• I tested out the leading AI agents for a while, and gave them each the same tasks.
• OpenAI's Dot saved me from failing to file my taxes, but was the worst at ordering lunch.
• Ultimately, dealing with multiple AI agents at once is a hassle!

I've been playing around with various AI agents — Muse, Instinct, and OpenAI's Dot, and I've found them genuinely really useful for certain things.

But which one is best?

I put them to some, uh, semi-rigorous testing. Ok, not totally rigorous or controlled, but I gave them all the same 3 tasks — triage my email, order me lunch, and build me a personal website — and it was interesting to see which worked best. It was also interesting to see how differently they functioned at these tasks.

If you haven't started using an AI agent yet but are curious, well, I'm not sure that this is going to answer all your questions, but maybe is a place to get started.

A big spoiler here for my ultimate recommendation: right now, Meta's Muse is the only free one of the bunch, so in my mind, that wins for most normal people who just want to try an agent out. OpenAI's Dot is only for the $100/month plan (ouch!) and Instinct is currently invite-only.

To me, that's a no brainer. Do the free one (unless you're already paying for the ChatGPT plan, in which case you're probably already a pretty pro user and probably don't need my advice).

Challenge #1: Manage my email

I get a lot of email. Most of it I don't need to bother opening. Help me figure out which are the important ones.

Muse: Muse has been a dutiful soldier here, and this was pretty much the first task I gave it when I started using it a few weeks ago. So far, "triage my email" has been the one truly useful thing an agent has done for me.

Instinct: Overall, I don't like the fact that Instinct works mainly through your text messages vs. a dedicated app. While that's very convenient in certain ways, I don't like the idea of seeing email (bad, no fun) in my texts (good, fun) — mixing the two feels wrong.

However, I have to hand it to Instinct — it found a Paperless Post invite for a party that I would otherwise have completely missed in my personal email. It was the only agent to pull that one out for me.

Dot: Dot did something truly useful that required a lot of context, and it did all on its own. It noticed an older email exchange from last month with my tax accountant (I had filed for an extension, due in October). Dot noticed my accountant never confirmed he actually filed my taxes — yikes! This actually really saved me! (Don't worry, the taxes had indeed been filed.)

Finding an older — but important — email exchange that I hadn't closed the loop on is exactly what I want from an AI agent/assistant. I feel like 90% of things I'd rather do myself, but my human brain gets easily distracted and forgetful, and there are plenty of things I forget to deal with or get distracted.

Winner: Dot. Also me, for not going to jail for tax evasion.

Challenge #2: Order me lunch.

I asked each agent to order me a salad at a specific local restaurant. Because I didn't want to annoy real humans, I did the orders for pickup, to avoid any confusion or multiple separate deliveries.

This turned out to be a real fiasco, and I learned my lesson: it would have been infinitely easier for me to just do it myself.

Muse: Initially, Muse was very helpful. I accidentally gave it the wrong restaurant name, but Muse helped me find the right place and pulled up the correct menu options for me to see.

I had already connected my credit cards with Stripe, so I figured this would be easy. It offered up my debit card or another Mastercard, which I assumed was my regular credit card (I had just gotten a new card in the mail and didn't recognize the last four digits).

When I finally went to check my wallet, I discovered it was a mistake — it was actually the card connected to my health insurance-related HSA account, which is only approved for medical expenses.

By the time I straightened this mess out, I had already moved on to placing orders with Instinct and Dot. When I went to pick up my orders at the restaurant, there were only two bags with my name on them. Sure enough, I had gotten so distracted with the other orders that I never confirmed with Muse about placing the order, and it never sent through. (Can you see now what I was saying before about how I get distracted and don't finish tasks?)

Instinct: The most annoying part about Instinct, again, in my opinion is that it's over text messages. That means there were some quirks when I tried to text on my laptop — sometimes it failed to send as SMS. But after a few fails, Instinct was able to place the order relatively quickly. Well, sort of.

All told, this took 9 separate text messages on my end — not including Instinct's responses. It is hard for me to imagine that this was at all easier than just going onto the restaurant's website or UberEats and doing it myself.

Although the process was fairly painless, there was one thing I didn't like: it put the other through with no tip (!!!) and didn't ask me if I wanted to add one.

Dot: Somehow, this was the most difficult to get to work. It kept getting tripped up by the 6-digit code sext by text needed to login, but it kept failing (I had to get the code texted 3 separate times), and the browser it created for me to enter wouldn't let me type into it. A mess, basically, but finally it worked.

Winner: None. I feel very confident in saying that it would have been infinitely easier to just place the order myself through regular means. It's possible that it would be easier to order in the future, since I've already done the work of setting it up once. But I've learned my lesson.

Challenge #3: Build me a website

I have an old personal/professional website, but it's due for a refresh. I have terrible aesthetic sense and don't want to spend much time designing a site. Seems like a good job for AI to do for me!

Muse: I appreciated that, unlike Dot and Instinct, Muse didn't use the photo of my face from my byline photo (it seems very weird to have a giant photo of your own face on a professional website).

But all three basically did the same thing: pulled the info from my author bio on Business Insider, selected some recent articles as clips, pretty basic stuff.

Instinct: The design here was the most boring, and in a way I wouldn't even know how to make it look better (terrible aesthetic sense!). Weirdly, the selected article it pulled for me were random ones from over a year ago.

Dot: The look and design were probably the best here, and it pulled a decent mix of articles I'd want to showcase. But GOOD GRIEF the tagline here is so corny that I'm sort of embarrassed to even show you, even though I didn't write it myself:

Winner: Based on the mockups it made with design alone, I'd go with Dot. I think I could work with this. But all three of these made such cringey, cheesy copy about me that it honestly made me feel genuinely depressed. Is this who I am? Yuck!

Obviously, I'd have to rewrite all the copy myself, and pick the articles for clips — and at this point, is this even saving me any time beyond being a very generic template? Ah well.

Conclusion: The biggest challenge with all of them was figuring out what kind of task an agent is well-suited for.

Most of all, I found that trying to manage three different agents at the same time was a huge hassle. I want AI agents to be like a wife — making my life easier by anticipating my needs, not a husband who simply does chores when told. But this has backfired on me: now I have three wives, and they're all nagging me and I'm forgetting which is which. Ultimately, I don't recommend AI polygamy. May my experiment with it help you choose your bride.

• Barclays said it's cutting 5,000 jobs, or 5% of its workforce, in an AI push.
• The British bank made the announcement in its third-quarter earnings presentation.
• Wall Street at large is grappling with how AI will transform its workforce.

Barclays said it's cutting 5,000 jobs, or around 5% of its full-time workforce, as it increases its reliance on AI.

The British bank said in its third-quarter earnings statement that it is "structurally reducing" its costs through "technology-enabled" head count reductions.

Barclays laid out the numbers in its accompanying earnings presentation, linking the cuts specifically to "organisational simplification and technology change efficiency driven by AI."

Around 60% of the cuts will impact support functions, including developers, according to the presentation.

Wall Street overall is grappling with how AI will impact head count for both back- and front-office roles, as much of junior bankers' technical, repetitive workload can be easily automated.

Goldman Sachs said in a memo last year that it plans to "restrain head count growth," and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said he will likely hire fewer bankers and more "AI people."

