A million lawsuits isn't cool... you know what is?

Top News

• Meta pulls ads for anti-Meta law firms: The Instagram and Facebook owner has been on the losing end of some pretty major legal decisions of late. Most notably, a jury in Los Angeles found the company (along with YouTube) liable for a young woman’s addiction to their products, which exacerbated her mental health struggles. That case set a dangerous precedent for Team Zuck, with law firms now scrambling to develop litigation of their own against the deep-pocketed corporation. Many of these lawyers and firms have been recruiting potential new clients on Meta platforms, of all places. The company put a stop to that this week, removing hundreds of Facebook and IG ads for trial lawyers and marketing companies building class action suits against them. In a statement, Meta explained “we will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful.”

• Gen Z uses, detests AI: A new poll from Gallup, ed tech VC firm GSV Ventures, and the Walton Family Foundation (yes, the Walmart Waltons) once more confirms what many other surveys have suggested: Americans are using AI products but aren’t super-happy about it. The number of respondents between 14 and 29 who said they felt “hopeful” about AI was down to 18%, from 27% just a year ago. Nearly a third said that AI makes them feel “angry.” This comes just two weeks after Quinnipiac found that, while 51% of Americans use AI to research topics they’re curious about, 76% said they can trust AI “hardly ever” or only “some of the time.” Quinnipiac found that 35% of Gen Z’ers were “very concerned” about AI’s advancement, while 43% were “somewhat concerned.” These young adults are the exact people AI companies need to adopt their products en masse in order to recoup all of these capital expenditures on energy and compute, so this will be an important trend line to reverse at some point.

• SiFive raises $400M: The AI chip company doesn’t actually manufacture anything. They sell designs and blueprints for new chip concepts to customers like Alphabet/Google. This sector was once largely dominated by the UK’s Arm Holdings, but as they’ve now pivoted over to producing chips of their own — making themselves a rival to many of their best customers — startups like SiFive have spotted a potential opening. The company raised a $400M round at a $3.65 billion valuation. CEO Patrick Little told Reuters he anticipates this will be their last funding round before an IPO.

TWiST 500

First up, a new entrant in the “Maybe Pile” of startups we’re considering for the T500 but haven’t officially earned their spot. Debut research startup Elorian comes from former Google DeepMind researcher Andrew Dai. (Co-founders include Apple and Google AI researcher Yinfei Yang and former Harvard AI professor Seth Neel.)

They’re developing AI models that are better able to understand images and visual data, which the team hopes will provide a significant boost for the automotive industry, robotics, architecture, and others.

The company’s fresh out of stealth mode this week, announcing $55 million in initial funding at a $300 million valuation. They’re still pre-revenue, but plan to release their first line of reasoning models to the public within the next year.

Moving on, OpenAI isn’t just in the T500, it dominates nearly every news cycle. (That is, whenever Anthropic isn’t releasing new models that threaten the planet.)

The ChatGPT maker announced this week that they’re pausing development on the UK’s Stargate AI infrastructure project, as part of an overall attempt to rein in spending ahead of their IPO process. The company announced plans for Stargate last September.

Meanwhile, Axios reports that OpenAI is working on a “Mythos”-level frontier model of its own that could also threaten the world’s cybersecurity protections. They plan to run their own version of Project Glasswing, enlisting fellow tech companies and organizations to help them prepare our cryptographic capacity for its ultimate public release.

In thankfully lighter news, Fox’s free ad-supported Tubi became the first streaming platform to launch a native app within ChatGPT. Users can install the Tubi app from the ChatGPT app store, and then any time they use @Tubi in a prompt, the chatbot will search Tubi’s archive of 300,000 films and TV episodes for recommendations and answers. – Lon

A message from Render

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This Week in Startups

E2273: Anthropic’s Mythos is so dangerous… you’re NOT ALLOWED to use it! Jason and Alex explore the potential for Project Glasswing, and whether this modern-day Manhattan Project can keep us safe from the cyberthreats to come, along with guest AI expert and Neurometric CEO Rob May. Plus we’re checking out Death By Clawd — the website that tells you how long your startup has to live before it’s Claude-shotted — along with creator, Gyani aka “The G-Man.”

E2272: It’s an OpenClaw all-expert panel on TWiST, with three of our favorite developers and vibecoders: Ryan Carson, Alex Finn, and Yazin Alirhayim. They’re talking about Anthropic cutting off Claude subscriptions from OpenClaw, checking out Google’s Gemma 4 release, and demoing their latest projects: ClawChief, Agent Henry, and Sidecast.

E2271: AI “holding company” Feltsense asked their swarm of founder agents to recreate every startup from Y Combinator’s Winter ‘26 cohort. We’re checking out the results with founder Marik Hazan and asking… is this viral-ready approach TOO aggressive? PLUS a live demo of Boardy from founder Andrew D’Souza and Jason’s thoughts on Steve Jobs’ legacy on the 50th anniversary of Apple Computers.

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LAUNCH Accelerator 36!

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