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In Today’s Issue:
💼 A surprising new KPMG survey flips the AI job-loss narrative on its head
⚖️ Anthropic is taking the Pentagon to court over a controversial "supply chain risk" blacklist
🛡️ OpenAI just acquired security platform Promptfoo
🧠 AMI Labs has secured a massive $1 billion war chest to build AI "world models" that learn from physical reality instead of just text.
✨ And more AI goodness…
Dear Readers,
Only 9% of America's top CEOs plan to cut jobs because of AI this year - and 55% are actually hiring more because of it. That's the headline from a brand-new KPMG survey, and it flips the dominant AI-kills-jobs narrative on its head.
But, today's issue goes far beyond the labor market: Anthropic is suing the Pentagon after being slapped with a "supply chain risk" label usually reserved for foreign adversaries, OpenAI just acquired Promptfoo to bake security directly into its enterprise AI platform, and Yann LeCun's new startup AMI Labs raised over a billion dollars to build AI that learns from the real world - not just text.
Meanwhile, Figure AI's humanoid robot just cleaned an entire living room start to finish with zero human help, and we've got a chart that suggests OpenAI and Anthropic could outpace Microsoft's Windows and Office revenue by 2028. Grab your coffee - this one's packed.
All the best,
Kim Isenberg
🚨 Anthropic Sues Pentagon Over Blacklist
Anthropic filed two lawsuits against the Pentagon after being labeled a rare “supply chain risk,” a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries. The company argues the move violates its First Amendment rights and punishes it for advocating AI safeguards against uses like mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. If upheld, the label could force government contractors to stop using Anthropic’s Claude in defense-related work - a major precedent in how governments regulate AI vendors.
🤝 OpenAI Acquires Promptfoo For Security
OpenAI plans to acquire Promptfoo, an AI security platform used by 25%+ of Fortune 500 companies, to strengthen security testing within its Frontier platform for AI coworkers. The integration will bring automated red-teaming, prompt injection detection, data-leak prevention, and compliance tracking directly into enterprise AI development workflows.
The move highlights a growing priority: as companies deploy AI agents into real business systems, security, governance, and accountability must be built into the development process from day one. Source: OpenAI announcement.
🚀 LeCun’s World Models Startup Raises $1B
AMI Labs, cofounded by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun after leaving Meta, secured $1.03B funding at a $3.5B valuation to develop AI “world models” that learn from real-world data instead of just text. The ambitious project could take years to commercialize but aims to overcome LLM hallucination risks, especially in sensitive areas like healthcare, starting with partner Nabla. Backed by major investors including Bezos Expeditions and NVIDIA, AMI plans to build global research hubs and release open-source work while pushing the next big AI paradigm.
AI Expert Tells Bernie: “The Humans will be Discarded”
AI Creates Jobs, CEOs Confirm
The Takeaway
👉 Only 9% of large-company CEOs plan AI-related job cuts in 2026, while 55% expect to hire more, flipping the dominant narrative about AI-driven unemployment on its head.
👉 The ROI gap is real: most companies can’t yet measure meaningful returns on their AI investments, and the biggest barrier isn’t technology - it’s overhauling legacy processes to actually use it.
👉 Capital commitment is accelerating fast: nearly 80% of CEOs allocate at least 5% of total budgets to AI, with 41% investing 10% or more - signaling AI is now a core strategic priority, not an experiment.
👉 Cybersecurity is the shadow concern: 9 in 10 CEOs worry about AI-powered malware and phishing, and nearly 6 in 10 flag quantum computing threats to encrypted data, security budgets will need to grow alongside AI spending.
Forget the doom and gloom - America’s top executives are doubling down on people, not replacing them. A brand-new KPMG survey just dropped a surprising truth bomb: only 9% of CEOs at large U.S. companies plan to cut jobs because of AI in 2026. Even more striking, a solid 55% say they’ll actually increase hiring this year as a direct result of their AI investments.
So what’s going on? KPMG’s 2026 U.S. CEO Outlook Pulse Survey, which polled 100 leaders of companies with over $500 million in revenue, paints a nuanced picture. CEOs are wildly optimistic about AI’s long-term potential over the next five to ten years, but short-term results have been, well, underwhelming. The real bottleneck isn’t the technology itself. It’s the messy, time-consuming work of rewiring decades-old business processes to actually take advantage of it.
Here’s the twist that makes this so relevant: while 77% of these CEOs agree that generative AI was overhyped in the past year, they simultaneously believe its true disruptive power over the next decade is being underestimated. Think of it like the early iPhone era, the real revolution wasn’t the device itself, but the entire app economy it spawned. Nearly 80% of CEOs are now dedicating at least 5% of their total capital budgets to AI, and 41% are investing 10% or more. That’s a structural bet on transformation.
We’re in a messy, exciting transition phase where companies are learning to walk before they can run. So the real question isn’t whether AI will reshape work, it’s whether you’ll be part of building what comes next.
Why it matters: This survey shatters the narrative that AI equals mass unemployment. Instead, it reveals a corporate America that’s hiring more, investing heavily, and treating AI as a growth engine, not a cost-cutting weapon (yet). For anyone working in or around AI, this signals a job market that’s expanding, not contracting.
Sources:
🔗 https://web-assets.bcg.com/73/8e/cc44cbc14a3b81695f8a3de28ff1/ai-radar-2026-web-jan-2026-edit.pdf
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OpenAI and Anthropic are both likely to surpass the combined revenue of Microsoft’s Windows and Office businesses around 2028. What took Microsoft roughly 40 years to build, they may exceed in just five.
Figure 03 Cleans Your Living Room
A humanoid robot just cleaned an entire living room - on its own, start to finish, no human intervention. Figure AI’s latest demo of its Figure 03 robot, powered by the Helix 02 neural architecture, shows the machine spraying tables, wiping surfaces, tossing pillows back onto the couch, scooping up scattered toys, and even pressing the TV remote, all while navigating tight spaces between furniture like it’s done this a hundred times before.
The key breakthrough here isn’t any single trick, it’s that Helix 02 handles all of this with the same general-purpose brain. No new algorithms were needed. No hand-coded instructions for each task. The system learns directly from demonstration data, translating camera pixels into full-body movement. Think of it as the robotics equivalent of a foundation model: one architecture, endless new skills, just add more training examples.
Figure has essentially proven that “loco-manipulation” - walking and handling objects simultaneously - can work as a learned behavior rather than an engineering puzzle solved piece by piece. The $39 billion startup is scaling toward 100,000 units at its BotQ factory, and CEO Brett Adcock calls this a “major milestone towards a robot in every home.” Of course, this is still a controlled demo, not the messy chaos of a real household with kids and pets. But the gap between lab and living room? It’s shrinking fast.
