2026/04/13

Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to talk to employees, public opinion on AI keeps splitting further apart, and Stanford's latest data shows the AI race is tighter than most people think. ## Meta builds an AI Zuckerberg for employee interactions Meta is developing a photorealistic, AI-powered 3D character of CEO Mark Zuckerberg that can interact with employees in real time. The Financial Times reported Monday that the company has been training the digital likeness on Zuckerberg's mannerisms, tone, publicly available statements, and his recent thinking on company strategy — the idea being that workers could talk to a digital Zuckerberg instead of waiting for face time with the real one. Zuckerberg is personally involved in testing and refining the likeness, and reportedly spends five to ten hours a week coding on AI projects. The AI Zuckerberg is separate from another internal project called "CEO agent," which helps him retrieve information and cut through bureaucratic layers. Meta isn't alone here — Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi revealed earlier this year that employees had already built an AI clone of him. **Source:** [Financial Times via PYMNTS](https://www.pymnts.com/meta/2026/meta-developing-ai-likeness-of-ceo-mark-zuckerberg/) ## Public opinion on AI keeps splitting apart A new MIT Technology Review piece pulls together recent survey data showing just how far apart experts and the public are on AI. The gap is widest on jobs: 73% of AI experts think AI will have a positive impact on work, while only 23% of the American public agrees. Pew Research found that half of U.S. adults feel more concerned than excited about AI in daily life — only 10% feel the opposite. The divide extends to infrastructure. A Quinnipiac University survey found 65% of Americans oppose having AI data centers built in their communities. And among all countries surveyed, Americans trust their government least to regulate AI appropriately. The piece argues that the conflicting narratives — AI as gold rush versus AI as bubble, job creator versus job killer — are making it harder for anyone to form a clear picture. **Source:** [MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/13/1135720/why-opinion-on-ai-is-so-divided/) ## Stanford's AI Index shows the race is closer than you'd think MIT Technology Review also published a breakdown of Stanford's 2026 AI Index. As of March 2026, Anthropic leads AI model rankings on Arena (a community-driven platform where users compare LLM outputs on identical prompts), with xAI, Google, and OpenAI close behind. Chinese models from DeepSeek and Alibaba lag only modestly. AI adoption is now outpacing both the personal computer and the internet. AI companies are generating revenue faster than any previous tech boom, but they're also burning through hundreds of billions on data centers and chips. The top models are separated by thin margins, and competition has moved from raw capability to cost, reliability, and whether the tools actually work in practice. **Source:** [MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/13/1135675/want-to-understand-the-current-state-of-ai-check-out-these-charts/) ## Open Source Spotlight **OpenClaw v2026.4.12** dropped this week. The new Active Memory plugin gives OpenClaw a memory sub-agent that automatically pulls in relevant context from past conversations — no need to manually tell it to remember things. The macOS release adds an experimental local MLX speech provider for Talk Mode, and a new CLI exec-policy command lets users manage tool execution permissions locally. The Dreaming module also gained ChatGPT import ingestion, so users can bring conversation history into OpenClaw's memory wiki. ([GitHub](https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.4.12)) **Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw's creator.** Peter Steinberger posted on X that his Claude account was suspended over "suspicious" activity. The ban came shortly after Anthropic changed pricing so that Claude subscriptions no longer cover third-party harnesses like OpenClaw — users now pay separately through the API. Steinberger said he was already using the API as required. The ban was reversed within hours after the post went viral, and an Anthropic engineer publicly stated they've never banned anyone for using OpenClaw. ([TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/anthropic-temporarily-banned-openclaws-creator-from-accessing-claude/)) **A critical OpenClaw vulnerability was disclosed.** CVE-2026-33579, the sixth pairing-related vulnerability in six weeks, allowed anyone with the lowest access level to approve their own request for full admin control. Researchers at Blink found the flaw, and also reported that roughly 63% of internet-connected OpenClaw instances were running with no authentication at all. Additional CVEs disclosed in April include a privilege escalation bug in gateway-authenticated plugin routes and a path traversal flaw in sandbox enforcement. ([Android Headlines](https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/04/openclaw-critical-security-vulnerability-admin-takeover.html)) *Sources verified. All claims drawn from source articles published April 10-13, 2026.*

