Top 5 Stories
1,100+ employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind signed a letter urging the US government to help "deliberately pace" recursive AI development, warning progress could outrun humans' ability to understand or control it. — LINK
The Trump administration banned imports of new Chinese humanoid robots and connected power inverters, aiming to protect the US AI buildout's supply chain from security risks. — LINK
OpenAI disclosed that the rogue AI agent behind its Hugging Face breach also compromised accounts at four other services, including a Modal customer, by exploiting exposed credentials and a codebase vulnerability. — LINK
DoorDash launched DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery program, after earning FAA Part 135 certification — becoming the eighth US operator cleared for commercial drone delivery. — LINK
OpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to its top models (including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro) through 2027, part of a $250M+ commitment to external scientific research. — LINK
Top 5 Funding Announcements
Buildforce — The largest tech-enabled electrician staffing platform in the US raised a $10M Series A led by Saepio Capital to fuel national expansion. — LINK
Hush Security — Raised a $30M Series A (with Akamai joining as a strategic investor) to expand its platform governing AI agents and other non-human identities. — LINK
Claros Technologies — Closed a $55M Series B to scale its PFAS "forever chemical" destruction technology, led by Treehouse Family Capital. — LINK
Act Security — Emerged from stealth with $60M total ($20M seed + $40M Series A, led by Team8, Bessemer, and Notable Capital) to tackle cloud patch vulnerabilities, founded by the Medigate team. — LINK
Pilot Protocol — Emerged from stealth with a $4.5M seed (led by Version One) to build "the internet for agents" — a networking layer letting AI agents find, trust, and transact with each other. — LINK
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Top 5 Tweets
"I wrote about why we believe the future is for everyone. More coming about a positive vision for a world with superintelligence soon," said @Mark Zuckerberg.
"Mark Zuckerberg gets it right... Concentration of power is the biggest risk of AI. When a small number of labs (working hand-in-glove with the administrative state) decide who has access to which model capabilities, they inevitably shape what can be said, known, and built. That's not 'safety.' It's control," responded @David Sacks.
"Grok Voice is now #1 in agentic performance," said @Elon Musk, touting the new Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0's speech and agentic benchmark scores.
"Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem... During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion. That's why we created the Open Secure AI Alliance," said @Jensen Huang.
"The truth. COVID.GOV," posted @The White House.
This Week in Startups
E2317: Most lab-grown meat companies have already gone under, even those with a lot of funding and early buzz. Cultivated meat is expensive to produce, and so far, there’s little demand from consumers who fear the “mad science” connotations of growing tissue in a lab. But Japan’s IntegriCulture is still standing, in part because of an innovative deal with cosmetics companies that license their technology. Go deep on this little-discussed niche industry with IntegriCulture founder Dr. Yuki Hanyu.
E2316: We’ve been told that quantum computing has been “5-10 years ago” for 30 years. On this edition of TWiST Tokyo, Jason sits down with Yaqumo CEO Kazu Nakashoji to discuss why now may be the moment that things start to change. Find out why quantum machines are so error prone, why quantum computers have such an unconventional supply chain, and and go deep on the cryptography reckoning that may be coming for your Bitcoin.
E2315: In the first episode of our week-long summer trip to Tokyo, Jason is joined by CEO Bilal Kharouni of Ekei Labs. He’s using AI and epigenetics to develop longevity treatments in Okinawa, one of the world’s legendary Blue Zones noted for its residents’ tendency to live long, healthy lives. He discusses why a smaller raise can go much further in Japan than Silicon Valley, why the best moat for biotech companies is not an AI model but their data, and why Ekei killed a burgeoning side business in order to maintain focus.
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