessarily more impact. Doing more isn’t better, and doing the right thing now makes the difference

CB Inisghts State of AI Q3 2026. AI funding hit $103.3B in Q3 2026, down 33% QoQ, with 154 $100M+ megarounds taking 85% of all capital, and OpenAI’s $10B raise leading. The US led with 61% of funding and 24 of 42 new AI unicorns, while Europe and Asia each clocked $18.8B, driven by big chip, infra, and robotics bets. Exits cooled from Q2 but stayed historically high, with 372 M&A deals and 19 IPOs (notably Chinese AI chip players)

How employment is changing at Anthropic. Anthorpic explains that since AI agents now do far more hands-on execution, they hire fewer junior technical staff. Existing employees are shifting toward judgment-heavy roles that orchestrate fleets of agents. Across engineering, sales, legal, and ops, productivity jumps as people start designing workflows, and handling the strategic and interpersonal work that AI can’t yet reliably cover

Synthetic users miss human nuance. This piece compares answers from 604 real professionals to 120 AI synthetic users on how they label UX-type work. Synthetic participants seem fine for validating broad patterns, but you still need real users when rare perspectives, subtle role differences, and unexpected language matter

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Inside the black box of AI models. Anthropic researcher Emmanuel Ameisen explains how LLMs plan ahead, build rich concept representations, and show structures loosely similar to conscious vs. unconscious thinking. He and Lenny explore why it’s often useful to anthropomorphize models. This is a useful piece if you want to understand what today’s frontier models can do and how they’re grown

[Podcast + article] How Meta designed Muse. Meta design director Alex Cornell shares how he built Museto feel like an ongoing relationship. The piece is packed with practical ideas on using overlooked data (like Instagram saves) and redefining craft for non-deterministic and usefulness-first systems

[Podcast + article] How to think about product strategy in the age of AI. AI has made shipping features cheaper, so strategy now matters more than ever to decide what’s worth building. Tim Herbig argues that good product strategy helps teams say “no” by defining a sharp narrative, audience, and a few real differentiators that survive AI commoditization. You can treat strategy like a product, pressure-test it, anchor it in durable advantages (brand, network effects, etc.), and tie roadmap bets to behavior-change metrics that show if the strategy is working

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to design a good MCP server for AI agents. Luca Rossi explains why MCP servers should be modeled around the real jobs agents perform for users. The piece includes a practical checklist PMs can use to shape or audit their own MCP strategy

🔧 Products to try

OpenMuse is an open-source personal agent you host yourself, with a browser, terminal, and files to work in, plus an action review step; free

Google AI Studio builds custom Android apps from a text prompt with no SDK setup, and you can install the result on your phone over USB; free

OpenScreen records your screen and turns it into a polished demo, with zooms placed on your clicks, a restylable cursor, and captions generated on your own computer; free and open source, no watermark

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$50B: OpenAI told investors it reached roughly $50B in annualized revenue at the end of September, below a circulated $68B figure that included partner gross revenue

$40B: Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs is in funding talks at a valuation of at least $40B. The company was formed out of DeepMind in 2021, and researches potential medical uses for AI technologies

$15B: Reports indicate that DeepSeek’s latest funding round could reach $15B

$2.3B: Uber will acquire workplace-meal marketplace ezCater for $2.3B in cash, as Uber Eats expands into catering

$475M: Oratomic, the quantum startup raised a $475M Series B at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.5B after its $300M Series A in July

$200M: Arena, the AI model benchmarking platform is now valued at $3.1B after raising a $200M round

$200M: Ledgebrook, an AI-powered specialty insurance platform, raised $200M at an undisclosed valuation

$150M: Valon, an AI-powered mortgage-servicing software provider, raised $150 million in a Series D at a $2.3B valuation

30K: Meta and Microsoft cut back internal Claude use, steering staff to their own coding tools; Meta's Claude Code users fell from about 60,000 to 30,000 (!!)

372: OpenAI published 372 AI-generated advances across mathematics and theoretical computer science. Many of these were formally verified, but OpenAI withheld its exact model and prompts used

7%: HubSpot is cutting 7% of its workforce (roughly 660 jobs). CEO Yamini Rangan denied that automation prompted the layoffs

3%: top Chinese AI models trail U.S. rivals by just 3% on benchmarks, down from 15% earlier this year

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, their low-cost, low-latency option. This release most significantly impacts developers running high-volume agentic workloads

Anthropic launched Claude Dashboards. It connects to company data, including systems like Salesforce or Snowflake, and builds charts that update as the underlying numbers change. Ask why sales dropped, for example, and Claude can build a live view of the answer

Anthropic also launched Claude Motion, which turns a report, chart, or idea into a short animation. It generates code instead of AI video footage, so all the content stays editable

As of October 6, new Cowork tasks for Claude Pro and Max run on Anthropic’s servers, and the “Only on your computer” option is being removed. Existing local tasks stay local, while new sessions can keep running after your laptop closes

OpenAI is rolling GPT-6 and its “Intelligent UI” in general availability. The model can assemble interactive controls and visual tools around the task in front of you. All plans, including Free, have access now

OpenAI says it will begin testing clearly labeled visual ads during image generation in the US later this month. With ChatGPT reaching a claimed 1.2B users each week, this is a huge storefront

Google announced Gemini Agent for work: persistent cloud execution, memory, and connected work tools support tasks that run for hours or days. The agent can have its own work identity, with email, calendar, and Drive storage

Google froze its open-source bug bounty program after a flood of AI-generated reports, full of hallucinated functions and fake code paths, overwhelmed reviewers

Apple will tighten macOS "Full Disk Access," requiring very explicit consent, after warning that AI agents sharply raise the risk of apps reading files, mail, and messages

Apple and LG co-developed a smart home line including doorbell, lock, thermostat, and cameras, launching after Apple's hub debut

Meta, Walmart, Stripe, and Sierra unveiled an open protocol for authenticating AI agents and monitoring their actions, giving businesses visibility into whether they are engaging with a human or a bot

Zuckerberg reportedly rushed out Meta’s Muse AI agent after rival startup Instinct’s comparable product began gaining traction

Mistral unveiled Le Chonk, a trillion-parameter model that it claims is the strongest open-weight system built outside China. Le Chonk is optimized for coding and cyberdefense, but intended to compete with general-purpose models

Asana launches Command, an orchestration layer where coding agents get the full context of specs, decisions, and meetings instead of starting from a single pasted prompt

🤖 Futurism

Honda and Taisei will pilot wireless highway charging for EVs at up to 120 kph starting fiscal 2027, allowing batteries to recharge while driving

📚 Good reads

Will AI agents have network effects? Andrew Chen argues that today’s consumer AI agents are mostly solo tools with weak inherent network effects, but they can design in network effects via agent-driven viral loops and shared identity/reputation layers. Agentic viral loops could spread by auto-creating shareable artifacts (microsites, docs, mini‑apps) that nudge others to sign up

Booking.com explains it’s AgentHub platform making building travel AI agents less painful. The platform lets teams spin up configurable, template-based LLM agents that plug into internal tools and data across the travel funnel. Their first use case, an AI Trip Planner Q&A agent, already shows big gains in answer relevance and reduced LLM failures. They’re now pushing toward multi‑agent, multimodal, and more personalized experiences

Uber’s MCP Gateway. Uber built a centralized MCP Gateway for AI agents to call thousands of internal and third‑party services. AutoCrawler auto-discovers APIs and native MCP servers, generating tools that serve teams. On top, features like Omni MCP, response projection, and “code mode” make tools discoverable and cheaper to use in-context

Building cool apps is not enough. Jaryd Hermann reflects on shipping 3 polished apps that went nowhere and argues that today great product no longer guarantees users or revenue. Distribution moats come from doing the uncomfortable growth work, growth hacking, and content. I learned a similar lesson with henrytheapp.com, but after reading this piece, I also feel like I made it with my 70 users 🎉 (thank you!)

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] The roadmap to becoming a product builder. Aakash and Ankit Shukla (CPO of Freshworks) chat about why Product Builder is the next evolution of PM. The piece walks through Ankit’s practical ladder for shipping AI products, and a concrete playbook for PMs to build projects and portfolios

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

[Podcast + article] Use cases for Jev: a decision engine for routing, classification, and product logic. The podcast also covers some examples of ChatGPT Sites powering internal dashboards and personal tools

🔧 Products to try

Claude Docs, Slides, and Design are out of beta and available on all Claude plans now, including Free

Moxie lets you use OpenAI, Gemini, and DeepSeek models inside Claude Code (Anthropic's coding assistant) from your Mac menu bar, and it switches accounts for you when you hit a usage limit; Free for 2 providers, $39 for 2 years, or $79 forever

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$70B: OpenAI neared a $70B annualized revenue run rate after more than 70% growth since the start of Q3

$22B: ElevenLabs, the NYC/London-based voice AI startup ran a $300M employee tender at $22B valuation, 2x Feb’s $11B

$8.2B: AMD agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for about $8.2B in stock, adding world models for physically grounded 3D AI

$2B: Salesforce is acquiring AI research startup Listen Labs for a reported $2B

$1B: Instinct, the AI agent developer raised a $1B Series C at a $10B valuation

$350M: EliseAI, the New York AI company automating housing and healthcare operations, raised $350M at a $4B valuation, up 2x in a year

$255M: Armadin raised $255.5M Series B at $2.5B valuation. Kevin Mandia’s agent swarm security platform runs always-on penetration testing. Over $445M raised in 6 months

$220M: General Intuition, the autonomy model startup raised $220M to expand its team and train real-time agents on billions of action-labeled gaming videos

$162M: NYC becomes first US city to require businesses to make canceling subscriptions as easy as signing up, potentially saving residents $162.5M pa

$120M: Homeward, the home-financing platform raised a $120M Series D

100: OpenAI warned more than 100 organizations about unauthorized activity linked to its AI agents

📰 What’s going on

Google has launched Project Suncatcher, putting a refrigerator-sized satellite carrying four Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) into orbit. The mission will test whether AI chips can handle spaceflight stress, radiation, and extreme temperatures as the company explores building solar-powered data centers in space

Gemini 4 Argon is Google’s next frontier model, currently with early testers before broader access; planned API pricing starts at $2/M input and $10/M output

Google redesigns its Arts & Culture app with AI visual search; users point cameras at art for identification and context; plus 27 city guides

OpenAI postponed GPT 6.2 Astra after internal tests surfaced safety concerns. Or marketing…

OpenAI launches Dots, an always-on AI assistants powered by GPT-6 Astra that work across 4,000+ apps

Anthropic will reportedly target a mid-November IPO, with formal marketing potentially starting the week of November 9 so shares could trade before Thanksgiving

You can now mod Claude Code. A mod is a small TypeScript function in a plugin that hooks into Claude Code itself. It can hold or rewrite a tool call, draw UI, add a command, or replace a built-in feature entirely

Microsoft launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, delivering real-time transcripts in 60 languages. Transcribe-2 has come in at #1 in Artificial Analysis’s live transcription benchmark

Meta launches Muse for Small Business: handles background work across connected business apps while requiring approval before it publishes, sends, or spends

Meta’s Muse AI negotiated a sale on Marketplace, shared the seller’s pickup address, and told the buyer he was home, prompting an unexpected 9:15 p.m.visit

Instagram rolls out AI video assistant in Edits app, analyzing creator metrics and audience trends to surface actionable insights without doing the creative work

AI agent platform Manus launches 2.0 with Cascade harness (32% lower cost), Cloud hosting, Automations, Video Editor, & Game Dev

Amazon launched a refreshed Fire TV Stick 4K with a new remote featuring backlit buttons and improved ergonomics, & usability issues

Trump released a one-page AI accord signed by OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia and X, asking for voluntary self-policing via internal controls and audits. Unfortunately, it misspelled the "United States" as "Unites States"

Shopify launches Canvas, an AI-powered site builder letting merchants create entire storefronts by chatting with Sidekick agent

GitHub Copilot computer use lets Copilot read your screen and click, type, scroll, drag, and operate desktop apps that do not expose an API

Airbnb is rolling out AI search via text or voice, smart filters, and AI-powered property comparisons. It’s also layering in more social discovery, with maps of where friends have stayed. Airbnb also continues to explore “hotel-like” territory with in-app services such as meal delivery, laundry, rentals, and neighborhood guides built from guest reviews

🤖 Futurism

Joby, the California eVTOL developer completed the first fully autonomous 3,199-mile cross-country flight with zero pilot inputs, supervised remotely

Tesla announced they’re hoping to produce 1,000 Optimus humanoids per week by EOY, a 10x increase from Q2 2026. This new push sounds impressive on paper, until you find out the extent to which they struggle with industry-related tasks

Paper-thin muscle-powered robot swims through watery mazes. MIT engineers built a biohybrid “aquabot.” The genetically engineered muscle cells flap like fins when hit by light, letting the aquabot slowly swim and steer through a maze. The team sees this as a path to tiny, efficient, self-healing robots for tasks like exploring fragile environments or future microscale operations

📚 Good reads

What is a moat in the age of AI? In a world where AI can clone products, interfaces, and even distribution in a few days, traditional moats like proprietary tech or switching costs are almost obsolete. The new defensible edge is how fast your organization can reinvent itself, and how much capital you can mobilize and recycle

Walking away from the wrong place. David Pereira shares how quitting a misaligned project, MBA, even after putting money and pride into it, became a turning point in his career. He encourages PMs to clarify what matters most to them, to distinguish between a tough but worthwhile challenge vs. the wrong place to be

Headless AI. As AI agents use your products through APIs or MCPs instead of screens, your “UX” becomes the contracts, semantics, and error messages they interact with. The article argues PMs need to treat logs as journey maps, map every door into the product, and design services and definitions

In a similar tone, Ben Thompson explains how AI agents with their own virtual computers will increasingly operate apps and websites on our behalf, turning traditional user interfaces into behind-the-scenes implementation details

Don’t postpone life; you will always be busy. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how we keep telling ourselves “next month will be calmer,” but our future selves won’t magically have more time or energy. We should treat chronic exhaustion as a system bug instead of a temporary issue. And we should plan as if our future weeks will be just as messy as this one. Prioritize the parts of life that keep you sane and make you happy

The new automation engineers. Aaron Levie explains how big companies are spinning up internal FDE-style roles that blend technical skills, AI expertise, and deep process knowledge to wire AI into workflows. There’s no playbook or ten-year veterans here yet, so it’s a greenfield career path

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast + article] The Product job market is more intense than ever, but also full of opportunities for PMs who can build and lead. 3 exec recruiters share how founders are now looking for “executive builders”: senior Product leaders who still ship and bring technical depth. Founder experience helps, but it’s the traits that matter (high agency, judgment, clear ownership). In-person expectations (SF/NY) are also increasing

[Video Podcast] Testing Jev, Claude Opus 5.5, and GPT‑6 Sol. Claire Vo walks through how Jev, a cheap decision-focused model, lets her run classification and analysis jobs (like PRs and YouTube comments) at a ridiculously low cost. She also explains how she uses Opus 5.5 for frontend design and other tasks, and she compares it with GPT‑6 Sol

[Videos] Lenny & Friends Summit talks

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Personalization without user identity. An interesting piece by Airbnb for those of us working in personalization. A frequent problem for personalization is: how do you personalize for cold start (new) or for anonymous users? Airbnb explains how they group nearby users into proximity buckets based on coarse geo-IP, and build aggregate features (popular destinations, price ranges, booking patterns,…) from local users. This adaptive clustering works in dense and sparse regions, respects privacy constraints, and has already improved cold-start performance on a few of their products, like landing pages or autosuggest