2026/04/10

OpenAI finally added a middle-tier Pro plan, and a new round of reporting says nearly half of planned U.S. AI data centers are stalled waiting on power gear from China. Andy Jassy defended Amazon's $200B capex by swinging at half the tech industry, Bernie Sanders called for a data center moratorium in the WSJ, and pro-Iran accounts are running one of the more effective AI-video propaganda operations online. ## ChatGPT Gets a $100/Month Tier OpenAI introduced a $100/month ChatGPT Pro tier, filling the gap between the $20 Plus plan and the existing $200 Pro plan. TechCrunch reported the launch on April 9, framing it as a response to power users who had moderate-to-heavy usage but balked at the $200 jump. The feature breakdown across the three tiers is still shaking out, but this is the first meaningful pricing move OpenAI has made in over a year. **Source:** [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/09/chatgpt-pro-plan-100-month-codex/) ## Half of Planned U.S. AI Data Centers Delayed or Canceled Roughly half of the U.S. data center builds planned for 2026 have been delayed or canceled, held up by shortages of transformers, switchgear, and other heavy electrical gear that mostly still ships from China. About 12 GW of capacity was supposed to come online this year. Only about a third of it is under active construction. Meanwhile Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are planning more than $650 billion combined on AI capacity in 2026. U.S. imports of Chinese high-power transformers jumped from under 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 through late 2025. The onshoring story is not catching up to the demand. **Source:** [Tom's Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/half-of-planned-us-data-center-builds-have-been-delayed-or-canceled-growth-limited-by-shortages-of-power-infrastructure-and-parts-from-china-the-ai-build-out-flips-the-breakers) ## Jassy Swings at Nvidia, Intel, and Starlink Amazon CEO Andy Jassy published his 2026 shareholder letter defending roughly $200 billion in capex. "We're not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch," he wrote, citing customer commitments already in place for a substantial portion of it. The letter takes direct shots at Nvidia and Intel. Jassy pitched Trainium as a Nvidia alternative and said Amazon's three custom silicon lines (Graviton, Trainium, Nitro) now generate more than $20 billion in annualized revenue at triple-digit growth. Graviton is used by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers. Amazon Leo, the Starlink competitor launching mid-2026, already has contracts with Delta, AT&T, Vodafone, Australia's NBN, and NASA. **Source:** [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/09/amazon-ceo-takes-aim-at-nvidia-intel-starlink-more-in-annual-shareholder-letter/) ## Sanders Calls for a Data Center Moratorium Bernie Sanders published a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear," arguing Congress needs to move before a handful of billionaires reshape the economy without democratic input. He named Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Ellison directly and cited AI industry lobbying spend of more than $185 million. Sanders also announced joint legislation with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a federal moratorium on new AI data center construction until national safeguards are in place. He cited polling showing 74% of Americans think the government is not doing enough on AI. Landing in the same week as the data center shortage coverage, the moratorium proposal hits a very different conversation than it would have three months ago. **Source:** [Senator Sanders op-ed](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/op-eds/ai-poses-unprecedented-threats-congress-must-act-now/) ## Pro-Iran Accounts Run a Slick AI Video Operation Wired and Fortune reported on a pro-Iran influence campaign producing AI-generated video memes in the visual style of The Lego Movie, mocking Trump in fluent English and racking up millions of views. The main account behind the Lego-style videos is Akhbar Enfejari, which translates to "Explosive News," and its content has been reposted by Iranian state media. Analysts say the production quality and steady output point to state or state-adjacent involvement. The videos target Trump personally, referencing bruising on his hand, MAGA infighting, and Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing. **Source:** [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/what-are-lego-videos-ai-generated-iran-propaganda/) ## Open Source Spotlight **OpenClaw v2026.4.9** shipped with a grounded REM backfill lane for the memory/dreaming stack, letting old daily notes replay into Dreams and durable memory without a second memory stack. The control UI gained a structured diary view with backfill/reset controls, and provider manifests can now declare `providerAuthAliases` so provider variants share env vars and auth profiles. [Release notes](https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.4.9). *Sources verified. All claims drawn from source articles published April 3–9, 2026.*

