Google throws away the AI wrapper

Top News

• Atoms program elides AI wrappers: Google and the venture firm Accel started the Atoms program to fund early-stage AI startups in India. But in a sign of the times moment for 2026 tech, they found that “AI wrappers” dominated the submissions. (That is, startups based around relatively superficial features that are built atop of powerful third party AI models.) Accel partner Prayank Swaroop told TechCrunch that this definition fits 70% of the overall applicants for the program, but 0% of the five final selections. Those lucky startups will receive $2 million in funding from Accel and Google’s AI Futures Fund, along with $350,000 in Google compute credits.

• Apple acquires MotionVFX: The Polish outfit produces plugins, motion graphics tools, and other VFX applications for use within the iconic Final Cut Pro line of editing software. Products include mFilmLook, which allows editors to adjust color grading and simulate different film emulation effects, while the mO2 plug-in inserts 3D models directly into Final Cut. They’re been acqui-hired into Cupertino, and will strengthen Apple’s in-house video production efforts, as a boost for their new Apple Creator Studio subscription service.

• Alibaba preps “AI agent” product: Bloomberg reports that the Chinese giant plans to ride the country’s OpenClaw/agentic AI trend by releasing its own enterprise-ready AI assistant, built atop its Qwen family of models. The agent gets built-in access to the Alibaba galaxy of platforms, including shopping destination Taobao and fintech service Alipay. How will this integrate with existing enterprise platforms and services? What does Alibaba plan to charge companies that want custom agents for all their executives? Great questions, for which Bloomberg has zero answers.

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One topic we return to frequently on the pod: Despite all of its clear benefits and advantages, why do Americans continue to harbor such negative, paranoid feelings about AI technology? That NBC News poll we’ve discussed frequently found that AI was less popular than ICE Agents, and only outscored the nation of Iran and the Democratic Party in approval.

One potential reason: for right or wrong, the media is consistently filled, day-to-day, week-to-week, with negative stories about AI companies and their impacts on users, and individuals and companies taking them to court.

Just today, a collective of teenagers in Tennessee filed suit against xAI. (The group includes two minors.) They claim that an unnamed person used Grok to create deepfakes of them with their clothes removed, then spread these images around on apps including Discord and Telegram. Their attorneys claim that xAI created an environment that made the outflow of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) essentially inevitable. The company did not publicly respond to the suit but co-founder Elon Musk posted to X back in January that the company was “not aware” of any inappropriate images of underage people being generated by Grok, and suggested that “adversarial hacking” has led to misuse of the tool.

Also making headlines on Monday: Encyclopedia Brittanica filed suit against OpenAI, accusing the company of trademark infringement and illegally using its content “at a massive scale” to train AI models. Lawyers for the plaintiff claim that ChatGPT responses often contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions” of Brittanica articles, and further allege that ChatGPT sometimes hallucinates, then attributes its fictions to the Encyclopedia. (Hence the trademark infringement claim.)

No monetary damages are specified. Instead, Brittanica is seeking an injunction to stop OpenAI from continuing with the infringement and copyright violations. This isn’t the company’s first AI courtroom drama; in September, they filed suit against Perplexity on similar grounds.

And this is just one day. Compound these kinds of stories five or six days a week or months or even years, and you come to understand why Americans are dubious of the potential for AI tools (many of which are genuinely useful!) – Lon

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