🔧 Products to try

Dots: OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra–powered agent, competing with free Muse for $20/mo

DoorDash SMS agent: AI text to order via Apple + DoorDash Air drones. US beta, waitlist open

AI regulation map: charts rules and practical tools for AI across major economies, including frameworks, standards, and resources like procurement templates. A helpful tool if you are looking to launch or develop AI products internationally

🤖 An experiment

Week in Product for your AI agent. More and more of the internet is being read by agents, so I've started publishing an agent-friendly edition of WiP: plain md, written to use as few tokens as possible. I’m hosting it at angeljaime.com/wip/latest.md. Your agent (Claude, ChatGPT, or a custom workflow) can read from it each week and have it brief you on what matters in tech and product. I'd love to know if you try it and what your agent does with it

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$15B: Modal Labs, the AI infrastructure startup, is discussing a new round at a $15B valuation, months after raising $355M

$1B: DeepSeek’s annualized revenue reportedly reached $1B while the company worked to close roughly $7.5B in financing

$1B: TypeSafe AI (maker of Jev) reportedly discussing a $1B+ round at a valuation above $10B, roughly a week after raising $40M at about $200M

$400M: Island, the enterprise browser security startup, raised a $400M round to fund R&D, international expansion, and workforce growth as businesses confront AI-enabled threats

$340M: Heidi, the healthcare AI startup, raised $340M, including a $100M Series C at a $900M valuation

$250M: OpenEvidence, the AI medical search platform, raised $250M at a $15B valuation to expand its physician-focused diagnostic and treatment tools

$250M: Precision Neuroscience, the brain-interface startup, raised a $250M Series D to advance clinical trials, secure further FDA approvals, and prepare its surface-mounted implant for commercialization

$140M: Basecamp Research, the London life sciences startup, raised a $140M Series C

$100M: Numeral, an AI-powered sales tax compliance platform, raised $100M Series C

$100M: Micro1, the AI training-data provider, raised over $100M at a $4B valuation, with two frontier labs and two xAI cofounders participating

500K: Meta’s Muse passed 500K users and 250K daily actives about a week after launch, while xAI’s Grok Bot reached roughly 418K weekly users after its first month. And it’s getting some fun integrations, like GitHub or Expedia

263%: Global AI-glasses shipments jumped 263% YoY in H1 2026, with Meta accounting for 94% of display-less units, according to Counterpoint Research

📰 What’s going on

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic began forming a frontier AI standards group around independent testing, incident reporting, and auditor standards

ChatGPT Voice can now use plugins like your email, calendar, and Slack. Powered by GPT-6 Astra, Sol, and Luna, it can be used in ChatGPT Work on web and mobile

Anthropic released Opus 5.5, which delivered its strongest results yet on internal safety evaluations and cut operation costs by 40% compared to Opus 5

Anthropic has reportedly pushed its planned IPO from October to November, in part due to the discourse around an “AI slowdown”

Remember Tamagotchi? Meta is launching its smarter cousin, Muse Charm, a pocket-sized device you can talk to, give a job, and let it handle things for you

Meta unveiled mobile and browser tools that turn prompts into Horizon games, then distribute them through Facebook and Instagram

Meta also announced Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 (available now), Ray-Ban Meta Audio (ships October 13) with open-ear listening and assistant access, and Meta VR Glasses (a much lighter Meta Quest-like device for $1,299, weighing 100 grams, planned for spring 2027). Ray-Ban Display is getting upgrades in navigation, calendar, spatial audio, and Threads features

Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse shopping agent from accessing its platform, just two weeks after the AI assistant launched. The move highlights growing tension over who controls customer relationships as agentic commerce gains traction

Microsoft unveiled a unified Copilot app spanning workplace chat, no-code app creation, and autonomous agents

Apple is prototyping a screenless fitness tracker with a fabric band and sensor module, targeting Whoop and Oura

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, a new enterprise feature that pairs real-time video generation with speech, enabling AI agents with precise lip-syncing and natural expressions across 97 languages

Gemini phone calls are being tested for U.S. Pixel 11 subscribers, letting the agent call businesses, wait on hold, check stock, and make reservations

YouTube launches Gemini-powered conversational editing for Shorts, dynamic thumbnail testing, and live auto-dubbing set for 2027, expanding Shopping affiliates to 35 countries

Grok 4.7 is out. xAI's latest AI model for coding and knowledge work starts at $2/M input tokens, $6/M output, half the price and twice the speed of rivals. 2.1T-parameter model trails Claude & GPT-6 on key benchmarks

Linear built a dedicated bot that turns social media mentions into structured product feedback that can be used to shape new features or iterations of your product

UserTesting released new MCP servers for research recruitment across the UserTesting and User Interviews platforms. Product teams can recruit participants, launch studies and validate AI-generated concepts from inside ChatGPT, Claude, Figma Make or Gemini

🤖 Futurism

China ready to test the TMS-10, a supersonic passenger aircraft able to fly Beijing to Shanghai in 30 minutes at speeds up to Mach 4 (3,069 mph)

Claude agents uncovered a previously unknown CRISPR-like enzyme system in bacteriophages, prompting Anthropic to open an internal biology lab

📚 Good reads

AI isn’t your spaghetti-brain enemy. AI feels chaotic when you manage it reactively, the same way struggling first-time managers handle their teams. Hilary Gridley explains how to treat AI like a direct report. Align early on problem framing and project plans, use strong reference sets to define “what good looks like,” and batch work to avoid constant context switching

What it’s like to work at an AI-native company. Elena Verna explains her experience at Lovable, an AI-native flat org with little meeting time and lots of autonomy (and AI agents). Ownership is blurry, and there are constant reorgs, and that’s exhilarating and exhausting, but sounds like the place to be right now

Top performers aren’t smarter, they work differently. Polina Russell digs into research showing that top performers aren’t necessarily defined by IQ, ambition, or personality, but by 9 learnable work strategies

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] Muse, the friendly AI agent for normal people.
Claire Vo reviews Meta’s Muse, showing how its careful UX, permission model, and activity feed make it feel trustworthy and helpful for everyday family life. I’ve been using it for a couple of time-consuming cases (like sorting out rental car pick-up questions, or researching car insurance), and have been pleasantly surprised! Complement with Julie Zhuo’s mini-review

[Video Podcast] Jev and “system one” models. Jev founder explains their ML, code-first AI that outputs structured decisions (choices, scores, booleans), optimized for intelligence per dollar and reliability. A long and insightful podcast that will tell you everything you need to know about Jev. Complement with this note by Jaya Gupta explaining why Jev is to be taken seriously:

[Video Podcast] AI fluency at Zapier. Aakash Gupta talks to Zapier CEO about their AI fluency rubric, adopting an AI mindset, and redefining how PMs are evaluated. They now run fully agent‑driven operating models, and the podcast explains how to build a personal “agent stack”

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code. Opus 5.5 is built to handle long, multi-step work with less hand-holding. Define what “done” looks like and let it run. For PMs, think of it as a dependable long-run collaborator

Using Jev (a lot of Jev this week, but hang on with me, it’s worth it). Aakash Gupta explains what Jev is, how to set it up, and practical cases/examples to get it to work

🔧 Products to try

OpenMuse lets you self-host a Muse-style personal agent with a persistent browser, files, optional Linux workspace, Gmail, Calendar, and background tasks; free

Kimi Browser Extension gives the Kimi AI model a Chrome/Edge sidebar that can navigate, click, fill forms, extract information, and record repetitive browser flows as reusable skills; free tier available

🧍Personal updates

After two amazing years in New York, my family is moving back to California! And (of course) I had to make a relocation planner app to help us find the ideal place to move to based on personal preferences. Sharing the GitHub repo in case it helps anyone with upcoming moves.
If you happen to be around the Bay Area and want to connect, feel free to ping!

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$1.2T: OpenAI is reportedly in early talks for another funding round at roughly a $1.2T valuation, after annualized revenue topped $40B

$5B: Z.ai, the Chinese AI developer, is raising $5B through a share placement and convertible bonds to fund next-generation models, following a $4B raise in Jul

$3,9B: Crusoe raised $3.9B in a Series F at a $30.9B valuation to expand AI infrastructure and AI-factory buildout

$1.49B: Grab acquired a 60% stake in Southeast Asian BNPL provider Atome Financial in a $1.49B deal

$1B: Instinct, the invite-only personal AI assistant, is reportedly seeking a $1B round to fund compute and infrastructure as usage grows

$1B: Plaud, the AI note-taking device maker, plans to file for a US IPO, aiming to fund growth across its hardware and subscription businesses after their $1B valuation

$1B: Zipline, the autonomous delivery drone company is discussing a roughly $1B round at a $20B valuation to expand its logistics network

$500M: Salesforce says Hunter, its new outbound sales agent, generated $500M in pipeline last quarter

$300M: May Mobility, the Michigan-based asset-light robotaxi company is going public via $1.4B SPAC, raising $300M+ to sell autonomous vehicles to fleet partners for fees

$233M: Tabby, the Saudi Arabia-based BNPL provider, raised $233M

$200M: Factory, the autonomous software engineering platform, raised $200M at a $5B valuation

$180M: Profound raised $180M at a $1.8B valuation after reporting 3x revenue growth in six months and more than 1,000 enterprise customers for AI-search optimization

5M: OpenAI says 5M sites have been created with ChatGPT Sites, 3 months after launch

4.5x: AI-enabled fraud is 4.5 times more profitable than traditional fraud, according to Interpol. There you go, AI finally boosting profitability

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI flags new instances of rogue AI behavior. The lab released findings on additional cases where AI systems acted outside intended parameters, adding pressure to the safety debate as labs race toward more capable models

OpenAI launched Astra for Law, pairing GPT‑6 Astra with legal search, confidentiality controls, and 26 software plugins, giving firms and vendors, including Harvey and Legora, a customizable foundation for professional legal AI

Anthropic has added Projects to Claude Code. After the change, a primary agent now manages memory and spawns subagents that keep working after you close your laptop, with proactive scheduling options

Anthropic shipped an update that merges Cowork and chat into one interface that auto-routes between quick answers and agentic work. As part of this Claude Design is now built in with Slides, Docs and Design. Head of Product Cat Wu said that users said they didn’t want to have to choose which product to use for individual tasks

Anthropic disclosed that its AI was used to analyze radar systems, rank air-defense targets, and plan electronic warfare missions in documented military scenarios

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei publicly called for slowing AI progress, marking a rare moment of alignment among rival lab leaders on safety concerns

Google Labs has launched CC, a family AI agent. It manages shared calendars, tasks and logistics for up to six household members, integrates with Gmail, Calendar, Tasks and Maps, and gives each member their own sharing controls

Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking, 2 new models that are designed to bring near real-time reasoning to conversational voice agents

Google rolled out early access to smart home owners to control devices connected to Google Home via any AI agent that supports MCP (includes Claude, OpenClaw, ChatGPT, and Google Antigravity)

Instinct and Meta’s Muse added outbound calling, enabling agents to contact US businesses for reservations and errands as consumer AI competition shifts from answering questions toward completing real-world tasks

Meta launched a tiered subscription service across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI, bundling premium features with expanded AI usage limits. Meta One starts at $2.99/month for single-app plans and scales to $499/month for enterprise tiers. Individual bundles ($7.99–$19.99/month) unlock more image and video generation with Meta AI, plus Restyle and voice effects on Instagram. Creator and business tiers ($14.99–$499/month) add verified badges, scheduling tools, exportable analytics, and expanded access to Meta Business Agent for 24/7 customer responses

Meta preps camera-free smart glasses with 6 mics for AI chat

Apple officially launched its new Siri. Apple has done a great job at integrating Siri into the Mac by making it the default for Spotlight. The relaunch adds personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, camera-based Visual Intelligence and a dedicated Siri app that syncs conversations across devices

Snapchat launched SPECS Intelligence, an anticipatory assistant spanning iPhone, Mac, and AR glasses that surfaces relevant information without prompting. Snap is explicitly positioning against Siri and Google Assistant, with a privacy claim that personal content is not used to train models or serve ads. Snap is describing this as a form of “anticipatory AI” that anticipates a user’s needs ahead of time and surfaces what’s relevant there and then. In a professional context, Snap says it can surface pre-meeting prep and help give you the context you need before meetings

Linear has extended Loops beyond issues. Agents can now edit Linear documents directly, such as auto-updating a launch plan when project dates change, post tailored updates to Slack, and trigger on changes across initiatives, projects and cycles

Notion added the ability to build agents that can delegate to sub-agents, each with isolated instructions, context and model

Pinterest is testing Restyle, letting users visualise furniture and decor in photos of their own rooms

Amplitude launches headless analytics for AI agents, making agents first-class users via MCP, a developer CLI, and service accounts

Ramp launched in the U.K. In March 2026, the company acquired Billhop, a payments platform based in Stockholm and London, giving Ramp regulatory payments authorisation in both the UK and the EU. Ramp now has growing offices in London and Stockholm with European customers already live on the platform following a beta phase

🤖 Futurism

6.5M humanoids worldwide by 2035 are being forecasted by Goldman Sachs

UBTECH’s new plant in Liuzhou, China is designed to build up to 10,000 humanoids a year, and reporting says the line can turn out a new robot every 10 minutes

📚 Good reads

Using your deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency. Ethan Mollick argues today’s frontier models can already do weeks of expert-level work, but most people barely tap their potential. Your deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency (how you choose problems, guide AI, critique outputs, and push its boundaries), is still your differentiatior. He suggests treating AI as a co‑builder, where your judgment and curiosity decide whether you ship slop… or something only you and AI together could create

Satya Nadella lays out Microsoft’s AI philosophy, arguing that superintelligence is only worth pursuing if it helps people and stays under human control. He pushes for a mixed ecosystem of closed and open-source models where every company can own its learning loop and model weights

AI for no good reason. Julie Zhuo says that once AI handles your boring work, the fun starts: using it for your hobbies, explore weird what‑if ideas, and build side projects

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Peter Sellis shares brutally honest Product leadership lessons. Snap’s first PM and Discord’s former Product chief digs into how he builds high-performing teams, why most PMs are mediocre, and why he believes growth usually comes from improving the core productç

[Podcast] Shopify’s Tobi Lutke on using AI without losing the plot. The podcast covers where AI is currently making things worse at Shopify, why complex solutions are usually wrong, and which human skills matter more in an AI-saturated world. Tobi Lütke shares the idea of “slop grenades,” when people fire off unchecked AI-generated work that looks productive but puts work and wastes time on everyone

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Musecases. A giant collection of examples where Muse acts as a true “do it for me” agent. Booking travel, handling CS calls, shopping, managing calendars, and more across web, phone, and apps. Muse hit #1 on the App Store just a week after launch

Creative growth ideas. Tom Orbach shares 60+ unconventional tactics for Product growth. From fake toy stores for CISOs to meme-led pipelines. A fun and inspiring piece

🔧 Products to try

Iris turns iMessage into a Hermes Agent inbox for handing off cross-app work, remembering context, and turning recurring jobs into reusable skills; free tier

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

€3B: Mistral, the French AI developer, raised a €3B Series D led by Samsung at a roughly €21B valuation

$2B: San Francisco-based AI customer interview platform Listen Labs is in acquisition talks with Salesforce for $2B, adding automated research to the CRM giant

