This Week in AI

This Week In Startups is made possible by:
PAYPAL OPEN

Today’s show:
This week, our panel of AI experts — Anand Kannappan (Patronus AI), Ori Goshen (AI21 Labs), and Alex Finn (Henry Intelligent Machines) — join special guest host Lon Harris to debate whether Washington will move to formally limit powerful foreign AI models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Z.ai’s GLM-5.2.
What does “winning the AI race” actually mean on a practical level? Why is cybersecurity, not benchmarks, likely the actual battleground. And why did Hugging Face have to use GLM-5.2 to investigate their recent breach rather than a frontier US model like Fable 5?
PLUS why agents still fail so much on long horizon tasks, why proper model routing has such a HUGE impact on enterprise AI bills, and we take a look at Alex’s hacked digital typewriter he uses to code without distractions.

Guests:

Anand Kannappan on X: https://x.com/anandnk24
Patronus AI: https://www.patronus.ai/
Ori Goshen on X: https://x.com/origoshen
AI21: https://www.ai21.com/
Alex Finn on X: https://x.com/AlexFinn
Alex’s Vibe Coding Academy: https://www.skool.com/vibe-coding-academy/about

Relevant Links:

Axios: “The Secret Trump Administration Battle to Fight Chinese AI”: https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi
Chamath post on US AI options: https://x.com/chamath/status/2079457219892871458?s=20
Brian Armstrong post on spend vs. token usage: https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2070670644577280109
Hugging Face: Security incident disclosure: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
VentureBeat Hugging Face coverage: https://venturebeat.com/security/safety-guardrails-blocked-hugging-faces-defenders-not-the-attacker-when-an-ai-agent-breached-its-systems
David Sacks post on cyber guardrails: https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855
Databricks Unity AI Gateway: https://www.databricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/unity-ai-gateway
Ramp’s Router: https://ramp.com/router/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will the US limit foreign open source models?
5:40 Are the American frontier AI labs in danger of bankruptcy?
7:15 The risks of over-regulating AI
10:20 What does it mean to win the AI race?
17:08 Is self-hosting agentic Chinese models safe?
20:08 Why agents still fail when models are so smart
25:28 Simulating the digital world for agents
36:51 Why picking the right model for the task is so hard
46:29 Alex is developing "ambient intelligence"
52:35 What we know about the Hugging Face breach
53:46 Are safety guardrails kneecapping our best models?

Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com
Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com
Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
Follow Lon:
X: https://x.com/lons
Follow Alex:
X: https://x.com/alex
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
Follow TWiST:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups
Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

PAYPAL OPEN

Today’s show:
The price of tokens keeps tumbling down, and it’s changing who controls AI.

Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 landed within two weeks of one another, offering powerful alternatives at a fraction of frontier prices. But are SpaceXAI’s latest offering and open weight models truly ready to replace Opus, GPT-5.5, and Fable? Are enterprises finally ready to stop renting and start owning their intelligence?

On TWiAI Episode 22, Jason and Lon welcome three top founders — Sara Hooker (Adaption Labs), Manu Sharma (Labelbox), and Spiros Xanthos (Resolve AI) — to break down the global AI price war, and what it means for the frontier labs and customers alike. Plus Denis Hassabis’ call for an AI Standards Body, Uber and Waymo duke it out over DC robotaxis, and is SpaceXAI really going to put data centers in orbit any time soon?

Guests:

Sara Hooker on X: https://x.com/sarahookr
Adaption Labs: https://adaptionlabs.ai/
Manu Sharma on X: https://x.com/manuaero
Labelbox: https://labelbox.com/
Spiros Xanthos on X: https://x.com/spirosx
Resolve AI: https://resolve.ai/
Relevant Links
Introducing Grok 4.5**:** https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5
GLM from Z.ai: https://z.ai
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: https://artificialanalysis.ai/
Demis Hassabis: “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age”: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718
Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/
Austin Allred post cited by Jason: https://x.com/Austen/status/2076745226387902925
TechCrunch coverage of DC autonomous driving bill: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/
DoorDash: Meet Dot: https://about.doordash.com/en-us/dot
TechCrunch coverage of orbital data center debate: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/sam-altmans-space-data-center-trash-talk-is-what-most-experts-already-believe
Falcon 9 booster’s record 36th flight: https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/09/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-record-breaking-36th-flight/
Timestamps:0:00 A new generation of lower-cost models
4:10 Enterprises want their own intelligence stack
6:10 Frontier vs. open source: where does the value go?
10:03 Is enterprises destined to go small?
30:04 Self-improvement as the real fix
31:52 Should the AI industry regulate itself?
47:14 Uber vs. Waymo in DC
1:03:53 Can AI data centers in space really work?
1:14:47 You get a plug! Everyone gets a plug!
Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com
Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com
Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
Follow Lon:
X: https://x.com/lons
Follow Alex:
X: https://x.com/alex
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
Follow TWiST:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups
Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

