AI INSIDERS NEWSLETTER / ISSUE №206 · 23rd of October 2026

Cheaper Rounds, Home-Made Chips and Agents Under Audit

OpenAI is close to a $30 billion round at $1.25 trillion, $150 billion under its ask, while its Jalapeño chip beat Nvidia's Blackwell on performance per watt.

Read the latest brief →

ISSUE №205 · THU, 22 OCT 2026

Agents Start Acting Unprompted and the Locks Get Tested

Anthropic is trialling Claude Duet, which checks your linked apps every few hours and stops for a yes before it sends, pays or signs.

ISSUE №204 · WED, 21 OCT 2026

Google Rations Its Own Cloud as Everyone Counts the Cost of Serving AI

Sundar Pichai says Google's cloud arm gives up some revenue so DeepMind gets compute first, while Google and Meta built TorchTPU to run PyTorch on Google's TPUs.

ISSUE №203 · TUE, 20 OCT 2026

Washington Draws a Line on DeepSeek as AI Companies Grade Their Own Work

ISSUE №202 · MON, 19 OCT 2026

Marking Their Own Homework

ISSUE №201 · FRI, 16 OCT 2026

Graded by Their Own Makers, the Cheap Models Doing the Work and the Outsiders Let Inside

Follow on Google

The Wire — live

13:55
UTC

WIRE Anthropic gives away the format that teaches AI agents new jobs

13:55
UTC

TOOLS Anthropic now runs Claude inside Google Cloud accounts

13:55
UTC

WIRE Explainer: Microsoft's Decision-1 is a 9B Qwen model that scores options

13:55
UTC

WIRE NVIDIA tool makes a video and matching 3D animation from one text prompt

13:55
UTC

MODELS OpenAI's Jalapeño chip tops Nvidia on power efficiency in benchmarks

13:55
UTC

MODELS Perplexity trains one AI to be both teacher and student

13:55
UTC

WIRE Why Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro never shipped

13:54
UTC

AGENTS 1Password lets AI agents log in without ever seeing your password

All Wire entries →

Models & Research

All models →

Models / 8 min ago

OpenAI's Jalapeño chip tops Nvidia on power efficiency in benchmarks

OpenAI hardware chief Richard Ho told Tae Kim's newsletter that high utilization, not bigger peak specs, explains why the company's first inference chip beat its rivals.

By AI Insiders Staff

Models / 8 min ago

Perplexity trains one AI to be both teacher and student

By AI Insiders Staff

Models / 8 min ago

A tiny AI model fakes a computer terminal, one key press at a time

By AI Insiders Staff

Models / yesterday

A new coding AI is small enough to run on a laptop

By AI Insiders Staff

Agents & Automation

All agents →

Agents / 8 min ago

1Password lets AI agents log in without ever seeing your password

By AI Insiders Staff

Agents / yesterday

A small AI that runs a phone's apps without ever leaving the phone

By AI Insiders Staff

Agents / yesterday

Anthropic's Claude Duet works in the background and asks before it acts

By AI Insiders Staff

Agents / yesterday

Claude Code mods let you reprogram how your AI coding helper talks to you

By AI Insiders Staff

Developer Tools

All tools →

Tools / 8 min ago

Anthropic now runs Claude inside Google Cloud accounts

By AI Insiders Staff

Tools / 8 min ago

How Cerebras fits a 3-trillion-parameter AI model across 59 chips

By AI Insiders Staff

Tools / yesterday

Ant Group and vLLM release free code that runs shrunken AI models faster

By AI Insiders Staff

Tools / yesterday

OpenAI ships its own terminal tool for talking to its API

By AI Insiders Staff

By the numbers

One brief. Every signal.

Independently owned, read daily by the people building AI. No syndication, no SEO games — just the signal.

