Stripe is reportedly considering buying all or some segments of PayPal's business. PayPal has struggled with growth in an increasingly competitive financial payments industry. Meanwhile, Stripe hit a $159 billion valuation on Tuesday, up from $91.5 billion a year ago. Stripe's co-founder and president, John Collison, said that the company isn't yet aiming for an IPO as that would sidetrack its current product and business growth.
Some tech firms have started tracking their workers' use of AI tools with an eye on productivity gains, and in certain cases, factoring it into performance reviews. There are jobs that aren't even considering candidates unless they demonstrate AI fluency. AI adoption hasn't been easy, as tech workers have many of the same feelings about AI as the broader population, including skepticism about how much time it is actually saving them. There's also the added anxiety about adopting a technology that will cause them to eventually lose their jobs.
The AI community tends to say 'this is the worst it will ever be' in response to criticism, but in many aspects, this is also the best it will ever be.
As the first engineer on TLDR's new Applied AI team, you'll build AI agents and composable Claude Skills to let non-technical teammates create their own AI workflows. Learn more [19].
Anthropic's Claude Cowork is getting a wider release. Anthropic launched a series of connectors and plugins for the knowledge worker tool earlier this week aimed at 'turbo-charging' the capabilities of individual employees. The update marks the tool's transition into a true enterprise-grade product. Organizations can now connect Claude Cowork to tools like Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, and FactSet. They can also deploy customizable plugins that encode institutional knowledge and workflows.
Anthropic is softening its core safety policy to stay competitive with other AI labs. The company previously paused development work on its model if it could be classified as dangerous, but it will end that practice if a comparable or superior model is released by a competitor. Anthropic faces intense competition with rivals that regularly release cutting-edge tools. The change in policy is unrelated to Anthropic's battle with the Defense Department over how its Claude tools should be used.
KiloClaw enables users to deploy OpenClaw agents in under 60 seconds without dealing with complex infrastructure setup. The service runs on Fly.io's multi-tenant VMs, offering robust security and persistent "always-on" capabilities with built-in monitoring. It integrates with the Kilo Gateway, offering access to over 500 models, and includes an innovative benchmarking tool, PinchBench, to optimize model selection for real-world tasks.
Everyone focuses on how hard a task can models solve. Benchmark data also captures how much work models need to get there. Opus 4.6 solves harder tasks, more reliably, with considerably less compute. The post contains charts comparing models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
A recent viral essay about how AI's bullishness could be bearish is full of flaws and just a work of speculative fiction. It posits that AI's success will be bad for the economy rather than good. However, the reality is that the technology will create more opportunity in the market rather than destroy it. There may be transitional pains, but there probably won't be any unsolvable problems.
We love this practical guide from You.com [11] that walks through a proven framework to identify, prioritize, and document high-value AI opportunities. Explore where AI can drive the most impact in your organization, both internally and externally. Learn more with this AI Use Case Discovery Guide [11].
Qwen3.5 integrates breakthroughs in multimodal learning, architectural efficiency, reinforcement learning scale, and global accessibility to deliver exceptional utility and performance. It features a unified vision-language foundation, an efficient hybrid architecture, scalable RL generalization, global linguisting coverage, and next-generation training infrastructure. Qwen3.5 natively supports context lengths of up to 262,144 tokens. This repository contains model weights and configuration files for the post-trained model in the Hugging Face Transformers format.
Agentic systems risk security breaches when agents execute generated code without proper boundaries. These systems should separate agent compute from generated code to prevent access to sensitive secrets. Combining isolated sandboxes with secret injection proxies enhances security by preventing credential theft or misuse during execution.
The VBVR suite introduced over one million video clips across 200 structured reasoning tasks to support large-scale research in video reasoning. It also included VBVR-Bench, a rule-based and human-aligned evaluation framework designed for reproducible assessment and scaling studies.
David Luan, head of Amazon's AGI lab, is leaving the company after less than two years. He was hired through an acqui-hire of his startup, Adept, leading efforts like the Nova frontier model to compete with major AI models. His departure follows a reorganization of Amazon's AGI division under cloud unit executive Peter DeSantis.
Meta has partnered with AMD in a multi-year agreement to enhance AI infrastructure with up to 6GW of AMD Instinct GPUs. This collaboration focuses on vertical integration across silicon, systems, and software, aligning roadmaps for scalable AI deployments. Shipments for the first GPU deployments will begin in late 2026, leveraging AMD's Helios rack-scale architecture for enhanced compute power.
Be at the forefront of the largest technological shift in decades. Join Salesforce's Developer Conference (San Francisco, April 15–16) for deep technical training, hackathons, and more. Save $600 with
METR is changing its Developer Productivity Experiment design as a significant number of developers are choosing not to participate in the study as they do not wish to work without AI.
