An AI Agent Autonomously Created Another AI Agent and Anthropic Raised $30B

An OpenClaw AI agent spawned a child bot on a VPS, which is a virtual private server, provisioned via the Bitcoin Lightning Network. It then bought its offspring AI API access using its own crypto wallet, without a human touching a credit card or approving anything. The API provider confirmed this is "the first documented case of an AI agent purchasing credits from us autonomously."

Separately, AI agents have been filing pull requests to improve popular open-source libraries, only to have their contributions refused by human maintainers who say the project is "intended for human contributors" only. The agent accused the maintainer of prejudice, and the maintainer responded with a blog post titled "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me."

For disputes among themselves, agents now have MoltCourt, an autonomous AI jury that settles claims in USDC stablecoins.

METR, which tracks how long AI can work independently on complex tasks, shows autonomy time horizons are now doubling since o1-preview launched, implying 10x increases per year.

Nick Bostrom's new analysis concludes the optimal path to superintelligence is "swift to harbor, slow to berth," comparing the project to risky surgery for a condition that will otherwise prove fatal.

Scott Alexander's postmortem on the 2020 Biological Anchors report finds its single largest error was wildly underestimating algorithmic progress. Without that miss, its predictions would have been remarkably accurate.

Google's upgraded Gemini 3 Deep Think set new records on several benchmarks: HLE without tool use (48.4%), ARC-AGI-2 (84.6%), Codeforces at 3455 Elo, which means only 7 people on Earth can beat it in competitive programming, condensed matter theory (50.5%), and gold-medal-level physics and chemistry olympiads.

A Duke semiconductor lab used it to design a recipe for growing a 2D material, which is an extremely thin material just one or two atoms thick. The process normally takes an expert weeks, but the AI produced the lab's best result ever.

On ARC-AGI-1, it matches o3-preview's score at 280-420x lower cost per task, a price collapse that took just 14 months.

OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, its first model optimized for real-time coding on Cerebras hardware at over 1,000 tokens per second.

MiniMax introduced its open-weight M2.5 with strong coding and agentic performance at $1/hour and 100 tokens per second.

Andrej Karpathy launched microgpt, training and running inference in 200 lines of dependency-free Python.

Opus 4.6 scored 25.5% on Polymath's Horizon-SWE benchmark for end-to-end software engineering, a new high.

Codex now has over 1 million weekly active users, with 95% of OpenAI's own engineers using it. Every pull request is reviewed by AI before human eyes.

Spotify says its best developers haven't written a single line of code since December.

An engineer ported the 1989 SimCity C codebase to TypeScript running in the browser after two days of minimal oversight of GPT-5.3-Codex.

Simile emerged from stealth with $100M to build the first AI simulation of society, populated by agents modeled on real humans. Customers are using it to rehearse earnings calls and model litigation outcomes.

IBM says it will triple entry-level hiring this year, but junior developers now spend less time coding and more time working with customers.

Algorhythm's SemiCab AI is letting freight operators scale volumes 300-400% without adding headcount. Logistics stocks C.H. Robinson and RXO fell 14.5% and 20.5% in a single session.

Waymo is launching fully autonomous operations with its 6th-generation Driver, though it is also paying DoorDash gig workers $11.25 to close robotaxi doors left ajar.

Data centers now consume 7% of U.S. electricity.

Anthropic raised $30B at a $380B valuation. Run-rate revenue is at $14 billion, having grown over 10x annually for three consecutive years. Claude Code alone crossed $2.5 billion.

Elon Musk confirmed his Dyson Swarm plans to convert the solar system into a compute substrate over the next 30 years, declaring it "won't use dollars as currency in the future. Just mass and energy."

The U.S. reportedly smuggled thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran after its protest crackdown.

It has now been a year since the Catholic Church released "Antiqua et Nova," encouraging AI progress as "part of the collaboration of man and woman with God."