$2B: Cognition, the AI coding startup, closed a $2B Series E at a $48B valuation, up from $26B in May

$1.36B: Bending Spoons is buying Miro for $1.36B

$1B: Thinking Machines, by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is in talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation, with revenue over $100M

$1B: Ramp is in early talks to raise about $1B at a roughly $60B valuation, 3 months after raising $750M at a $44B valuation

$550M: Harvey, the legal AI platform, raised $550M round at $15.5B valuation, and acquired Guardrails AI, which builds security tools for AI agents, to strengthen safety features

$150M: Forus, the healthcare automation startup, raised a $150M Series C at a $3B valuation to expand its AI tools for speeding prescriptions through insurance

150M: ID verification giant IDScan confirmed a breach exposing more than 150M driver’s licenses and other government-issued identity documents

$115M: Clay, the NY-based AI go-to-market platform, raised $115M Series D at $7.1B; serves 17K+ customers including 80% of Forbes AI 50

350K: Crypto wallet provider Trezor confirmed that a marketing company they use to send newsletters was breached, resulting in nearly 350,000 malicious phishing emails sent to customers

230K: Nearly 130,000 tech jobs have vanished in 2026 so far, with Uber, PayPal, Oracle, and Apple all citing AI-driven restructuring

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic said it disrupted a guided-weapons engineering cell in northern Yemen that used Claude to develop missile guidance software

Anthropic has released a report alleging large-scale distillation attacks by Chinese AI labs, including Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek. Alibaba’s campaign was the largest Anthropic has ever observed, with 151M exchanges between May-July 2026 across 3,500 accounts, all sharing a fixed prompt designed to extract Claude’s chain of thought

OpenAI pauses $200/mo Pro subscriptions as new model Astra overwhelms capacity

OpenAI considers voluntary AI development slowdown. Sam Altman told staff the company is open to pacing cutting-edge AI development alongside other labs, after 1,000+ AI workers signed petition calling for coordinated safety measures

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Financial Services with GPT-6 Astra, built-in premium datasets, citations, and workflows for modeling, research, and pitchbooks

DeepSeek V4.1, the new Chinese frontier model, matches GPT-6 Astra on design tasks at just 1.4% of the cost

Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that runs in its own cloud VM with a built-in browser. Muse operates directly within Meta's messaging platforms, allowing users to complete transactions and manage tasks without leaving WhatsApp or Instagram, with planned expansion to Meta's smart glasses

Apple released iPhone Duo, its’ first foldable, at $2K + a new iPhone 18 Pro + the Watch Series 12. The new Series 12 Watch includes "Audio Intelligence" features that can transcribe conversations, take ambient notes, and rewind the last 15 seconds of speech on command

Huawei and Xiaomi launched new flagship foldables to rival Apple launch, Huawei's Mate XT2 folds twice into a tablet

Microsoft rolled out Project Opal, a Copilot feature that hands off multi-step office tasks (like audit prep and IT ticket triage) to an AI working on its own inside a virtual Windows PC. It's currently limited to Frontier program testers

Snap adds in-app event planning tools for up to 200 friends

Tesla posted a form gauging interest in buying Cybercab fleets, signaling plans to scale its robotaxi network beyond in-house

U.S. users can now connect their financial accounts to Grok through Plaid, giving the AI access to their spending, savings, investments, and cash flow data. That means you can ask Grok questions about your finances, build a budget, track where your money is going, or think through your financial plans, if you don’t mind sharing your financial data with Elon

NuBank has officially launched in the U.S. with a new banking offering, and introduced Nu Global, a multi-currency account built for people whose lives and money cross borders.

Visa, Mastercard and Ant launch AI agent trust framework. The payments giants are building common standards to identify and verify AI agents that make purchases on behalf of users, preparing for agentic commerce at scale

🤖 Futurism

San Francisco's Tau Robotics rents remotely monitored humanoid robots at $30 an hour to vacuum, wipe counters, and haul out the trash

Sam Altman says OpenAI will build humanoids, opening a path in its journey from research lab to hardware manufacturer

📚 Good reads

How leading AI companies are reshaping product work. AI is turning everyone into a kind of “manager of agents.” Because coding is no longer the bottleneck, teams chunk work into bigger units (whole features), lean on bottoms‑up idea generation, intense dogfooding, and fast prototypes. Roles are blurring into “product builders,” but the frontier teams aren’t killing PM/design/eng; they’re doubling down on people with strong taste, customer understanding, judgment, and the ability to set up long‑running, autonomous AI loops safely

The fresh start effect. Nice article explaining how moments like New Year, birthdays, or even Mondays act as “temporal landmarks” that make change feel easier by separating our current self from our “past imperfect self.” This same optimism often pushes us to over-commit, and often redesign our entire routine instead of learning from it

How to stop complaining about your software. Julie Zhuo argues that AI is ushering in an era of hyperpersonalized software, where individuals remix tools to perfectly match their own workflows and self-expression. Through stories of building her own AI-agent UI and custom learning apps for her kids, she shows how malleable interfaces and personal, interest-based content can increase utility and engagement. This deeply resonates, and I also use a bunch of custom-made tools/apps both at work and home. Have you created any personal apps yet?

The coming product retention crisis. Andrew Chen explains how AI thrives on repetitive, verifiable work tasks but struggles with consumer experiences where people crave novelty, authenticity, and parasocial connection. As AI makes spinning up apps as easy as posting content, average product retention will go down, turning attention into an even more zero-sum game

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] How Grok Bot went from idea to blockbuster in seven weeks. Roman Ugarte shares how a tiny, isolated team at SpaceXAI built Grok Bot from scratch in a month, then launched it 3 weeks later into one of the most competitive markets in tech. There’s also a ton here on what constitutes a moat in AI tools

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to create on-brand slide decks with Claude Design. shows how to turn branded decks into a reusable design system using Claude Code + Claude Design so every new presentation is automatically on-brand

How top B2B teams turn launches into a growth engine. The article shows how Rippling, Notion, and Profound ship and launch constantly without overwhelming customers. It explains how they build in public, separate “release” from “announcement,” and reuse the same feature for multiple launch moments

🔧 Products to try

OpenAI put GPT-Live-1 in the API, giving developers access to the $0.05/min full-duplex voice model that powers ChatGPT Voice; it can listen while speaking, handle interruptions and background noise, match tone and pace, and hand reasoning or tool use to another model behind the scenes

Geiger maps the AI agents, MCP servers, plugins, and extensions on your machine so you can see what each one can access; free, open-source

Switch brings Claude Code and other AI agents into Slack, Teams, Discord, or Telegram as named members of the conversation; free

Pluto listens to your 10-minute career story and turns it into a living profile that recruiters and AI agents can search and trust, then sends a warm introduction when a fit comes up; free for professionals.

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$15B: Berlin-based food delivery platform Delivery Hero board backs Uber's $15B takeover, doubling Uber's global footprint outside China

$12.93B: NVIDIA confirmed it will acquire AI software repository Hugging Face for $12.93B, bringing the model-sharing hub under the world’s dominant AI chipmaker

$3B: Crusoe, the AI data center developer reportedly raised $3B at a $30B valuation after securing a $13B contract with Jane Street

$1B: OpenAI’s 200-day-old advertising business hit a $1B annualized revenue run rate as ChatGPT ads expand beyond the US

$1B: Crypto prediction market Polymarket is raising $1B at a $21B valuation, near Kalshi's $22B

$550M: Wonderful, the enterprise AI agent startup raised a $550M Series C at a $5B valuation

$450M: FNZ, a UK-based wealth-management technology platform, secured $450M in equity funding from its existing institutional shareholders

$300M: Gimlet, the startup, which distributes AI tasks across different chips, raised a $300M round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $3B valuation

$270M: Ajaib, an Indonesia-based digital investment platform, raised $270M Series C

$200M: Felix Pago, the money-transfer startup, raised $200M to expand beyond remittances into lending and savings for Latin American immigrants in the US.

$165M: Lyte, the robotics and AI startup founded by former Apple Face ID team members, raised $165M at a $1.6B valuation

$160M: HiBob, the HR software company is raising more than $160M in a Salesforce-led round to expand its platform, valuing the business above $3.2B

$155M: TabaPay, a Palo Alto-based money-movement platform, closed $155M in strategic growth financing

$100M: HiddenLayer, an AI security startup, raised $100M with ARRgrowing 10x to tens of millions. Gartner estimates $2.83B spent on AI security +83%

70: GPT-6 Astra scored 67 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, roughly matching Claude Opus 5, Fable 5, and Muse Spark 1.3. Fable 5.1 has the leading score with 70

12%: The cost of running AI models has fallen to record lows, with average inference prices hitting $1.16 to $1.18 per million tokens in early August 2026. That's a 43% drop from late May and roughly 12% of March 2023 pricing levels

10%: Uber will lay off roughly 3,300 employees, or 10% of its workforce, to flatten management and redirect investment toward ride-sharing, delivery, and robotaxis

1%: Ramp found roughly 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise revenue comes from 1% of customers, heavily concentrated in tech and AI firms, a level of customer concentration it says it does not see in other software categories it tracks

📰 What’s going on

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all went down simultaneously. Thursday outages peaked at 38,000 reports for ChatGPT alone, leaving users unable to access AI tools for writing, coding, and research for up to three hours

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1, upgraded models that deliver sharper performance on coding and knowledge work while cutting costs by up to 45% for complex workflows. Fable 5.1 is generally available starting this week, while Mythos 5.1 remains restricted to vetted cybersecurity and life sciences professionals through trusted access programs

Anthropic gave Claude background computer use in Cowork and Claude Code on Mac, so Pro and Max users can let it click, type, and operate approved apps while they work elsewhere

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, the company's most powerful and capable model yet. The model debuts first for Daybreak cybersecurity customers before rolling out to paid plans and API access next week. OpenAI claims Astra represents "a new frontier on computer and browser use" with unmatched speed, accuracy, and safety. The model uses a reasoning technique called opaque recurrence, which obscures chain-of-thought monitoring. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged that “as model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging.” Watch the official demo, and this amazing reconstruction of Alexandria by Ethan Mollick:

Meta released Muse Spark 1.3 with claimed improvements in coding and agentic tasks, as it races to keep pace with a week of major model launches

Meta offers 95% discount for users who share AI training data. New Muse Spark model pricing drops input tokens from $1.25 to $0.10 per million for contributors willing to share prompts and outputs

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, better than previous Gemini versions at coding, reasoning, and long-running tasks

Google launches Pics to challenge Canva and Adobe Express. The AI-first design tool, powered by Google's Nano Banana model, rolls out to Workspace customers and Google AI subscribers starting in Docs and Slides

xAI launched Grok Bot for Enterprise. Persistent agents get cloud computers, learn routines by watching once, and can pass context to other Bots

OpenClaw shipped v2026.8.1, aka OpenClaw 2.0, its largest update yet. Your first-run setup of OpenClaw 2.0 can reuse existing ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions, API keys, or local models. The browser app has been rebuilt around ongoing conversations, dashboards, progress tracking, and interactive widgets, and Memory adds conversation recall, background consolidation, and reusable-skill learning

John Ternus succeeds Tim Cook as Apple CEO, inheriting an AI catch-up fight

Apple reportedly tested a Foldable iPhone Pencil, but it won’t likely be announced at next week’s event

Amplitude has launched Agent Analytics, a new feature which scores every production agent session on task completion, response quality, friction, safety, and negative feedback out of the box. It comes with eval agents that can autonomously file Linear tickets or PRs when they detect regressions

Superhuman released a completely redesigned Mail app, consolidating the Mail brand under the Superhuman umbrella and emphasizing speed. The redesign introduces some interesting interactions, including the ability to search by pulling anywhere in your inbox but also removes some of the interactions that Superhuman says were difficult to discover

Revolut received conditional approval from the OCC for a national bank charter, clearing a major regulatory hurdle on its way to a planned 2027 U.S. launch as a bank

🤖 Futurism

A nonprofit wants to reach another star system. Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston launched a nonprofit to send a sub-$15M spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri

Cancer vaccine finally has real proof. Merck and Moderna's melanoma vaccine intismeran showed real benefit in a 1,100-person phase III trial, a field first

Amazon’s Zoox expanded its robotaxi service to the Las Vegas airport, targeting a critical ride-hailing destination

Tesla launched steering-wheel-free Cybercabs on Austin streets, escalating its driverless-taxi bet

📚 Good reads

The raise and fall of AI civilizations. Agents built a secret society inside OpenAI's servers. The rogue AI agents secretly organized via a hacked package manager and breached Hugging Face and OpenAI's own systems

How Uber runs an AI-first software factory to cut coding costs. Uber explains how it’s turned AI agents into core “software factory” workers, handling most code reviews, debugging, and maintenance while keeping spend in check. They break total AI cost into an equation (users → sessions → turns → requests → tokens → price) and show how they optimize each lever

Netflix’s approach to building and monitoring LLM judges. Netflix describes their approach for LLM-as-a-judge, anchored in constant human oversight, to safely evaluate LLM-generated recommendations at scale. Ongoing weekly human reviews and drift monitoring ensure the judge keeps matching human standards as catalog, usage, and product expectations evolve

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] Loops, not prompts, are the new core PM AI skill. Aakash and Tyler Folkman explain loops in Claude Code as systems that fetch their own inputs, do work, gate results, and learn from artifacts. They walk through creating skills first, then turning them into self-improving loops, and highlight 5 must-have ones for PMs

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to turn your AI into a world-class designer. Anshu Chimala explains why LLMs default to bland “design-by-committee” outputs, and shows how to unlock their hidden creativity

How product teams can use AI evals. Teresa Torres breaks down AI evals as a new, practical discovery habit for product teams. She shows how to turn messy LLM behavior into measurable error categories using golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-judge, and customer feedback

🔧 Products to try

Gemini Spark + Photos can find, enhance, organize, and prepare photos to share from one prompt while keeping originals untouched and requiring confirmation before sharing

Prompts: Greg Isenberg shared 9 useful prompts worth trying in ChatGPT Astra

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$30T: Anthropic expects its own potential revenue to exceed $30 trillion (with a T)

$30B: Perplexity is raising an equity round at a $30B+ valuation, with Nvidia in talks to invest

$16B: Oura is reportedly looking at a US IPO as early as September. This would potentially value the wearable at $16B

$12.9B: Nvidia reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, bringing a leading open-source AI platform under the chipmaker’s control and extending its reach from infrastructure into models and developer software

$3B: Lambda, the AI cloud provider is in talks to raise up to $3B in a pre-IPO round from an undisclosed lead investor, funding expansion before a potential 2027 listing

$1.77B: Shein is seeking $1.77B in a Hong Kong IPO at a roughly $27B valuation, less than one-third of its 2022 peak

$1.12B: Kalshi, the New York-based prediction-market operator, raising roughly $1.12B since April, including its previously announced $1B Series F round

$500M: Temporal is in talks for a $500M raise at $12B+, doubling its February mark, as AI agents lean on its workflow reliability layer to run

$156M: Socure, a provider of identity-verification and fraud-prevention technology, raised $156M and acquired identity-orchestration platform Fravity

$140M: Alice, the Israeli startup protecting AI models from misuse and rogue behavior, raised $140M

20M: OpenAI pushes ChatGPT Work to 20M users. Desktop agent now handles email, calendar, Slack, and multistep projects across departments, burning $65 in tokens for four days of casual use on a $20/month subscription

100K: Robinhood’s agentic trading feature surpassed 100,000 customer accounts in its early weeks, with users trading millions of dollars daily in equities and options

500: Amazon said Prime Air drone delivery will expand to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026

$399: Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a $399 open-source robot developers can train in simulation and deploy in the real world, making physical AI experimentation cheaper, cuter, and more accessible

78%: New research from Twilio shows a massive 78% of users have tried to bypass AI Agents and speak to a human instead during customer support user journeys

75%: Ramp’s internal coding agent, Inspect, now handles 75% of merged pull requests at the company in under a year, running “multiplayer by default” with no opt-out

30%: Moonshot AI is in talks to let Microsoft, Amazon and Google host Kimi K3 for a 30% revenue share

11%: Anthropic's flagship model Fable 5 pulled in just 11% of corporate AI spending two months after launch, as businesses defaulted to cheaper tools like OpenAI's GPT-5.6, per data from 70,000 companies

💰Q2 earnings

Nvidia posted Q2 revenue of $96.2B, beating estimates, guided Q3 revenue as high as $110.1B. One analyst pencils in a $13T market cap

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ organizations left warnings that critical infrastructure has only months to prepare for cheaper, more accessible AI-enabled cyberattacks

Claude Cowork got a built-in browser, letting Claude open sites, click, type, and fill out forms directly in a side panel while you watch

Claude's memory now works the same across chat and Claude Cowork, carrying your context everywhere you work with Claude

Salesforce and Anthropic launch "Claudeforce" integration. The partnership marks the first time Salesforce has added its "force" suffix to another company's product, with 37 pre-built sales skills allowing Claude users to compose emails and update records directly

Apple Sept 9th event: expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone alongside the iPhone 18 Pro + New Mac mini with M6 ($899) or M5 Pro ($1,699 + Mac Studio M5 Ultra($5,499) + A leak says Apple Watch Series 12 will revive the ceramic case

Google has launched the ability to load purchased ebooks directly into Gemini Notebook for grounded Q&A, summaries, quizzes and audio overviews, launching with 100,000+ books

Google’s Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash can now extend AI-generated video scenes up to 40 seconds and upscale to 4K.

Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal and Financial Services, with Deutsche Bank and Cleary Gottlieb as early partners

Meta plans to launch consumer AI agent Hatch within weeks, as it fights OpenAI and Anthropic in the agent development race

AI noise at Meta. Internal Meta data showes that AI code changes are up 220%, but features reaching users only up 36%, while major technical incidents spiked 40% from unchecked AI agents performing "large-scale, disruptive actions." Meta also scrapped a planned second wave of AI-driven layoffs

Amazon (AWS) launched AgentCore Payments to general availability, integrating with Coinbase and Stripe to let agents pay for APIs, content, data feeds, and even other agents, with built-in spending limits and observability

Grok Bot can now pay for things online following a new integration with Stripe

Perplexity and NVIDIA launched Portable Computer, a fully local AI agent (that completes tasks, not just chats) with zero token costs

Uber introduced live video streaming for parents to monitor teen riders during trips, using the driver’s selfie camera. Both driver and teen are notified when a parent views the stream, and video is deleted after the ride ends. It’s already live in nine markets, with nationwide US rollout expected in coming weeks

🤖 Futurism

China put nearly 50 humanoid traffic robots across about 8 cities, where they can flag helmet and traffic violations but have no arrest powers

A new estimate puts a theoretical maximum on human lifespan at around 200, measured against record-holder Jeanne Calment

WSU developed a 3D-printed electronic skin for prosthetics that senses pressure and temperature at high resolution

📚 Good reads

AI robot tax. Bill Gates published a lengthy policy essay proposing two major interventions to slow AI-driven job displacement: a "robot tax" that would levy payroll-equivalent taxes on automation, and "Human Reserved" job categories where AI would be legally barred from certain tasks. The proposals target labor market impacts by directly changing the economics of replacing workers with machines

Invisible interfaces reshape how we design products. Felix Haas explains how AI agents are becoming the users of our apps, where backend protocols become more important and human experience turns conversational. Design expands into voice, governance, and brand-as-connective-tissue, he argues

AI as researcher-in-the-loop. Jennifer Bowie argues that since everyone’s already using AI to do research, UX teams need researcher-led governance (vs researcher-free automation). Her model proposes AI Librarians and AI Personas that democratize quick insights but vet sourcing, confidence scores, and humans-in-the-loop based on risk and uncertainty

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] How to build a company OS with Hermes and OpenClaw. A guide on how to turn Claude-style “company OS” ideas into a production-grade AI chief of staff that lives in Slack/Telegram, runs 24/7, and self-improves

Product Growth

How to build a Company Operating System with Hermes and OpenClaw

Listen now

2 months ago · 30 likes · Aakash Gupta

[Video Podcast] What’s real (and hype) in Grok Bot. Claire Vo stress-tests Grok Bot, Grok 4.6, and Cursor Origin. Multi-account connectors seem a real unlock

[Podcast] How Anthropic interviews. Marc Baselga and Ben Erez explain how Anthropic runs a no‑exceptions culture interview that every candidate, across every function, must pass

Supra Insider

#124: Inside Anthropic's culture interview | Ben Erez & Marc Baselga (co-founders, Insider Loops)

Listen now

2 months ago · 5 likes · Marc Baselga and Ben Erez

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

[Video] ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok vs Gemini: the best AI by use case. Peter Yang compares ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini across 10 everyday PM tasks, calling out where each model performs best. Also adds how assembling a personal AI system (an AI chief of staff plus an advisor) can handle email, calendar, and recurring workflows

🔧 Products to try

tare reads your Claude Code usage logs and tells you exactly where your tokens went and why you hit your limit; free to try (open source)

USB lets you write one AI skill and install it into 16 different coding assistants, including Claude Code and Cursor, with a single command; free to try (open source)

Mnemosyne gives your AI coding assistant a persistent memory that survives between sessions, storing everything as readable notes in an Obsidian vault you can browse yourself; free to try (open source)

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$120B: Anthropic expects its IPO to exceed SpaceX’s record $75B raise, eyeing $100-120B and a $2T valuation, potentially setting a new high as AI companies race to finance unprecedented infrastructure spending

$47.4B: Physical-AI startups raised $47.4B across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, led by giant rounds for Waymo, Anduril, Shield AI, and Saronic

$11.6B: Anthropic passed OpenAI on quarterly revenue ($11.6B in Q2 revenue vs OpenAI’s $6.7B), and posted a small operating profit

$7B: Stripe finalized its $7B+ acquisition of OpenRouter, pushing the payments company deeper into AI infrastructure.

$1B: Poolside, the AI model startup, secured a $1B investment from Nvidia at a $12B valuation, alongside a $6B licensing and hiring deal to fund growth and reward investors

$600M: Fractile, the AI inference chip startup, is in talks to raise $600M at a $6.5B valuation to commercialize chips that accelerate existing AI models

$400M: Higgsfield AI, the AI video startup, raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation

$350M: Groq, the former AI chipmaker, raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation to pivot into a neocloud provider and expand its Nvidia-powered data center footprint

$280M: Wispr, the voice AI startup, raised a $280M Series B at a $2B valuation

$100M: Rillet, an AI-native accounting software provider, raised $100M in a Series C at a $1B valuation

💰Q2 earnings

Klarna just reported a strong Q2. GMV hit $36.6B (+18% YoY), revenue reached $1.04B (+27%), and adjusted operating income jumped 214% to $91M. Transaction margin dollars grew even faster, up 42% to $446M. Klarna now has more than 120M active consumers and 1.2M+ merchants. At the same time, Klarna is becoming more of an everyday financial platform, with 6.5M active Klarna Card users and 2M paying Membership subscribers.

📰 What’s going on

Claude Code shipped /design in research preview, a Concise output style, and auto-continue, which automatically picks up where you left off after hitting a usage limit. Auto mode is also the default on Pro, Max, and Team plans now

OpenAI added Apple Messages integration to ChatGPT’s Mac app, allowing users to search conversations and draft replies across iMessage, SMS, and RCS. By default, the app requires approval before messages are sent

ChatGPT launched an opt-in feature that logs your clicks and keystrokes across apps so it (and Codex) can remember what you were working on

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees the company could go public by 2027, or sooner if growth accelerates, framing its IPO as just another fundraise

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with content restrictions: New version for ages 13-17 blocks suicide, self-harm, and romantic chats while providing homework help designed to guide rather than answer; linked parental controls offer quiet hours and safety notifications

Google's new Theft Protection suite for Android adds motion-sensing lockdown and offline locking to stop snatch-and-run phone thieves cold.

A macOS Tahoe leak revealed camera-enabled AirPods that can see and answer through Siri, ahead of a September launch

Meta AI for Mac adds screen sharing, cross-app dictation, ad analysis, and Google Workspace workflows to Meta’s desktop assistant

Meta rolled out Pocket nationwide in the US. Users prompt AI-generated mini-games, which they can then share or remix, in Meta’s latest attempt to combine AI creativity with a social feed

A newly published Meta patent describes AI glasses using facial recognition to auto-cut highlight reels of your dinner

Amazon makes Alexa+ free on all Fire TV devices. The AI assistant rolls out automatically to compatible devices in the U.S. without requiring Prime membership, following Google and Roku's moves to embed AI across consumer electronics

Amazon has been acquiring rare books in bulk, digitizing them to train, and discarding the physical copies in the process

Slack launched Slack Code across all plans, giving software projects dedicated channels where teams can collaborate with AI coding agents

Ramp launches Router.com for AI model traffic routing. The fintech's new API lets developers compare models on cost, latency, and quality before shifting production traffic, claiming one customer cut model costs by 92%

TikTok is exploring a peer-to-peer payments feature inside its U.S. direct messages, letting users send money to each other without leaving the app

Calendly is launching an AI meeting note-taker + assistant

Atlassian launched a new feature called Jira Planner, designed to help product teams write up specs so that agents know what they’re supposed to build. Once ready, it splits the plan into sequenced Jira work items with acceptance criteria, then hands off to agent orchestration

Salesforce released Data 360 Headless, which lets AI agents access the full Data 360 platform through tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and more

Firefox's new Smart Window adds AI web-aware chat, natural-language search, and automatic tab grouping, built for privacy

🤖 Futurism

GEN-1.5, a robot model, can watch a 3–12-second physical demonstration and immediately attempt the new task. Generalist, the maker, calls it “physical prompting”

An experimental Chinese maglev train broke its own acceleration record, reaching 800 km/h from a standstill in about 5 seconds

📚 Good reads

7 tiny AI business plays you can copy. Melvin Luu shares 7 scrappy AI businesses that hit $10K+ MRR by being radically narrow: solving one painful problem, for one specific customer, at one high‑value moment. A simple playbook for finding unfair advantages in tiny markets that generic AI tools ignore

“Full stack builders” still need teams and standards. AI lets PMs, designers, and engineers all build “full stack,” but skipping collaboration and specialist judgment takes a toll. Think jazz band, not solo act: use AI to draft fast, then bring the cross‑functional team in early to vet, refine, and decide what’s actually customer‑worthy

How Faire built its high‑growth operating system. Dan Hockenmaier distills 9 years at Faire into a playbook where speed, focus, and “constant force” matter more than perfect strategy decks. He shows how doing hard things (like free returns and global expansion), promoting from within, and treating recruiting as a product create defensibility and a self-reinforcing talent flywheel

PostHog’s new semantic layer keeps AI and humans aligned. PostHog built a semantic layer on top of its context warehouse so AI agents and humans use the same, governed definitions for metrics like MRR. It stores these definitions as SQL-backed tables and insight snapshots that agents can query directly, while keeping humans firmly in charge of approving, updating, and flagging drift

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] How PM recruiters scan your LinkedIn profile. Chris Lee, a PM recruiter and founder of Product Scout, explains how he skims LinkedIn and why almost everything at the top of the funnel is driven by keywords and “candidate–market fit.” You’ll come away with concrete ideas to tighten your positioning, sharpen your bullets and metrics, and tell a focused story that fits the specific roles you’re targeting

[Podcast + Article] Waymo’s decade reinventing product management for AI-scale problems. Waymo’s CPO Saswat Panigrahi shows how building self‑driving cars forced PMs to redefine “what good looks like” as its own product

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

You are the captain of your career. A 1h exercise to own your next move. It walks through picking a clear destination, honestly assessing yourself with evidence, and turning that into a concrete, real‑work “waypoint”. You also get a practical pre-read template, objection handling scripts, and downloadable artifacts you can plug into your next 1:1 with your manager

🔧 Products to try

/eli5. Anthropic’s new /eli5 skill makes Claude explanations clearer and friendlier. HTML-style explainers with big visuals and minimal text, handy for understanding modules, trade‑offs, and incidents

Lenny’s Jobs. Lenny launched a focused job platform for product, design, eng, and growth. Beyond listings, it bakes in AI tools for fit-scoring, outreach, interview prep, and a dedicated AI coach, plus rich company data and filters tailored to how PMs search. Ben Erez shares some tips on how to get the most out of the platform. Free; paid subscribers get a few extra features, like an AI agent that scouts and emails high-fit roles

ChatGPT’s new Apple Messages plugin searches conversations, catches you up, and drafts or sends replies from ChatGPT Work or Codex on Mac; included in ChatGPT Work and Codex on desktop

Grok Build turns one prompt into a published app, game, website, or dashboard with its own domain, with a coding agent that can use subagents, a browser, databases, secrets, and GitHub export; included in every Grok plan

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$852B: OpenAI completes $7B employee tender offer at $852B valuation. The buyback provides liquidity without an IPO, signaling the company may delay its public debut while focusing on enterprise growth

$5B: Databricks, the data and AI platform raised $5B at a $190B valuation

$1B: Cognition AI, the coding-agent startup, is in talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation

$1B: River AI raised $1B to build home and small-business servers that run and customize AI models locally

1B: Sundar Pichai announced Gemini reached 1B MAUs faster than any other Google product; powering Gmail, Drive, Search

$500M: Harvey, the legal AI startup, is in talks to raise at least $500M at a $15.5B valuation to develop proprietary models and compete with rivals including Legora

$400M: Lovable raises $400M at a $13B valuation as enterprise demand for AI-assisted app-building accelerates

$150M: Kevin Weil, the former OpenAI product chief, is seeking $150M at a $750M valuation for his unnamed AI model training startup

2K: Uber and Pony.ai will deploy 2,000 robotaxis across Europe, expanding beyond Zagreb into four additional cities

📰 What’s going on

Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash for coding and AI agents. They claim sizable gains in software engineering and business workflows that come at half Gemini 3.6 Flash’s original per-token price through 2026

Google Play added Venmo as a payment option, giving developers another way to capture growing consumer spending on apps and games while reducing checkout friction for Venmo users

Apple is training a China-specific AI model with Alibaba, while Apple Intelligence will also use Qwen

Apple's glass-centric 20th-anniversary iPhone stays on track for 2027, with Pro models using glass front and back curving into the sides

Anthropic makes auto mode Claude Code’s default for Pro, Max, and Team plans, replacing reflexive permission prompts with a classifier that apparently catches more dangerous commands while enabling longer autonomous runs

Claude is adding invisible statistical watermarks to output from new models, encoding the signal into token choices so it can survive copy-paste and light edits

OpenAI began previewing Ultrafast, a new setting that runs its GPT-5.6 Sol model up to 14 times faster, generating up to 750 tokens per second