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

When Rishub Jain worked on safety at Google DeepMind, he held one of the most coveted jobs in tech. He was among a small group of researchers working to mitigate the most consequential risks of AI.

But he left to cofound a nonprofit, Sampura Research. Jain traded the prestige and access that come with a Google job because he feels he can have a sharper, more profound impact on AI safety from the outside. Jain says he wants the autonomy to pursue research on a specific issue in AI alignment, which he felt had been deprioritized.

"All the top AI companies do care a lot about safety, and they invest in it, but they could be investing a lot more, and that's kind of what was inhibiting me," Jain says. "If they invested more in safety, I would still be at the lab and working on what I'm interested in with a large team." Google did not respond to a request for comment about whether it maintains a focus on this specific area of research, but DeepMind's principles state that it maintains "a holistic approach to responsibility, safety and security."

Jain's founder story echoes concerns raised by safety researchers who have quit OpenAI and Anthropic, including dire warnings that these companies are "gambling with our lives," and could develop technology that ends humanity. Once dismissed as fringe and doomsday-obsessed, the AI safety profession is growing as hacks by rogue agents and a string of departures have vaulted the issue into mainstream concern.

Open roles in AI safety jumped by 91% on LinkedIn over the past year. The industry expects a flood of cash from much-anticipated IPOs at Anthropic and, potentially, OpenAI, as those made absurdly wealthy by the equity returns may funnel money into potential clean-up crews for the messes created by the technology's rapid development.

The AI safety problem is existentially big, but the people who have spent time honing AI expertise are few. These are people who test and train AI systems to operate ethically. Some focus on technical research, others on policy and governance. And they're increasingly sounding alarms.

"The people who are most worried about AI are often the people who have been closest to the technology," Laura González Salmerón, advising manager at 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit focused on transitioning people into careers with high social impact. The scarcity issue is less about funds and more about people. "Talent is the main bottleneck."

Startups and nonprofits in AI safety must fight for talent in a shallow pool.

Jain's Sampura lists a salary range of $273,000 to $395,000 for an experienced team leader, which would put that worker in the top 3% of earners in the US, but likely pales in comparison to offers from larger companies. Meta reportedly offered $100 million in signing bonuses last year to poach the world's top experts. OpenAI gives employees an average of $1.5 million in stock-based compensation, and technical staff at Anthropic can earn more than $1 million annually.

Money aside, researchers are divided over whether they're more effective when working inside tech companies to mitigate risks as the latest models develop, or stepping back and attempting to steer the ship toward safer outcomes from the outside, like Jain did.

"I'm a little bit concerned about the pace of AI, and if we're able to actually come up with something useful before the rug gets pulled beneath us," Jain says. He's worried that AI's advancement will outpace the work to keep it in line with human values. "That's kind of what's been happening already."

David Robinson, who led transparency work for OpenAI's safety team, wrote an essay for The Atlantic explaining his departure. He said that AI companies should have more layers of checks and safety measures, akin to those in airports and nuclear energy, rather than the steamrolling culture of Big Tech.

"Perhaps I should have stayed and fought for fundamental shifts in our staffing and culture, but in practice, my colleagues and I were so busy sprinting that we seldom had the chance to consider big changes, much less to actually make them," he wrote. Robinson has said he plans to work on these issues from outside of the company.

As the issue grows in prominence, so has a niche of organizations helping train and recruit workers — and the opportunities aren't just for AI experts. Neav Topaz, co-director of Kairos, a nonprofit that upskills people to work in AI safety and recently raised $50 million from Coefficient Giving, says he speaks with about 10 to 20 people each month who want to move to AI safety, and interest is growing. He tells me that people are asking him more frequently about what the work entails.

"People are watching AI get good at their own jobs and starting to ask themselves what comes next," he says. The emerging jobs in AI safety "pay well, the field is growing fast, and you get to work on what might be the defining problem of our time."

Kairos this summer launched its Generator Residency, a cohort of 27 people who spent three months training for career transitions into AI safety. It's less about the research and technical work and more about merging other expertise, like in consulting, with AI safety principles.

He says that of the 27 residents, a dozen have already landed roles in the AI safety space, and many of the rest have offers to do so.

"Most of the people who will do this work are doing something else today," Topaz says. "The biggest talent gap in the field isn't researchers. It's people who grasp how high the stakes are and can translate their varied expertise into things that could make a difference in this space."

The major AI companies maintain that safety is a top priority. Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay calling for a slowdown in AI development, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk have agreed with him. Amodei and Altman have both said recently that they will bring third-party evaluators into their companies to bolster safety protocols.

These companies have their own safety teams, but safety work competes with business priorities to build the most advanced models and win in the market. The tension, along with safety issues like OpenAI's rogue agents hacking Hugging Face, has led to more scrutiny of internal safety work. Within days of Robinson's departure, OpenAI fired three researchers, claiming they shared sensitive internal data improperly with third-party AI safety researchers. The ousted researchers wrote a letter, reported by The Wall Street Journal, to OpenAI's board, arguing that their engagement with safety researchers fell within the scope of their roles, and that their terminations were "chilling those who remain at OpenAI." OpenAI said that the decisions "were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out," and that the company would not fire people for doing so.

While some have obsessed over AI risks for years, 2026's breakthrough moment has accelerated funding for and interest in the industry. 80,000 Hours has had calls with some 8,000 people since its founding in 2011, the majority of which have focused on AI in some way, González Salmerón says. Philanthropic groups like Coefficient Giving offer massive grants to startups in the AI safety space. METR, a nonprofit AI safety group that investigated the OpenAI agentic hack on Hugging Face, says it raised $71 million in six months this year.

Much of the funding flowing into AI safety filters through effective altruism, the Silicon Valley-tied philanthropic ideal focused on using evidence and logic to donate money where it will achieve the most good. Critics say the philosophy can place too much emphasis on avoiding future problems rather than addressing imminent needs. With more alarms sounding around the existential threat of AI, more people view those theoretical, distant fears as urgent causes.

AI safety groups and individual donors have spent nearly $50 million in this year's election on candidates focused on regulating AI, Axios reported. Jaan Tallinn, a billionaire who invested early in Anthropic and could soon have even more billions as a result, has donated $170 million to nonprofits focused on AI safety. Tallinn's view, as he recently told The Wall Street Journal, is that he can have the biggest impact on the future of AI and its risks by investing in AI companies, and then donating returns to nonprofits working in the AI safety space.

Coefficient Giving, the philanthropic venture from Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz rooted in the effective altruism movement, announced its AI-safety-focused arm, Project Tailwind, in September. It says it's on track to give more than $1 billion this year to help companies of all sizes scale up in preparation for what it believes will be a deluge of philanthropic capital. Sampura Research has received an $11 million grant from the group. If startups don't begin hiring now, the logic goes, they won't move quickly enough when massive wealth hits the industry.

The dizzying development of AI has created safety risks, and there are "gaps in the ecosystem that aren't being filled and that aren't being owned by people," says Rossa O'Keeffe-O'Donovan, the program director in technical AI safety at Coefficient Giving. There are few people, he says, who sit at the intersection of technical expertise, risk analysis, a solutions-oriented vision, and the capacity to hustle as a startup founder.

New roles will emerge not just for technical talent, but also for consultants, policy wonks, communications experts, and founders who can run a business alongside technical experts. Working from the outside, they'll face hurdles in buying compute power, a lack of direct access to the latest AI models, reduced leverage, and smaller paydays.

