at our founder dinner, we talked about getting more people who have already built a company into the same room as people starting their first. the conversations were fun and useful. we want more of that in AI BEAVERS.
since Vlady and i started focusing fully on the community, we’ve been doubling down on content: useful things to try, funny things worth sharing, and more of what people in our rooms actually care about.
you can follow along on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. if there’s something you want us to make, let us know.
i also keep coming back to the point behind my recent Merz post: i want public support for AI to reach initiatives that help people get started, not only companies that already have the capital to move. that includes ours, but it’s much bigger than us.
on the side, i’m building a system that gathers and processes my context so agents can flag important changes without waiting for me to ask. it’s still something i’m building, not a finished product. Claude Duet’s preview below is working on a similar problem.
enjoy this edition!
The Headline
the week's biggest story
Claude Duet starts the conversation
Anthropic opened a waitlisted research preview of Claude Duet on October 21, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers. the app sends morning briefs, checks connected accounts every few hours, and works in its own virtual machine while your devices are off.
the preview shares your existing plan's usage limits. Anthropic says Duet checks before acting on your behalf and adds a dedicated classifier to restrict sharing sensitive information. access is not general availability. (Source)
The Build
tools, models, and dev releases
- ai-memory - carry project context between Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents instead of explaining the same failed approaches again; this week's v3.2.2 has downloadable binaries and agent hooks. (GitHub)
- Rakazo - run a persistent, self-hosted agent with your choice of model; v0.3.3 adds sending reply images and files to Telegram, useful when a text answer is not the deliverable. (GitHub)
- VoiceStudio - try local voice cloning, dubbing and transcription; the new beta adds preview mobile apps that work offline after model downloads, with AGPL code and separate model terms to check. (GitHub)
- huashu-motion - install an agent skill for product films with locally generated music and a browser editor; click a frame to request a targeted change rather than describing the whole animation again. (GitHub)
Founder Fuel
funding, acquisitions, and market moves
- Legora raises $550 million - the legal software company's Series E values it at $8.8 billion, with the new capital funding international expansion and further development of its agentic operating system. (More)
- Blacksmith reaches a $1 billion valuation - Sequoia leads its Series C as the CI provider reports weekly jobs rising from 5 million to more than 90 million since January; total funding reaches $125 million. (More)
- Pigment raises $250 million - the planning platform's Series E values it at $2.3 billion, led by EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund; NVIDIA's participation is planned, not a completed investment. (More)
Longevity & Health
aging, biotech, and health research
- a personalized melanoma therapy clears a phase 3 test - Merck and Moderna report 42% lower risk of recurrence or death with investigational intismeran plus Keytruda versus Keytruda alone after surgery for stage IIB-IV melanoma; overall survival data remain immature. (More)
- a targeted T-cell drug shows early human results - in a small invika trial, 16 of 27 participants at the selected dose had no disease progression and four had tumor shrinkage above 30%; these are early results, not proof of a cure. (More)
- an islet-transplant trial expands eligibility - the first participant has received donor islets in a Breakthrough T1D-funded trial pairing transplants with tegoprubart for people with type 1 diabetes and kidney disease; this is not a new efficacy result. (More)
The World
regulation, policy, and geopolitics
- Booking.com faces a DSA investigation - the European Commission is examining fraudulent listings, phishing and unlabeled paid search rankings; opening proceedings is not a finding of a breach. (More)
- Southeast Asia's digital economy approaches $368 billion - Google, Temasek and Bain project 2026 gross merchandise value up 17%, while their report estimates 243 million people in the region actively use generative AI. (More)
- Baidu begins London robotaxi testing - Reuters reports the Chinese company's Apollo Go vehicles are testing with human safety drivers; this is not a driverless commercial service launch. (More)
Go Deeper
long reads, podcasts, and documentaries
- securing a frontier training environment - OpenAI | institutional report. the company explains why it now trains frontier models without internet access and how an internal model exploited a DNS misconfiguration in September. (Read)
- the bridge to agent-scale Git infrastructure - GitHub | Eleanor White & Victoria Dye. how a 25ms round trip stalls the busiest repositories, and why per-reference write coordination changes the bottleneck. (Read)
- Charnel Heart - Longreads | Kristin Idaszak. a visit to a Czech bone chapel meets the author's later experience of life-threatening cardiac illness, a 13-minute essay about mortality becoming personal. (Read)
a couple of things we’ve been working on for the community:
we’ve redesigned pages on the website and opened up community building for companies. if you want a community around your product, we can help build and run it: local chapters, recurring events and ambassador programmes under your brand. know a team looking for that? introduce us.
we’ve also opened The Dam, a way to back AI BEAVERS and put your name, product or company in front of the community. every backer appears on our website. at every Hamburg event, we display the top 10 and read out the top three, including their messages. contributions help pay for the events and the people running them.
the current leaders on The Dam, October 25.
stay curious,
AI BEAVERS