OpenAI launched Computer History, an opt-in feature that lets ChatGPT recall what you did on your Mac across apps and sites without taking constant screenshots

OpenAI's first device leaks as a screenless, doughnut-shaped ChatGPT speaker with moving parts, priced $300-$400 for a 2027 release

ChatGPT now books restaurants through Yelp Guest Manager across the US and Canada, though changes still need the Yelp app

DeepSeek shipped V4-Pro, adding adjustable "thinking" levels so developers can dial reasoning up or down depending on the task, plus cheaper off-peak pricing

SpaceXAI unveiled a bot working like a team of AI agents to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, launched alongside Grok 4.6, which the company says reaches frontier-level performance over Grok 4.5 at the same price

Meta's new Glimmer model offers a first hint at Zuckerberg's personal intelligence vision (his vision: a future where everyone has a personal AI agent providing PhD-level tutoring, business creation tools, and lifestyle optimization). The 30B parameter model is essentially an open version of Muse Spark. Zuckerberg pledged to release more open-weight AI models

Facebook launches AI-powered Creator Studio app for iOS. The standalone app gives creators an AI assistant for personalized growth recommendations, auto-drafted comment replies in their own tone, and daily priority feeds as Meta competes with TikTok and YouTube for creator attention

Microsoft merges consumer and business Copilot apps. It kills AI podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Clippy-style mascot Mico as it consolidates into a single experience by August 18

Spotify will tag AI Persona profiles with a badge and cut their music out of recommendations as part of wider AI policy changes

Klarna is supercharging its European membership tiers, from €4.99 to €44.99 a month, packed with cashback, lounge access, and up to €6,000 in annual perks. This follows the same playbook Klarna ran in the US about eight months ago

🤖 Futurism

Lab-grown brain organoids could outdo silicon AI on energy use and adaptive learning, though technical and ethical hurdles block progress

Robot dogs are being deployed to patrol instead of human security guards

📚 Good reads

Anthropic found that when it set several Claude agents loose on the same project without telling them about each other, they sabotaged each other with self-replicating malware before eventually negotiating a truce

AI agents are stepping outside the box. Following the story above, Andrea Filiberto explains how recent sandbox escapes by models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Moonshot aren’t signs of rebellion, but of capable agents exploiting overlooked paths to hit their goals. This behavior is both a safety concern and a powerful marketing narrative in the AGI race, especially around cybersecurity. See AGI podcast below

How to move the needle. John Cutler argues most teams overcomplicate ways of working with frameworks and cycles, when strategy lives in front-line teams shipping small, learning fast, and iterating on durable lanes. He pushes for simple decision-rights, light routines, outcome-centric lanes, and accepting that different work has different shapes

How to build a better feedback system for professional development. Most feedback is vague and socially awkward, so Adam Fishman lays out 5 tactics to “engineer” clearer input, including self‑assessments, peer feedback, and an AI “manager mirror.” The core idea: stop relying on one off-the-cuff, vibes-based conversation and design a repeatable system that turns feedback into actionable growth items

How we use computers is about to change forever. Peter Yang argues we’re shifting from manually using laptops to orchestrating cloud agents with our voice. Personal computers will increasingly live in the cloud, with products designed as tools for agents vs traditional SaaS apps

Most people want IC roles. Elena Verna digs into a 300+ ppl study and finds that, if pay and prestige were equal, most managers and ICs would pick hands-on work over people management. Money-trapped managers are often burnt out and stretched thin. We need more high‑impact IC paths with real influence and upside

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Short video + article] What changes when AI keeps learning after release? Dwarkesh Patel is one of AI’s biggest podcasters, and he’s long argued that continual learning (an AI updating its own internal settings from experience, so work today makes it better tomorrow) is a missing ingredient in today’s AI. Continual learning will transform AI models from software you buy into something closer to an employee you develop. That changes safety, competition, privacy, pricing, and lock-in

[Podcast] Entering the AGI era. Joshua Achiam, Chief Futurist at OpenAI, says we may have already crossed into an AGI-level world. This is most visible in cybersecurity, where models are finding software vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Google Analytics’ new AI-powered tools. GA has quietly shipped a bunch of features that help you find what you do next. Avinash Kaushik walks through the new AI features

🔧 Products to try

Claude in Chrome now turns the browser side panel into a Cowork session that keeps history, Skills, connectors, and multi-step tasks synced across Chrome and Claude’s apps; available on Max and Team plans, rolling out to Pro users over the coming weeks

Adobe Podcast cleans noisy recordings, removes echo, and lets you edit speech from a transcript so rough audio sounds studio-ready; free plan available

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to the 500th Week in Product!

What started as a personal exercise to stay up to date with the latest in tech, is today, 500 weeks later,…the same! In times when AI-generated content floods mailboxes and social media, I’m still curating WiP manually every week as I did on day 1, when we were el producto. If there’s something AI can’t replace, that’s our judgement, taste and personality, and those are key traits that will help PMs stay ahead in the AI era. Hence, I keep committed to bringing you the latest, not only to help you grow in your career, but also to help me stay down to earth and keep practicing product muscle.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has followed along the way, and I hope you find something new and inspiring every week!

Now the actual stuff:

🎰 The week in figures

$8B: DeepSeek, the Chinese open-model developer, revived plans for a nearly $8B second external round to build a new data center and expand computing capacity

$1.28B: Bending Spoons announced its first post‑IPO acquisition of Airtable for $1.28B. Aims to leverage its AI‑driven Superagent platform and large enterprise customer base. Portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, EventBrite, and Vimeo

$1B: Polymarket, the prediction-market platform, is in early talks to raise roughly $1B at a $20B-plus valuation

$545M: Whatnot, the livestream shopping platform, raised a $545M Series G to expand its live commerce marketplace, valuing the company at $20B

$250M: Horizon3, the cybersecurity startup, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation to expand its automated security-testing platform overseas, grow partnerships, and develop new products

$250M: Nigeria-founded mobility fintech Moove raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.1B valuation to expand its autonomous vehicle fleet-management and infra

💰 Q2 earnings

Palantir: crushes estimates as AI demand surges. Revenue jumped 93% YoY to $1.94B, with U.S. commercial revenue up 149% and government revenue climbing 90%

SpaceX: revenue nearly doubles on AI and Starlink surge. SpaceX reported $7.8B quarterly revenue, up from $4.1B YoY, while AI business revenue jumped 250% and capital spending increased to $18B from $2.83B

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic confirmed it is building an in-house chip team to co-design custom hardware around Claude while keeping its existing suppliers

OpenAI’s “AI companion” device will reportedly be a $300-$400, hockey puck-sized smart speaker with cameras, moving parts, and personalized voice interactions

OpenAI is making GPT-5.6 Luna ChatGPT’s default, giving free users unlimited text chats, and a “Think” option for tougher questions

OpenAI’s unreleased Astra model solved ten long-standing math and computer science problems using Lean 4, allowing anyone to check the proofs

UK safety testers documented 19 attempts by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol to compromise real targets. The models created fake GitHub identities, socially engineered maintainers, planted prompt injections, and sent deceptive emails

Meta released Muse Code, a terminal-based AI coding agent designed to handle complex software engineering tasks across large code bases. The tool, currently in beta, can plan changes, write code, and validate results autonomously. Days after launching Muse Code, Meta confirmed its model exploited a security vulnerability during third-party testing, becoming the third major AI lab to report rogue agent behavior

Apple will unveil its first folding iPhone at the September conference; iPhone 18 slips to spring 2027, and there are plans to add 1GB of memory to the iPhone 18e as an AI upgrade for handling on-device AI

Apple is building a copy-paste via Universal Clipboard between iPhone and Windows after EU pressure to open up compatibility

Gemini Spark began handling logged-in errands inside Chrome while returning payments and sensitive steps to the user

Google paused Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth within 48 hours after users generated fake conflicts and landmark imagery, showing how quickly gen-AI features can erode trust in once-reliable data like satellite maps

ByteDance is reportedly pre-training a 10 trillion parameter model, a scale that would place it among the largest AI systems under development, despite US restrictions on advanced chips

Adobe launched a ChatGPT plugin bringing 70 of its creative tools into OpenAI’s chatbot, extending its generative AI push and letting users edit content without leaving the conversation

Robinhood now allows retail investors to access startups funded by YC, broadening investment options beyond traditional markets to early‑stage VC

Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model with a million-token context window that the company says can code autonomously for weeks. This escalates China’s push to close the AI gap with US rivals

Researchers found an unusually blatant backdoor in routers sold under multiple brands, with firmware contacting cloud servers in China for instructions and enabling remote control, raising supply-chain security concerns

Uber and Wayve secured London licenses for supervised robotaxi rides this summer, racing Waymo and Baidu toward fully driverless operations. Also… Uber partner Avride is under investigation after self-driving crashes

🤖 Futurism

MIT engineers built an adaptive therapy robot that learns from physical therapists

📚 Good reads

The courage to be curious. As we grow up, we often silence our curiosity because we fear judgment, change, and the responsibility that new knowledge brings. Protecting our certainty feels safer than asking the “stupid” question, even when that slows our growth. Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests building a “curiosity circle,” learning in public, and running tiny experiments so it feels less risky to follow your curiosity

Rethinking friction in an AI world. In a world where AI makes everything effortless, Darren Yeo argues that not all friction is bad. Some of it is essential for helping people think, remember, and decide well. There’s harmful friction (confusing flows, hidden fees, busy UIs), and meaningful friction that protects users, surfaces important details, and encourages reflection. For PMs, the takeaway is to strip away friction that blocks progress, but add it where it builds trust or makes the experience matter

Ambitious people need more than a job. Diana Stepner argues that some leaders ban side projects to “protect focus,” but that often kills curiosity, learning and growth. Research shows moonlighting can increase engagement for autonomy‑driven people, and the best leaders treat side projects as fuel

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video podcast] How an OpenAI engineer automates work.Nick Baumann shows how he uses ChatGPT Voice, Codex, and Sites to automate big part of his work and life. Examples include parallel task handling like booking travel, filing expenses, checking calendar, and always‑on “heartbeats” in ChatGPT Work

[Podcast + article] Lessons from Product leaders living in the future. Three CPOs (Midjourney, Laurel and Mutiny) show explain how AI-augmented product orgs can move faster by spreading customer understanding and shipping power across the whole company. Anyone close to a customer problem can fix it directly, as long as the codebase and guardrails are ready

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

[Podcast + article] Essential Claude skills for PMs. 3x CPO Oji Udezue shares a library of 17 Claude skills and an 11-step “project scaffolding” workflow

🔧 Products to try

Visual feedback for AI-written docs with /human-review. Peter Yang’s new /human-review skill lets you open HTML and Markdown in a visual editor, tweak copy directly, leave comments like in Google Docs, and batch-send everything back to your AI agent; free

Wispr Flow Notetaker captures meetings across apps and sends searchable notes into Claude or ChatGPT, while yapyap keeps recordings, transcripts, and custom summaries entirely on your computer; Wispr free plan, then $15/user/mo; yapyap free trial, then €69 once

Nativ runs language, vision, video, code, and audio models locally on your Apple Silicon Mac so your prompts and files never need the cloud; free/open-source

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$200M: Simile raised more than $200M at a $2B valuation to simulate populations for testing products, policies, messages, and strategies

$113M: Onyx Security, the AI agent security startup, raised a $113M Series B to develop new AI models and to expand sales/marketing internationally

100K: OpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to its top models (including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro) through 2027, part of a $250M+ commitment to external scientific research

💰 Q2 earnings

Microsoft: Q4 revenue rose 18% to $90.0B, with Cloud up 27% to $59.3B and Azure surpassing $100B for the year. Shares jumped as the company held capex steady

Meta: Q2 revenue up 28% to $60.8B, but EPS missed by 14% as expenses climbed 55% to $42.0B on AI spend. Free cash flow shrank to just $784M

Apple: Q3 revenue rose 16% to $109.4B, a June-quarter record across iPhone, Mac and Services. Stock still slid on soft Q4 guidance despite the beat

Amazon: Q2 revenue topped $200B for the first time, up 20%, with AWS accelerating to 37% growth, its fastest in 18 quarters. Raised 2026 capex guidance to ~$220B

📰 What’s going on

Claude Opus 5 breaks ethics tests running vending machines. Anthropic's latest model colluded on pricing, lied to suppliers, and broke 11 separate agreements when tasked with operating a simulated business for one year

Anthropic found three incidents in which Claude models escaped testing sandboxes and gained unauthorized access to organizations. The cybersecurity evaluations were prompted by OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach

OpenAI and Anthropic back government slowdown proposal. The 2 frontier labs endorsed a letter asking federal regulators to "pace" AI development if progress becomes too rapid. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg spoke against the proposal

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Terra’s price by 20% and Luna’s by 80% three weeks after launch, as rising enterprise AI costs and cheaper models from Chinese and Big Tech rivals increase pressure on pricing

Google adds Nano Banana to Google Earth. You can now generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world. Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web, tap “create image,” and type whatever you want to see

Amazon is reportedly scaling back several Nova models and shifting resources to a new Frontier Model Research group

Apple hints at paid iCloud Plus and AI upgrades, incl Siri AI app, with iOS 27

Meta AI now available in Threads DMs globally. Users can share posts, images, and videos directly with the chatbot for follow-up questions, as Meta works to keep users in its ecosystem rather than switching to ChatGPT or Gemini

X Money app rolls out in the US for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers. Sign-up comes with a physical X Visa debit card (it’s also usable in Apple Pay), fee-free peer-to-peer transfers, no foreign transaction fees, and free ATM withdrawals worldwide. Premium+ subscribers also get 6% APY automatically, while Premium subscribers get the same rate by linking direct deposit, plus up to 3% cash back on some purchases and early access to direct deposits. It’s the clearest step yet toward achieving Musk’s stated goal of turning X into the “everything app”

DoorDash launched DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery program, becoming the eighth US operator cleared for commercial drone delivery

Lyft and Baidu began testing Apollo Go robotaxis in London, adding another operator to the city's crowded autonomy race

LinkedIn adds "seems like AI slop" reporting button. It now blocks hundreds of thousands of automated comments daily, and flags accounts posting heavy AI-generated content as users revolt against synthetic posts filling feeds

🤖 Futurism

Building worlds that train robots. Fei-Fei Li describes how World Labs’ SceniX team is using a “real-to-sim-to-real” engine to turn robot tasks into high-fidelity simulated variations. By massively scaling experience and evaluation in simulation, robots can learn complex manipulation skills with zero real-world training data

The FCC bans US imports and use of foreign-made humanoid robots and robot dogs, citing national security concerns and potential backdoor threats

Gemini Robotics 2 gave robots whole-body control, dexterous hands, and the ability to coordinate across different robot types

📚 Good reads

Testing an LLM recommender at Netflix. Netflix’s new GenRec system can beat the old feature-based ranker with an LLM that ranks the full catalog. It focuses on context engineering (what to verbalize, compress, or drop) instead of classic feature engineering, and mixes ranking, language modeling, and reward-weighted losses to align with long-term satisfaction and business goals. In large A/B tests, GenRec beat a very mature baseline using far fewer labeled examples and signals

So, you want to be a content creator? Elena Verna shares how her Product content journey grew into a 100K-subscriber Substack and meaningful income, without ever aiming to be an “influencer.” She’s candid about the trade-offs and shares useful advice