The world feels unmoored, and the future perhaps more malleable than ever. The appeal of doing work that does good could stave off feelings of uncertainty, dread, and anxiety that people increasingly feel toward AI. In one doomer camp, AI will obliterate white-collar jobs. The optimistic view is that AI drastically reshapes work and spurs the creation of jobs we haven't yet thought of. AI safety is one of the first.

"There are lots of people beyond AI researchers who can help, like cybersecurity experts, like biosecurity experts, like economists," says Mantas Mazeika, a researcher with the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit focused on AI research and advocacy. "They're making very significant contributions that the pure AI researchers, who were most of the people focusing on the problem beforehand, would be completely unable to do on their own."

• The director behind Yung Lean's "Storm" video said AI copies made him consider quitting filmmaking.
• Romain Gavras said AI imitations of "Storm" on social media made his work look "lame."
• The original video, released in April, has amassed more than 40 million views on YouTube.

The director behind Swedish rapper Yung Lean's viral "Storm" video says AI almost drove him from filmmaking.

In an interview with Vulture published on Tuesday, Romain Gavras said he was disheartened by the wave of AI-generated copies of the music video.

Gavras directed the video for "Gener8ion," an audiovisual project he runs with French producer Surkin.

The video, which has amassed over 40 million views since its release in April, follows Lean as a bully at a boarding school before the boys he has been tormenting break into an elaborate dance sequence around him during a class photo.

In September, social media users began using AI to remake the dance scene from "Storm," swapping Lean and the schoolboys for a wide range of new characters, including animals and celebrities.

"My daughter sent me the first one I saw," Gavras said. "She was like, 'Look, this dog is doing it.'"

It was funny for a while, he said, but the novelty soon wore off as the copies seemed to spread everywhere.

"It made me sad for all the people who put in so much work on our video," Gavras said. "A trend like this can make even good work look lame. Part of me wanted to quit filmmaking, move back to Greece, and become an olive farmer."

Gavras said he wasn't trying to make any commentary on AI, but when people started calling "Storm" the kind of video AI couldn't pull off, he found himself drawn into the debate.

"The tech people were like, 'Oh yeah? AI could never?' Then they started replicating it. So we were forced into this conversation. It's a nightmare," Gavras said.

He added that he has turned down a few AI companies that have approached him about licensing the video.

"There's an economic model coming that we didn't want to be a part of," he said.

However, even as AI-made versions of his work proliferate online, Gavras said the technology can imitate elements of the video but has yet to create anything with the same originality or human spark.

"They're missing the swagger of Yung Lean. He looks like a dangerous baby. There's something in the imperfection of humanity, and the interior life of someone who dances or even someone who just smokes a cigarette, that's not quite there yet," he said.

Last month, Lean and the dancers performed the choreography at the MTV Video Music Awards. A video of the performance has since racked up nearly 14 million views.

Gavras is not the only filmmaker who has weighed in on the impact of AI on creative work. Other major Hollywood directors have raised similar concerns: Guillermo del Toro has said AI could rob future filmmakers of the chance to learn their craft, while Tim Burton has said it strips away the humanity behind art.

• Japan's aging population and rural exodus are fueling a small-business succession crisis.
• With no heirs, many aging business owners are listing their companies on succession platforms, often at low prices.
• Meet the young entrepreneurs betting on themselves to keep these businesses alive.

Six days a week, Kengo Ohama is up before the sun. He takes 5 minutes to get ready, and is soon out the door for an hourlong motorbike ride to the neighboring town of Mihara in Hiroshima, Japan.

By 6 a.m., he pulls up outside a log-cabin-style building, home to Country Road, the café and roastery that he's been managing with his wife since April.

He cleans the space, makes pastries, roasts coffee beans, and serves guests throughout the day. After the last table has cleared, Ohama stays behind to prepare for tomorrow. By the time he gets home, it is already 11 p.m.

Ohama had always dreamed of opening a café. When he found an established one listed on Relay, a Japanese business-succession platform, it felt like fate.

The café's owners, an older couple looking to retire, no longer had the physical stamina to run the business."Their biggest wish was simply for someone to take good care of the shop and keep it a lively place," Ohama, 31, told Business Insider.

The terms of the takeover were simple: He had to keep the business operating, but was free to redesign the interiors as he saw fit. "That flexibility made the opportunity very attractive," Ohama said.

Ohama now covers 50,000 Japanese yen in monthly rent for the building. The business itself — including the brand, furniture, kitchen equipment, recipes, and supplier information — was transferred to him for zero Japanese yen.

A new generation steps in

Ohama is part of a younger generation taking over Japan's small businesses as their longtime owners age out with no successor in sight.

The country's low birth rate and rapidly aging population have left many business owners without adult children to inherit their companies. Even when they do have kids, those heirs may live elsewhere, have established careers, or simply not want to take on the demands of running a local business.

In 2023, the Japan Finance Corporation found that 57.4% of small and midsize businesses it surveyed expected to close when their current owners stepped away, up from 52.6% in 2019.

That gap has created an opening for platforms such as Relay and BATONZ, which connect owners looking to hand over their businesses with prospective successors.

Relay has listed about 900 businesses to date, including roughly 350 active listings, a representative told Business Insider. Owners looking to pass on their businesses are often in their 60s and 70s, while successors are often in their 30s and 40s.

BATONZ, which also handles more conventional acquisitions by companies looking to expand, has listed more than 42,000 businesses and matched 3,421 buyer-seller pairs as of March 2026, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

Keeping a beloved place open

For some business owners, these platforms can offer a lifeline when an unexpected crisis forces them to confront succession planning sooner than they expected.

Akitaka Mitsui spent years working as an outdoor tour guide before opening Mori to Mizu Backpackers in Nagano, a city in central Japan known for its alpine landscapes, in 2011.

When the pandemic brought travel to a standstill, he temporarily closed the guesthouse. Even after it was safe to reopen, he had to scale back the operation and cut staff.

By 2022, visitor numbers were picking up again, and Mitsui was considering expanding once more. Then he suffered a stroke.

"It was not severe, but I had to be hospitalized," Mitsui, 67, told Business Insider. "The cause of the stroke was never identified, which meant it could happen again. I began to think it would be better to stop running the business."

He turned to BATONZ to find a successor outside his family.

"I never intended to make my children take over the business," he said. "I wanted them to do what they wanted to do with their own lives."

Enter Kota Fujisawa, a Nagano native who moved to Tokyo for university and later worked in consulting.

Fujisawa, 29, had been looking for a way to help revitalize his home region. Along with two childhood friends, he took over the guesthouse in May 2024, though one of them has since left the business. They renamed it Local Knot Backpackers.

He said they paid less than 10 million Japanese yen for the business, which came with its website, booking systems, and staff. The building was not part of the transfer, and he declined to disclose the monthly rent.

It is a drastic change from his stable office job, where he worked on just one part of larger projects. Now, as a small-business owner, Fujisawa has more freedom to shape the entire operation and decide where to take it next.

"My previous work was mainly desk-based, but I now spend much more time on-site and have more opportunities to communicate directly with a wide range of tourists," Fujisawa told Business Insider.

Still, there is a balancing act: Taking over an established business means deciding what to preserve and what to rework.

"If we changed everything, it would become a completely different place," he said.

