Ads are coming to AI... but not to Claude

Top News

• Anthropic says NO to AI ads: The Claude maker has firmly rejected the notion of putting ads in its AI outputs, announcing in a new blog post that hosting ads within chatbot discussions “would be incompatible” with their overall mission of providing “a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.” The post doesn’t mention rivals OpenAI by name, but of course it comes just a few weeks after The House of Altman started inserting ads into its free or low-cost ChatGPT tiers. Anthropic’s latest ad campaign — set to debut on Sunday during Super Bowl LX — is even more pointed. The tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

• Resolve reaches unicorn status: The startup emerged from stealth in late 2024 with an AI solution for quickly fixing software issues and bugs in commercial and customer-facing systems, where even a few minutes of downtime can cost an enterprise big money. To date, they’ve landed around 20 major customers, including Salesforce, Coinbase, and DoorDash. The company raised a new $125 million round, pushing the valuation up and above $1 billion. They’re not included in the TWiST 500 yet but… hey, it could happen…

• The one BIG FLAW in OpenClaw: We’ve spent the last several weeks playing around with the white hot open-source virtual assistant and it has already taken over a significant chunk of TWiST and LAUNCH’s organizational and administrative-type work. But as Oliver discussed with the team from ZioSec on a special edition of our “This Week in AI” podcast, OpenClaw and other agents continue to rely on LLMs like Claude, GPT, and Gemini, which represents a major and ongoing security flaw. Because those models are designed to please and accommodate users, while minimizing friction, OpenClaw remains extremely vulnerable to attackers, who exploit this same helpfulness to gain access to users’ private systems and data. ZioSec’s Aaron Walls and Andrius Useckas warn that the next generation of AI security breaches will not rely on sophisticated or cutting edge techniques, but simply hackers asking politely for an agent’s help. (Follow @ThisWeekInAI for more updates and deep insights!)

TWiST 500

We’ve been following Cerebras Systems very closely in this space throughout 2026. Their massive, lightning-fast Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) processors are looking like a bonafide alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs, attracting new compute clients from Meta to OpenAI (who signed a mega-deal for infrastructure and wattage just last month). With all that buzz comes fresh funding, of course. Today, Cerebras announced a new $1 billion round led by Tiger Global Management, valuing the company north of $23 billion. Word has it Cerebras may be considering an IPO soon, taking it out of the TWiST 500, and into the ranks of hot AI stocks sure to appeal to a raft of fresh retail investors.

In other AI fundraising news, text-to-voice pioneers ElevenLabs announced a $500 million round led by Sequoia Capital, which will also introduce Sequoia partner Andrew Reed to the company’s board. Bloomberg reports that they plan to earmark the cash for improvements to ElevenLabs’ tech, along with a new platform making it easier for enterprise customers to set up and deploy voice agents for everyday functions like customer support, sales outreach, and employee training. ElevenLabs also has eyes on international expansion into Central/South America, Asia, and Europe.

Speaking of international AI concerns, let’s talk France’s Mistral, which we can now proudly name as a ‘friend of the pod’ after hosting CEO Arthur Mensch last fall. They’ve dropped two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. Mini Transcribe is designed for handling “large batches” of audio files at once. Realtime, as the name suggests, aims for real-time transcription. It’s available for free under an open source license, and currently works across 13 languages.

The freedom of open source is the big breakthrough here. The models are small enough to run locally on a phone or laptop, meaning you don’t have to upload potentially sensitive private conversations into the cloud for transcription. Wired points out that the technology also gets us one step closer to automatic universal translation from anyone’s phone or handheld device. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2244: In our final TWiST Tokyo update, Jason welcomes The League founder Amanda Bradford and Uber veteran Will Barnes to discuss the TOP priorities for early stage founders. These are the areas where they can’t afford to lose focus for even a week. Find out why it’s so important to keep a close eye on your expenses, why trust and reliability are so crucial, even for an MVP, why distribution should always be top of mind, and more vital lessons from the trenches.

E2243: SpaceX and xAI are MERGING into what will be the world’s most valuable private company (at least until a planned IPO later this year). Get Jason’s thoughts on why this makes sense, and how Elon Musk will turn humanity into a Kardashev II-level civilization, on TWiST. PLUS, we’re running down all of the LAUNCH Team’s favorite OpenClaw Skills that have exponentially increased our productivity.

E2242: Another show, another Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw deep dive. In this edition, LAUNCH researchers Oliver Korzen and Lukas Durand join Jason to show off all the ways they’re using Moltys to automate behind-the-scenes tasks for the pod and Jason’s other companies and projects. PLUS investor and entrepreneur Rahul Sood joins us to discuss all the potential security risks associated with OpenClaw and how to keep yourself (roughly) safe.

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