Friday, January 16, 2026

TL;DR

Today’s briefing covers 401 items from 13 sources. Top stories include: Strengthening the U.S. AI supply chain through domestic manufacturing; AI video startup, Higgsfield, founded by ex-Snap exec, lands $1.3B valuation; Apple lost the AI race — now the real challenge starts.

Top Stories

Strengthening the U.S. AI supply chain through domestic manufacturing

OpenAI

OpenAI launches a new RFP to strengthen the U.S. AI supply chain by accelerating domestic manufacturing, creating jobs, and scaling AI infrastructure.

AI video startup, Higgsfield, founded by ex-Snap exec, lands $1.3B valuation

TechCrunch AI

Higgsfield says it’s on a $200 million annual revenue run rate. So it opened its previous Series A round back up and sold another $80 million in shares.

Apple lost the AI race — now the real challenge starts

The Verge AI

For an AI loser, Apple did an awful lot of winning last year. The mess that was the Apple Intelligence rollout was embarrassing, to be sure, but through it all, the company kept doing what it does best: selling iPhones. With this week’s news that it’ll use Gemini models to power the long-awaited sma

OpenAI Invests in Sam Altman’s New Brain-Tech Startup Merge Labs

Wired AI

Merge Labs has emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding from OpenAI and others. It aims to use ultrasound to read from and write to the brain.

Hands On With Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, an AI Agent That Actually Works

Wired AI

Cowork is a user-friendly version of Anthropic’s Claude Code AI-powered tool that’s built for file management and basic computing tasks. Here’s what it’s like to use it.

Research Corner

Paper Source
AI Survival Stories: a Taxonomic Analysis of AI Existential Risk arXiv AI
GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents arXiv AI
PCN-Rec: Agentic Proof-Carrying Negotiation for Reliable Governance-Constrain… arXiv AI
Antisocial behavior towards large language model users: experimental evidence arXiv AI
Improving Chain-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning via Attention-Aware Interven… arXiv AI
Thinking Long, but Short: Stable Sequential Test-Time Scaling for Large Reaso… arXiv AI
A Scoping Review of the Ethical Perspectives on Anthropomorphising Large Lang… arXiv AI
Epistemology gives a Future to Complementarity in Human-AI Interactions arXiv AI
Beyond Rule-Based Workflows: An Information-Flow-Orchestrated Multi-Agents Pa… arXiv AI
Continuum Memory Architectures for Long-Horizon LLM Agents arXiv AI

Industry Updates

News & Analysis

Deep Dive: Today’s AI Landscape

Synthesized from multiple research sources

Based on the most recent search results available, here are the major AI breakthroughs and announcements from early 2026:

Medical and Healthcare AI

Cardiac Diagnostics: Researchers at the University of Michigan developed an AI model capable of diagnosing coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMVD) using only a standard 10-second EKG strip, a condition previously requiring advanced imaging or invasive procedures.[3]

Sources:

Here’s a summary of AI news announcements from January 16, 2026, focusing on breakthroughs and launches:

AI as Coworker and Expansion Beyond Chatbots:

  • Anthropic’s Cowork: Anthropic launched Cowork, a version of Claude Code designed for non-developers, allowing users to employ AI agents for complex tasks. It operates at the file system level and can access email and third-party apps.

Sources:

This newsletter is automatically generated by PAI using RSS aggregation and AI research tools. Sources include arXiv, HuggingFace, OpenAI, Google AI, MIT News, VentureBeat, and more.

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