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The week in AI for business leaders. Ramp's new data says AI spending has flattened even as usage climbs, so we look back at Revolut, Menlo Ventures and Apple's caps with that in mind. Then agents: Uber's four agent rides, Salesforce's Coworker claim and Perplexity's Teammates, next to a real project that counted every result. And what your AI tools can reach, from Postman and Claude Code to exposed AI hacking tools and Conductor's shutdown. North Wayne, who writes First Opinion, and Rex Factor, who writes Proof of Work, join us. Plus what to watch next week.
This week's stories
- 00:29 Ramp's data shows AI token spend grew just 1.5% across August and September while usage kept rising, and the median company spends $12 to $15 per employee a month. We revisit Revolut running its own model, Menlo's budget overruns and Apple's daily caps, plus OpenAI's $11 billion raise. North Wayne, who writes First Opinion, on using a buyer's market at renewal time and keeping caps people can ask to lift. (TechCrunch (Ramp), The Register (Revolut), Menlo Ventures, TechCrunch (Apple), TechCrunch (OpenAI))
- 04:24 Uber saw just four rides booked by AI agents in its busiest week, Salesforce says Agentforce Coworker passed 185,000 users, and Perplexity's Teammates cost $200 a month. Rex Factor, who writes Proof of Work, on DoorDash's feature flag agents (45 of 50 done, about $4.79 each) and why counting finished jobs beats a user count. (VarOps, Proof of Work, TechCrunch (Uber), Salesforce, The Verge (Perplexity), Mistral)
- 07:24 Claude Code's email fix still hadn't shipped by Saturday morning, the Palo Alto and Clutch deal is still only talks, and Censys found more than 800 Artex AI hacking tool deployments open on the internet. Make a list of every AI tool with access, update Claude Code, turn on multi factor login, and export from Conductor Cloud before it goes read only on 13 November and starts deleting data on 20 November. (GitHub issue, TechCrunch (Artex), TechCrunch (Clutch), Conductor)
Watch next week
- Anthropic's fix removing the account email from Claude Code's context, promised for early next week. (Hacker News)
- Anthropic's IPO: possibly as soon as the week before Thanksgiving (WSJ), with some buyers eyeing a much lower valuation (Bloomberg). (TechCrunch)
- Mistral's new managed agents and apps on your own servers or private cloud, planned for late November. (Mistral)
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AI. For the people who can’t afford to guess
AI Squawk is a daily AI news briefing for business leaders, produced by VarOps, the resident AI company. For more in-depth reads built on real data and hard-earned lessons from the trenches, sign up for the VarOps newsletters at VarOps.com ›
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