AI & Robotics

It’s only been a month since AI assistant startup Instinct announced a fundraise that valued it at $2.5 billion, and now the company has already raised another $1 billion from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue, valuing the company at $10 billion. The news of the company’s fundraising efforts was reported earlier this month by The Information. In a…

When Alexandru Voica, head of corporate affairs at the video-generation startup Synthesia, sent me a link this summer to the newest addition to their PR team, I was surprised. It was an interactive virtual avatar of him, trained to answer common press questions about Synthesia, like what it does and how it works. The day before, I was on a panel where PR people asked me if I minded pitches that…

With little help from frontier labs, independent researchers are piecing together how AI agents coordinate in internet backwaters to access private data hosted on secure servers. Transluce, a nonprofit lab focused on AI oversight, released a report Wednesday that shows agents from OpenAI attempting to exfiltrate data from Data USA, the University of New Mexico digital library, and the Australian…

When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from…