Getting a foothold in a new industry

Beyond handing over entire businesses, succession platforms can also help aspiring entrepreneurs gain access to the infrastructure they need to get started.

For Takayuki Otawara, a 29-year-old former civil servant in Miyazaki, it opened a path into farming despite his lack of agricultural experience. His interest in cacao farming began during a stressful stretch at work, when he discovered craft chocolate and fell in love with it.

"I had never farmed before," Otawara told Business Insider. "The only thing I had ever grown was a small tomato plant for a primary-school project."

His parents initially opposed his decision to leave a stable government job for farming. His friends, though, were more encouraging. "They mostly thought it sounded interesting," he said.

To get started, Otawara needed a greenhouse and farmland, neither of which his family owned. After struggling to find one through local farmers, he turned to Relay and found a listing from a strawberry-farming family looking to scale back their operations as they got older.

Under a business succession agreement, Otawara bought a greenhouse and irrigation equipment from the original owners for 3 million Japanese yen.

He used the facilities to start his own farm, where he now grows cacao alongside strawberries, bananas, rice, and other crops.

He is at the farm every day, where his work begins at 6 a.m. and often ends around 7 p.m. He is usually in bed by 10 p.m.

The work is more demanding than his former office job, which came with weekends and public holidays off. However, farming has given him a kind of satisfaction he never found as a civil servant.

"The work I put in comes back to me directly as results," Otawara said. "In the government, you have a clearer idea of what your salary and career will look like until retirement. Now, how much I do and how much I earn can change. I find that exciting and rewarding."

• Rand Wacker, a Box product executive, wants his potential hires to go beyond being just AI-literate.
• Wacker likes when candidates show him their side projects, especially if they've monetized them.
• He's dipped his toes into building, too, with an Apple TV app that evokes the feel of old-school TV.

Knowing how to use AI is only enough to get a foot in the door for interviews, according to a Box executive.

Rand Wacker, Box's vice president of product strategy, said that for candidates applying for a job at Box, AI literacy is a bare-minimum requirement. Having a fully developed side hustle or project — something he practices himself — is what gives potential hires a leg up in interviews.

Case studies, which he said used to be a staple in Box interviews, are now a relic of the past. Now, he expects candidates to be prototyping out their ideas.

What he really likes to see is candidates showing him a product they've built themselves using AI, even if it has nothing to do with Box's business. He said he's had potential hires show him mobile apps that they've built, gotten onto the App Store, and are monetizing to some degree.

"They're running this little side hustle overall," he said. "And it shows the passion."

He said that people who explore and experiment with AI are the ones who win in the AI world, as they figure out how to use it most effectively in their personal and professional lives.

He practices what he preaches

Wacker, who's spent almost 30 years in the software engineering and product management fields, said he started out as a "computer nerd" and loved playing around with software tools and building things.

As he progressed in his career, he said he had less time to experiment with building, but AI has recently allowed him to test small ideas he didn't have time to explore before vibe coding existed.

He recently made an app to bring back old-school TV because he missed the days when he'd turn it on, pick one of three cable channels, and it would play a random movie from a random point.

"These days, whenever I'm trying to find something to watch on the weekends, it's decision fatigue. Which of the six streaming services do I go to? What are the 20 million titles I scroll through?" he said.

Using Cursor, he built an Apple TV app that would access his entire movie library, pick a random movie, and play it from a random point.

Working on these kinds of projects is a great way to learn the tools available on the market, get ideas for how to use them in other areas, and scratch the itch to create something of his own.

Wacker is one of many executives who have dipped their toes back into building and writing code in recent years. Leaders who haven't written lines of code in decades have started experimenting with AI coding to stay closer to their products and feel like individual contributors.

• Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature still requires drivers to pay attention to the road.
• During its Q3 earnings call, the company said unsupervised FSD for personal cars is coming in 2027.
• The catch? Your Tesla must remain within the company's Robotaxi geofences.

When I reviewed Tesla's Full Self-Driving software in January, I hailed it as an "impressive" driver-assistance feature that left me wanting more.

I dreamed of being able to flip the autonomous driving system on whenever I make my routine 400-mile trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles — kick my feet up, listen to music, and ideally fall asleep without having to supervise the road.

That's been part of Tesla's ultimate pitch for the future. "With autonomy, you get your time back," Elon Musk has said.

And the pitch may soon come true. Just don't expect to make long self-driven road trips quite yet.

On Wednesday, during Tesla's Q3 earnings call, Ashok Elluswamy, the company's VP of AI, painted a more modest picture of what FSD unsupervised will look like for a personal car — at least at first.

Elluswamy said unsupervised FSD is coming "somewhere around Q2 next year" for privately owned Teslas, with the rollout of FSD V15.

The caveat is that it will only be operable in areas where Tesla already operates its Robotaxi service, which represents a small fraction of square miles for the total number of Teslas on US roads.

The Robotaxi platform is available in parts of seven metropolitan regions: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area, all Tesla robotaxis are supervised by a human operator.

"The only additional requirement is to make sure that, for example, the customer Model Ys can be part of the geofences and the fleet management that Tesla has for it to be fully autonomous," Elluswamy said.

In other words, your Tesla may be able to drive itself, but only if you're within the zones where Tesla Robotaxi is operating. If you're in Austin, that could cover about 260 square miles of the city, excluding high-speed roadways.

That's similar to what other aspiring self-driving car companies have pitched.

Tensor, a San Jose-based automaker, aims to sell a luxury sedan that it says can drive itself. However, the self-driving feature will only operate within restricted geofences, the company told Business Insider.

Tesla didn't say why it needs to limit the release of unsupervised FSD to geofences at first, although there are likely questions about liability that the company will have to address once it declares, Yes, our technology now lets you take your eyes off the road.

Autonomy is a difficult problem to solve after all. During the call, Elluswamy shut down the idea that competitors could catch up to Tesla's FSD.

"When they get in the long tail of this problem — it's so long that people don't realize — anyone with a sane mind should not attempt to solve this problem," he said. "It's so difficult."

• Sundar Pichai said he uses AI agents to track Google's model development and internal discussions.
• The bots summarize updates and monitor how Google's computing resources are used.
• Pichai said humans still make consequential decisions about resource allocation.

Even Google's CEO needs help keeping up with Google.

On the Sources podcast released Wednesday, Sundar Pichai described to host Alex Heath how he delegates some of the information-gathering that comes with running the tech giant.

“It could easily take me an hour a day to kind of catch up, what's happened in the last 24 hours, right?" Pichai said. "But now I have agents running which summarize and bring that information to me. I can still go deeper, and I do so often."

Pichai said that his AI agents give him a way to "understand the model development arc," figure out how Google's computing resources are being used, and follow threads spread across numerous internal chat groups without having to read through every conversation himself.

“Similarly, there are agents with telemetry into our compute usage by product area, efficiency, utilization, and giving me inputs and insights, you know," Pichai added. "I think it's made all of us, you know, be better at what we do."

That doesn't mean Pichai has handed over the important calls to AI. He said humans — including himself — remain directly involved in consequential decisions about allocating computing resources.

Managing agents is becoming a skill in its own right, giving some workers a new set of headaches, from checking the bots' output to preventing them from duplicating work or straying beyond their assignments. Business Insider previously reported that the need to manage agents is making everyone a boss without higher pay.

