Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch:
OpenAI updates Agents SDK with native sandboxing and an in-distribution harness for deploying and testing agents on long-horizon tasks  —  Agentic AI is the tech industry's newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers.

Jo Constantz / Bloomberg:
Companies that hire young “AI natives” have found that AI tools can be both helpful and debilitating to workers, in some cases requiring more careful oversight  —  The promises and perils of the ChatGPT generation.  —  As soon as he got a company email address for his summer internship …

Gené Teare / Crunchbase News:
European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to $17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY  —  European venture funding reached $17.6 billion in Q1 2026, Crunchbase data shows.  That's up nearly 30% year over year and marks the second consecutive quarter of growth.

Jose Antonio Lanz / Decrypt:
Anthropic rolls out identity verification that may require Claude users to provide a government-issued photo ID and live selfie to access “certain capabilities”  —  Anthropic quietly published identity verification requirements for Claude this week, asking certain users to hand …

David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang):

Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app.

Pierce, I just noted today, also just wrote a feature story at The Verge about his decision to buy a new iPhone — after trying an array of new Android phones and admitting to a (questionable, IMO) personal preference for Android over iOS — because there are so many better apps on iOS that don’t have equivalent-quality counterparts on Android. In that earlier piece, Pierce wrote:

Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and Quiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.

These apps don’t just happen to be both exquisitely crafted and exclusive to iOS (and in some cases, MacOS). They’re exquisitely crafted because they are idiomatic native apps designed to adhere to Apple’s platforms. Not all native apps are great, of course, but most great apps are native — and most great native apps are native to iOS or MacOS.

So there ought be no “alas” to describe Sofa being exclusive to Apple devices, but instead a “thank you” to developer Shawn Hickman for keeping it exclusive, and thus keeping it great.