A weekly snapshot of new AI tools, products, and platform launches that matter for builders.
This week in one sentence: AI coding tools command billion-dollar valuations, agentic AI moves from demos to enterprise, and Google's AI search is driving users to DuckDuckGo.
I've been tracking AI product launches through Firecrawl and TechCrunch feeds over the past week. The signal is clear: the AI race has shifted from models to distribution. Here's what caught my attention.
🤖 AI Coding Tools Are Still the Hottest Category
Cognition raised $1 billion at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. That's a coding assistant startup valued higher than many public SaaS companies. OpenRouter doubled its valuation to $1.3 billion in just one year — turns out model routing and API gateway infrastructure is a real business.
Meanwhile, Microsoft shipped Copilot Cowork — an autonomous multi-step AI agent built directly into Microsoft 365, in collaboration with Anthropic using Claude technology. It can execute complex workflows across Office apps without hand-holding.
Figma Make now edits production codebases. You can visually tweak a UI and it modifies the actual source code, not just mockups. Google AI Studio launched "vibe coding" mode with a Google AI subscription, and Colab Learn Mode shipped with Gemma 4 — an open model that is byte-for-byte the most capable open model right now.
🧠 AI Agents Go Mainstream
Google's Cloud Next 2026 was all about agents. The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform lets organizations build, deploy, and manage fleets of AI agents. Google also rolled out their 8th-gen TPUs — custom silicon purpose-built for the agentic era, not just traditional ML training.
Meta launched "Plus" tier subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, with AI plan trials bundled in. The social giant is betting you'll pay for AI features alongside ad-free browsing.
Robinhood now lets AI agents trade stocks autonomously. Users can delegate trading decisions to bots. The risks are obvious — but so is the signal: every platform is becoming an AI agent platform.
On the acquisitions front, Publicis bought LiveRamp for $2.2 billion specifically to strengthen its position in "agentic AI business systems." The ad industry sees AI agents as the next wave of marketing automation.
🎨 Creative AI Gets Legit
ElevenLabs Music v2 can switch genres mid-song — opera to heavy metal in the same track. It's trained on licensed data and cleared for commercial use. Not a toy anymore.
Gemini Omni, Google's anything-to-anything multimodal model, deepfaked a reporter in front of the Eiffel Tower during a live demo. Impressive and unsettling in equal measure. Meanwhile, ChatGPT now lives in PowerPoint — a sidebar that generates and edits presentations from prompts.
Amazon Prime Video greenlit three AI-made animated series through their GenAI Creators' Fund. The line between "AI-assisted" and "AI-generated" is dissolving fast.
🔬 Hardware Arms Race
The semiconductor boom continues. Snowflake signed a $6 billion deal with AWS for AI CPU chips. Micron and SK Hynix both crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, driven entirely by AI memory demand.
ByteDance is developing custom CPU chips for their AI rollout (Reuters exclusive). Vertu — yes, the luxury phone brand — launched the Alphafold, a $6,880 AI foldable with a built-in "AI Hermes" assistant meant for CEOs.
🔍 Search Is the New AI Battleground
The most interesting tension right now is in search. Google went all-in on AI Overviews at I/O, and users are pushing back. DuckDuckGo reported a 30% spike in iOS installs and a 27% jump in "No AI" search visits immediately after Google's AI announcements.
Google responded by adding Preferred Sources — users can now pin trusted sites in AI Overviews. Click-through rates reportedly double when a source is marked as preferred. CNN, meanwhile, is suing Perplexity over "verbatim" scraping of paywalled content. Copyright in the AI era hasn't been solved — it's being litigated one lawsuit at a time.