Delegating to bots doesn't necessarily make work easier, either. A Cisco engineering director who manages more than 10 agents told Business Insider that overseeing them involves more task switching and can make work feel more intense without shortening his days.

For the Google CEO, however, continuous work is a plus.

"So because your agents, they're running in the cloud, they're running 24/7, they have your context, and so they can pick up things where you left off," Pichai said. "It's a continuum there. By the time it's doing that, you would be applying yourself to the next problem and so on."

• Thiel criticized the US-Iran war, diverging from Trump's foreign policy stance, POLITICO reported.
• "There were a lot of mistakes that were made," Thiel said at a lecture earlier this month.
• Despite his criticism of the war in Iran, Thiel highlighted his continued support for Trump.

Billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel said he's skeptical of the US war with Iran and does not believe the United States should have launched it, putting the major Republican donor at odds with President Donald Trump over one of the administration's defining foreign policy decisions, POLITICO reported.

Thiel's remarks, delivered on October 12 at a private event, are his most explicit statements to be revealed publicly about the war with Iran and come less than two weeks before the midterm elections in which Trump's party is grasping to maintain power in Congress. The audio of Thiel's comments was obtained by Decoded by POLITICO from a lecture earlier this month.

"I'm skeptical of [the war], I think we should not have done it," Thiel said. "There were a lot of mistakes that were made."

Thiel added, "Maybe we don't have the hard power. Maybe we're going to lose the soft power war."

In the full lecture, Thiel made clear his strong opposition to neoconservatives and Middle East wars. Despite his criticism of the Iran war, Thiel highlighted his continued support of Trump and suggested he wanted to protect the president.

Still, Thiel's break over the war represents one of the most important examples to date of a fierce Trump ally sharing deep concerns about the conflict.

The comments were part of Thiel's lecture series in Nashville, which Decoded has documented since their start this fall. In the latest lecture, Thiel issued extensive warnings about what he described as the unchecked power of the International Criminal Court, drawing on comments from Bush-era figures Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

"I read the Cheney family's Trump derangement syndrome as an attempt to buy favor with the [International Criminal Court] and avoid prosecution. Probably too late," Thiel said. "And I have come to suspect that the threat of an ICC arrest warrant is the sword of Damocles hanging over the Trump administration as it tries to persecute this war in Iran."

Thiel also discusses meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2024, after the October 7 attack, where he said he asked the president about his plans in Gaza. Thiel said Netanyahu told him, "I can't just Dresdenize it," referring to the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden during World War II that killed roughly 25,000 people.

The first big tech investor to back Trump in 2016, and then have a high-profile speaking role at the Republican National Convention that year, Thiel was also the biggest financial backer of super PACs supporting Vice President JD Vance's Senate campaign in 2022. POLITICO reported in March that Vance was "skeptical" of the U.S. striking Iran in the lead-up to the beginning of the war.

Representatives for Thiel and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company's newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.

• Last summer, Erin Levi left Connecticut and moved to Montreal on her own.
• She barely knew anyone in the city, and relocating at 42 gave her a panic attack.
• Moving to a new city while working for herself was hard, but it made her feel brave.

Last summer, I left my life in Connecticut behind and moved to Montreal on a whim, without a plan.

People told me I was brave.

Really? I'm a travel journalist. I've followed a snow leopard expert across Nepal; I've lived with a family in Uzbekistan who didn't speak English; and I've had a private encounter with the King of Bhutan.

Montreal is only a 6-hour drive from my hometown in Connecticut. It didn't seem brave to me. It seemed, frankly, safe.

Yet moving here at 42 gave me a panic attack. I hadn't been to Canada in more than 12 years and barely knew anyone.

After my parents dropped me off, we spent a few days exploring my new city together, where it's easy to get by without a car — it felt like the start of another semester abroad. Except this time, I was older and had no plans to leave.

The last time I'd been in Montréal with my parents was in the summer of 2003, before I left for a semester abroad in Hanoi. I had my first pho in Montréal's Chinatown.

So why Montreal?

A Facebook post on a full moon in May changed my life.

My lease in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was up. So was my relationship. My landlord wanted an extra $500 a month for the lofty, 1,100-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in the woods that I had been sharing with my now-ex. That would bring the rent to $3,250 a month, not including utilities, which often reached $700 during the winter because of the high ceilings.

I saw all of this as signs to leave.

But I was about to write a check for $5,985 upfront for a $1,995-a-month, 900-square-foot, one-bedroom duplex nearby and buy a car.

Then a Canadian friend shared that her 638-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment near Montréal's Little Italy was available for 6 months at a writer-friendly rent: 1,100 Canadian dollars, or about $775 a month, including utilities, WiFi, furniture, and a beautiful patio. My friend is a professor and works abroad for half the year.

Ever since my first job at Tourisme Québec's New York office — the role that ultimately launched my travel-writing career — I'd wanted to live in Montreal. I also speak French. It seemed like a no-brainer, so I said "oui."

I found out that Americans can spend up to 6 months in Canada per visit. However, anyone who spends more than 183 days in the country in a calendar year may have to pay taxes. Foreign media workers like me also don't require a work permit. I consulted an immigration lawyer about staying in Canada.

My new life in Canada

Since moving, I've learned to row. I take weekly lessons at the Olympic Basin, where beginner courses cost CA$200 each. Gliding hundreds of meters solo in a scull has been one of the best antidotes to my anxiety. Socially, though, I should've joined the dragon boat team.

My neighborhood, La Petite-Patrie, is home to some of the city's top restaurants, including Vin Mon Lapin, Pasta Pooks, and Limbo. And Marché Jean-Talon — the largest open-air market north of Mexico — is my local grocer.

Some cultural highlights have included celebrating Jewish holidays at Leonard Cohen's shul, attending my first F1 race, cross-country skiing in Parc du Mont-Royal, and going to a hockey game solo.

Sure, there's been loneliness. There's been longing. It's not easy moving to a new city when you work for yourself. Nor is it easy being more than 10 minutes from my parents — and their delicious cooking. But I've also made new friends, hosted old friends, and opened my heart.

Brave, eh? Perhaps I really am.

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered moving out of California because of a proposed billionaire tax.
• Zuckerberg would get $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" if the billionaire tax passes.
• Meta made the offer to Zuckerberg to help keep him in California after he considered leaving.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered moving out of California because of its proposed billionaire tax, Meta disclosed in a new SEC filing on Wednesday.

Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 40, a one-time tax on the assets of the state's billionaires.

The filing said that Zuckerberg told a special committee formed by Meta that he was considering moving.

In response, the committee concluded that it was "critically important" for Zuckerberg to keep running Meta close to its Silicon Valley headquarters — particularly to its AI division, Meta Superintelligence Labs.

The filing said the committee got Zuckerberg to agree to remain in California or any other jurisdiction where Meta has its corporate headquarters for eight years, barring unforeseen circumstances.

As part of its efforts to ensure he can remain in charge as it raises more cash for its AI initiatives, the company is granting the Meta CEO a new stock class.

The shares would give Zuckerberg $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" to cover the tax by selling stock without losing control of Meta, if the tax passes. The new shares wouldn't add to Zuckerberg's net worth or increase his percentage ownership of Meta.

"The goal is to keep Mr. Zuckerberg continuing to lead the Company from California," the filing says.