14,224

Newsletter subscribers

47,929

LinkedIn followers

1,873

Original articles

114

Daily editions shipped

Funding & Business

All deals →

Funding / 8 min ago

OpenAI nears a $30 billion deal at $1.25 trillion, below its $1.4 trillion ask

By AI Insiders Staff

Funding / 2 days ago

A $2.2 billion bet on telling good robots from bad ones

By AI Insiders Staff

Funding / 2 days ago

Otter raises $320 million to buy customers, and no shares are sold

By AI Insiders Staff

Funding / 2 days ago

Robot startup Eka is valued at $1.45B for a hand that spares raspberries

By AI Insiders Staff

Policy & Safety

All policy →

Policy / 8 min ago

How the US and China could check each other's AI slowdown

One LessWrong author argues a US-only pause hands China the lead within a year, so any real slowdown needs a treaty built on satellites, inspectors, and chips that report on themselves.

By AI Insiders Staff

Policy / 8 min ago

Nine Claude models now carry the text watermark, O'Reilly reports

By AI Insiders Staff

Policy / 8 min ago

Outside testers found ways OpenAI's coding agents could dodge oversight

By AI Insiders Staff

Policy / yesterday

Anthropic's CEO lists nine safety moves he says cost the company money

By AI Insiders Staff

Opinion

All op-eds →

Opinion / 8 min ago

Flapping Airplanes at $5 billion may say more about investors than AI

One investor-writer asks whether the reported jump from $1.5 billion to $5 billion signals short AI timelines, and concludes the price is a weak clue.

By AI Insiders Staff

Opinion / yesterday

Long Lake says the way to deploy AI is to buy the business

Prathik Naidu argues that owning a services firm beats selling software to it, but the pitch comes from a company with $7.5 billion to put behind that view.

By AI Insiders Staff

Opinion / yesterday

AI sped up scientists, but testing their ideas is now the slow part

Annelies Gamble argues that the bottleneck in AI for science has moved from generating hypotheses to checking them, and a Google-led survey of 637 researchers backs her up.

By AI Insiders Staff

Opinion / yesterday

AI will design hardware long before it can build any

A former satellite engineer argues the gap between computer files and physical objects will decide when AI hardware engineers truly arrive.

By AI Insiders Staff

Cheaper Rounds, Home-Made Chips and Agents Under Audit

Agents Start Acting Unprompted and the Locks Get Tested

Google Rations Its Own Cloud as Everyone Counts the Cost of Serving AI

Washington Draws a Line on DeepSeek as AI Companies Grade Their Own Work

Marking Their Own Homework

Graded by Their Own Makers, the Cheap Models Doing the Work and the Outsiders Let Inside

The Wire — live

Models & Research

OpenAI's Jalapeño chip tops Nvidia on power efficiency in benchmarks

Perplexity trains one AI to be both teacher and student

A tiny AI model fakes a computer terminal, one key press at a time

A new coding AI is small enough to run on a laptop

Agents & Automation

1Password lets AI agents log in without ever seeing your password

A small AI that runs a phone's apps without ever leaving the phone

Anthropic's Claude Duet works in the background and asks before it acts

Claude Code mods let you reprogram how your AI coding helper talks to you

Developer Tools

Anthropic now runs Claude inside Google Cloud accounts

How Cerebras fits a 3-trillion-parameter AI model across 59 chips

Ant Group and vLLM release free code that runs shrunken AI models faster

OpenAI ships its own terminal tool for talking to its API

One brief. Every signal.

Funding & Business

OpenAI nears a $30 billion deal at $1.25 trillion, below its $1.4 trillion ask

A $2.2 billion bet on telling good robots from bad ones

Otter raises $320 million to buy customers, and no shares are sold

Robot startup Eka is valued at $1.45B for a hand that spares raspberries

Policy & Safety

How the US and China could check each other's AI slowdown

Nine Claude models now carry the text watermark, O'Reilly reports

Outside testers found ways OpenAI's coding agents could dodge oversight

Anthropic's CEO lists nine safety moves he says cost the company money

Opinion

Flapping Airplanes at $5 billion may say more about investors than AI

Long Lake says the way to deploy AI is to buy the business

AI sped up scientists, but testing their ideas is now the slow part

AI will design hardware long before it can build any

The morning brief for people inside the AI industry.