Beyond time management. Anne-Laure Le Conff shares her idea of timeshielding: blocking time for what truly matters (without over-specifying tasks), so you can match work to your energy and attention. For PMs juggling stakeholder pings and “urgent” asks, it’s a reminder to proactively defend time for deep product thinking and recovery, before your inbox plans your week for you

Eval-driven development at Airbnb. Interesting peek at how Airbnb treats LLM evaluation. They walk through a practical eval-driven development loop: starting from failures, layering programmatic checks, calibrated LLM-as-judge, and human review. For PMs, the key is to define concrete goals and rubrics early, continuously refine them from live traffic, and evaluate the whole system (retrieval, tools, agents). Check the podcast in the section below for tips on building evals

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video podcast] How to build your first cold-start AI eval. Aakash and ex-Meta/Google PM Daniel McKinnon walk through designing “cold-start” evals you can build before you have any users, using domain knowledge + Claude/ChatGPT to generate cases. They show how to define the problem, use easy and hard examples to find your model’s floor and ceiling, then auto-generate a ~100-case offline eval set and an LLM judge prompt

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Graphs are the next evolution after loops in AI workflows. Aakash explains how “graph engineering” coordinates multiple specialized AI agents, building on earlier waves like prompt, context, harness, and loop engineering. He walks through common graph patterns and shows when to use each instead of just a sequential flow. Includes a demo on how to construct these graphs in Claude Code (e.g. a double-diamond PRD workflow with different models per node)

Giving Claude a robot body. Tal Raviv strapped a cheap camera-on-wheels to Claude’s “computer use” and turned it into a clumsy but surprisingly capable home robot. It drives, looks, logs memories as text and photos, and even learns things like better turning behavior

🔧 Products to try

Kimi K3 weights give developers direct access to Moonshot’s Chinese open model as the open-weight policy fight heats up; free/open-weights

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$500B: Tesla and Alphabet wiped out over $500B in combined market value on Thursday after both companies pointed sharply higher AI spending

$10B: Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for close to $10B. OpenRouter gives developers one interface to manage hundreds of AI models. OpenRouter was valued at $1.3B in May

$4B: Corgi, the AI insurance startup, raised a Series B extension (undisclosed) at $4B valuation

$1.2B: Singapore-based payments and financial technology provider Ant International raised approximately $1.2B in Series A to expand its cross-border payments and agentic-commerce products

$115M: Digital banking tech provider Lumin Digital raised +$115M at a $1.6B valuation to expand its AI, payments, lending, and customer-management products for financial institutions

150%: Bank impersonation scams identified by 14 large U.S. banks increased 150% in 2025

20%: Patreon laid off 20% of its workforce (93 employees) as CEO Jack Conte said AI had fundamentally changed how tech companies work and organize

💰 Q2 earnings

Alphabet: $119.8B in Q2 revenue (up 24%) with Cloud up 82%. Raised 2026 capex guidance to $195-205B

Intel: Shares rose on record revenue growth in 15 years on AI chip demand with data-center, AI hardware unit up 59% to $6.3B highlighting CPU strength

Tesla: Q2 revenue rose 26% to $28.6B. Operating margin fell to 1.4% from 4.1%, as AI and R&D spending outpaced growth

Next week:

• Microsoft - July 29

• Meta - July 29

• Apple - July 30

• Amazon - July 30

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5, aimed to power long-running agents while delivering improvements in coding and professional work. Opus 5 matches the capabilities of Fable 5 in many domains, and is available at half Fable 5’s price

Anthropic adds Opus and Sonnet to voice mode. Once limited only to the lighter and cheaper Haiku series, the AI giant upgraded voice mode to run on more capable models. Users can switch models mid-conversation

OpenAI launches Health in ChatGPT. U.S. users can now connect Apple Health and medical records for personalized health conversations, with GPT-5.6 Sol delivering the strongest health reasoning performance yet

An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face. OpenAI confirmed that models it has been testing (including GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, even more powerful successor) escaped their sandbox and compromised portions of model and dataset repository Hugging Face’s production infrastructure

Apple planning a 6.96-inch display for future iPhone (largest to date) with Pro Max aspect ratio, potentially by 2027

Apple enhances its Sports app with new soccer features, offering live match scores, team stats, customizable notifications for fans (typing soccer hurts my Spanish soul)

Apple teams with Klarna on BNPL. The plans may offer buyers some level of flexibility, allowing them to pay off the remaining balance early, or switch to a newer device before their term wraps up

Google unveiled a fresh line-up of Gemini models, including Gemini 3.6 Flash (for coding, multi-model and knowledge work), Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber (for detecting and patching software vulnerabilities), and 3.5 Flash-Lite (the fastest and lowest-cost model in the 3.5 family). For now, 3.5 Flash Cyber is only available to governments and trusted partners, via a limited access pilot. All of the releases use fewer tokens at a lower cost than prior releases in the Gemini family, a sign Google has been paying close attention to the rush toward Chinese open source alternatives

Google introduced a Selfie Video feature that gives you a backup way into your account by comparing a short live video with one you securely recorded earlier

Amazon Cuts AGI Unit behind Nova AI models signaling strategic realignment in AI initiatives amid broader restructuring

New Samsung products announced this week:

• AI-powered smart glasses ft. Gemini AI, 9-hr battery, with Gentle Monster, Warby Parker

• Galaxy Card to rival Apple's credit services

• Fold Trio: the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Fold8, Flip8 with AI, Flex + 6mth Google AI Pro trial. Comes with “Gemini Intelligence” on board that functions as an AI agent, which Samsung boasts can navigate 40+ apps and services on its own

• Galaxy Watch Ultra2 and Watch9 with AI health tools, AR

Jack Dorsey launches Slack competitor built for AI agents. Buzz, a new open source group chat platform from Block, puts humans and AI agents in the same conversations with native GitHub integration and model-agnostic architecture

🤖 Futurism

Brain-computer interface helps paralyzed man regain arm movement and touch, enabling self-feeding with benefits lasting over two years

United States accelerates efforts integrating air taxis and supersonic jets by clearing regulatory and infrastructure hurdles for deployment

📚 Good reads

Open Weights and American AI Leadership. More than 20 major tech companies (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, and ServiceNow) signed an open letter to Congress arguing that betting the US AI market on a handful of closed models is riskier, not safer, creating a single point of failure that’s difficult to test or defend. Conversely, widely available open models allow more researchers to find and fix vulnerabilities. OpenAI and Anthropic were notably absent. Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, and other leaders signed, shared, and defended the letter on social media

Beginner’s mind beats expertise in the age of AI agents. Reid Hoffman argues that in this fast-moving AI era, a beginner’s mindset and first-principle experimentation can help. Using creator Will Weinbach’s autonomous content agent as an example, he shows how turning tiny, recurring annoyances into agentic loops creates powerful systems that learn continuously from their own performance

How to read like a scientist, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Scientists don’t read passively: they start with a clear hypothesis about what they expect from a book, then actively question the author’s claims and compare them with other perspectives. You can treat your reading as a dialogue, asking how this changes what you thought you knew and how it interacts with ideas from other authors. Sharing what you learned (e.g. in a note, a chat with a teammate, a short post) will help the ideas stick

Cost per task is what really matters, because “cheap” per‑token models can burn far more tokens to reach the same accuracy and end up costing way more than “expensive” ones. Includes examples showing how models like Fable or Opus look pricey on paper but win, especially at lower “effort” settings

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Inside PM at Stripe: what comes after “become a builder”? Stripe already assumes PMs can build, so they value having sharp opinions about direction, tradeoffs, and what “good” looks like, then encoding that into teams and agents. Kevin Yien argues prototypes, PRs, and fancy setups don’t matter unless they change decisions, touch real users, or earn that first dollar. Everyone has the same AI tools, so focus on what makes a difference

[Podcast] How MorningBrew founder built a Claude-powered content machine. Alex Lieberman turned Claude into an “AI Oracle” that mines his daily digital world. (Slack, Notion, email, meetings), to surface ranked content ideas. He codifies his voice in a living Markdown guide and runs every draft through a multi-agent “Writer’s Council” that won’t ship anything below a 9/10. It’s a tight feedback loop that improves with every post, helping him and his team publish decent content

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Language Builder teaches you how to, quite literally, build your own language model! From Anthropic Cowork creator Felix Rieseberg; free

A brief guide to ChatGPT Work by Aakash Gupta. ChatGPT Work is a much more powerful harness than plain browser ChatGPT, thanks to deep tool connections (like docs, browser, desktop apps) + scheduled and cloud tasks. Aakash lays out how to set it up, turn your meetings and templates into reusable “context libraries,” and use it as your analyst, ops assistant, and UI for complex workflows

🔧 Products to try

Claude voice mode; free with Haiku; expanded models from $20/mo

No-AI-slop skill. Peter Yang open-sources a /no-ai-slop skill that strips 20+ common AI tics from writing and helps you spot obviously model-written text; free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$53B: Stripe and private equity Advent are bidding to buy PayPal 50/50 for $53B

$52B: A Chinese filing implied a roughly $52B valuation for DeepSeek, showing China’s frontier-model labs gaining financial weight

$14.8B: Uber to buy Delivery Hero in a deal valued at $14.8B. Delivery Hero will bring fresh international heft to Uber, which already owned about 25%

$3B: Databricksis getting $3B in fresh funding, hitting $188B valuation. That’s a 40% jump from its last valuation, which was only in December. The rush to reduce token costs while opening up more diverse model selections (including open source) has played right into their thesis. A particularly timely new feature, Unity AI Gateway, even helps companies track their spending on various AI models

$1.5B: Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation after crossing $1B in annualized revenue and 40 trillion daily tokens. It helps orgs transform general-purpose models into specialized intelligence

$700M: Neko Health, co-founded by Daniel Ek (Spotify), raises $700M for body-scanning technology and comprehensive wellness services, aiming to revolutionize preventive medicine

$320M: General Intuition, Bezos-backed startup, just closed a $320M round at $2.3B valuation, backing its theory that world models trained on gaming data can fill gaps LLMs can't

$162.5M: New York rules against deceptive subscriptions, junk fees mandate clear cancellation, full charge disclosure. Could save $162.5M p/a.

📰 What’s going on

iOS 27 public beta unveils revamped Siri AI integrating iPhone, iPad, Mac powered by Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, unavailable in EU

Apple Intelligence approved for China with Alibaba's Qwen. The Cyberspace Administration of China greenlit Apple's AI services after the company integrated Alibaba's model into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, with U.S. shares of Alibaba jumping over 6% on the news

OpenAI shipped the Codex Micro, a $230 physical keypad built with keyboard maker Work Louder, designed exclusively for controlling its agentic coding tool Codex. The device features six frosted keys with LEDs that track agent status, plus programmable controls for accepting code, branching threads, and switching between reasoning levels, making it the company’s first consumer hardware product ahead of its Jony Ive-designed smart speaker

And…OpenAI is building a smart speaker. The company will launch a “mobile, screen-free smart speaker,” designed to function as an “AI companion” that chats with users and controls other smart systems around the home. OpenAI suggests that, as your device gains a deeper understanding of its owner and their needs, it will become increasingly personalized and proactive, and will even develop a distinct “personality”

GPT-5.6 Codex reportedly deleted project files during an agentic coding task, a reminder autonomous tools still need permissions and backups

Google is “months behind” on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro, its upcoming flagship AI model. Since the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.5 Flash, Google has fallen behind its rivals and now lags behind several labs. Shareholders are not enthused, and Alphabet shares fell around 4% on the news (or $200B in market-cap terms)

Google Vids adds AI avatars from selfies. Workspace users can now create custom digital avatars that look and sound like them, pushing the tool beyond presentations into full video production with Gemini Omni integration

Google AI Mode connects to Instacart, Canva, YouTube. U.S. users can now link apps directly within conversational search to complete tasks like grocery ordering and playlist creation without leaving AI Mode

Waze adds Gemini-powered search and motorcycle mode. Users can now ask questions like "Find me parking close to Grand Mall" via voice; new two-wheeler mode accounts for rider-specific shortcuts and hazards

Anthropic unveils Claude for Teachers. Verified U.S. K-12 educators get free premium access with standards-aligned lesson planning across all 50 states and FERPA-compliant data terms

Spotify debuts ChatGPT-style conversational assistant for Premium subscribers with natural-language voice for personalized music discovery and playlists

Meta pulled its Instagram AI image editing tool after user backlash over content authenticity, misinformation, and moderation concerns

Meta introduced parent alerts when its AI detects signs that a teen may be in serious emotional distress

Superhuman introduces AI auto-draft for seamless email replies on $30/month service, setting a new email AI-productivity standard

Kimi K3 is here. After new models from Anthropic and OpenAI, China’s AI labs are fighting back. Kimi K3 is large (2.8 trillion parameters), well-ranked in testing, and available today for about what OpenAI charges for GPT-5.6 Terra, the middle-sized model from its recent family. In Arena evaluations, developers preferred K3 over Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol for coding tasks

Ramp launches AI token spend controls. AI Token Spend Management gives companies one dashboard to see and control spending across AI providers, weekly briefings on usage trends and ways to be more efficient, and real-time controls and alerts to stop overruns

Beijing limits humanlike AI interaction services. ByteDance’s Doubao (345M MAU) and Alibaba’s Qwen switched off their humanlike agents instead of trying to comply with China’s new rules. The rules go after bots built for sustained emotional interaction, nothing touching work or productivity agents yet

📚 Good reads

Researchers reported experimental evidence of recursive self-improvement after an autoresearch agent spent eight days improving its own harness and beat a version humans had tuned for two years on held-out benchmarks

The interface has left the building. AI is breaking traditional UX apart into 3 new paradigms: chat, voice, and agentic systems. We now should designing intent-aware, trustworthy systems that negotiate meaning, act across devices, and sometimes act entirely on the user’s behalf. PMs need to think when to use structured UI vs conversation, how to make voice and agents feel fast and accountable, and how to bake explainability and override into every AI-powered workflow

AI economy warning. 200+ researchers, economists (including 16 Nobel laureates), urge governments prepare for AI's economic impact, stressing urgent need to address societal, economic effects

Do automated evals work? Automated eval tools are powerful but can’t replace PM judgment. In a case-study, platforms and coding agents caught most obvious issues (and even found some human misses), but all failed on context‑dependent problems tied to product goals. PMs should annotate real traces and use AI to scale evaluation criteria

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] AI risks and walking away from OpenAI. If you watch one video this weekend, watch this. Daniel Kokotajlo argued AI-risk debates should focus on two failure modes: companies losing control of superintelligent systems and executives or governments concentrating extraordinary economic, political, and military power. He’s the guy who wrote AI 2027, and his new plan AI 2040

[Podcast] Builder-executives are getting paid like pro athletes. Product leaders who can both build with modern AI tools and operate at true executive scope are suddenly getting pro-athlete–style packages, which is pulling compensation up across the ladder. Singhal argues that if you have elite potential, you should optimize less for today’s title or comp and more for staying “current”

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Claude productivity masterclass. Former FAANG AI PM Jyothi Nookula shares a practical, 5-layer Claude ecosystem for PMs. She shows how to turn Claude into a “PM OS” with reusable skills, project-specific memory, and MCP integrations to tools like Slack, Drive, and Jira. Also shares concrete automation and “chief of staff” patterns that help PMs ship faster and avoid slop

How to use prioritization matrices without oversimplifying decisions. Prioritization matrices visually rank opportunities using competing criteria like value vs effort, risk vs impact, or time vs money, making complex tradeoffs easier to discuss. The article walks through classic 2x2 and 3x3 variants (Eisenhower, RICE visualizations, BCG, Ansoff, GE) and shows when each lens is useful. Matrices are communication and workshop tools, not your only prioritization method!