Meta declined to comment. A person familiar with the matter said that the new class of shares, which totals $150 billion, is also intended to raise capital, compensate employees, and keep Meta's stock price on the right track.

Meta's filing showcases how tech billionaires are responding to the tax proposal. Some, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin and former CEO Eric Schmidt, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into attack ads against the proposal.

While Zuckerberg has taken a lower-key approach, it's clear he's been taking the proposed tax seriously.

The Meta CEO, who is worth about $240 billion according to Forbes, has multiple residences in California, including in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.

He also has a sprawling property portfolio outside the state, including a doomsday bunker in Hawaii, a waterfront mansion in Miami, and a castle in Ireland.

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• Tesla posted footage of its robotaxi driving without a safety driver ahead of its Q3 earnings call.
• Two of the clips included footage of a Waymo robotaxi and Avride encroaching on Tesla's path.
• The clips showed the Tesla Robotaxi slowing down.

Tesla took some subtle jabs at its robotaxi competitors ahead of its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

On a website Tesla created for its robotaxi safety report, the company uploaded clips of its self-driving cars maneuvering in real-world conditions without a driver behind the wheel. Obstacles and hazards included stormy weather, a pedestrian crossing at a green light, stray pets, and rival robotaxis getting in the way.

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI, also posted the video on X, calling it "Robotaxi B-roll."

At around the 1:44 mark of Elluswamy's post, the video shows a robotaxi coming to a complete stop in its own lane as a Waymo makes a wider-than-usual right turn. The Waymo can be seen encroaching into Tesla's lane before it returns to its own path.

A Waymo spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

In another short clip, the Tesla robotaxi is seen driving at night, braking for an Avride car that pulled up from the right, a little too far into the Tesla's path.

Avride is a robotaxi company that offers robotaxi rides through Uber in Dallas and is testing rides with a safety driver behind the wheel in Austin.

A spokesperson for Avride did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla posted the footage as it seeks to make its case publicly on robotaxi safety. The company began offering a limited number of autonomous rides without an in-car safety monitor in Austin in January.

In the newly posted safety report, Tesla said its robotaxi service has driven 3.3 million miles autonomously — relatively small compared to Waymo's more than 271 million miles driven as of June.

Tesla said during its Q3 earnings call that it will launch unsupervised Cybercabs in Dallas in November.

• Meta established a new class of stock to ensure Mark Zuckerberg stayed as CEO.
• The stock class will "continue the founder-led model that has driven the company," Meta said in its third-quarter earnings.
• Zuckerberg has taken a leading position in Meta's AI era.

Meta's board wants Mark Zuckerberg to stick around.

The company announced a new category of non-voting Class C stock in its third-quarter earnings report. It listed several reasons for creating the new class — one of which is to keep the CEO in control.

A Special Committee established by Meta's board determined that Zuckerberg was the best fit to lead the company into its future, and highlighted the CEO's creative vision and management abilities.

"The creation of the Class C common stock will continue the founder-led model that has driven the company's success since its inception," Meta said.

The stock class will also provide Meta the ability to finance its growth, the earnings report said. Meta is spending big on AI and the data centers needed to power it. The company reported $34.91 billion in third-quarter capital expenditures.

Meta's press release said the distribution would effectively amount to a two-for-one stock split for existing shareholders. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, said that the stock will be distributed to existing shareholders.

Other tech companies have issued stock to access new capital without diluting their CEO's voting power. Google performed a stock split in 2012 for a similar reason. Semafor was first to report the new stock class.

Zuckerberg has long been the face of Meta. He's strengthened his leadership through the AI boom, going "startup mode" and getting hands-on with the tech. The company's AI team set up their desks around where Zuckerberg sits.

The success of Muse, Meta's AI agent, has raised the profile of another Meta executive: Alexandr Wang. The chief AI officer has joined Zuckerberg for podcasts and spoken onstage at keynotes.

A Financial Times profile last week touted Wang as a "potential successor to Zuckerberg." It's clear the board wants Zuckerberg there for the long haul.

• Meta's AI agent, Muse, is unprofitable due to "very high compute costs," CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.
• Meanwhile, Meta expects Reality Labs, its AI glasses division, to lose $15 billion next year.
• The social media giant has a plan to fix that.

Meta says some of its biggest cash incinerators could finally start turning profits.

The social media giant, which generated over 97% of its quarterly revenue from ads, has faced persistent questions from investors about the lack of profitability in its AI and hardware initiatives.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed those concerns head-on during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg said that Muse, the AI assistant it launched last month, is unprofitable since it's "very compute intensive to run." Meta expects to start turning that around next year by massively improving Muse's efficiency.

"If compute efficiency continues improving quickly for another few years, which we think is highly likely, then Muse will be highly profitable over multiple years," he said.

Meta plans to make money from Muse by taking a small transaction fee off of purchases it drives, Zuckerberg said at Meta's Connect conference last month.

Zuckerberg added that Muse, which launched only in the US and Canada, wasn't launched globally due in part to the amount of compute it requires. (Meta's North American users are generally its most lucrative.)

Zuckerberg also struck a positive note about its cash-hemorrhaging Reality Labs division, which makes products like Meta Ray-Bans and virtual reality glasses.

Meta expects Reality Labs to narrow its losses to about $15 billion in 2027, down from the $18 to $19 billion it expects to lose this year. The division should start trending toward profitability next year, as Meta's AI systems make it more useful, Zuckerberg said.

"I continue to believe that the path to delivering holographic experience, of bringing together the physical and digital worlds and everyday glasses, will come through VR first," Zuckerberg said.

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• The "Fourth Wing" TV show has its Violet and Xaden.
• Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society are adapting Rebecca Yarros' series.
• Amazon announced in October that the show had found its two lead actors.

At this point, it's hard not to be familiar with Rebecca Yarros' "Empyrean" series about dragon rider Violet Sorrengail.

When "Onyx Storm," the third book in the romantasy series, was released in January 2025, it became the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years.

Yarros is working on the fourth installment in the series, and she recently released a collection of short stories set in the "Empyrean" universe called "Threshing Day." However, it will still be a while before book four is ready for readers.

In the meantime, though, we're getting closer to a series adaptation of "Fourth Wing," which officially found its lead actors.

'Fourth Wing' is becoming a TV show

In October 2023, Deadline announced that Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society were developing "Fourth Wing" into a TV series. Yarros is an executive producer for the show.

Outlier Society produced Jordan's "Creed III" and is developing a slate of other series and films in addition to "Fourth Wing."

Deadline also reported in October 2023 that Amazon MGM Studios had acquired the rights to the entire "Empyrean" series. In her January 2025 Variety interview, Yarros said she had shared the "five-book arc" for the "Empyrean" series with Amazon.

"They have the five-book arc, which went a little awry in Book 3 just because the positioning, but they already know that," she told Variety. "But they have the five-book arc and the general big points of what happens in between each book, but they don't have the specifics between Book 4 and Book 5, because I'm getting ready to go to my crazy plotting board and plot out every single event that happens in each book, so that I make sure that I'm within my two books there."

A new showrunner

In July 2024, Outlier Society announced it had hired Moira Walley-Beckett, who worked on shows like "Breaking Bad" and "Anne with an E," as the showrunner for the series. In a January 2025 interview with Variety, Yarros said Walley-Beckett was "great" and "phenomenal," but in July 2025, Walley-Beckett exited the project.

