Airbnb rolled out its new AI-powered search this week as part of its fall update, a significant step for a company that has been slow and deliberate about AI. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky has said in the past that a chatbot-only interface is not fit for travel discovery. With more AI on the way to the Airbnb app, I caught up with Chesky over Zoom to talk about how the company is approaching it…
Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.
October 2, 2026
The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter – yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and…
Satlyt, founded by a former Google and SpaceX product manager, raises $8M to run AI on satellites
October 2, 2026
The way Rama Afullo tells it, he saw orbital data centers coming.
The Kenyan American engineer previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business before a brief stint at SpaceX’s Starlink communications network in 2024. His experiences convinced him that…
The buzzy AI startup Instinct has just revealed a new potential revenue stream: product recommendations. Unfortunately for the company, the rollout is already rubbing some users the wrong way.
Overnight, the AI agent began pushing product suggestions to users as part of a new feature called Instinct Selections, an effort to curate personalized lists for users in areas like dining, travel, and…
When Stephan Ewen co-founded Restate in 2022 to provide durable workflow infrastructure, he couldn’t have anticipated how valuable such an offering would become for managing AI agent processes.
The Berlin-based startup had set out to build an execution engine that made…
Airbnb adds AI search, more social features
October 1, 2026
Airbnb is evolving in two directions: On the ground, it wants to compete with hotels by providing myriad services; online, it is using AI and people in its Airbnb network to aid travel discovery.
As part of its fall product update, the company is adding services to the app…
OpenAI on Monday apologized to the Australian government for not immediately notifying the country’s administration that its agents had breached some public services websites. The company also detailed how some of those breaches happened and outlined additional measures it is taking to assess the impact of the events.
“In June, during internal training and evaluation our models…
Reco raises $55M as AI agent security startups crowd the market
September 30, 2026
Terms like “AI sprawl” have become common fare on tech social media and in thought leadership as enterprises start deploying AI agents en masse. But CISOs worried about securing swarms of agents suddenly operating across networks are likely finding themselves…
Anthropic’s prospectus details losses, growth, and, yes, a warning that its AI could end humanity
September 30, 2026
Anthropic devoted nearly a third of its hotly anticipated IPO prospectus to risk factors, according to the Financial Times, which says it has reviewed the filing in recent days. The filing details specific, worrisome behaviors that Anthropic says its models have already…
When the call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather believed he was talking to his brother. The voice on the other end of the line said he’d been kidnapped and that the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom. Her grandfather paid, only to learn later that his brother had been somewhere else entirely, with no clue any of it was happening. The voice, it turned out, was a…
