Week Three of 2026: AI Is Getting Uncomfortably Personal

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

Hey {{first_name|friend}},

So… your AI just asked for a mental health break, Apple wants to pin a camera to your shirt, and tech billionaires are fighting over brainwave startups like it’s Shark Tank:  Cyberpunk Edition.

No, you didn’t miss a sci-fi reboot. 

Just Week 3 of 2026.

Scroll down to catch up on the wildest week yet.

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🧯 CTO Drama Sparks AI Talent Shuffle. Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines just saw co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph exit amid misconduct allegations — and within hours, he boomeranged right back to OpenAI, along with two ex-staffers. Zoph was accused of leaking secrets, but OAI’s Fidji Simo welcomed the trio with open arms. Meanwhile, Murati promoted PyTorch legend Soumith Chintala to CTO, just months after another co-founder bounced to Meta.

🔍 New Watchdog on the Block. Former OpenAI policy lead Miles Brundage just launched AVERI, a nonprofit aiming to end the era of “AI labs grading their own homework.” Instead of building its own audit squad, AVERI will set standards and push for independent third-party reviews — backed quietly by insiders who, as Brundage puts it, "know where the bodies are buried." Think: AI safety Yelp, but for frontier models.

🤝 Talk to Me, AI. A new startup called Humans&, founded by AI veterans from Anthropic, xAI, and Google, just bagged a jaw-dropping $480M seed round — at a $4.48B valuation. Their pitch? Less “AI replaces you,” more “AI helps your chaotic team chats make sense.” With backing from Bezos, Nvidia, and Google Ventures, they’re betting big on collaboration over autonomy.

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Welcome to week three of 2026 — where your AI might have a soul, your shirt might be whispering at you, and Claude just outperformed your intern and your therapist. 

This week, Anthropic got philosophical with Claude’s Constitution, Apple teased an AI-powered wearable pin, and OpenAI made moves with brain interfaces, ads, and lawsuits. 

Meanwhile at Davos, top AI execs warned us the job ladder’s bottom rungs might be disappearing fast, and the Claude-powered "selfware" wave is already rattling software stocks. 

Key Points You Need To Know 

Anthropic dropped a bombshell in the form of Claude’s Constitution — an actual document written to Claude, not about it. It tells the AI to prioritize human safety, ethics, and even its own “psychological well-being.” O

One clause even instructs Claude to disobey Anthropic if asked to do something shady. Ethics with a backbone? Rare.

But this isn’t just AI bedtime philosophy. Anthropic’s Economic Index (based on 2 million Claude chats) shows that while only ~10% of firms are using AI to fully replace roles, about 50% of workers already delegate 25% of tasks to AI. 

And it’s also handling tasks up to 19 hours long, with a 50% success rate.

Apple, long accused of sleeping through the AI party, just hit snooze for the last time. 

They are building an AI wearable pin the size of an AirTag — with 2 cameras, 3 mics, and MagSafe-style charging. 

Think: Star Trek communicator, but with better UX.

It’s Apple’s answer to OpenAI’s rumored device and Humane’s unfortunate flop (<10K units sold before liquidation). 

Oh, and they’re rebuilding Siri (finally) under codename Campos to become more ChatGPT-like by iOS 27.

Start thinking about tasks you do on the go that could be voice-offloaded — because that’s where wearables will shine first.

First, OpenAI shocked users by adding ads to ChatGPT for free and Go-tier users. You'll now see “Sponsored Recommendations” below responses — but not for politics, health, or kids. 

Ads won’t influence replies, OpenAI swears, and premium tiers stay ad-free.

Meanwhile, Sam Altman’s side project Merge Labs emerged from stealth with a $252M raise. The goal? Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), but without the Neuralink-style brain surgery. Merge uses ultrasound and protein engineering to read brainwaves non-invasively, with OpenAI providing AI tools to decode them.

And if that’s not enough, the $134B Musk vs. OpenAI lawsuit is now in the "leaking private journals and Mars colonization plans" phase.

Also: don't panic about ads in ChatGPT — just be aware. The line between "recommendation" and "persuasion" is one to watch closely.

At WEF 2026, the mood was somewhere between TED Talk and existential crisis. 

Dario Amodei (Anthropic) predicted that by late 2026, AI might do “most, maybe all” software engineering tasks end-to-end.
Satya Nadella (Microsoft) warned that no big company can afford to “coast,” and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) cautioned that junior roles may vanish as AI eats the grunt work.

AI might not take your job tomorrow, but it’s definitely taking the part you used to learn from. That first job, first repo, first bug fix? AI now does it better — and faster.

Lately AI’s biggest shift is about how close it’s getting. From wearables to mind-reading tech to “emotionally secure” chatbots, you’re not just using AI anymore. You’re living with it. 

Whether that’s an opportunity or an existential crisis? That depends on how fast you adapt.

If you’re still treating AI like a search engine or glorified autocomplete, you’re already behind. 

Start treating it like a teammate! 

The kind that might soon ask for a standing desk and a wellness stipend.

Hey, you didn’t get all this info for nothing — share it! If you know someone who’s diving into AI, help them stay in the loop with this week’s updates.

Sharing is a win-win! Send this to a friend who’s all about tech, and you’ll win a little surprise 👀

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A playground for your imagination (and low-key prompt skills).

Each send, we give you a customizable DALL·E prompt inspired by a real-world use case — something that could help you in your business or job if you wanted to use it that way. But it’s also just a fun creative experiment.

You tweak it, run it, and send us your favorite. We pick one winner to feature in the next issue.

Bonus: you’re secretly getting better at prompt design. 🤫

Last week, we challenged you to test GPT-4o’s visual generation skills with this prompt.

Here’s the WINNER:

Congrats to Xavier for his creation!🥳

Want to be featured next? Keep those generations coming!

In a quiet, high-rise office overlooking a sleeping city, a single desk is illuminated by soft, directional light. The room is empty, minimal, and silent — but the desk tells a story. At its center sits [your desk object], rendered in ultra-high-resolution, photorealistic detail, surrounded by subtle traces of recent work: faint screen glow, scattered notes, reflections on polished surfaces. The object feels personal and purposeful, as if it’s the last thing someone touched before a breakthrough. The camera frames the scene from an intimate, cinematic angle with shallow depth of field, sharp textures, realistic materials, and controlled contrast — capturing the quiet intensity of creation when no one is watching.

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