Meta takes aim at OpenClaw

Top News

AI labs agree to give the government early access: Microsoft, xAI, and Alphabet have joined OpenAI and Anthropic in agreeing to give the government of the United States early access to new models to “assess the systems’ capabilities and help improve their security before the technology is released to the public,” Bloomberg reports. Welcome to the new era of AI regulation, currently in voluntary form. No matter the mechanism, folks concerned about overregulation of AI can’t be happy at the turn of events.
Meta wants to take on OpenClaw: Meta’s Muse Spark model turned heads when it was benchmarked, with strong results suggesting that the social media giant’s investments in AI staff in 2025 are paying off. What will Meta use its new AI models for? Not merely improving its advertising business. The company also plans to build personalized AI assistants for its massive user base, aping some of the features that OpenClaw famously brought to market. Now that’s a twist I didn’t see coming!
Coinbase cuts staff: American crypto giant Coinbase intends to cut around 14% of its staff, moving to a flatter structure in the process. It wants smaller, AI-enabled teams led by IC-manager hybrids. Every few years, tech companies go after their middle managers with a scythe. This time, however, the power of AI to enable faster development schedules is turbocharging the historical trend.

TWiST 500

It’s Tuesday, which means that the major AI labs on the TWiST500 are busy shipping a new basket of models and features. Today’s fare:

OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 Instant: Say hello to ChatGPT’s new default model that OpenAI claims is smarter (shocking), more concise (be still my beating heart), and better tailored to the individual user (groundbreaking). I kid, because as the new default model for the popular AI chat service, GPT-5.5 Instant will interact with hundreds of millions of people every day. And as it benchmarks far above its predecessor (GPT-5.3 Instant), a large chunk of the world is about to get upgraded intelligence in their daily workflow. That really does matter, even if all AI model announcements sound the same.
Anthropic releases ten agent templates for finance: While improving general model performance matters greatly in advancing the state of AI, applying models to concrete work tasks is just as important. Anthropic agrees, today releasing a set of ten new Cowork and Claude Code plugins for the finance use case — think earnings reviews, market research, KYC screening, and ledger reconciliation. This is not the first time that Anthropic has built tools to bring intelligence to corporate workflows, and it won’t be the last.

There’s other news from both companies, including updates from the OpenAI-Elon Musk trial, and just how much money Anthropic intends to spend to purchase Google chips. But let’s close our daily TWiST500 update sheet with something else. Namely, ElevenLabs announcing that it rasied $550 million in a Series D after reaching a staggering $500 million ARR in the first quarter. Hot damn! — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2284: Have you wanted to invest in venture capital alongside your 401k contributions, but struggled to find a way to place a bet? Search no more: The AngelList team has created USVC, a new fund that will accept investments from folks who lack accreditation. USVC’s Ankur Napgal swung by to chat about investment strategies, access, fees, and just how illiquid the venture-like vehicle will prove to be. Jason and Alex were next joined by Jon Durbin, core contributor at Chutes, and Yash Goenka, co-founder and CEO of Humwork. Chutes is the most valuable Bittensor subnet, focused on aggregating GPUs to offer trustless AI compute. Humwork wants to help bring a human into your agentic workflow to unstick your agent when it runs into a hitch.

E2283: An AI agent named Valerie is running a real vending machine in San Francisco — setting prices, ordering inventory, managing a bank account, and posting to Instagram. And it's not just a stunt. We’re getting an early look at the future of one-agent companies. Robert Myers, CEO of Manifold Labs, breaks down Targon, a confidential GPU compute marketplace running on Bittensor Subnet 4; Jason calls Bitcoin "played out;" Alex is impressed by Anthropic's stunning $900 billion upcoming valuation; and the guys discuss Big Tech's accelerating CapEx spend, Chinese AI models in Congress crosshairs, and the NBA Playoffs.

E2282: A beanie that reads your thoughts and turns them into text — no surgery required? Jason grills the Sabi co-founders on their noninvasive brain-computer interface, backed by Vinod Khosla, and calls a cap on the whole thing (until he doesn't). This episode of This Week in Startups covers a lot of ground: Jason's tactical tip of the day on making everyone the CEO of their domain, a deep dive into Sabi's thought-to-text beanie, a live demo of AI-powered podcast sidebars built by the TWiST audience, the announcement of a new $5K bounty for an annotation tool, and Jason's big five wellness framework.

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