Sep 8, 2025 4 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ Tesla Shocks Uber

Plus: Anthropic’s $1.5B Reckoning, Chatbots Don’t Want Middle

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

Driverless rides are breaking records and reshaping mobility overnight. Meanwhile, billion-dollar AI reckonings and assistants bypassing middle layers hint at how quickly the old order is fading.

ROBOTAXI

Tesla’s Robotaxi App Nukes Uber & Waymo Downloads

👀 What’s the move: Tesla flipped the switch on its Robotaxi service in Austin and the Bay Area on September 5, and the iOS app instantly shattered first-day download records — 40% above Uber’s best launch day, 6x Waymo’s all-time peak. Demand’s so rabid that a product still saddled with safety drivers looks like the hottest ticket in mobility.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just another Musk stunt. If Tesla sustains even a fraction of this adoption curve, the market recalibrates: Uber becomes a legacy middleman, Waymo looks like a science project, and regulators now have to choose between slowing Tesla down or legitimizing its de-facto monopoly. The Robotaxi war just collapsed into a one-horse race.

⛵ Key takeaway: Tesla didn’t just launch a ride-hailing app — it just made Uber feel like Nokia.

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COPYRIGHT

Anthropic Pays Record $1.5B for Pirated Books

👀 What’s the move: Anthropic agreed to a $1.5B settlement with authors over millions of pirated books used to train Claude. Each affected work nets ~$3K — a payout large enough to set records, small enough to keep a $183B startup breathing. The alternative was a December trial that risked bankrupting Silicon Valley’s hottest AI bet.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just hush money — it’s precedent. “Fair use” survived, but dataset laundering now carries billion-dollar receipts. Every AI lab from OpenAI to Meta will either start writing checks or find safer data pipes. The bigger story: copyright is no longer an obstacle, it’s a cost center — priced, settled, and absorbed into venture math.

⛵ Key takeaway: In AI, piracy wasn’t a crime — it was a seed round. Now it’s just another invoice.

Koah Sells Ads for Chatbots—Not the Ones That Matter

👀 What’s the move: Koah raised $5M to slip contextual ads into smaller AI apps like Luzia, Heal, Liner, and DeepAI. Their case is simple: when $20/month subscriptions won’t scale in markets like Latin America, ads can. But the majors—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—aren’t customers, and likely never will be. If ads arrive there, they’ll build their own stacks.

💡 Why it’s not boring: Koah is a fragile experiment, but it surfaces the bigger truth: AI apps burn cash on inference, and someone has to fund it. Even if OpenAI or Anthropic roll their own ad rails, Koah shows where the pressure point lies—conversational intent is a monetizable asset waiting for the right owner.

⛵ Key takeaway: Koah won’t own chatbot ads, but it proves someone will—and the platforms won’t outsource it.

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“AI pay-per-use engine.”
Embeds licensed AI search, summaries, ads with 50/50 creator revenue share.
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📢 Koah
“Ads for the AI long tail.”
AI-native ad layer for chatbots—serves contextual ads inside conversations when subs won’t scale.
→ Seeded $5M (Forerunner, South Park Commons, AppLovin co-founder); early partners see 7.5% CTR, $10K MRR; positioning as the adtech stack for Luzia, Heal, Liner, DeepAI.

BAY AREA MEMOS

AI inference startup Baseten has secured a $150 million investment backed by CapitalG, bringing its valuation to $2.15 billion.
AI startup ProRata secures $40 million in new funding to expand its profitable advertising and search tools for publishers.
Tether is expanding beyond stablecoins by integrating its on-device AI into a messaging app that will also handle crypto payments.
Authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming it used pirated books to train its new AI.
Tesla's board has proposed a historic $1 trillion compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk, contingent on the company's market value reaching $8.6 trillion within a decade.

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