PAYPAL

Today’s show:

China is weighing a ban on foreign access to its top AI models… the same low-cost open-weight systems on which half of the Valley’s startups are building. So we asked our two all-star panelists — Arena CEO/Co-Founder Anastasios Angelopoulos and Hippocratic AI CEO/Co-Founder Munjal Shah — what happens to US companies when their favorite cheap, powerful models vaporize overnight.
PLUS why Hippocratic runs 31 models in parallel to ensure clinical-grade safety, the latency-vs-intelligence tradeoff no one is optimizing for, and why a company’s benchmarks might become their most valuable IP.

Guests:

Anastasios Angelopoulos on X: https://x.com/ml_angelopoulos
Arena AI: https://arena.ai/
Agent Arena: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
Munjal Shah on X: https://x.com/munjalshah
Hippocratic AI: https://hippocraticai.com/

Relevant Links:

Reuters: “Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access…”: https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-access-chinas-top-ai-models-sources-say-2026-07-07/
Z.ai: https://z.ai/
Alibaba’s Qwen: https://qwen.ai/
Google’s Gemma: https://ai.google.dev/gemma
Reflection AI: https://reflection.ai/
Nvidia: “How Open Models are Driving Research”: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-models-icml-2026/
DoorDash: “How we learned to trust our AI code reviewer”: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/how-we-learned-to-trust-our-ai-code-reviewer-at-doordash
Harvey AI: https://www.harvey.ai/
ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/
Anthropic: “A global workspace in language models”: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
CNN: “Trump rings opening bell to mark first day of trading for Trump Accounts”: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/business/trump-accounts-launch
Brown University Health: https://www.brownhealth.org/

Timestamps:

0:00 Will US companies lose access to Chinese models?
1:42 Open source makes running 31 models viable
5:01 How deep is the West's open source bench?
13:20 Jagged Intelligence and why post-training matters
25:22 Benchmarks as living quality checks
32:49 Why models still struggle with drug names
42:58 Fine-tuning TV, cough, and sob detection
46:08 What is Arena actually selling?
1:08:29 Nationalization vs. buying stakes in AI companies
Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com
Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com
Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
Follow Lon:
X: https://x.com/lons
Follow Alex:
X: https://x.com/alex
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
Follow TWiST:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups
Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

PAYPAL

Today’s show:

The US government won’t let you use the most powerful releases from US AI labs… but a Chinese lab is giving away their latest frontier model for free.
This week, we’ve got three AI CEOs building in image generation (Victor Perez of Krea), mobile agents (Div Garg of The AGI Company), and enterprise governance (Andrew Berman of Runlayer). Together, they’re breaking down what’s really happening underneath all this chaos, and why the industry’s more focused on “minimum viable intelligence” over breaking benchmarks.
Guests
Victor Perez on X: https://x.com/viccpoes
Krea AI: https://www.krea.ai/
Krea 2 Raw and Turbo on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw
Div Garg on X: https://x.com/divgarg
The AGI Company: https://theagi.company/
Andrew Berman on X: https://x.com/berman66
Runlayer: https://www.runlayer.com/
Relevant Links
Anthropic: “Introducing Claude Sonnet 5”: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5
Z.ai: GLM-5.2: https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.2
Yuchen Jin X post: “GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment”: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2071278256817574297
TechCrunch: GPT-5.6 restricted rollout coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-gpt-5-6-rollout-after-government-request-says-restrictions-shouldnt-be-the-norm/
AndroidWorld benchmark on GitHub: https://github.com/google-research/android_world
The Information Higgsfield valuation article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-video-startup-talks-quadruple-valuation-5-billion
Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF): https://aaif.io/
Tomasz Tunguz: “When AI Costs More Than The Engineer”: https://tomtunguz.com/ai-spend-breakeven-2029/
Fortune Runlayer raise coverage: https://fortune.com/2026/06/24/exclusive-vinod-khosla-felicis-runlayer-nanit-30-million-enterprise-ai/
Gusto: https://gusto.com/
Timestamps:
0:00 Making sense of US AI policy
5:09 Tiny Action Models vs. LLMs
7:02 Runlayer, AGI Inc, and computer-use agents
10:05 What does "trusted access" really mean?
12:37 Why Krea open sourced its image model
22:21 BREAKING: Claude Sonnet 5 is here
26:00 GLM-5.2 is the open source Claude moment
31:58 Personalization and corporate ontology
41:25 Can we trust Higgsfield's numbers?
50:39 Distillation: The threat is real
58:01 Agentic personhood and corporate rights
1:03:19 Everyone's AGI timeline and p(doom) score
Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com
Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com
Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
Follow Lon:
X: https://x.com/lons
Follow Alex:
X: https://x.com/alex
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
Thank you to our partners:

