Hi friends 👋
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. Adam Faik 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!
