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X limits free users: If you use X and don’t pay for the service for the privilege of posting, watch your volume. You are now limited to “50 original posts and 200 replies per day,” whereas before you could ship as many as 2,400 updates every 24 hours. Naturally, the move will limit certain spam activity, but seeing free access to the popular social media service increasingly limited isn’t natively exciting.
Alibaba’s AI bets soar: Chinese tech giant Alibaba reported 3.2M robotaxi rides in Q1 2026, up from 1.4M in the year-ago quarter. Elsewhere in its AI results, the company’s GPU cloud saw its growth rate rise from 128% in Q3 2025 to 143% in Q4 2025 to a staggering 184% in the most recent period. While much attention is paid to American AI labs, don’t forget just how big — and intelligent — the world is.
Bitcoin insurance for shipping: The Iranian government may turn to bitcoin as its currency of choice to charge ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait, largely closed since the outbreak of war between the United States and Iran, is currently bedeviling global energy, helium, and fertilizer markets. And Iran sees a chance to maintain a grip on the waterway to the point that it can erect a tollbooth. With a little help from the blockchain.
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An API is not enough. Developers also need SDKs, or software development kits, to help make sense of what the application programming interface offers and how to interact with it intelligently. Building SDKs for APIs is big business — a large enough enterprise that Stainless raised $35 million across several rounds for its API→SDK business.
Today, AI lab and TWIST500 member company Anthropic announced that it has purchased the startup. The move is a win for the backers of Stainless (a16z, Sequoia, Felicis, and others) as they just converted their equity investment in the startup into Anthropic shares, and a win for the model-maker as it has now in-housed the very team that built SDKs for its own APIs.
The battle to win the enterprise is afire today, as AI labs and hyperscalers alike scramble to earn corporate AI market share. Bringing talent into the fold with a track record of translating APIs into enterprise-friendly tooling is an obvious add for Anthropic, and a potential annoyance for other AI labs who now have yet another vector across which they must compete.
Stepping back a little, it’s good news that Anthropic bought Stainless. For founders and their backers. Startup M&A is the lifeblood of venture capital, as IPOs have become thin on the ground in recent years. That Anthropic is still finding tools to buy means that the major AI labs, flush with cash and equity today, may continue shopping for some time yet.
The market is all about that DPI, baby, and if you sell to a company about to go public you are set to turn liquid faster than an ice cube left on a hot dashboard. Onward! — Alex
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This Week in Startups
E2289: Self-driving just stopped being a science problem and became an engineering challenge instead. That's the through-line of today’s double-header with the CEOs of two of the most important AV companies in the world — Wayve's Alex Kendall and Waabi's Raquel Urtasun. Between them: ~$2B raised in the last six months, Uber as a partner, Nissan and Volvo as OEMs, and a shared bet that end-to-end AI plus world models beats Waymo's city-by-city map-and-pray approach. If you want to understand the state of the self-driving industry beyond recent Waymo announcements, this is the episode for you.
E2288: Anthropic just declared every unauthorized secondary sale of its stock "void" — naming Hiive, Forge, Sydecar, Upmarket, and others in a public hit list. Jason and Alex sit down with Jenny Fielding (Everywhere Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical VC), and Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures) to unpack what the AI lab’s move to limit secondary trades means for SPV operators, brokers, and the founders trying to keep control of their cap tables. Plus: a real story of a founder who returned a $15M Series A six months after closing because Claude was going to eat his startup, SaaS moats, and just what does it mean to be rich?
E2287: Cerebras just jacked its IPO range to $150–$160 a share, OpenAI bought a consulting firm to seed its $4 billion private-equity joint venture, and a startup in Oakland is electrolyzing magnesium out of seawater for one-third the going price. Alex Wilhelm and Jason Calacanis go deep with AI21 co-CEO Ori Goshen on why model orchestration, not bigger LLMs, will decide who wins enterprise AI. The crew also covered the decline of OpenClaw, TikTok's new £3.99 ad-free tier, more entries in the live-show sidebar bounty, and had time for a little Off Duty before signing off.
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