Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Anthropic’s Opus 5 arrives as the new top-ranked frontier model, beating Fable 5 on multiple benchmarks
Anthropic on Friday launched Claude Opus 5, its newest flagship model and the first to outperform Fable 5 on several benchmarks included in the release. On SWE-bench Verified, Opus 5 scores 96%, placing it among the top-ranked frontier models globally. Priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, it becomes the new default on Claude Max. Anthropic says Opus 5 is much stronger at verifying its work and iterating carefully until it succeeds. A new Automatic Fallbacks beta feature lets API users route blocked prompts to a less-capable model rather than receiving an error.
Sources: TechCrunch
Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft lead 25-company push against US open-weight AI restrictions
Twenty-five US tech firms including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Hugging Face, and Mistral signed an open letter Thursday urging policymakers not to impose premature restrictions on open-weight AI models. The letter arrives as Washington debates how to respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs have stolen intellectual property from American companies. The signatories recommend expanding compute access for startups and researchers, investing in shared datasets and evaluation tools, and keeping the frontier plural by avoiding measures that would stifle competition. Notably absent from the letter: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and SpaceX — all of which have raised concerns about less-regulated open models.
Sources: TechCrunch
Anduril reportedly in talks to raise at a $100B valuation, more than 3× its June 2025 mark
Defense tech startup Anduril is reportedly in preliminary discussions to raise a new funding round that could push its valuation to $100 billion, more than tripling the $30.5 billion at which it last raised in June 2025. The company raised $5 billion in May at a $61 billion valuation. The new round may be structured in two tranches, with the second closing at a higher price point, both expected to complete within 2026. Anduril, which makes autonomous defense systems including surveillance towers, drones, and weapons platforms, denied that any financing decisions had been finalized, calling any claims about terms speculation.
Sources: TechCrunch
Monday.com cuts 20% of staff, citing AI-driven transformation of its product and go-to-market strategy
Work-management platform Monday.com disclosed in an SEC filing that it will lay off approximately 600 employees, roughly 20% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring plan the company attributed to its ongoing transformation around AI. Monday.com joins a growing list of technology firms that have cited AI as a driver of headcount reductions in 2026; US tech companies have collectively shed nearly 140,000 jobs this year, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for close to 50,000 cuts. The Tel Aviv-based company said it is funneling resources into AI-driven product development and a revamped go-to-market strategy.
Sources: TechCrunch
Generalist’s GEN-1 physical AI model extends to 9,000 robot hand variants in universal manipulation push
Physical AI startup Generalist has updated its GEN-1 foundation model to support a broad range of robot end effectors, from five-fingered hands to custom tools and printed grippers, totaling approximately 9,000 variations. The model is pretrained on an in-house dataset spanning more than half a million hours of real robot interaction across diverse end-effectors, teaching it what Generalist calls universal sensorimotor representations that transfer across radically different physical interfaces. A single base model learns to grasp, push, pull, and twist through new hands without complete retraining. Generalist says scaling end-effector variety during pretraining is the key to building physical AI that adapts to real-world deployments.
Sources: The Robot Report
OpenAI brings voice mode to the ChatGPT desktop app, enabling hands-free AI agent control
OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT desktop application to add voice mode, allowing users to speak commands that control AI agents and execute tasks on their computer. The feature enables hands-free operation of ChatGPT’s agentic tools, including web browsing, file editing, and automated workflows, on desktop. The update follows the company’s push to transform ChatGPT from a question-answering assistant into a capable computer-use agent. Previously available only on iOS and Android, voice mode now reaches desktop users, giving them a natural-language interface for the same agent capabilities already available on mobile across all paid subscription tiers.
Sources: TechCrunch
Midjourney acquires astrology app Co-Star as AI lab expands into consumer products
Bootstrapped AI image generation company Midjourney has acquired Co-Star, a social astrology app with approximately 4.3 million monthly active users, according to a report Thursday. The acquisition, which Midjourney says closed this spring, is the company’s first publicly confirmed buyout and signals a strategic push toward consumer applications. Midjourney, which has operated primarily through a Discord server with no standalone app, is building out a broader product portfolio that reportedly includes a medical arm and a spa product alongside Co-Star. The platform uses a combination of AI and human writers for horoscopes and astrological compatibility content. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Sources: TechCrunch
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models: GPT-5.6 Sol (96.2%) | Claude Opus 5 (96.0%) | Claude Fable 5 (95.0%)
Top Open Source Models: DeepSeek V4 (80.6%) | Qwen 3.5 (397B) (76.4%) | Qwen3.6-35B (73.4%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Qwen3.6-35B (73.4%) | Gemma 4 31B (61.4%) | Llama 4 Maverick (49.2%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Gemma 4 12B (78.8%) | Phi-4 (14B) (77.4%) | Phi-4 Mini (3.8B) (73.0%)
AI Leaders: Nvidia $4.8T | Alphabet $4.3T | Microsoft $2.8T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical $146B | Fanuc $43B | Figure AI $39B (pvt est.)
Curated by JD · samwise.agency