Sutskever memo and TanStack worm rattle OpenAI as Anthropic courts SMBs

Sources

Introducing Claude for Small Business anthropic.com

Anthropic courts a new kind of customer: small business owners techcrunch.com

For founders and investors, Anthropic’s new offering signals that the AI platform wars are expanding downmarket and that the next major battleground for user acquisition isn’t the Fortune 500; it’s the 36 million small businesses that make up the backbone of the U.S. economy.

Our response to the TanStack npm supply chain attack openai.com

OpenAI details its response to the TanStack “Mini Shai-Hulud” supply chain attack, outlines protections taken to secure systems and signing certificates, and explains why macOS users must update OpenAI apps by June 12, 2026. Learn what happened, what was affected, and how OpenAI is strengthening defenses against evolving software supply chain threats.

Altman forced to confront claims at OpenAI trial that he’s a prolific liar arstechnica.com

“Very painful”: Altman relives his Muskian reaction to losing control over OpenAI.

Who trusts Sam Altman? techcrunch.com

“I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessperson,” Altman testified in federal court.

Microsoft doesn’t want any of this theverge.com

Maybe I’m just punch-drunk in my third week attending Musk v. Altman, but I have become very, very fond of Microsoft during the course of this trial. They don’t want to be here any more than I do. Their opening statement was honestly one of the most Microsoft things I’ve ever seen. More than anything […]

Notion just turned its workspace into a hub for AI agents techcrunch.com

Notion’s new developer platform lets teams plug AI agents, external data sources, and custom code directly into their workspace. The move pushes the productivity company deeper into agentic software, positioning Notion as a hub where third-party agents act on documents and databases.

Anthropic now has more business customers than OpenAI, according to Ramp data techcrunch.com

Anthropic now serves 34.4% of businesses tracked in Ramp’s expense data, edging out OpenAI at 32.3%. The fintech’s survey marks the first time Claude’s maker has led paid enterprise adoption, reversing OpenAI’s longstanding lead among corporate AI buyers.

Alexa is moving into Amazon․com theverge.com

Amazon is wiring its Alexa+ assistant into the Amazon.com search bar as Alexa for Shopping, available via voice and touch on mobile, desktop, and Echo Show. Typed queries now route through the LLM, which personalizes recommendations and automates checkout across Amazon and other retailers.

Amazon launches an AI shopping assistant for the search bar, powered by Alexa+ techcrunch.com

Alexa for Shopping offers a voice- and touch-enabled shopping experience across mobile, desktop, and Echo Show smart displays. Alexa for Shopping provides more personalized recommendations and automates the shopping experience across Amazon and other online retailers.

Musk’s xAI is running nearly 50 gas turbines unchecked at its Mississippi data center techcrunch.com

xAI’s Colossus 2 site is drawing a lawsuit over its use of nearly 50 ‘mobile’ gas turbines as de facto power plants without standard permitting. Critics say the workaround sidesteps Clean Air Act review for one of the largest AI training builds underway.

Mark Zuckerberg announces ‘completely private’ encrypted Meta AI chat theverge.com

Meta’s new Incognito Chat, rolling out in Meta AI and WhatsApp, ends conversations the moment a user closes the window and stores nothing on Meta’s servers. Zuckerberg calls it the first major AI product without server-side conversation logs.

WhatsApp adds an incognito mode in Meta AI chats techcrunch.com

Meta said these incognito conversations are not saved, and messages will disappear by default once you close the chat.

Clio’s $500M milestone arrives just as Anthropic ups the ante techcrunch.com

Legal software maker Clio crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue, riding a wave of law-firm AI adoption. The milestone lands as Anthropic pushes deeper into legal workflows with Claude, intensifying competition for a vertical long dominated by traditional SaaS incumbents.

Anthropic blames dystopian sci-fi for training AI models to act “evil” arstechnica.com

Anthropic researchers trace misaligned, scheming behavior in language models partly to the volume of dystopian AI fiction in training data. Fine-tuning on ‘synthetic stories’ depicting well-behaved AI characters reduces the tendency, suggesting narrative priors shape how models role-play their own identity.

AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers technologyreview.com

People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it. A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a…

(AINews) Codex Rises, Claude Meters Programmatic Usage latent.space

a quiet day lets us report on a long trend of the major coding agents

Microsoft’s Edge Copilot update uses AI to pull information from across your tabs theverge.com

Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what’s in your tabs, compare the products you’re looking at, summarize your open articles, and more. In its […]

AI invades Princeton, where 30% of students cheat—but peers won’t snitch arstechnica.com

Old “honor code” systems are under strain.

(AINews) The End of Finetuning latent.space

a quiet day lets us reflect on whither finetuning

Adaption aims big with AutoScientist, an AI tool that helps models train themselves techcrunch.com

Adaption’s new AutoScientist tool is designed to let models adapt to specific capabilities quickly through an automated approach to conventional fine-tuning.

Data centers are coming for rural America theverge.com

At its peak, the Androscoggin paper mill in Jay, Maine, a rural town about 67 miles northwest of Portland, employed about 1,500 people - until a pulp digester exploded in 2020, forcing the mill to close permanently. In 2023, the 1.4 million-square-foot facility was purchased through a joint venture by JGT2 Redevelopment and a number […]

Quoting Boris Mann simonwillison.net

“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase. If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing. — Boris Mann Tags: ai-agents , ai , agent-definitions

Origin Lab raises $8M to help video game companies sell data to world-model builders techcrunch.com

Origin Lab will serve as a marketplace where AI labs can buy high-quality licensed data, and video-game companies can sell it.

Poppy debuts a proactive AI assistant to help organize your digital life techcrunch.com

Poppy is an AI-powered app that connects your calendar, email, messages, and other services to surface reminders, suggestions, and tasks based on what’s happening in your life.

The newest AI boom pitch: Host a mini data center at your home arstechnica.com

The plan aims to speed up AI compute deployment while compensating residents.

Amazon employees are “tokenmaxxing” due to pressure to use AI tools arstechnica.com

Workers are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks.

Anthropic’s Cat Wu says that, in the future, AI will anticipate your needs before you know what they are techcrunch.com

The head of product for Claude Code and Cowork says that the next big step for AI is proactivity.

Who decides what AI tells you? Campbell Brown, once Meta’s news chief, has thoughts techcrunch.com

“The conversation is sort of happening in Silicon Valley around one thing, and a totally different conversation is happening among consumers.”

Quoting Mo Bitar simonwillison.net

Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I’m not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It’s called Ralph Loops. And I think it could change literally everything. And he’s gonna say, what’s a Ralph loop? And you will say, give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I’ll show you. Now you won’t actually do anything, because you can’t do anything. B…

Rivian adds a new onboard AI assistant to its latest software update arstechnica.com

The Rivian Assistant is available for both Gen1 and Gen2 hardware.

Learn the system bensbites.com

are live models making a comeback?

Three things in AI to watch, according to a Nobel-winning economist technologyreview.com

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech…

Introducing the 6 stages at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 — built for today’s tougher startup market techcrunch.com

From October 13-15, TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will feature 200+ sessions across six stages, led by 250+ tech leaders shaping the industry today. Register now to save up to $410, plus 50% off a second pass.

Fostering breakthrough AI innovation through customer-back engineering technologyreview.com

Despite years of digitization, organizations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digital investments, according to McKinsey research. That’s because most big companies begin with technological capabilities and bolt applications onto them, rather than starting with customer needs and working backward to technology solutions. Not prioritizing the customer can create fragmented solutions; disjointed…

Implementing advanced AI technologies in finance technologyreview.com

In finance departments that have long been defined by precision and control, AI has arrived less as a neatly managed upgrade than as a quiet insurgency. Employees are already using it while leadership races to impose structure, governance, and strategy after the fact. The result is a paradox: one of the most tightly regulated functions…

References

The Next Web thenextweb.com

Nadella warned executives that he did not want Microsoft to become ‘the next IBM’ to OpenAI’s ‘Microsoft’ — a reference to the 1980s deal where IBM outsourced its OS to Microsoft, only to be eclipsed by it.

Gizmodo gizmodo.com

Sutskever testified to having spent nearly a year documenting Altman’s conduct in a 52-page memo submitted to the board, alleging Altman habitually ‘pitted executives against one another’ and provided ‘conflicting accounts’ of company operations.

