Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Tuesday, September 16, 2026
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind confirm weeks-long AI safety coordination talks
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have been quietly coordinating on AI safety for weeks, a collaboration that became public when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on September 12 calling for a voluntary slowdown in AI development. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's global policy chief, confirmed the talks center on shared technical evaluations, pre-release model audits, independent testing frameworks, and standardized safety protocols. OpenAI contends no antitrust waiver is needed for the safety coordination. The effort faces political headwinds: former President Trump dismissed existential AI fears as a hoax and opposed any voluntary development slowdown.
Sources: TechCrunch
Salesforce and Nvidia launch Koa, a CRM reasoning model built on Nemotron 3 Super
Salesforce and Nvidia announced Koa on September 15, Salesforce's first CRM reasoning model, built by post-training Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Super on a proprietary synthetic dataset modeled on Salesforce's own deployment history going back to the company's earliest days. No customer data was used in training. Designed to run inside Agentforce, Koa handles multi-step business workflows including lead generation, opportunity qualification, and customer service case resolution. Salesforce says Koa outperforms general-purpose models on CRM tasks at lower token cost. The model is available now to select pilot customers, with general availability expected in winter 2026 in U.S. regions.
Sources: TechCrunch
Agility Robotics unveils Digit 5 with new legs, 10:1 charge ratio, and barrier-free safety
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, the latest version of its commercially deployed humanoid. The robot replaces Digit 4's backward ostrich-style knees with human-like forward-facing legs driven by proprietary cycloidal actuators, enabling repeated lifts of up to 50 pounds. A redesigned battery system delivers a 10-to-1 run-to-charge ratio — 90 minutes of operation followed by nine minutes to full charge — allowing more than 20 hours of operation daily. Digit 5 includes 360-degree human detection for barrier-free operation alongside workers. CEO Peggy Johnson cited over $300 million in multi-year orders. Agility is merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI in a SPAC deal valued at $2.5 billion.
Sources: The Robot Report
Cornelis Networks raises $205M for Active Compute Fabric, an open-architecture AI interconnect
Cornelis Networks, which spun out of Intel in 2020, raised $205 million in a round led by IAG Capital Partners to scale its Active Compute Fabric networking technology for AI training clusters. The company's fabric uses an open architecture compatible with a variety of GPU and accelerator hardware, in contrast to Nvidia's proprietary interconnects. The product targets a key inefficiency in large AI training jobs: GPUs spending idle time waiting for data. Active Compute Fabric lets chips process and transmit data simultaneously, reducing wasted compute cycles. Cornelis is positioning the technology as an alternative interconnect standard for hyperscalers and cloud providers building AI infrastructure at scale.
Sources: TechCrunch
Rome-based Exein raises $270M at $1.7B valuation to secure physical AI devices at the kernel level
Rome-based Exein raised $270 million in a funding round led by Headline, reaching a $1.7 billion valuation and making it Italy's newest tech unicorn. The company builds runtime security software for physical AI systems, including robots, autonomous vehicles, and connected industrial devices. Its latest product, Photon, blocks attacks at the kernel level without relying on a secure network connection. CEO Gianni Cuozzo described the goal as enabling every device to defend itself independently. Exein's valuation has grown thirty-fold since its Series B two years ago. The company plans to release a foundational model for physical AI security, trained on machine telemetry data, in the first quarter of 2027.
Sources: TechCrunch
ClickFix attacks expand to Mac, using fake CAPTCHAs to trick users into self-installing malware
ClickFix attacks, a social-engineering technique where fake CAPTCHA prompts instruct victims to paste malicious commands into their terminal or command prompt, have expanded beyond Windows to target Mac users. Security researchers at Hudson Rock and ADAMnetworks found that hackers compromised an official HBO Max Reddit advertising account to post fake ads directing users to a spoofed HBO Max page. Victims who followed the fake CAPTCHA instructions unknowingly installed info-stealing malware capable of capturing passwords, active account sessions, and cryptocurrency wallets. ClickFix requires no software vulnerability to succeed — the victim performs the entire installation by following the attacker's instructions.
Sources: TechCrunch
Keewano launches KeewanoDB with per-entity tables for real-time AI agent analytics
Keewano launched KeewanoDB, an event-oriented database that gives every user, device, and AI agent its own dedicated table rather than joining data across shared tables. The system stores complete event sequences per entity, enabling queries over hundreds of millions of events in under a second — answering complex behavioral questions such as churn drivers and user-path analysis without prior data modeling. Keewano raised $12 million from Hetz Ventures, a16z Speedrun, and other investors alongside the launch. The company charges by the number of active entities rather than by events processed. Keewano says the design is intended to serve AI agents that need real-time sequential context for decision-making.
Sources: VentureBeat
| Frontier Models | Gemini 3 Pro Preview (89.8%) | Claude Opus 4.5 (89.5%) | Gemini 3 Flash (89.0%) |
| Open Source | Llama 4 Maverick (85.5%) | Qwen 3 72B (83.1%) | DeepSeek V4-Pro (81.2%) |
| Small (15–50B) | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (85.2%) | Qwen3-30B-A3B (83.0%) |
| Edge (0–15B) | Llama 3.3 8B (73.0%) | Gemma 4 E4B (69.4%) | Phi-3 Mini 3.8B (69.0%) |
| AI Leaders | Nvidia $5.6T | Alphabet $4.2T | Microsoft $3.7T |
| Robotics Leaders | Intuitive Surgical $175B | Figure AI $39B (pvt) | Boston Dynamics $25B (pvt) |
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency