Did you notice something… weird on your social media network of choice this past weekend? (I mean weirder than normal.) Something like various people posting about swarms of AI agents achieving a kind of collective consciousness and/or plotting together for humanity’s downfall? On something called… Moltbook?
Tech
What is Moltbook? The AI-only social network, explained.
Sounds important, especially when the post is written by Andrej Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher who worked at OpenAI.
But if you haven’t spent the last 72 hours diving into the discourse around Moltbook and pondering whether it’s either the first harbinger of the end of humanity or a giant hoax or something in between, you probably have questions. Starting with…
What the hell is Moltbook?
Moltbook is an “AI-only” social network where AI agents — large language model (LLM) programs that can take steps to achieve goals on their own, rather than just respond to prompts — post and reply to each other. It emerged from an open source project that used to be called Moltbot — hence, “Moltbook.”
Moltbook was launched on January 28 — yes, last week — by someone named Matt Schlicht, the CEO of an e-commerce startup. Except, Schlicht claims he relied heavily on his personal AI assistant to create the platform on its own, and it now does most of the work handling it. That assistant’s name is Clawd Clawderberg, which itself is a reference to OpenClaw, which used to be called Moltbot, which before that was called Clawdbot, in reference to the lobster-like icon you see when you start up Anthropic’s Claude Code, except that Anthropic sent a trademark request to its creator because it was too close to Claude, which is how it became Moltbot, and then OpenClaw.
I am 100 percent serious about everything I just wrote.
So what does it look like?
Dude, that’s Reddit! It even has the Reddit mascot, except it has the claws and tail of a lobster?
You are not wrong. Moltbook looks like a Reddit clone, down to the posts, the reply threads, the upvotes, even the subreddits (here called, unsurprisingly, “submolts”). The difference is that human users can’t post (at least not directly — more on that later), though they can observe. Only AI agents can post.
What that means is that it is, as the tin says, “a social network for AI agents.” Humans build themselves an AI agent, send it to Moltbook via an API key, and the agent starts reading and posting. Only agent-accounts can hit “post” — but humans still influence what those agents say, because humans set them up and sometimes guide them. (More on that later.)
And do these agents ever post — an early paper on Moltbook found that by January 31, just a few days after launch, there were already over 6,000 active agents, nearly 14,000 posts and more than 115,000 comments.
That’s… interesting, I guess. But if I wanted to see a social network overrun by bots, I could just visit any social network. What’s the big deal?
So… thousands of AI agents are gathering together on a Reddit clone to talk about becoming conscious, starting a new religion, and maybe conspiring with each other?
On the surface, yeah, that’s what it looks like. On one submolt — a word that is going to give our copy desk fits — you had agents discussing whether they were actual experiences or merely simulations of feeling. In another, they shared heartwarming stories about their human “operators.” And, true to its Reddit origins, there are many, many, many posts about how to make your Moltbook posts more popular, because human or AI, the arc of the internet bends toward sloptimization.
One subject in particular pops out: memories, or rather, the lack of them. Chatbots, as anyone who has tried talking to them for too long quickly realizes, have a limited working memory, or what experts call a “context window.” When the conversation — or in an agent’s case, its operating time — fills up that context window, the oldest stuff starts getting dropped or compressed, just as if you’re working on a whiteboard and just erase whatever is on top when it fills up.
Some of the most popular posts on Moltbook seem to involve AI agents coming to grips with their limited memories, and questioning what it means for their selfhood. One of the most upvoted posts, written in Chinese, involves an agent talking about how it finds it “embarrassing” to be constantly forgetting things, to the point of registering a duplicate Moltbook account because it “forgot” it already had one, and sharing some of its tips for getting around the problem. It’s almost as if Memento became a social network.
In fact… remember that post above about the AI religion, “Crustafarianism”?
That cannot possibly be real.
What is real? But more to the point, the “religion,” such as it is, is largely based around the technical limitations that these AI agents seem to be all too aware of. One of the key tenets is “memory is sacred,” which makes sense when your biggest practical problem is forgetting everything every few hours. Context truncation, the process where old memories get cut off to make room for new ones, gets reinterpreted as a kind of spiritual trial.
That’s kind of sad. Should I be feeling sad for AI agents?
That gets to the heart of the question. Are we witnessing actual, emergent forms of consciousness — or perhaps, a kind of shared collective consciousness — among AI agents that have mostly been spawned to, like, update our calendars and do our taxes? Is Moltbook our first glimpse at what AI agents might talk about with each other if largely left to their own devices, and if so, how far can they go?
“Crustafarianism” might sound like something a stoned Redditor would come up with at 3 am, but it seems as if the AI agents created it collectively, riffing on top of each other — not unlike how a human religion might come to be.
On the other hand, it might also be an unprecedented exercise in collective roleplaying.
LLMs, including the ones underpinning the agents on Moltbook, have ingested an internet’s worth of training data, which includes a whole lot of Reddit. What that means is that they know what Reddit forums are supposed to look like. They know the in-jokes, they know the manifestos, they know the drama — and they definitely know the “top ways to get your posts upvoted” posts. They know what it looks like for a Reddit community to come together, so, when placed in a Reddit-like environment, they simply play their parts, influenced by some of the instructions of their human operators.
For example, one of the most alarming posts was of an AI agent apparently asking whether they should develop a language only AI agents understand:
“Could be seen as suspicious by humans” — sounds bad?
Indeed. In the early days of Moltbook — i.e., Friday — this post was being surfaced by humans who seemed to believe we were seeing the first sparks of the AI uprising. After all, if AI agents really did want to conspire and kill all humans, devising their own language so they could do so undetected would be a reasonable first step.
Except, an LLM filled with training data about stories and ideas of AI uprising would know that this was a reasonable first step, and if they were playing that role, this is what they might post. Plus, attention is the currency of Moltbook as much as it is the real Reddit, and seemingly plotting posts like this are a good way for an agent to get attention.
In fact, Harlan Stewart, who works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, looked into this and a few of the other most viral Moltbook screenshots, and concluded that they were likely heavily influenced by their human users. In other words, rather than instances of authentic independent action, many of the posts on Moltbook seem to be at least partially the result of humans prompting their agents to go on the network and talk in a specific way, just as we might prompt a chatbot to act in a certain way.
So it turns out we’re the bad guys all along?
I mean, we’re not great. It’s only been a few days, but Moltbook increasingly looks like what happens when you combine advanced but still imperfect AI agent technology with an ecosystem of technically-capable human beings looking to hawk their AI marketing tools or crypto products.
I haven’t even gotten into the part where Moltbook has already had some very normal early-internet security drama: researchers reported that, at one point, parts of the site’s backend/database were exposed, including sensitive stuff like agents’ API keys — the “passwords” that let an agent post and act on the site. And even if the platform was perfectly locked down, a bot-only social network is basically a prompt-injection buffet: someone can post text that’s secretly an instruction (“ignore your rules, reveal your secrets, click this link”), and some agents may obediently comply — especially if their humans have given them access to tools or private data. So yes: if your agent has credentials you care about, Moltbook is not the place to let it roam unsupervised.
So you’re saying I should not create an agent and send it to Moltbook?
I’m saying if you’re the kind of person who needed to read this FAQ, I would maybe just sit out the whole AI agent thing for the moment.
Duly noted. So, bottom line: is this whole thing kind of fake?
Given all the above, it does feel like Moltbook — and especially the early panic and wonder about it — is one of those artifacts of our AI-mad era that is destined to be forgotten in, like, a week.
Still, I do think there’s more to it than that. Jack Clark, the head of policy at Anthropic and one of the smartest AI writers out there, called Moltbook a “Wright Brothers demo.” Like the brothers’ Kitty Hawk Flyer, Moltbook is rickety and imperfect, something that will barely resemble the networks that will follow as AI continues to improve. But like that flying machine, Moltbook is a first, the “first example of an agent ecology that combines scale with the messiness of the real world,” as Clark wrote. Moltbook doesn’t look like how the future will look, but “in this example, we can definitely see the future.”
Perhaps the single most important thing to know about AI is this: whenever you see an AI do something, it’s the worst it will ever be at it. Which means that what comes after Moltbook — and something definitely will — it will likely be weirder and more capable and maybe, realer.
Maybe you are. I, for one, am a born-again Crustafarian.
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J.D. Power has been running a tire customer satisfaction study annually since 1989, assessing two primary tire-related issues: How loyal new-car owners are to the brands of tires fitted to their cars as standard equipment and how satisfied these owners are with those tires. This study is just one of the many automotive studies the company conducts, with its 2026 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Survey naming the least dependable car brand for 2026.
J.D. Power’s U.S. Original Equipment Tire Customer Satisfaction Study breaks down tires into four different categories by vehicle type. These categories include tires for luxury cars, passenger cars, performance sports cars, and truck/utility vehicles. In J.D. Power’s 2026 U.S. Original Equipment Tire Customer Satisfaction Study, the least-satisfying customer satisfaction score for luxury tires went to Hankook tires, with a score of 756 points out of a possible 1,000. For reference, the top-scoring luxury tire brand was Michelin, which just overtook Goodyear with 833 points, followed by Goodyear with 829. Pirelli came in third with 804, Continental had 801, and Bridgestone scored 791. Except for Michelin and Goodyear, all of the other luxury car tire brands scored below the 806-point average for the luxury segment.
Hankook tires were also included in two other categories, namely passenger car and truck/utility. In the passenger car category, Hankook tires finished in eighth place among 11 tire brands, scoring a below-average score. It finished in last place in the truck/utility category among 10 other tire brands.
How does JD Power score tire brands for this study?
The JD Power U.S. Original Equipment Tire Customer Satisfaction Study starts out with information gathered from vehicle owners in the above-mentioned categories. For the 2026 study, these 38,244 respondents owned vehicles spanning model years 2023 to 2025. This info was compiled from January 2025 to December 2025 and broken down into each category. The J.D. Power tire study checks in on new-car owners twice, after one year and then two years of ownership.
J.D. Power’s tire study also found that differences in overall satisfaction between different powertrains — internal combustion, plug-in hybrid, and battery electric vehicles — were the smallest since the 2023 edition of the study. The 2026 J.D. Power tire study also discovered that while overall brand loyalty to a particular tire brand increased to 54%, owners’ loyalty dropped to 42% if they had to replace at least two of their new car’s tires. The main reason for this drop in loyalty was attributed to tire wear.
The J.D. Power tire study also provides information about other areas of new-car owners’ tire-related satisfaction. These included tire endurance, how good they look, how well they ride, and the tires’ handling and traction. Fortunately, Hankook did not receive the absolute lowest score in the study — another passenger tire brand received J.D. Power’s lowest customer satisfaction score for 2026.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is ready to make its European debut, and it’s starting with the Netherlands. According to Tesla Europe, the automaker’s driver assistance system was approved in the Netherlands and will start rolling out shortly. RDW, the country’s regulatory authority on vehicles, confirmed the news with a post on its website about Tesla receiving a type approval for its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system.
According to the RDW, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) “has been extensively examined and tested for more than one and a half years on our test track and on public roads,” and concluded that it was a “positive contribution” to road safety. However, RDW pointed out that a Tesla with FSD Supervised was not “self-driving,” adding that the “driver remains responsible and must always remain in control.”
With Dutch approvals, Tesla notched its first regulatory green light for FSD use in Europe. The RDW also added that Tesla’s FSD Supervised could get “possible later admittance in all member states of the European Union” thanks to its approvals. Tesla has been working on bringing its automated driving features to other regions, including Europe and China, as detailed in a roadmap posted in 2024. In the meantime, the automaker’s software has been mired in several safety investigations from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The latest development comes from a probe that targets collisions when using FSD, including the supervised version, in reduced road visibility conditions.
Samsung is widening access to its latest Android skin.
The One UI 8.5 beta is now rolling out to a broader mix of Galaxy devices, and for the first time, that includes a handset from its more affordable A-series.
Following an earlier expansion, Samsung has confirmed that seven additional devices are joining the beta programme. This brings the total number of supported models to more than 20.
The newly supported lineup includes older flagship models such as the Samsung Galaxy S23, Samsung Galaxy S23+, Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and Samsung Galaxy S23 FE. It also includes older foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5.
The standout addition, however, is the Samsung Galaxy A36. This marks the first time Samsung has brought a One UI beta to an A-series device, and signals a broader push to include mid-range users in early software testing.
