john tan

turning companies ai-native

[john tan @john_tans]

Super smart pivot 💪💪💪

[David Hsu @dvdhsu]

There’s more code being written every day, by more people, than ever before. (GitHub commits are up 14x year over year.) Same thing is happening inside companies: non-engineers using CC / Codex who want to ship to production. All of it works on localhost — but no devops or IT team wants to deploy it to prod without putting it behind auth, access controls, or having an audit trail.

[john tan @john_tans]

turns out you can teach old dogs new tricks

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

Many managers I have talked to have debated whether the strongest future builders are senior folks (who have more experience / taste / seen-some-shit wisdom) vs younger folks (who are faster at adapting to new technology and are more digital native.)

So far, the oldies are winning.

[john tan @john_tans]

the trillion dollar loop that can be used for any workflow in any business.

step 2-3 is where most companies refuse to act on.

[a16z @a16z]

The SpaceX iteration loop:

1. Question every requirement.
2. Delete any part or process you can.
3. Simplify and optimize.
4. Accelerate cycle time.
5. Automate.

Most engineering organizations skip directly to step five. They take a process that should not exist and then automate it.

SpaceX runs the steps in order, every time, on every part of the company. When the Algorithm has been run enough times on a piece of hardware, it starts to look like nothing else in the industry.

@elonmusk

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

Just as Starlink provided the cashflow to scale Falcon 9, datacenters in space will fund the Starship build out and the mission to Mars.

SpaceX is going to look a lot like an AI infrastructure company for the next few years.

[john tan @john_tans]

One of the most interesting breakdowns you will see of AI spend across functions…

AI is not eating software - it’s eating up all functions and giving judgement back to individuals

Finance is surprisingly low here!

[Marty Kausas @marty_kausas]

Here's our forecasted Claude spend, broken down by team.

Engineering is highest at $3.1k/person/month.

No surprise. The interesting part is who's right behind them.

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

SpaceX hit $3 trillion market cap today.

This means Elon Musk made more money in the last 24 hours than Warren Buffett made in his entire lifetime.

Insane.

[john tan @john_tans]

🤯🤯🤯 crazy timing and big moves

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models.

For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities

[john tan @john_tans]

how i do visual edits in an ai native world ✍️🎨

[emil @emilfagerholm]

introducing a new way to build with lovable

instead of writing prompts, just draw directly on your app

everyone is now a frontend developer

[john tan @john_tans]

Intercom → Fin → Salesforce in weeks for $3.6B

[Eoghan McCabe @eoghan]

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027.

Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today.

Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers.

To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.

To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything.

To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me.

And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (:

[john tan @john_tans]

Interesting developments...

🇬🇧 bans social media for under-16s
🇺🇸 suspends access to Claude for foreign nationals

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

We are banning social media access for under 16s.

These days kids must find their feet in a world where technology intrudes into every area of their life.

I just can’t let that go on anymore. So we’re giving children their childhoods back.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

We don’t honestly know the best approaches to rebuilding companies around AI agents, especially in ways that expand competitive advantage & augment existing human capabilities. Practical agents are merely months old. Experimentation (and productive failures) will be required.

[john tan @john_tans]

@karpathy @emollick @danshipper @simonw @natolambert @Fortune @WIRED @theneurondaily @benthompson and it gets wilder

/9

[Polymarket Money @PolymarketMoney]

JUST IN: Andrej Karpathy, a top AI scientist at Anthropic, is reportedly barred from accessing the company’s most advanced AI model because he is not a U.S. citizen.

[john tan @john_tans]

Claude Fable 5 reactions in the first 3 days...

/1

[john tan @john_tans]

@karpathy @emollick @danshipper @simonw @natolambert @Fortune @WIRED @theneurondaily @benthompson the last 24 hours has been crazy

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:

— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.

— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)

— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.

— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”

— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.

— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.

— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.

— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

[john tan @john_tans]

🚨 Routing models and inference is so critical for consumers, businesses and governments

https://t.co/1uSE9rb7Kv

[john tan @john_tans]

Switched from Opus 4.8 → Codex 5.5 → Fable 5 → Back to Codex 5.5

All in 1 week. 🎢

[john tan @john_tans]

Switched from Opus 4.8 → Codex 5.5 → Fable 5 → Back to Codex 5.5

All in 1 week. 🎢

[john tan @john_tans]

@gabriel1 lol iykyk

[john tan @john_tans]

🤯🤯🤯 https://t.co/JwNaTfNMV4

[john tan @john_tans]

the trillion dollar question

[john tan @john_tans]

Great read

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

https://t.co/TjJDFgynKm

[Simon Willison @simonw]

Very pleased to hear Anthropic have walked back this policy https://t.co/8eOBDzTbCs