Is humanity ready for AI? Especially Clawdbot?

Top News

• Anthropic CEO issues a warning: Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, posted a 38-page essay on Monday (titled “The Adolescence of Technology”), which warns that artificial super-intelligence is not only imminent, but a potential threat to human civilization. More specifically, he says: "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species." This word of caution is particularly notable coming from the increasingly dominant Claude Code maker, whose Claude Opus 4.5 model powers the hottest new AI assistant in the world: Clawdbot. (More on that down the page.) This isn’t some vague futurist or fringe loony, but one of the chief architects of AI’s current state of the art.

• Some TikTokers jump to UpScrolled: While many breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing that TikTok will remain in the US, via a new collective of non-Chinese investors, others are concerned that this means the US app will become a target for censorship. According to The Verge, this has led to a not-insignificant flow of fresh users from TikTok to an alternative, shadowban-free app called UpScrolled. The up-and-coming doomscroll rival is only averaging about 14,000 downloads per day as of last week, but that’s still a 29x jump since before the TikTok US news was announced. If TikTok really does start clamping down on open discourse, that trickle could theoretically turn into a flood.

• Zocks raises $45M Series B: The company — which built an AI assistant specifically for financial advisers — grabbed a fresh round of cash from Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED, along with some participation from prior backers Motive Ventures and 14Peaks Capital. The company specializes in enterprise AI with a strong level of security and privacy. Hence their focus, for now at least, on designing tools specifically for financial service providers. Their software is already in use by around 5,000 firms, including Cambridge Investment Research and the Carson Group.

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So about this Clawdbot…

It’s a new AI assistant that was first released publicly in early January by creator Peter Steinberger (@steipete), powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5. As one of our guest experts, Alex Finn (@AlexFinn), explained on today’s pod: Clawdbot is open-source, works on your local machine, and can essentially do anything on a computer that a human could do.

As well, anything Clawdbot CAN’T already do out of the box, it can learn to do and develop as a skill. All of our guests today — also including Matt Van Horn (@mvanhorn) and Dan Peguine (@DanPeguine) — have been using Clawdbot on their personal projects, and even releasing the skills they’ve developed for their followers on X, Github and elsewhere. These skills include various real-world tasks, from combing real-time X results via Grok’s API to automating a tea company’s operations and logistics, to scheduling a Tesla to defrost in the mornings before school drop-off time arrives.

The potential here is mind-blowing. Alex Finn calls it “the greatest application of AI I’ve ever seen in my life.” Matt used it to progress on multiple personal projects WHILE appearing on our show today. Dan’s parents are offloading much of their day-to-day work on to their new digital helper. There seem to be realistic questions about whether or not this is going to lead to mass-scale job loss and the cratering of the vibecode and SaaS ecosystems in the immediate future!

There are also, of course, some drawbacks, as we discussed on the episode. Clawdbot remains surprisingly vulnerable to bad actors (particularly via prompt injection), and connecting your entire life via one AI assistant still uses a lot of tokens. (Matt suggests a Claude Code Pro account for anyone serious about digging in here.) Still, it’s hard to hold back progress… and this certainly feels like progress as we exit the “almost there-but-not-quite” age of Agentic AI. – Lon

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