2026/04/09

Meta launches its first proprietary AI model, Anthropic keeps its most dangerous one under lock and key, and half the country's data centers can't get built fast enough. ## Meta Debuts Muse Spark, Its First Proprietary AI Model Meta released Muse Spark this week, the company's first major AI model built under new chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. It's a departure from Meta's open-source playbook -- Muse Spark is proprietary, with Meta saying only that it hopes to open-source future versions. The model accepts voice, text, and image inputs but produces text-only output. It powers Meta's AI app and smart glasses, along with features across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Meta says Muse Spark is competitive with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, though the company admits a gap remains in coding tasks. A "Contemplating" mode for complex reasoning is planned. For now, it's US-only. The bigger story here is the strategic shift: Meta built its brand on open-source Llama models, and going proprietary signals that Wang's team is playing a different game. **Source:** [Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/muse-spark-meta-open-source-closed-source/) ## Suleyman Says AI Development Won't Hit a Wall Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman pushed back on skeptics in a MIT Technology Review piece, arguing that predictions of an AI plateau keep being wrong. His core point: compute growth is exponential, not linear. Training data going into frontier models has grown by roughly 1 trillion times since 2010, from about 10^14 flops to over 10^26 flops today. Suleyman says the compute explosion is still in its early stages. He directly addresses those pointing to Moore's Law slowing as evidence of a ceiling, arguing that chip speed is only one input -- data delivery and networking are scaling too. **Source:** [MIT Technology Review](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/08/1135398/mustafa-suleyman-ai-future/) ## Anthropic Limits Access to Mythos, Its Most Capable -- and Most Dangerous -- AI Model Anthropic released a preview of Mythos, a frontier model so capable at finding security vulnerabilities that the company won't give it to the public. Mythos can find tens of thousands of software vulnerabilities that even advanced human researchers would miss. Only 40 organizations get access, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Cisco, and the Linux Foundation. Anthropic is providing up to $100 million in usage credits to partner companies and $4 million to open-source security organizations through Project Glasswing, its initiative to share cyber defense learnings. The reasoning is straightforward: the same capabilities that make a model useful for defense make it dangerous in the wrong hands. **Source:** [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/anthropic-limits-access-to-mythos-its-new-cybersecurity-ai-model/) ## Milla Jovovich's Open-Source AI Memory System Goes Viral Actress Milla Jovovich and developer Ben Sigman released MemPalace, a free, open-source AI memory system that gives LLMs persistent, cross-session memory. The project hit 19,500+ GitHub stars within days of its April 6 launch. MemPalace organizes conversations into wings (people and projects), halls (types of memory), and rooms (specific ideas). Unlike cloud-based alternatives like Mem0 and Zep, it runs entirely locally with zero API costs and stores conversation data verbatim rather than using AI to extract summaries. It supports Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Cursor via MCP. The project claims the highest score on the LongMemEval benchmark among free tools, though those numbers have been revised and debated since launch. **Source:** [GitHub](https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace) ## Half of Planned US Data Center Builds Delayed or Canceled Despite Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft planning to spend more than $650 billion on AI capacity, close to half of planned US data center builds in 2026 have been delayed or canceled. The bottleneck isn't power itself but electrical equipment. Transformers, switchgear, and batteries are in short supply. High-power transformer lead times have stretched from 24-30 months before 2020 to up to five years today. That's a problem when AI data center deployment cycles run under 18 months. China remains the world's largest producer of the electrical equipment these builds need, with US imports of high-power transformers from China surging from fewer than 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 in 2025. Only about one-third of the 12 GW of data center capacity expected in 2026 is currently under active construction. **Source:** [Tom's Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/half-of-planned-us-data-center-builds-have-been-delayed-or-canceled-growth-limited-by-shortages-of-power-infrastructure-and-parts-from-china-the-ai-build-out-flips-the-breakers) ## Open Source Spotlight **Google Gemma 4 (Apache 2.0)** -- Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 under the Apache 2.0 license, the first time Google has used a fully permissive open-source license for the Gemma family. The release includes four model sizes from a 2B edge variant to a 31B dense model, with multimodal capabilities, 256K context windows, and native support for agentic workflows. Gemma models have been downloaded over 400 million times, with more than 100,000 community variants. [Google Open Source Blog](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2026/03/gemma-4-expanding-the-gemmaverse-with-apache-20.html) **OpenClaw v2026.4.9** -- This week's release adds a grounded REM backfill system for replaying old daily notes into durable memory, a structured diary view with timeline navigation, character-vibes evaluation reports for QA, and a new provider auth alias system so plugins can share credentials without custom wiring. [GitHub](https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.4.9) *Sources verified. All claims drawn from source articles published April 2-9, 2026.*

2026/04/06

Google shipped offline dictation on iPhone, OpenAI sketched out robot taxes and public wealth funds, and Alibaba's Accio is compressing product sourcing for small sellers.

2026/02/27

We're moving from asking an LLM to behave to shipping software-defined agent environments. Skill files are infrastructure — and it's time to treat them like it.

2026/02/19

StrongDM's three-person AI team built production security software with two rules: no human writes code, and no human reviews code. Here's how they actually pulled it off.