TOGETHER WITH POPHATCH

Hello again, human brain, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• OpenAI monetizes your chats 🤑

  It launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.

• California beat OpenAI 🏛️

  Newsom passed an AI safety bill OpenAI lobbied against.

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Peep today's Spot the AI at the bottom. 👇

MAIN COURSE

ChatGPT will take your money 💳

OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. It lets you buy products mid-conversation.

Huh?

Ask for gift ideas, and Instant Checkout lets you buy from merchants like Etsy, Shopify, and more directly in chat. OpenAI charges merchants a transaction fee. It didn’t specify how much.

Why do I care?

OpenAI wants to be the new Amazon. If shopping shifts from Google search to AI chats, whoever controls the chatbot controls what 700 million weekly users see and buy.

How does payment work?

OpenAI and Stripe built an open-source payment standard, so any AI can sell stuff. Stripe handles payments, merchants integrate with one line of code, and both companies take a cut.

This feels familiar.

OpenAI claims product results are organic and unsponsored. But they charge transaction fees and decide what appears when you ask. Amazon and Google built empires on this exact model.

How are competitors reacting?

Amazon blocked AI agents from scraping its site. Google launched a competing protocol this month. Shopify added code blocking autonomous purchases. Everyone sees where this is going.

What's next?

Now, you confirm every purchase. But OpenAI calls this “the first step toward agentic commerce.” This means AI that shops for you. That's when the real money starts flowing.

AI learns your insecurities and sells you solutions. Hope they’re on sale.

TOGETHER WITH POPHATCH

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You build. It runs the playbook. Done.

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SIDE SALAD

California beat OpenAI 🏛️

Last week, Governor Newsom signed SB 53. This bill requires AI firms to disclose safety protocols. OpenAI and Meta lobbied against it.

SB 53?

It’s California's new safety law that forces OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and more to publish safety frameworks and report to the state's Office of Emergency Services.

Report what?

Cyberattacks, deceptive model behavior, and anything that poses health and safety risks. Anyone can report these incidents.

OpenAI and Meta don’t want this?

Nah. They lobbied against it. OpenAI wrote an open letter to Newsom urging him not to sign. Anthropic actually endorsed it.

Didn't Newsom veto something similar last year?

Yupp. SB 1047 only focused on the largest models. Newsom says it gave a false sense of security and overlooked risks from smaller systems.

What changed?

Scott Wiener (hehe) worked with AI companies to address their concerns. The new bill aims to balance transparency requirements with protections for innovation. This includes a new public computing cluster called CalCompute.

Will other states follow?

New York has a similar bill awaiting the governor's signature.

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Think Piece 🧠

Electronic brain cells that use protein wires from bacteria? These fake neurons could plug into living cells and make computers and health devices more energy-efficient.

Startup News 💰

OpenAI surpassed SpaceX as the world’s most valuable private company. It sold $6.6 billion in shares and has a total valuation of $500 billion.

Anthropic hires a new CTO. Rahul Patil was formerly Stripe’s CTO.

Research 👨‍🔬 

GEM — open-source “Gym” for LLM agents. It’s a standardized, high-throughput suite of environments for training and evaluating multi-turn, long-horizon behavior.

DA2 — end-to-end model that predicts dense depth from a single 360° panorama, trained at scale using a perspective-to-panorama data curation pipeline.

Cool Tool 🛠️

PopHatch — an AI cofounder that finds buyers, runs outreach, and plans your week so you can ship. Tracks what worked and updates the plan automatically. Get 1 month free.

MEME FOR DESSERT

SPOT THE AI

3 of these are real trees. 1 is AI. 🌲

Which one is AI-generated? 👇

Ideas? Comments? Complaints?

Respond to this email or hit me up on 𝕏.

Until next time 🤖😋🧠