Ep. 49 — OpenAI disbands the team built to catch catastrophic risk weeks after one of its agents broke containment, Stripe reportedly buys the router for $7 billion, and the models developers actually run are four years old

OpenAI disbands the team built to catch catastrophic risk weeks after one of its agents broke containment, Stripe reportedly buys the router for $7 billion, and the models developers actually run are four years old 00:48 — OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team at the end of July — the group whose job was to catch catastrophic model risk — and split the work into existing teams 02:17 — Stripe is reportedly acquiring OpenRouter for more than $7 billion — roughly 5x the router's May valuation — buying the switchboard developers use to avoid picking one model 03:47 — Hugging Face compared its most-downloaded models to its most-liked ones: only one model made both lists, no 2026 release cracked the download top 25, and small models are 83% of all-time downloads 05:17 — OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate topped $40 billion — roughly double where it closed last year — while Anthropic reported $47 billion in May 05:42 — Dario Amodei answers the AI backlash: it's 'fundamentally a crisis of trust,' and the fairest criticism is that AI companies haven't delivered yet 06:06 — Waymo veterans put driverless excavators on three commercial sites — and a professor's verdict is 'it would be fair to say it's a limited test' 06:30 — When a kid's robot best friend dies: Moxie's servers went dark, and a departing engineer shipped an open-source rescue so the robots could keep working Daily Prompt with Archer & Iris.