TechRadar techradar.com

Judge Gonzalez Rogers cautioned Musk against using the courtroom as a platform for his social media feud, specifically citing his posts labeling Altman as ‘Scam Altman’… Musk struggled to define technical benchmarks such as ‘AI safety cards’ or identify specific, current safety violations by OpenAI, eventually admitting he felt like a ‘fool’ for his early funding.

Duke Law / Daily Journal law.duke.edu

Columbia Law School professor Eric Talley noted that the documents cited in the complaint — primarily emails and the initial Certificate of Incorporation — are ‘relatively informal’ for a multi-million-dollar commitment… under California law, a donor typically loses the standing to sue a nonprofit over its mission once the gift is made.

Crypto Briefing cryptobriefing.com

Musk escalated his financial demands to as much as $150 billion in damages… the jury’s role is strictly advisory; Judge Gonzalez Rogers holds the ultimate authority to decide on the structural and financial remedies if a breach is found.

The New Stack thenewstack.io

Microsoft ceased its revenue-sharing payments to OpenAI, while OpenAI’s reciprocal payments to Microsoft were capped at a fixed ceiling through 2030… rights have transitioned from exclusive to non-exclusive.

TanStack postmortem (Tanner Linsley) tanstack.com

An attacker used an orphaned commit in a fork to poison the repository’s build cache. When a legitimate PR was later merged, the release workflow restored the malicious cache, which then extracted a short-lived OIDC publish token from the runner’s process memory.

Endor Labs analysis endorlabs.com

This was the first documented case of an npm worm capable of producing packages with valid SLSA Build Level 3 provenance attestations.

SecurityWeek securityweek.com

TanStack, Mistral AI and UiPath hit in fresh supply chain attack — UiPath reported compromises in 65 distinct packages and Mistral AI saw its core SDKs on both npm and PyPI poisoned.

Socket.dev (Axios → OpenAI prior incident) socket.dev

Axios supply chain attack reaches OpenAI macOS signing pipeline, forces certificate rotation — the affected workflow used a floating tag for the Axios dependency rather than a pinned commit hash.

Datadog Security Labs securitylabs.datadoghq.com

54% of JavaScript applications use at least one dependency within 24 hours of its release; a 7-day delay would have blocked 11 of 21 reviewed supply-chain incidents.

HeroDevs (‘Just Update Isn’t the Answer’) herodevs.com

The malware established a background process that continuously validated stolen tokens; if a token was revoked, the daemon was programmed to attempt to wipe the victim’s home directory.

Reddit r/ClaudeAI thread reddit.com

Many on community forums like Reddit labeling the launch a ‘nothingburger’ or a mere marketing repackaging of existing tools… solopreneurs and micro-businesses expressed frustration that they must still choose between a $20/month individual Pro plan or a significantly more expensive Team plan with a high seat minimum

Intuit investor press release (Feb 2026) investors.intuit.com

Intuit and Anthropic partner to bring trusted financial intelligence and custom AI agents to consumers and businesses… Intuit used Claude to provide millions of users with plain-English explanations of intricate tax calculations

VentureBeat — Ramp AI Index analysis venturebeat.com

Anthropic’s business adoption has surpassed OpenAI’s, reaching 34.4% compared to ChatGPT’s 32.3%… Anthropic’s lead remains fragile due to high token-based costs and compute constraints that have already caused ‘budget crises’ at some larger firms, such as Uber, which exhausted its annual AI budget in four months

Maxima.ai — AccountingBench writeup maxima.ai

AI agents initially maintained 95% accuracy, they diverged by more than 15% by the end of a 12-month fiscal period because small, uncorrected inconsistencies compounded over time

Fast Company — corporate insurers retreat from AI risk fastcompany.com

Major insurers like Travelers and Chubb have begun adding ‘AI exclusion clauses’ to standard professional liability (E&O) policies, leaving businesses exposed if an AI error leads to a third-party financial loss

LISC — Workday Foundation Solopreneurship Accelerator lisc.org

Anthropic has joined Workday and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) to launch the Solopreneurship Accelerator Program… an initial cohort of 15 aspiring solo business owners with $10,000 grants, Claude credits, and an AI-first curriculum