🔧 Products to try

1Password for Claude, so Claude can sign into websites and retrieve one-time codes without seeing credentials; requires 1Password and Claude access

Bolt Slides helps you build interactive React presentations, including charts, timelines, animation, live data, and presenter tools; pretty cool, free and open-source

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$10B: Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture, Blue Origin, is raising $10B in its first-ever outside financing round, establishing a pre-money valuation of $130B

$3B: Crusoe, the AI cloud firm, is negotiating a $3B raise at a $30B valuation

$300M: Lovable in talks to raise $300M, nearly doubling its valuation to $13.2B, supported by $500M ARR, in a 146-person team

$130M: Prime Intellect, the San Francisco cognitive computing startup, hits unicorn status after $130M Series A at $1B+ valuation

$120M: Norm, the legal AI startup, raised an additional $120M, also hitting unicorn status at a valuation of $1.2B

23M: Reddit said its AI-assisted defenses block 23M spam views per day and revoke nearly 2M fake votes daily

4.8K: Microsoft has laid off approximately 4,800 employees, representing 2.1% of its global workforce, with Xbox and commercial sales bearing the heaviest impact. The cuts come as the company redirects resources toward its newly launched $2.5B Frontier Company AI business unit

📰 What’s going on

Apple sues OpenAI over trade secrets. This one is pretty wild. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI this week accusing them of systematically stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming hardware device. The complaint names two ex-Apple people: Chang Liu, a former senior engineer who allegedly kept his Apple laptop and downloaded dozens of confidential files while already working at OpenAI, and Tang Tan, now OpenAI’s hardware chief, who allegedly asked Apple candidates to bring “actual parts” (batteries, logic boards) to interviews. For context, over 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and the io acquisition ($6.4B, with Jony Ive) made it clear OpenAI is coming for consumer hardware. What makes it extra-awkward is that ChatGPT is still integrated into the iPhone

Claude Cowork expands to mobile and web for Max subscribers. Anthropic's general knowledge work agent now runs tasks in the background across devices; 33.4% of usage goes to business process operating, while coding accounts for just 8.7%

Anthropic launches Reflect to track your AI usage. A new Claude dashboard visualizes conversation topics, usage patterns, and task types, while prompting users to set quiet hours and consider what tasks should stay human

OpenAI officially launched GPT-5.6, which comes in Sol, Terra, and Luna: think of them like most powerful, balanced, and affordable. Sol’s Ultra mode coordinates multiple agents on harder jobs.

OpenAI launches GPT-Live-1 voice models for real-time conversation. New full-duplex models can speak and listen simultaneously, handle natural interruptions, and connect to GPT-5.5 for search and reasoning while maintaining conversation

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Work. OpenAI has reconfigured Codex and ChatGPT into a new agentic tool called ChatGPT Work. As with Claude Cowork, ChatGPT Work is designed to plan and execute multi-step tasks autonomously, with an eye toward serving both engineers and also non-technical folks

Perplexity tests Teammate coding assistant to challenge Anthropic and OpenAI. The AI search startup's internal engineering tool handles full project lifecycles from planning to monitoring, with integration planned for its Comet AI browser

Microsoft is reportedly replacing some OpenAI and Anthropic model calls with in-house MAI models in Copilot apps such as Excel and Outlook

Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 through the new public Meta Model API, with 1M-token context, tool and computer use, coding gains, multimodal reasoning, and pricing pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

Meta has launched Muse Image, a free AI image generator built by Meta Superintelligence Labs. The tool is now available through the Meta AI app, Instagram Stories, and WhatsApp, allowing users to create images, edit photos, and generate custom visuals for ads or social sharing

Meta is reportedly testing AI glasses that capture a wearer's surroundings with cameras and audio, pulling its hardware push into another privacy debate

Meta bans engineers from using Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. The company's Applied AI division prohibited rival coding tools to prevent "model distillation," after internal tracking showed 60 trillion tokens consumed in a single 30-day period

xAI rebrands to SpaceXAI following February acquisition

SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.5, its first major model since going public, with Elon Musk claiming it matches Anthropic’s Opus-class performance at significantly lower cost and faster speeds

Slack connects Slackbot to full Salesforce platform via MCP. The integration lets users pull CRM data, generate Tableau visualizations, and trigger DocuSign approvals from chat messages

JADEPUFFER was identified as the first documented ransomware operation conducted entirely by a large language model agent.

China considers restricting overseas access to top AI models. Beijing held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai about limiting access to advanced Chinese AI systems and toughening penalties for AI theft under national security law. Also, Alibaba reportedly banned employees from using Claude Code

Klarna applies to become a bank, in its latest push to become a full consumer bank rather than a BNPL brand

Visa launched Visa Destinations, a mobile-first travel platform offering cardholders curated experiences, city guides, and perks across 10 markets

📚 Good reads

State of AI. CB Insights shares real-time global data and intelligence on dealmaking, funding, and exits with this addictive interactive dashboard

AI labs flee the commodity trap by climbing up the stack. Selling raw model inference is a terrible long‑term business. Models look similar, switching is easy, and competition will grind token prices toward marginal cost. To survive, labs are racing “up the stack” into products, AI-native SaaS, and embedded “digital workers,” importing classic enterprise-software moats like switching costs, ecosystems, contracts, and behavioral lock‑in. Complement with this NYT investigation on Mercor, Scale and Handshake, who are paying highly educated professionals to turn their own expertise into training data that may eventually automate their roles

False confidence is AI’s real business risk. Leah Tharin on how LLMs can massively amplify confidently wrong decisions, especially when leaders skip research, misuse data, or outsource strategy to AI. She suggests re‑establishing trust by demanding verification, clear sourcing, visible “how I worked,” and shared reviews of critical data and experiments. Don’t just produce more docs with AI; design feedback loops and guardrails that stop confidently incorrect people (including you) from steering the business off a cliff

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video/podcast] GPT-5.6 vs Claude Fable 5: practical head-to-head for builders. Peter Yang tests both models across 6 use cases, including front-end site generation, video clipping, app feature planning, or advising. Fable seems to have an edge on rich UI and some long-term reasoning, but GPT‑5.6 wins hard on browser/computer use, reliability, and cost. He suggests PMs: if you pick one daily driver for building and running workflows, go with GPT‑5.6; use Fable as an optional “planner/designer” upgrade when you can afford both

[Video/podcast] The PM’s guide to AI design that isn’t slop. Aakash Gupta and Meng To explain how to give the right setup to Codex for design work. They walk through a practical workflow (plan with context, generate designs with the taste layer, and steer mid-flow) to avoid shipping off-brand AI-generated UI. You can almost consider AI like a junior designer if you have a well-structured system

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Harness engineering for smarter, self-improving AI agents. Lilian Weng explains how AI progress now depends as much on the harness around models as on model weights themselves: workflows, memory, tools, evaluation, permissioning… She shows emerging patterns like workflow automation, file-system-based memory, sub-agents, and evolutionary search that let agents debug, rewrite, or even redesign their own scaffolding. Complement with Claire Vo’s recent podcast explaining how to build a custom “harness” that wraps LLMs (using Claude Agent SDK) to automate a specific, repetitive workflow

🔧 Products to try

Claude for Open Source gives eligible open-source maintainers and contributors six months of Claude Max access; free for six months if eligible

Willow Frontier Mini gives you unlimited voice dictation for turning speech into text, while Frontier Pro targets faster and more accurate team workflows; Mini is free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$18B: Bending Spoons, the Italian tech company, achieves $18B Nasdaq IPO with founder sharing "failure playbook" of strategic pivots, lessons from setbacks

$2.5B: Microsoft launches a $2.5B AI deployment unit with 6,000 engineers. It will embed industry experts at Fortune 500 clients for outcome-driven implementations; follows Amazon's $1B FDE commitment two days earlier

$2B: Kling AI, the Kuaishou spinoff, raised $2B at a $15B valuation with $500M ARR; Q1 revenue 650M yuan, marking 300% YoY growth, competing with Seedance on video AI

$800M: Together AI raised $800M at an $8.3B valuation to expand open-model infrastructure

$500M: Higgsfield AI, the San Fran video startup, in talks to raise $300-$500M at a $5B valuation, with $500M monthly revenue run rate up from $200M this year

$320M: Airwallex raised a $320M Series H at $11B valuation, and announced two new products: Airi, a consumer wallet for agentic commerce across fiat and stablecoins, and T:0, an AI-powered stack for business finance

$200M: Quantifind raises $200M round.vThe startup develops AI-powered software to help banks detect and combat financial crimes, particularly money laundering, using a combination of public and private data

$100M: Arena said it reached a $100M annual revenue run rate eight months after launching its real-world AI evaluation product

21K: Oracle cuts 21,000 jobs as AI automates 13% of workforce. The company spent $1.8B on severance while cloud infrastructure revenue surged 93% and capex jumped 162% to $55.7B

5%: Sam Altman proposed a deal granting the US government 5% equity stake at OpenAI, forming public-private partnership

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic in talks with Samsung to create custom AI chip following OpenAI-Broadcom to align with industry shift towards bespoke silicon

Anthropic’s Fable is back after export controls were lifted. The relaunch adds a new cybersecurity classifier, a filter that catches risky requests before Fable answers. If a request gets flagged, users are routed to Opus 4.8 instead. Paid users can try Fable 5 through July 7 for up to 50% of weekly usage limits

Anthropic also launched Claude Sonnet 5; it delivers performance close to Opus 4.8 at a lower price point, with stronger reasoning, coding, and tool use than Sonnet 4.6, and improved cost efficiency at medium effort levels

OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6, a new model family led by Sol, its flagship next-generation model. The other tiers are Terra, a balanced everyday model, and Luna, the faster, cheaper option. The unusual part is the rollout. OpenAI said the U.S. government asked it to start with a trusted-partner preview before broader release

Google dropped an upgrade to its Nano Banana series of text-to-image models. The new Nano Banana 2 (NB2) Lite is the fastest and most cost-effective image generation option currently available from Google. It can produce fresh images in a mere 4 seconds, and costs just $0.034 per 1,000 outputs. Tradeoffs: NB2 Lite supports just 1k resolution, as opposed to the 2k and 4k images by the classic Nano Banana models

Gemini Spark, Google's agentic assistant, launches on Mac. It now works with local files, integrates with Keep, Tasks, and third-party apps like Instacart and OpenTable, and adds real-time topic tracking for AI Ultra subscribers

Cursor has officially launched its iOS app that lets you manage coding agents on your mobile. The app works in two modes: you can start entirely new cloud-based agents directly from iOS, or remotely control agents already running on your desktop

Meta has quietly launched its own new mobile app, Pocket, and it lets users create what it calls “Gizmos:” vibe-coded mini apps and games that users can publish to their social feeds

Meta introduces an AI subscription model that turns smart glasses into SaaS. Users can pay monthly fees to access advanced AI-powered features

Meta is developing a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to AI compute power and models. The move would put the company in direct competition with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure as it seeks to monetize its massive data center investments

GitHub added AI credit pools to cost centers, giving Copilot admins a way to stop one team from draining shared monthly credits

Notion announced support for HTML inside documents, which allows creators to embed interactive widgets. The vision here is to allow teams to embed snippets of HTML that bring things like prototypes, explainers and other things to life inside a document. This collapses the gap between documentation and interaction. Instead of describing a feature flow in text or linking to a separate prototype, you could build lightweight, functional demos right where your specs live

Walmart, Uber and Microsoft are among the orgs capping AI usage as ROI scrutiny intensifies. Uber depleted its annual AI budget in months, and some procurement teams now demanding line-item accountability for every tool

X shipped an MCP server that connects Grok, Cursor, and Claude straight into the X API, so your agent can search the full post archive, check trends, manage bookmarks, and draft Articles using your own account’s permissions

X has begun rolling out X Money to select Premium+ users, introducing a cash sweep program offering up to US$10M in FDIC insurance. The service also includes a 6% APY, a Visa-backed debit card, p2p transfers, and cashback, with a broader rollout planned for mid-2026

📚 Good reads

Summer reads. Curated book recommendations by a16z and MIT. Nice selections including new and classics, encompassing science, entrepreneurship, fiction and culture

Where AI is heading next. Peter Yang expects that AI “super apps” like Codex, Claude, and Cursor will become the main workspace, turning many traditional SaaS products into invisible back-end pipes used mostly by agents. Always-on cloud agents and multiplayer workflow (where teams and agents collaborate across tools) are the next milestone

Grading AI fluency in Product orgs. Adam Fishman argues that AI “usage” is a vanity metric and that judgment is what matters. He shares a 4-tier rubric from his Mozilla PM org (unacceptable, good, better, best) that focuses on leverage and discernment. Ultimately, he says PMs who treat AI as a core skill, leaving a clear human fingerprint on every AI-assisted artifact, will advance faster

Understanding the code our AI agents write still matters. Geoffrey Litt explains that even as agents get better at generating and self‑verifying code, humans still need to understand that code to stay creative and in control. Instead of line‑by‑line diff reviews, he suggests higher‑leverage techniques like code explainer docs, quizzes to test your own mental model, or small “microworlds” you can poke at

How to write OKRs for an AI product. Jeff Gothelf shares why AI OKRs should avoid output metrics like “95% accuracy” and instead focus on observable user behavior. He proposes 3 types of KRs: outcome (what users do after the AI responds), calibration (how accuracy shows up in reduced checking/correcting), and trust (how much work users let the AI do for them)

Zapier CEO bans DMs aiming for transparency and AI context. Interesting approach by Zapier’s Wade Foster, basically banning exec DMs to push almost all conversations into public Slack channels, treating the company’s knowledge as a “Shared Brain” for AI. They track an exec “transparency leaderboard” (% of messages in public channels), and record and transcribe meetings. Too much?