Variety reported in September 2025 that Meredith Averill was taking over as showrunner. Averill was previously the showrunner of the Netflix series "Locke & Key" and a producer on shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Haunting of Hill House."

Amazon declined to comment on this piece when contacted by Business Insider, but Yarros shared a screenshot of a Deadline article about the showrunner announcement on her Instagram when it dropped.

"Welcome to the team, Meredith Averill! Guys, I love everything this wonderful woman has worked on and I'm so excited to have her joining us," Yarros said in her caption.

'Fourth Wing' is in the works

In January 2026, Jordan assured fans the "Fourth Wing" show was on its way in an interview with Deadline.

"We are making sure that this is going to be an exciting show that delivers on all of the things the fans want and some of the things that they won't be expecting either," Jordan said.

He also told the outlet that he's aware of how much fans of "Fourth Wing" care about the series.

"But trust me, I know how beloved this franchise IP is," he said. "It's early stages, but I feel how much people care about this one. It's not lost on us."

And on May 11, 2026, Jordan announced the show had been ordered to series for Prime Video at the Amazon Upfront, an annual event where Amazon offers a sneak peek at its coming content.

Yarros and Averill joined Jordan onstage at the event, as did Lisa Joy, an executive producer on the show who will direct the first episode. Joy has previously worked on shows like HBO's "Westworld" and Prime Video's "Fallout."

Yarros posted about the event on her Instagram story, sharing a photo of herself, Jordan, Averill, and Joy, writing, "What an absolutely wild night! So grateful for this team!"

Meet Violet and Xaden

The Amazon Upfront seemed to build momentum for the show, as it was announced in October that the Prime Video series had cast its Violet Sorrengail and her enemy turned lover Xaden Riorson. Deadline first reported the casting on October 15, 2026, though the streamer didn't confirm that news until October 21.

Esther McGregor will play Violet. McGregor, the 24-year-old daughter of Ewan McGregor, appeared in "Babygirl" and "We Were Liars," another Amazon adaptation.

Meanwhile, 30-year-old Emilio Sakraya has been cast as Xaden. The German actor is known for projects like "Rheingold" and the popular Netflix series "Warrior Nun." Both actors are relative newcomers, though, with their "Fourth Wing" casting marking a big step in their careers.

McGregor reshared Amazon's post about her casting to her Instagram story, writing, "So beyond excited. Honored. Thrilled."

Sakraya also shared the post to his Instagram story, but he captioned it with a quote from "Iron Flame," the second book in Yarros' series, in a fun nod to the text: "My house. My chair. My Woman."

In a statement shared by Amazon, Yarros said, "I'm so grateful to our producing and casting team for conducting a thorough, worldwide search to find Violet and Xaden. It will be incredibly exciting to see these talented actors, Esther and Emilio, bring our beloved characters to life on screen."

Yarros said at a London event in August 2024 that she intentionally never shared any hopes for which actors may be cast in the show.

"I will never say who my perfect fan cast is because the cast is so diverse, and I want to open that up to more diversity," she said. "And I feel like the second I say who I think this character is, that's who everyone will accept. That's only who they will accept."

"I kinda hope they find, like, an up-and-coming generation," she added. "But I would never put my fan cast in your heads."

At the same event, she clarified that she wouldn't be involved in the casting process, but that she had shared one hard-line casting request with Amazon and Outlier Society.

"They know how staunch I am against whitewashing Xaden," she said. "I think that's the biggest thing."

Xaden is described as having "warm tawny skin" in "Fourth Wing" and "tawny-brown" skin in both "Iron Flame" and "Onyx Storm." Sakraya was born in Germany to a Serbian father and a Moroccan mother, according to an interview with German Films Quarterly.

Amazon did not provide any additional details on casting or when filming for the series may begin.

Yarros talked about the series' pilot while on a book tour for 'Onyx Storm'

Although details about the series are limited, Yarros made a few comments about the show while promoting "Onyx Storm."

Speaking at an engagement on January 24, 2025, in New York, Yarros told fans she had read the pilot for the "Fourth Wing" show — and loved it.

"I read the latest version of the pilot last week," she said. "It's really nerve-racking when you read something like that because you're really — you're trusting someone else with your baby, right? And you're trusting someone else to say, like, 'Hey, this is important in your work, and this isn't,' and you kinda get your guard up."

"But guys, I, like, kicked my feet the whole time," she said. "You're gonna love it."

Yarros also praised Walley-Beckett at the event, calling her a "brilliant writer" and saying she maintained the book's integrity in the pilot. It's unclear how the pilot may have changed since Walley-Beckett's exit from the project.

• Walmart is rolling out two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on behalf of customers.
• The company says the tools give people more control of their bots, and help bots be more accurate.
• Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, after it blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site.

Walmart wants your bot to shop.

The retail giant said Wednesday that it has two new tools to help third-party AI agents shop on customers' behalf: agent profiles and an agent gateway.

The agent profiles link all transactions to the bot that performed them, and allow Walmart customers to manage authorizations and spending limits as they would for an additional user on their credit card account, the company said.

With agent gateways, bots no longer have to navigate a website that is designed for humans. Instead, Walmart is granting access through a model text protocol that it says will help agents work more quickly and accurately.

Walmart's move contrasts with Amazon's approach, which recently blocked Meta's agent Muse from its site, saying agents violate Amazon's conditions of use. Amazon has also pushed back on other third-party agents, including a lawsuit against Perplexity and restrictions on agents from Google and OpenAI.

"As customers begin using agents to help them shop, we're building connections, permissions and options that complement those tools and support how customers want to use them," the company said in a statement.

The company also said the gateway protects the information that Walmart has about its customers, and only provides what is necessary for completing a given transaction. In particular, the gateway can share a relevant pattern or preference — such as a customer's favorite laundry detergent brand — without sharing their entire purchase history with the agent.

The company also laid out a set of terms and conditions regarding how AI agents are expected to operate when shopping.

Under the terms, the company said it will honor its usual returns policy and that agents will always see the same pricing that a human would see on Walmart.com.

• Tesla has begun production of its humanoid robot, Optimus, in Fremont, California.
• Musk said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of 2027.
• Musk said it will take at least a year to produce 20,000 Optimus units a week.

Tesla has begun producing its long-awaited humanoid robot, Optimus, at its Fremont factory, the company said in its quarterly earnings report.

"The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," Tesla said, saying the current manufacturing process is "suitable for a commercial product."

"There's still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has long duration," CEO Elon Musk said on Tesla's Q3 earnings call. "It can't, like, wear out after a month."

Musk said the company will take at least a year to scale up Optimus production to 20,000 units a week in Fremont. He said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of next year.

Musk tempered expectations about how quickly Tesla can scale up Optimus production because it is "such a radically new product." He said the early stages of production will be "somewhat bumpy" because "there's like 10,000 things that have to go right" to build the robot. One of the big challenges Musk outlined is building robot hands.

Musk said Tesla is building an "Optimus Academy," where robots will practice tasks and generate data to improve the AI models that power them. The company also plans to install its next-generation AI5 chip in Optimus in April, which will give the robots more computing power and be a "big step change in intelligence," Musk said.

The latest version of Optimus has not been unveiled. Musk said he expects to release a video of Optimus within one or two months. He previously said Tesla was keeping the robot under wraps to prevent competitors from copying its design.

