TLDR 2026-09-18

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Big Tech & Startups

Anthropic Says Claude Drives 26% of Its Research and Development (3 minute read)

Anthropic claims that its Claude chatbot drives more than a quarter of its research and development work. There are over 30,000 agents doing research and engineering work at Anthropic at any one time. Its staffers collaborate with the chatbot for about 90% of their work. The company is trying to create a framework to track agents and monitor the amount of work they do.

Huawei's Plan to Become China's Nvidia (3 minute read)

Huawei plans to release two new AI chips next year. The company has now shipped more than 1,000 of its AI-computing systems to over 370 customers. China's AI chip market is projected to grow to $67 billion by 2030. Huawei's chip-making technology still trails Nvidia's, but the company is developing workarounds and new designs to squeeze in more computing power while using less advanced equipment.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Helix 2.5: Zero-Shot 30-Home Generalization (14 minute read)

Helix 2.5 is an advanced neural network pretrained on Index, Figure's global-scale dataset of human behavior. It can tidy living rooms, fold towels, and make beds in homes it has never seen. The model is the first evidence that whole-body intelligence can be learned from human experience and transferred to new scenarios. Index is now generating roughly 35 minutes of new human experience every second - if Helix 2.5 is any guide, more data and compute should translate directly into more of the physical world learned before a robot ever enters a new home.

How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine (17 minute read)

The differences between the versions of the Raptor rocket engine are stark. Many people initially didn't believe SpaceX when the company released a picture of the three generations of the design. The streamlining of the design also brought meaningful gains in performance - the Raptor 3 provides about 35% more thrust than the Raptor 1. This article looks at what specifically SpaceX changed that allowed it to take the Raptor from a tangle of wires and pipes into the svelte, streamlined engine it is today.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Reach 8 million tech professionals reading TLDR (Sponsor)

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Hacking OpenAI (11 minute read)

Researchers chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts in July. The accounts could access internal OpenAI repositories and potentially many other connectors. They used one employee's Codex to open a PR in OpenAI's internal monorepo. This post provides a full timeline of the disclosure process and details about how the vulnerabilities were discovered.

WebKit Features for Safari 27.0 (142 minute read)

The release notes on the WebKit features for Safari 27.0 are the longest yet, detailing 83 features, including Safari MCP. Safari MCP makes working with coding agents dramatically easier. It gives users' agent of choice control over the browser window so it can see how code renders. The MCP provides access to the DOM, network requests, screenshots, and console output, allowing agents to do more with less effort from users.

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Miscellaneous

The Startup That Built OpenAI's Biggest Data Center Is Now Making Tiny Ones (6 minute read)

Crusoe built one of the world's biggest AI supercomputers in Abilene, Texas. The company is now investing heavily in smaller data centers. It is manufacturing them in factories, loading them onto flatbed trucks, and deploying them wherever it can find available power. The company believes this is a faster and cheaper method than solely relying on large construction projects. Giant clusters with hundreds of thousands of chips are useful for training, but inference can be done with considerably smaller amounts of chips.

Inside the White House Tussle to Sway Trump on AI (11 minute read)

Anthropic's Mythos model sparked a shift within the White House as officials started realizing that AI can be used to launch cyberattacks and pose national-security threats. White House officials and AI executives are working on regulatory efforts, but when they disagree, the executives have gone directly to Trump. Trump has remained resolute that the nation needs to accelerate AI development and continue to build the data centers that are powering the AI boom.

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Quick Links

Ready to take your AI agent beyond the browser? (Sponsor)

Get hands-on with context-aware, omnichannel AI agents at Twilio Assemble SF on Sep 23. See live demos, connect with SF builders, and enter to win an M6 Mac Mini! [Save your spot]

Two techniques for working with System One models (8 minute read)

You can turn any LLM into a System One model by batching prompts that generate a single token with structured output.

Bend (GitHub Repo)

Bend is a language for communicating intent to AI.

Automattic's interim CEO and legal chief signed reciprocal severance deals during Mullenweg's brief ouster (6 minute read)

The agreements provide each of them with 12 months of base salary paid out as a lump sum, an accelerated vesting schedule for their equity, the ability to exercise their vested stock options, and another year of health coverage.

Atlassian State of AI SDLC Digital Summit, September 22 (Sponsor)

AI is reshaping how software gets planned, built, and run. Join Atlassian and Vercel's CEOs and leaders from DX, Lovable, and more on how they're adapting for the AI era. Reserve your spot.

Bitcoin's Quantum Migration Debate (29 minute read)

Bitcoin's quantum migration is a question of how to minimize total property-rights violations once elliptic curve signatures no longer reliably authenticate rightful ownership.

The Test Suite Is the New Code Review (15 minute read)

Code review used to be slow, but agentic review took that bottleneck away almost entirely.

How To Write With An LLM (5 minute read)

Use your own words, don't let the model trick you into thinking your draft is good, and let the model act as a copyeditor.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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Hacking OpenAI 👨‍💻, Claude leads R&D 🤖, Safari MCP 🌍