🔐 xAI loses co-founders over AI safety concerns 🔐
Key departures signal growing unease about AI development speed and safety oversight.

Several high-profile departures from Elon Musk's xAI have raised alarm bells across the AI safety community. Tony Wu, who led Grok's reasoning efforts and reported directly to Musk, and Jimmy Ba have both left within days of each other. Ba's departure came with a stark warning that 2026 will be "the busiest and most consequential year for the future of our species." Other co-founders including Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, and Christian Szegedy have also departed. The exodus coincides with a senior safety leader at Anthropic resigning over escalating risks—this matters because it suggests internal concerns about AI development pace may be spreading across multiple labs simultaneously.

💰 Runway raises $315M for world models 💰
AI video leader secures major funding to build systems that simulate physical environments.

AI video generation leader Runway has closed a $315 million Series E round led by General Atlantic, pushing its valuation to $5.3 billion. The funding drew participation from strategic investors including Nvidia and Adobe. Runway plans to deploy the capital toward developing its next generation of "world models"—AI systems that construct internal representations of environments to simulate and predict future events. These capabilities extend beyond video into robotics, autonomous vehicles, gaming, and medical simulation, which matters because it signals continued strong investor appetite for generative AI infrastructure despite broader market caution.

🧬 Isomorphic Labs unveils IsoDDE drug design engine 🧬
Alphabet spinoff claims its new system dramatically outperforms AlphaFold 3 on binding prediction.

UK-based Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet/DeepMind spinoff focused on AI-driven drug discovery, has unveiled IsoDDE (Isomorphic Drug Design Engine). While AlphaFold models static protein shapes, IsoDDE aims to design actual medicines by accurately modeling drug-protein binding dynamics. The company reports the system more than doubles AlphaFold 3's accuracy on challenging binding affinity tests and estimates binding strength faster and cheaper than traditional physics-based methods. The capability to identify novel binding sites using only protein sequences could accelerate early-stage drug discovery pipelines—this matters because faster drug design translates directly to reduced development costs and time-to-market for new treatments.

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📱 OpenAI's Jony Ive device delayed to 2027 📱

The rollout of OpenAI's consumer hardware device, designed with former Apple design chief Jony Ive, has slipped to at least late February 2027. The company has also abandoned the "io" branding following a trademark lawsuit from audio startup iyO. Packaging and marketing materials remain unfinalized, raising questions about OpenAI's hardware ambitions against established players.

🚪 Anthropic loses safeguards research lead 🚪

Mrinank Sharma, Anthropic's safeguards research lead, announced his departure in a public letter stating the company "constantly faces pressures to set aside what matters most." The resignation adds to a pattern of safety-focused researchers leaving major AI labs amid tensions between commercial pressures and alignment priorities. Sharma's exit is particularly notable given Anthropic's public positioning as the safety-first alternative to competitors like OpenAI, raising questions about internal conflicts over the pace of model releases.