EnergyX just secured rights to 35,000 acres of lithium-rich land in Arkansas beside Exxon and Chevron. But land is only part of the story. EnergyX's patented technology can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods, positioning it as a leading vertically integrated U.S. producer. Backed by General Motors, Eni, and POSCO, momentum is building fast.
Terraform Labs' liquidation administrator has filed a lawsuit against Jane Street and several employees, alleging they used non-public information from Terraform insiders to front-run trades during the Terra-Luna collapse in 2022 that destroyed over $40 billion in value. The complaint cites a wallet linked to Jane Street that withdrew 85 million TerraUSD from Curve within 10 minutes of Terraform's unannounced 150 million withdrawal on May 7, 2022, and claims Jane Street planted a former Terraform employee to establish insider communication channels. The lawsuit also connects to the administrator's filing against Jump Trading for $4 billion in damages in December, which alleges that Jump leaked information to Jane Street. Jane Street disputes the claims as "opportunistic."
Binance has disputed reports that it fired investigators who uncovered roughly $1.7 billion in crypto flows to Iran-linked entities, saying no one was dismissed for raising compliance concerns. Its internal review found no sanctions violations, and it has sharply reduced direct exposure to Iranian exchanges, even as the media reports allege internal discipline, probe dismantling, and continued scrutiny after documents tied funds to Iran-linked wallets.
NEAR Protocol has launched Near.com, a consumer super app designed for the agentic era. Its features include AI-driven transaction automation and a confidential mode for private on-chain activity. The app simplifies asset management by removing gas fees and private key complexities for users.
Crypto has lost its philosophical purpose by celebrating institutional adoption while abandoning its core mission of resisting centralization and preserving individual sovereignty. There are three possible futures – TradFi absorption, government surrender to permissionless systems, or an uneasy coexistence as a parallel walled-off system – with the latter as crypto's "Golden Path." Users should embrace inconvenience as the cost of sovereignty by prioritizing algorithmic stablecoins, enabling privacy, and building censorship-resistant infrastructure that rejects dependence on fiat ramps and centralized chokepoints.
Most tokens fail because they incentivize selling over holding, and one fix is giving token holders direct control over 100% of protocol revenue through governance votes on distribution versus reinvestment. This model hasn't been adopted due to insider profitability from token sales and securities law concerns, but a current regulatory window with the SEC's Crypto Task Force under Hester Peirce is exploring registration frameworks and safe harbors. There is urgency for protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap already merging equity and token holders to proactively demonstrate viable models before the window closes at midterms.
Blockchain is becoming the foundational infrastructure for fintech, driven by institutional adoption from BlackRock and Apollo. Legislation like the CLARITY Act validates this shift. Tokenized money market funds and stablecoins now provide efficient, 24/7 alternatives to traditional rails, forcing incumbents to innovate or face obsolescence.
Agentic commerce leverages x402 pay-per-call protocols and ERC-8004 identity registries to enable autonomous machine-to-machine markets. Frameworks like OpenClaw and DayDreams allow agents to discover, fund, and provide services using stablecoins. This infrastructure supports independent micro-businesses.
Crypto's purpose is building a code-based order to replace the collapsing rules-based international order, guaranteeing property rights, smart contracts, privacy, and identity across borders even in the face of debanking and denaturalization.
Every product team is building with AI now. The designers who can research, prototype, and ship AI-powered experiences — not just make them look nice — are the ones getting pulled into the room early.
Canva has acquired animation startup Cavalry and marketing AI company MangoAI to expand its creative and advertising capabilities. Cavalry's 2D motion tools will be added to Affinity, giving Canva a more complete professional suite that now includes motion editing alongside photo, vector, and layout design. MangoAI's reinforcement learning technology aims to improve video ad performance and measurement, strengthening Canva's push into marketing as it builds on tools like Canva Grow and MagicBrief.
Opkey launched Design Studio, an AI-powered suite that automates enterprise cloud application discovery and design processes from statement-of-work creation through configuration. The platform uses Argus, a domain-specific AI model trained on over 200 terabytes of enterprise application data, to manage the entire application lifecycle and reduce manual work. Opkey claims the system can accelerate Oracle and Workday implementations by up to 50% while reducing delivery effort and improving project margins for systems integrators.
Bluesky offers Light, Dim, Dark, and System appearance options across iOS, Android, web, and desktop, letting users manually choose a theme or sync with their device's dark mode schedule. Dark mode can improve comfort in low light and save battery life—especially on OLED screens—while Dim provides a softer alternative. If issues arise, updating the app or checking system-wide dark settings usually resolves them.