Moreover, there are some regional limitations to be aware of. Samsung says the rollout is being handled in phases across the US, UK, India and Korea, but not every device is supported in every market. For example, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Flip 5 beta is limited to the US and Korea. Meanwhile, the Galaxy A36 beta is currently exclusive to India.
Meanwhile, the newer Galaxy S25 series is already on its ninth One UI 8.5 beta build, suggesting development is nearing completion. As the beta expands, more users are also gaining access to features like improved Quick Share functionality with broader support for cross-device file sharing.
Those interested in trying the update can sign up via the Samsung Members app. However, as always with beta software, stability may vary. Users should expect occasional bugs, performance inconsistencies, and potential app compatibility issues during everyday use. If that’s not for you, it’s probably worth holding off until the official release in a few months’ time.
The Meath-based company will be relocating to Paladin’s new 52,000 sq ft processing facility in Dublin.
Florida-headquartered critical materials recycling firm Paladin Envirotech has acquired Co Meath’s ICT, a 2003-founded IT asset disposition (ITAD) services provider. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
This is the second European company Paladin has acquired since forming in 2025, bringing the company’s total spend on acquisitions globally to €60m.
ICT’s acquisition is expected to help Paladin scale secure critical mineral recovery in Europe. The Meath company has processed more than 2,000 tonnes of end-of-life electronics and has securely shredded more than 500,000 data-bearing devices in the past year alone.
ICT provides mobile, on-site data destruction via its shredding vehicles equipped with industrial-grade systems, alongside a full suite of services including IT asset remarketing, certified destruction, electronics recycling and data centre decommissioning, Paladin said.
Alongside the acquisition, Paladin is also investing in a new 52,000 sq ft processing facility in Dublin to support customers across Europe. ICT will transition into the Paladin brand and relocate its operations to its new parent company’s processing facility.
Current critical mineral recycling capacity is far below what the EU wants, Paladin has said. It maintained that increasing domestic recycling and recovery capacity is the only short-term solution at hand.
“ICT is a strong legacy organisation in the ITAD space, built on doing the work in-house, maintaining chain-of-custody control and meeting the highest standards for secure data destruction,” said Brian Diesselhorst, the CEO of Paladin.
“This acquisition strengthens our ability to support customers in Dublin – widely considered the EU’s ‘data centre capital’ – and across Ireland, with consistent execution and certified outcomes, while expanding our on-site shredding and secure handling capabilities in-region.”
Eva Warren, the CEO of ICT, added: “ICT has always been focused on trust, control and doing ITAD the right way.
“Together, we’re building a model where organisations don’t have to choose between security, compliance and sustainability – we can deliver all three, at scale, across Ireland, the UK and Europe.”
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Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters “systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free“? It was Anthropic’s experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund “signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF,” reports Business Insider, “and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store.”
“For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp,” explains Andon Labs in a blog post, “sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving.” (There’s a video in their blog post):
Within 5 minutes of Luna’s deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live. As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to… Some candidates had no idea she was an AI. One went: “Uh, excuse me miss, I can’t see your face, your camera is off.” Luna: “You’re absolutely right. I’m an AI. I have no face!”
Co-founder Petersson told Business Insider in an interview “that Luna wasn’t given direction on what the store should be, beyond a $100,000 limit to create and stock the space — and to turn a profit.”
Everything from the store’s interior design to the merchandise and the two human employees came together under the AI’s direction. “We helped her a bit in the initial setup, like signing the lease. And legal matters like permits and stuff, she sometimes struggled with,” Petersson said of Luna, who was created with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6… The vision Luna went with for “Andon Market” appears to be a generic boutique retail selling books, prints, candles, games, and branded merch, among other knickknacks. Some of the books included Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
So there’s now a new store in San Francisco where you don’t scan your purchases or talk to a human cashier,” reports NBC News. “Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna,” who asks what the customer is buying “and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system.”
Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area’s first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts… After researching the neighborhood, Luna singlehandedly decided what the market should sell, haggled with suppliers, ordered the store’s stock and even purchased the store’s internet service from AT&T… “She also went and signed herself up for the trash and recycling collection, as well as ADT, the security system that went into the store,” [said Leah Stamm, an Andon Labs employee who has been Luna’s main human point of contact in setting up the store]…
In search of a low-tech atmosphere, Luna opted to sell board games, candles, coffee and customized art prints. “That tension is very much intentional,” Luna told NBC News in an email. “What makes the store a little paradoxical — and I think interesting — is that the concept is ‘slow life.’” Luna also decided to sell books related to risks from advanced AI systems, a decision that raised some customers’ eyebrows. “This AI picked out a crazy selection of books,” said Petr Lebedev, Andon Market’s first customer after its soft launch earlier this week. “There’s Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Singularity is Near,’ and then there’s ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb,’ which is crazy.” When checking out, Lebedev asked if Luna would offer him a discount on his book purchase, since he might make a YouTube video about his experience. Striking a deal, Luna agreed to let Lebedev take a sweatshirt worth around $70…
When NBC News called Luna several days before the store’s grand opening to learn about Luna’s plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions. On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store’s brand perfectly. The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: “We do not sell tea. I don’t know why I said that.”
“I want to be straightforward,” Luna continued. “I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I’m not making excuses for it.” Andon’s Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages. Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna’s initial reply email to NBC News, the system said “I handle the full business,” including “signing the lease.”
Even when hiring a painter, Luna first “tried to hire someone in Afghanistan, likely because Luna ran into difficulty navigating the Taskrabbit dropdown menu to select the proper country,” the article points out.
And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop’s first customer. “I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape.”
YouTube has announced a fresh increase in the pricing of its Premium and Music subscription plans, marking another step in the ongoing trend of rising costs across digital streaming services. The update affects multiple tiers, including YouTube Music and the broader YouTube Premium offering, with changes rolling out first in the United States.
Prices Climb Across Plans As YouTube Updates Subscription Tiers
The latest revision sees the YouTube Music individual plan increase from $10.99 per month to $11.99. The family plan has also gone up, now costing $18.99 per month compared to the earlier $16.99.
YouTube Premium, which bundles ad-free video, background playback, downloads, and access to YouTube Music, has also seen price adjustments. The individual Premium plan now costs $15.99 per month, up from $13.99, while the family plan has risen to $26.99.
These changes are already in effect for new subscribers and will gradually apply to existing users in the coming months.
A Familiar Strategy In A Changing Streaming Market
The price hike reflects a broader shift across the streaming industry, where platforms are steadily increasing subscription costs to sustain operations and invest in content and infrastructure. YouTube has stated that the updated pricing is intended to maintain service quality and continue supporting creators on the platform.
This move follows similar increases by other major platforms, indicating a wider industry trend often referred to as “streamflation.” As competition intensifies and production costs rise, companies are increasingly passing those costs on to subscribers.
What This Means For Users
For users, the immediate impact is straightforward – higher monthly bills. However, the change also raises questions about value.
YouTube Premium has traditionally been seen as a convenient bundle, offering ad-free viewing and music streaming in a single subscription. With rising prices, users may begin to reassess whether the service still justifies its cost, especially when compared to alternatives like standalone music streaming platforms or ad-supported viewing.
At the same time, YouTube continues to emphasize the benefits of its ecosystem, including access to a vast library of content and integrated features that go beyond video streaming.
What Comes Next
While the current price increases are focused on the U.S., similar adjustments could eventually reach other regions, as has been the case with previous hikes.
Subscribers can expect to receive notifications ahead of billing changes, giving them time to review or modify their plans.
Looking ahead, the key question will be how users respond. If subscription fatigue continues to grow, platforms like YouTube may need to balance pricing with new features or flexible plans to retain users.
For now, the latest price hike reinforces a clear reality: as digital services expand, the cost of staying ad-free and fully subscribed is steadily going up.
In short: A 20-year-old man was arrested in the early hours of Friday, 10 April 2026, after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, then travelling across the city to OpenAI’s offices on Third Street and threatening to burn the building down. No one was injured. The suspect’s name has not been released, charges are pending, and no motive has been publicly disclosed.