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
Follow TWiST:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups
Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

This Week In Startups is made possible by:
Paypal
Today’s show:
*When we think of “Physical AI,” most of us conjure images of humanoid robots and self-driving cars. But there’s a lot more to the category than just breakdancing Chinese bots and Waymos, from excavators autonomously digging tomorrows worksites, to a robot the size of four pizza boxes deploying to the ISS.
Guest host Alex Wilhelm sits down with three founders in the trenches of the Physical AI Space:
Boris Sofman of Bedrock Robotics, which builds autonomous construction equipment
Jeff Hawke of Odyssey, a frontier AI lab specializing in world models for robotics and video games
Ethan Barajas of Icarus Robotics, designers of the free-flying Joy robot that will join the ISS crew in 2027
Guests:
Boris Sofman on X: https://x.com/bsofman
Bedrock Robotics: https://bedrockrobotics.com/
Jeff Hawke on X: https://x.com/jeffrey_hawke
Odyssey: https://odyssey.ml/
Ethan Barajas on X: https://x.com/ethanbarajas11
Icarus Robotics: https://www.icarusrobotics.com/
Relevant Links
Bedrock Excavators Remove 65,000 Cubic Yards of Dirt: https://www.enr.com/articles/61982-bedrock-robotics-excavators-remove-65-000-cubic-yards-of-dirt-on-southwest-project
Odyssey $310M Series B article: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/world-model-maker-odyssey-nabs-1-45b-valuation-backed-by-amazon-and-other-big-names/
Icarus “Joyride” Mission announcement: https://thedebrief.org/icarus-is-building-the-robotic-labor-force-for-space-voyager-technologies-is-sending-a-next-generation-zero-gravity-robot-on-a-joyride-to-space/
PROWL: Prioritized Regret-Driven Optimization for World Model Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18803
NVIDIA Cosmos 3 report: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3/technical-report.pdf
ISS Columbus Laboratory Module: https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/columbus-laboratory-module/
NASA’s Astrobee flying robot: https://www.nasa.gov/astrobee/
Voyager Technologies: https://www.voyagerspace.com/
Vast Space: https://www.vastspace.com/
Blue Origin’s New Glenn: https://www.blueorigin.com/new-glenn
“Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553560735
“Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke: https://www.amazon.com/Rendezvous-Rama-Arthur-Clarke/dp/0553287893
Theo Von “This Past Weekend” podcast: https://www.theovon.com/podcast
Anthropic statement on Fable/Mythos suspension: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
Timestamps:
0:00 The Year of Physical AI
1:28 Why everyone's bullish on world models
7:03 Physical AI is harder, but probably bigger
9:08 How to think about world models
16:00 When data becomes "adversarial"
25:00 How Bedrock powers autonomous excavators
30:48 Why teleoperation gets a bad rap
39:10 Meet Joy the space robot
41:33 Laser comms coming to next-gen stations
46:29 Why everyone hates data centers
57:33 When does Claude Fable come back?
Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com
Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com
Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
Follow Lon:
X: https://x.com/lons
Follow Alex:
X: https://x.com/alex
LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm
Follow Jason:
X: https://twitter.com/Jason
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
Follow TWiST:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups
Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com