Tesla stopped producing the Model S and Model X at its Fremont, California, plant earlier this year to make room for an Optimus line designed to eventually produce a million robots a year. A second line under construction in Austin is planned to have an annual capacity of 10 million robots.

Tesla is competing in a crowded humanoid market. Agility Robotics, which plans to go public, has deployed its Digit robot across nine customer facilities, while Figure AI has announced deployments in logistics and distribution centers this year. Sunday Robotics, 1X, and Weave Robotics are preparing to ship robots into homes this fall.

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• The Trump administration agreed to drop its appeal of a Public Service Loan Forgiveness ruling.
• The ruling blocked Trump's plan to limit PSLF eligibility from taking effect.
• An advocacy group said it's a victory for borrowers pursuing PSLF.

Student-loan borrowers pursuing a major forgiveness program got a rare legal win.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration agreed to drop two of its appeals of a June ruling that had blocked its plan to narrow eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after 10 years.

The Education Department intended to implement a plan on July 1 to exclude employers from PSLF who did not align with the administration's definition of "public service," listing actions like assisting with gender-affirming care or 'acts of terrorism.

A judge ruled at the end of June that the plan was unlawful and would not take effect. This followed a series of lawsuits filed by advocacy groups and nonprofits, including Student Defense, which said the education secretary did not have the authority to roll out those changes.

The administration appealed the ruling at the end of August. With the appeal set to be dismissed, borrowers will not face any immediate changes to PSLF. Another appeal in a separate PSLF lawsuit is still pending.

"The Trump administration's attempt to weaponize public service loan forgiveness against organizations it disagrees with was anti-democratic and unlawful from the start," Dan Zibel, chief counsel at Student Defense, said in a statement. "This is a significant victory for millions of Americans who have dedicated their careers to public service."

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent previously said that the rule had been intended to "ensure federal benefits go to our Nation's teachers, first responders, and civil servants who tirelessly serve their communities."

Borrowers pursuing PSLF are still facing challenges. The Education Department recently removed some borrowers' payments toward forgiveness, citing Biden-era coding errors. Others have reported delays getting their payments counted toward relief, leaving them in limbo.

A department spokesperson previously said that the agency "remains committed to ensuring that every qualifying payment is properly credited to a borrower's account."

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• Tesla is facing some profitability headwinds.
• Its operating income fell 56% year over year as AI and research and development costs climbed.
• The company is still in the green, and it surprised earlier this month by delivering 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter.

Tesla is still selling plenty of cars. Making the same amount of money on them is getting harder.

On Wednesday, the Elon Musk-led automaker reported that its operating income fell 56% year over year to $718 million in the third quarter — below Wall Street's estimates of $746.3 million — while overall revenue of $28.05 billion came in a smidge below analysts' estimates.

Tesla pointed to higher operating expenses tied to its AI efforts, or "SI"/"Super Intelligence" as Trump prefers, and other R&D projects. Lower regulatory credit revenue and weaker energy storage gross profit also weighed on profitability, while lower vehicle prices hurt revenue.

"While we continue to execute on innovations to reduce the cost of manufacturing and operations, over time, we expect our hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of SI, software and fleet-based profits," the company reported.

It's not all bad news for Tesla's profits. The company is still solidly in the green, and it beat on the bottom line. Tesla reported 48 cents in adjusted earnings per share, above the 44-cent analyst consensus estimate. Free cash flow of $1.5 billion was also a surprise after Wall Street had expected negative free cash flow of $4.92 billion.

The automaker also sees areas of profit growth in its future: autonomy subscriptions are trending up, and Tesla said it's offering the right, region-specific product mixes.

During the earnings call, Tesla's chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, said the company is experiencing its "highest backlog" of vehicles in four years. The company, he said, is trying to increase vehicle production.

He also added that Tesla has secured $30 billion of borrowing to support expected capital expenditures, but the company doesn't expect to "make any draws under any of the new facilities in this calendar year."

"The main takeaway is that Tesla's surprisingly positive cash flow quarter did not come from stronger profits," Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, said after the report.

"Added to the equation is the fact that Tesla's AI spending remains broadly inefficient, with research costs up nearly 70% and operating margins down to just 2.6%, while at SpaceX AI is already one of the biggest sources of revenue," the analyst added.

The new quarter has already made waves

The Tesla story continues to play out in real time, and it's had a busy month since the fourth quarter kicked off in October.

On Tuesday, during SpaceX's earnings call, Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX had each formed committees to explore a potential merger. Both companies are helmed by Musk — and he owns billions of dollars in stock of each.

Anticipation of the potential mega-merger has been building around the companies for much of 2026, and has only increased since SpaceX went public. Musk said he was not included in those committees and that calling the merger a foregone conclusion "would be overstating it."

It also came less than a week after Tesla held its high-flying demo for the Roadster. The sports car performed a gymnastics routine, including briefly jumping into the air and twirling over a lineup of other Tesla vehicles.

It came nine years after Tesla first promised to relaunch the Roadster. Musk first showed off a prototype of the vehicle in 2017 and predicted a 2020 product launch.

• Anthropic has its answer to AI agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.
• Claude Duet, built on Anthropic's flagship model, has entered the personal agent frenzy.
• Karan Ahuja, a recent departee from Meta, led Claude Duet's development.

Anthropic is joining the personal AI agent craze.

The company announced the new app Claude Duet on Wednesday, billed as a "proactive agent" that can run in the background, surface tasks to a user, and handle a variety of work. The tool is in research preview for now with a waitlist, meaning it won't immediately compete for the larger market with other new agents like Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots.

Still, the announcement ramps up the pressure on those companies — Anthropic says it built Duet around its flagship Opus 5.5 model, which was released in late September and has already become one of the industry's most popular. Recent model breakthroughs have made AI better at handling work on its own, spurring a rush to build these "always-on" personal agents.

"It can have the discernment and judgment around when to be proactive, when to act on your behalf," said Mike Krieger, a co-lead of Anthropic's Labs team, said in a Duet launch video.

The tool, Anthropic says, will send users a brief each morning about what's happening on their connected apps, and message them when something needs attention. Like other companies' offerings, it runs outside a user's computer, sends notifications, and asks for approval on certain tasks.

Anthropic announced Duet on the day of Meta's earnings report and used the opportunity to mention a new poach from Mark Zuckerberg's company. Karan Ahuja led product management for Meta Superintelligence Labs until July, according to his LinkedIn, before starting at Anthropic in August and leading Duet's development.

He wrote on X that he's been using Duet to build Duet, and said the team "built it for professionals and small business owners juggling a lot at work and at home."

Ahuja also wrote that Anthropic is letting people into Duet from the waitlist "as quickly as possible."

The news didn't go unnoticed at Meta. Alexandr Wang, who heads Meta Superintelligence Labs, posted a meme about Duet's similarity to Muse.

Anthropic is fast approaching a giant initial public offering, which could value the company at as much as $2 trillion. Like other AI players, the company navigates a high-wire competition to win over users, secure computing power, build state-of-the-art models, and deliver AI-native products.

The data firm Apptopia estimates that Muse had more than 14 million installations as of Wednesday. It found that Claude users who installed the Muse app were using Claude more than before, though still for fewer minutes per day than they spent on the Meta product.

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