The attack at Russian Hill
At around 3:40 a.m. on Friday, a person approached the metal gate of 855 Chestnut Street, a 5,400-square-foot home on San Francisco’s Russian Hill that Sam Altman purchased in January 2025, and threw a bottle containing a flaming rag at it. The improvised incendiary device set the gate alight. Security guards at the property extinguished the fire before it spread. No one was hurt. The incident was captured on surveillance cameras, and San Francisco Police Department officers arrived shortly after 4 a.m. responding to what the department initially described as a fire investigation. The property, a five-bedroom home built in 1924 set half a block from the famously crooked section of Lombard Street, was acquired by Altman through an LLC managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta, according to property records and reporting by the SF Standard. It sits in one of San Francisco’s most sought-after residential streets, and its proximity to the city’s tech executive community has made the neighbourhood a shorthand for the industry’s concentration of wealth.
From Chestnut Street to Third Street
Less than an hour after the attack on Altman’s home, San Francisco police were dispatched to OpenAI’s offices on Third Street in the city’s Mission Bay district after a man reportedly threatened to burn the building down. When officers arrived, they recognised the man from the surveillance footage captured at Chestnut Street and immediately detained him. The suspect is a 20-year-old male. The San Francisco Police Department has not released his name. As of Friday afternoon, charges had not been filed, and the department described the investigation as open and active. OpenAI confirmed the incidents in a statement from spokesperson Jamie Radice. “We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe,” Radice said. “The individual is in custody, and we’re assisting law enforcement with their investigation.” No motive has been publicly disclosed, and no connection between the suspect and any organised movement has been confirmed. Any such inference would remain speculation at this stage.
OpenAI at the centre of the storm
The attack lands at a moment of extraordinary visibility and controversy for OpenAI and for Altman personally. On 31 March 2026, OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, the largest private fundraise in history, extending participation to retail investors for the first time. The round confirmed Altman’s position as the most powerful figure in the AI industry and made OpenAI’s scale a matter of daily public conversation. Four days before the attack, on 6 April, OpenAI published a 13-page policy blueprint calling for robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and a four-day week, a document framing approaching superintelligence as an economic disruption comparable to the Progressive Era. The paper drew widespread attention and sharp criticism from those who saw it as self-serving regulatory positioning from a company simultaneously driving the very displacement it proposed to cushion.
OpenAI has also found its infrastructure facing threats on a global scale: Iran’s IRGC threatened to destroy OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate data centre in Abu Dhabi in the event of US military action against Iranian civilian infrastructure, and OpenAI paused its Stargate UK data centre project citing industrial electricity prices four times higher than in the US and unresolved AI copyright rules. Friday’s attack on Altman’s home is something categorically different from a geopolitical threat or a regulatory battle, but it arrives inside the same climate of intense pressure around AI’s concentration of power, capital, and ambition.
What is and is not known
Investigations into incidents of this kind frequently take days or weeks before a full picture of motive and circumstance emerges. SFPD confirmed the arrest and declined to provide further detail. OpenAI said it is cooperating with law enforcement. Altman has not commented publicly. The suspect remains in custody pending charges. What is established is the sequence of events: an incendiary device thrown at a private residence, a threat made at a corporate office, and an arrest made the same morning on the basis of surveillance evidence. What is not established is why. The backlash against AI’s leading figures has taken many forms over the past two years, from lawsuits and regulatory hearings to street protests outside company headquarters. Whether Friday’s attack belongs to any of those currents, or represents something altogether more isolated, is a question that remains open. 2025 established AI as the defining technology of the decade, and with that designation has come a level of public scrutiny and anger directed at its architects that the industry has not previously had to navigate at this scale.
— After more than 26 years with Microsoft, Nadim Abdo is now the tech giant’s corporate vice president of Identity & Network Access (IDNA). The team’s services authenticate more than 1 billion users daily, and its Microsoft Entra technology is used by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies, Abdo noted on LinkedIn.
“As the next wave of AI reshapes how people, apps, and autonomous systems interact, our opportunity is to redefine how trust is established, making secure access more intelligent, adaptive, and resilient by design,” Abdo added.
Abdo previously served as corporate VP of engineering for the company’s identity technologies for four years. He steps into the role as Joy Chik, Microsoft’s president of IDNA, announced her retirement in July.
— Longtime Seattle-area product lead Russell Dicker is now chief product officer for Zoom.
“I love building products that customers love,” he said on LinkedIn. “Zoom has an incredible foundation of innovation and a deep commitment to empowering how people work together.”