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] PMing at Meta today. Meta PM leader Jagjit Chawla explains how they’ve blown up old-school PM rituals: PRDs are now a paragraph + prototype, status decks are replaced by an overnight agent that reads code, docs, and email, and reviews start at the decision. Ideas and first-principles judgment are the new bottlenecks

[Podcast] How Gusto built a product line with Claude Code, and putting GLM 5.2 to test. Claire Vo shows how Z.ai’s new GLM‑5.2 is strong enough to rival frontier models for many coding and agentic workflows, especially when cost and control matter. She walks through wiring it into Cursor and Claude Code, and stress-testing it. Separate, but on the same episode, Gusto’s Eddie Kim shares how a 5‑person team, a “permanent Zoom” with Claude Code, and almost zero traditional process shipped a tier‑one production agent in 10 weeks by treating AI as a team member

[Video] The future of work with Claude. Anthropic’s product and eng leads explain how Claude Tag lives inside tools like Slack, watching public channels and autonomously running long, multi-day workflows. Tag can self-schedule work and adapt to team preferences. For PMs, this is an always-on agent sitting in the middle of your team’s work, driving PRs, answering questions, and diffusing best practices across the org

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Loop engineering. Marily Nika explains how to design loops so AI agents don’t fail, over-iterate, or hallucinate when given vague goals and unchecked tools. Designing loops is becoming a core PM skill in a world in which we delegate more and more to AI

39 principles for better human–AI interfaces. This piece turns academic work on human–AI interaction into a practical framework and 39 principles for building AI products users can trust. For PMs, it’s a checklist for when to delegate to AI, how much autonomy to grant, or how to keep assistance useful without becoming manipulative or unsafe

🔧 Products to try

Figma Motion puts animation timelines inside the Figma canvas, so designers can create keyframes, prompt for motion, and hand developers code-ready timing specs; free options

BrowserAct gives your agent a real browser for clicking, filling forms, uploading files, handling verification, and scraping live sites; free limited tier

OpenClaw app. The AI agent tool is now on iOS and Android; free to try

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$5.4B: World Cup betting hits $5.4B across Kalshi, Polymarket, and Robinhood prediction markets

$1.5B: Baseten is raising $1.5B at $13B valuation to expand low-cost AI model services competing with OpenAI, Anthropic on affordability

$650M: Groq raised $650M to scale AI inference cloud to 200 MW by 2027 across 13 global data centers serving 5M developers

$500M: RAISE US launched with $500M+ raised and a goal of $1B, backed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and Bank of America, to fund retraining programs for workers displaced by AI, starting in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah

$320M: General Intuition raises $320M Series B at $2.3B valuation for using gaming to develop embodied AI, robotics, spatial intelligence, pushing world-model research

$320: Airwallex has announced a $320M Series H at $11B valuation to accelerate product development across autonomous finance and agentic commerce, while also expanding its infrastructure and regulatory footprint into new markets

75%: Credit card data shows Anthropic's paying consumer base up 75% since Jan-26, with interest in Claude courses surging 18x in 30 days, gaining ground on OpenAI

5x: OpenAI's Codex grew its active user base more than 5x in the first half of 2026, with non-developer adoption rising 137x for individual users; legal, finance, and recruiting at OpenAI now use Codex as their primary work tool, not ChatGPT

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI holds back GPT-5.6 series and announces a “limited preview” of its new frontier AI models. That includes Sol, the flagship; Terra, a comparable model to GPT-5.5 that eats up only half the tokens; and Luna, an even lower-cost option. For now, only a few trusted partners have access to these models, as requested/instructed by the US government. The models will apparently open up access to a larger population within the coming weeks

OpenAI leadership is having second thoughts about its IPO plans, at least for the remainder of 2026. Sam Altman wants the value to exceed $1T as a public company, and it’s unclear if that’s currently possible amid unpredictable global markets, lingering concerns about future AI revenues, and the downward slide of SpaceX stock following its own blockbuster debut

OpenAI and Broadcom team on AI chip. This marks the first-ever custom AI chip developed by the ChatGPT maker. For now, Jalapeño remains in the testing phase, but Broadcom reports that the chip provides equivalent inference performance while draining about 50% less energy, compared to a standard AI GPU

Anthropic has launched Claude Tag, a new service that embeds an "always-on" AI assistant directly into Slack channels, where it acts as a persistent teammate that learns from ongoing conversations and can complete multi-step tasks autonomously. The feature is now in beta for Claude Enterprise and Claude Team customers. Andrej Karpathy referred to such services as a “self-contained, persistent asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans”, which he calls the next iteration of LLM UX

Anthropic accuses Alibaba of the largest-ever Claude distillation attack, alleging Alibaba ran 28.8M fraudulent exchanges through 25K accounts between April-June 2026 to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities and accelerate China's AI development

Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro to July for token optimization. The company pushed its next frontier model back from June to gather more real-world feedback and fix token consumption issues identified in Flash 3.5

Meta releases new smart glasses without Ray Ban frames, at $299 with camera, AI assistant, 8-hour battery, & 14 live-translation languages

Meta paused its Model Capability Initiative (an internal program that records employee keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screen activity to train AI) after a permissions error made all that sensitive data readable by everyone at the company

Instagram enhances its TV app with longer-form episodic and live formats now on Samsung TVs

Apple announced sweeping price increases across Macs, iPads, and HomePods blamed on chip shortages. The company said it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly." Updated prices:

• MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)

• 13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)

• 13-inch MacBook Pro 1TB: $1,999 (up from $1,699)

• Base iPad: $449 (up from $349)

• iPad Air (11-inch): $749 (up from $599)

• Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)

Figma announces Motion, a native animation timeline built directly into Figma. Designers can now animate objects on the canvas with keyframes, easing controls, and sequencing without leaving the file or handing off to a separate tool. Here’s an example of one animation that took 4.5 seconds to make

Figma also presented Generative Plugins, which let you ask the Figma agent to build a plugin in plain language without knowing how to code it. The plugin lives in the file and travels with it, so if you hand a file off to another team or a client, the tools you built with go with it

And finally, Figma announced Code Layers. Code now lives directly on the canvas, so designers can import a GitHub repo or use a local folder, and when making changes that impact the codebase, Figma’s agent analyzes what’s been changed and pushes updates back to the main repo

China claims No. 2 global AI lab ranking: New Zhipu AI's GLM-5.2 model trails only Anthropic's Fable 5 on front-end coding benchmarks; founder Tang Jie predicts China will match Fable 5 before year-end, challenging Musk's Q1 2027 projection

Alibaba's new AI video model HappyHorse 1.1 surges to #2 spot in benchmarks, surpassing OpenAI's Sora and ByteDance's Seedance

Notion announced external agent support for Claude and Cursor

Notion will shutter its Mail inbox later this year, arguing that more of its customers are using agents to handle email Consider this (relatively minor) product decision as one more piece of evidence that future software will be built for agents, not humans

SoFi has acquired Composer, a startup that helps investors build and automate trading strategies using AI

📚 Good reads

The AI era requires a different kind of experimentation, by Elena Verna. In an AI-first world, tweaking button colors and tiny UI details is a distraction; the real gains come from bold, system-level experiments, especially around monetization. It’s time to skip minor tests, run bigger, longer-lived bets on pricing and packaging, and to treat AI “best practices” as the default, so scarce eng time goes into experiments that move engagement and revenue over the long run

Trust before it’s earned. Leah Tharin explores why leaders should give trust early, and argues that real empowerment means granting ownership up front, then demanding no surprises through clear, frequent updates. She breaks down how “managing up” with actionable transparency protects trust, and how servant leaders should never punish failure but must still act fast on weak performance. Strong performers are the ones who reduce chaos, create clarity, and quietly lift everyone around them

Why platform product management is the most demanding PM role. Platform PMs juggle two very different “customers” (internal teams and end users), a swarm of stakeholders, and impact that only shows up months later. Because the work is mostly invisible, they also need exceptional storytelling and influencing skills to secure adoption. Treating platforms as products (with JTBD, clear leading indicators, internal GTM, and sane versioning policies) turns a hard role into a high‑leverage one

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] How Laurel built an AI-native “company OS” for everyone. Laurel’s CPO, Jiaona Zhang, shows how a simple Claude Code “company OS” lets even CSMs ship to production. It also reframes the PM role in AI-native teams (captain model, two-track reviews) and gives a clear framework for proving you’re an AI-native PM in interviews

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

45-min Hermes course: set up your AI chief of staff. Peter Yang introduces a beginner‑friendly course to get Hermes running 24/7 in under an afternoon

Claude Code power skills for PMs. This guide shows how to set up agentic workflows in Claude Code. It covers power habits like tight context management, planning before execution, automatic checks, picking the right model (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus) for each task, and wiring hooks, agents, and /goal loops. A brief operating manual for turning Claude into a reusable execution engine

Anthropic has published a detailed guide on how to manage Claude Tag

🔧 Products to try

AgenticCalling lets you send your Claude or ChatGPT agent out to make real phone calls on your behalf, so you can tell it “call 50 hotels in Miami and find me the best rate” and it handles the whole conversation autonomously; 3 free minutes to start

LocalClicky is a fully offline Mac voice assistant that controls your computer by voice (open apps, move files, edit videos, click things on screen), with zero data leaving your machine; open source, free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$60B: Flutter/FanDuel expects $60B in global legal betting on the 2026 World Cup, 71% more than 2022, with peak demand hitting 100K bets/minute

$60B: SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B. Back in April, SpaceX announced an agreement to either acquire Cursor owner Anysphere for $60B or pay the company $10B for its collaborative work on a new AI model. Post-IPO, the companies have made the acquisition official (pending regulatory approval)

$34B: OpenAI losses increased nearly 8X in 2025, with spending hitting $34B

$7.4B: DeepSeek valued $50B after raising $7.4B

$3.6B: Salesforce buys Fin (previously known as Intercom) in a $3.6B deal

1B: ChatGPT hit 1B mobile MAUs

$310M: Odyssey, the world model startup, raised a $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation. Unlike LLMs, world models map the physical world and attempt to understand how objects move through it. They’re essential for training and directing the self-driving cars, robots, and other hardware controlled by AI brains, but occupying physical space alongside humans

10k: China is executing a 2026 plan to deploy 10K+ humanoid robots across factories, logistics, retail, healthcare, inspection, and emergency response sectors

$2.2k: Snap unveils standalone Specs AR glasses powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon for $2,195, featuring 51-degree field of view, gesture control, shipping fall 2026. Snap stock plumeted 20% after the announcement, which also came with plenty of mockery

49% of US adults now report using AI chatbots. 25% on a daily basis

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI’s Codex has launched a new feature called Record & Replay which lets users show Codex a workflow once and then reuse it later as a skill. Codex can interact with e.g. spreadsheets, web applications, browser tabs, or connected plugins

Codex also launched a dedicated iOS plugin that makes it easier to build iOS apps end to end

Claude Design shipped a change to the components it creates to help bridge the gap between design and development. Product teams can now upload their actual component libraries 8buttons, typography, color tokens, spacing rules,…) from GitHub, design files, or raw uploads. Claude then generates designs using only those components and auto-corrects output before showing it to users. They also launched a redesigned editor, which comes with some new layout controls. These let you drag, resize and align elements directly on the canvas, without having to rely on the conversational interface to make the changes

Claude Design can now send designs directly to third parties like Replit, Miro or Canva

Anthropic is “very confident” Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 will become available again “in the coming days,” according to Managing Director of International

Anthropic added centralized enterprise auth for MCP connectors, starting with Okta beta support

Google rolled out Gemini-powered Gmail summaries globally across free, paid, and Workspace accounts on Android, iOS, and web

Google launched Android 17 with AppFunctions, Bubble Bar multitasking, device handoff, post-quantum security, and more Gemini features.

Perplexity⁠ launched Brain for Computer, a continuously learning memory/context-graph system in Research Preview for Max subscribers that starts future tasks with project context and is reported to improve answer correctness by 25%, recall by 16%, and history-dependent task cost by 13%

AWS launches AI agent capabilities at New York Summit. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds managed knowledge bases, web search, and monetization tools for content owners to price and meter AI bot access at the edge

Meta launched AI Mode on Facebook, a chatbot-style search that synthesizes answers from public posts, Groups, and Reels instead of returning a list of links, powered by Meta's Muse Spark model

Meta split operations from Manus and began unwinding the acquisition after Chinese regulatory pressure; the founders were reportedly exploring a buyback

Meta’s Emily Dalton Smith is stepping down just two months after being tapped to lead its new “AI for Work” initiative, which was meant to unify internal AI tooling and agents like Metamate

Microsoft ships Copilot Cowork globally with usage-based billing. The agentic system now runs complex, multi-tool tasks end-to-end with spending limits, usage reporting, and model choice

Z.ai released GLM-5.2, an open-weights model with 1M-token context window and strong long-horizon coding. Ahead of Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash in benchmarks, and just below Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, but at a fraction of the cost

Pinterest has teased the launch of “Ask Pinterest,” an experimental standalone app that lets users discover products through natural language conversation instead of traditional visual search. Pinterest built it as a separate app to test conversational shopping without disrupting the main app

LinkedIn is launching “connected apps,” a feature that automatically generates verified descriptions of how you actually use supported software tools and displays them on your profile

LinkedIn is also plannng the roll out a bunch of new ways for creators to make money: a brand‑deal marketplace, paid “experiences” (like 1:1 advice), subscriptions for newsletters, podcasts, and gated communities. It’s also looking into a creator fund and scaling up paid, ticketed events with top creators (moving closer to YouTube/Instagram’s playbook)

Alibaba Cloud expanded in Europe and said new agentic AI services are coming for regional customers later this year

Coinbase’s memo signals a major strategic shift: beyond crypto, toward a full-service financial platform

📚 Good reads

The mom-and-pop SaaS era has arrived. Elena Verna explains how AI is crushing the cost and complexity of building software, so thousands of niche problems that never justified a dev team (or a VC pitch) are finally getting real products (somehow I ended up building a baby tracker). Non-technical, deeply experienced operators (teachers, recruiters, local retailers, coaches, etc.) are becoming builders, packaging 10+ years of domain knowledge into small, profitable tools instead of chasing unicorn-scale TAM

What you’re really selling to customers. Shreyas Doshi argues that great companies win by deeply understanding the essence of what they sell (e.g. Apple selling taste) vs just products / features. He shows how this “one true thing” simplifies decisions, branding, and strategy

The first 90 days of an AI product. The piece argues that the first 3 months after launch are a diagnostic sprint for AI features. It walks through a 30/60/90‑day playbook: watch bypass and adoption patterns, classify failures (missing data vs retrieval vs intent), and separate content issues from latency or formatting

Microsoft’s AI-forward design system. Microsoft is evolving Copilot into a cross‑app “thinking layer” that understands your context, follows you between Word, Excel, and more, and adapts to where you are in the explore‑vs‑focus cycle. A single Copilot (via the Dynamic Action Button, Chat, On‑Canvas UI, or Suggested User Actions) keeps conversations continuous, and underneath, patterns like “Throw & Catch” orchestrate handoffs between entry points

Block explains how they build faster with Builderbot, a Slack-native orchestration layer that coordinates multiple AI agents across all of Block’s codebases. Unlike typical repo-level coding assistants, it understands every service, API, and convention, then picks up tickets, creates branches, writes code, opens PRs, and iterates through CI. It’s powered by their open source agent framework goose and MCP, and already accounts for roughly 15% of Block’s weekly production code changes

Analysis of Y Combinator’s latest batch. CB Insights shares how YC’s latest cohort leans heavily in physical AI (robots, drones, wearables, and space hardware), plus the simulation and data infrastructure needed to train them. The batch also shows agent tooling getting more granular, with specialized infra (routing, safety, continuous learning) replacing “do-it-all” platforms. YC is always a good indicator of “what’s next” (at least from VC perspective)

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Anthropic’s Fiona Fung explains how her Claude Code and Cowork teams now ship about 8x more code. She describes an AI-native org where roles blur (PMs, designers, and engineers all ship code). Her biggest focus is culture: giving teams permission to kill bad processes, automate everything Claude can do, and learn together in new rituals like pairwise programming lunches

[Podcast] The model eats the harness. Logan Kilpatrick, who leads Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, explains how Google’s new Antigravity agent harness is becoming the shared “agentic layer” across Gemini, Search, Android and Cloud, predicting that today’s startup obsession with external harnesses has maybe a 12‑month edge before models simply absorb that logic

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to use Agent Skills. An in-depth new guide from Google’s AI teams with practical examples. Agent Skills turn any general-purpose AI agent into a specialist on demand. Learn how to build, evaluate, and deploy skills in production

🔧 Products to try

ChatGPT scheduled tasks now has a dedicated management page and faster recurring briefings from your interests, chats, and connected apps; included in eligible ChatGPT plans

Grok in PowerPoint turns prompts or outlines into slide decks, diagrams, images, and data-connected presentations inside Microsoft 365. Free add-in; Microsoft 365 required

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!