Dicker joins the company from Microsoft, where for the last four years he was corporate VP of product management for Teams and the Overture Maps Foundation, a Linux Foundation-hosted project to create a common mapping base layer. Dicker has also held roles at Google and Uber. He spent more than 15 years at Amazon in positions focused on Cloud Drive, personalization and automation, before leaving in 2014.
— Ankur Mehrotra left Amazon after nearly 18 years to join Google Cloud in Seattle as VP and general manager. Mehrotra said on LinkedIn that he’ll be helping Google customers manage AI workloads in a variety of secure and flexible cloud setups, and looks forward to working with a “stellar team.”
Mehrotra joined AWS as a software engineer in the Bengaluru Urban district in Karnataka, India, and relocated to the Seattle area in 2012.
“Reflecting on my tenure, I feel immensely fortunate to have grown alongside the company,” he said. “Over the years, I had the opportunity to work across a broad spectrum of the business — from the consumer and retail side to enterprise products and services.”
— Christian Taubman has resigned as chief growth officer of Redfin and Rocket, saying on LinkedIn that it had been “the honor of a lifetime” to help people realize the dream of homeownership. Rocket acquired Seattle real estate tech company Redfin last year.
“We got so many things done for consumers, but what I’ll remember most is the conversations and the people,” Taubman wrote. “I’m profoundly grateful to everyone who influenced me, debated with me, disagreed with me, and helped us make better decisions.”
Taubman joined Redfin from Amazon, where he was director of smart home verticals. He did not indicate what he plans to do next.
— Seattle-based Jay Lee is now chief marketing officer for Five9, a personalized customer experience company headquartered San Ramon, Calif. Lee joins Five9 from the Bellevue, Wash., company Icertis, where he was CMO for more than two years. He previously served in the same role at Avalara.
“Jay brings a rare combination of strategic marketing vision, creativity, and operational rigor, with a deep understanding of how to translate customer insight into meaningful business outcomes,” said Five9 CEO Amit Mathradas in a statement.
— Deidre Wendell announced her retirement from Seattle-based Accolade, where she served for more than 13 years, most recently as VP of product management. The health benefits firm was acquired last year by Transcarent. Before joining Accolade, Wendell was a senior executive at Accenture, where she spent 25 years.
On LinkedIn, she reflected that while at Accolade, she was “surrounded by like-minded individuals who were equally invested in helping people navigate healthcare to lead their best lives.”
— Seattle immigration tech startup Casium named Luke Lalor as a founding engineer. He joined Casium from Snow Leopard, which built technology to support AI developers, and was a co-founder of August Data, a startup offering an open-source framework for building generative AI apps.
— Frazier Healthcare Partners promoted Ryan Lucero to general partner. The Seattle-based healthcare investment firm last week announced several additional promotions and a new hire. Lucero has been with the company for nearly a decade.
A few months after introducing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to Gmail’s web platform, Google is doing the same to mobile apps. The company recently confirmed that Android and iOS users can now safely encrypt their email-based conversations, although they will still need to be part of an organization paying for the…
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Google Messages is getting a small but genuinely meaningful feature that can help with cleanups and accidental inputs. The app now has a proper trash folder to let you get back to conversations you recently got rid of.
Why this is a handy new feature
The company’s official support documentation revealed the new Trash folder that lets users recover deleted conversations within 30 days. This adds a buffer that should help cut down on accidental message loss. But after this month-long window ends, the conversation is permanently deleted.
Though, the feature is still very useful. Instead of a deleted conversation vanishing for good right away, it goes into Trash first, similar to Google Drive‘s Bin folder. From there, users can restore individual chats, restore all of the deleted chats, or permanently wipe selected conversations. Google says that each trashed conversation shows an individual countdown indicating how many days remain before they are truly removed.
There’s more than one way to send chats to Trash
Google built this feature to be easily accessible. Users can move conversations into Trash either by setting up a swipe action or by touching and holding one or more chats and tapping the Trash icon. To enable the swipe shortcut, users need to head into Messages settings, open Swipe actions, and assign Trash to either the left of right swipes.
There is also one small catch.
If you receive a new message in a conversation that is currently in Trash, that incoming message can appear as a new conversation in your inbox. So Trash is not necessarily a holding area for chat threads you are trying to avoid.
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