π£ EV Daily: π€π§ π§ Claude restricted, TSMC backs bots, Gulf funds AI, teens love AI friends, Scale cuts labelers
Five things to know today + tool of the week.
Lead story: π€ All hail humanoids
What happens when robots outpace EVs? TSMC chair C.C. Wei expects humanoid robots to unlock 10x the value of the entire electric vehicle market. His bullish forecast follows TSMC's historic milestone β closing above a $1 trillion market cap, driven by AI chip demand, the first Asian company to achieve this since PetroChina in 2007. Read it as an early signal that tech hardware's center of gravity is shifting from batteries and drivetrains to gears, sensors, and self-learning software. Money follows momentum. Chinese robotics startup Unitree, valued at $1.64b in its latest funding round, now gears up for an IPO; meanwhile, Goldman Sachs estimates the industry will reach $40b within a decade. [DigiTimes] [SCMP]
Key signals, quick scan
A 30-second scan of four secondary signals that hint at where the curve is bending.
π§ Cursor now geofences access to Claude-4-Sonnet and other US models from China and Hong Kong, demonstrating that export control pressure is cascading down from hardware to software API layers. [The Information]
π° Anthropicβs Dario Amodei is negotiating multibillion-dollar investments with UAE and Qatari sovereign funds, according to leaked recordings. If the deals close, the Gulf will become a primary source of non-US capital for frontier model scale-ups, tilting compute influence toward energy-rich states eager to diversify beyond oil. [WIRED]
π©π»ββ€οΈβπβπ¨π» 72% of US teens have used an AI βfriendβ app. It shows generative AI is becoming a default social layer for the coming workforce, reshaping norms around privacy, intimacy and brand engagement. [NPR]
π§ Scale AI is laying off 14% of its low-skill data annotators and pivoting to specialist teams as smarter models need fewer but higher-quality labels. The data-pipeline labor pyramid is inverting, prioritizing expertise and upending the click-worker economy that powered the last decade of machine learning. [FT]
Tool of the week - Claude meets Zapier
This week, we wired up Anthropicβs Claude to Zapierβs Model Context Protocol (MCP) beta, turning it into a natural language agent that can automate tasks across your stack. No code needed.
The assistant works like this:
You ask Claude something in plain English β like βFetch my unread emails and post a summary in Slack.β
Claude reasons through your request, then uses Zapierβs MCP integration to execute actions across tools like Gmail, Notion, Linear, Google Sheets, and Airtable.
Itβs a clever workaround while we wait for ChatGPT agents to support more API-connected tools. Currently, Claude and Zapier provide wider coverage, allowing you to set up complex workflows with just a few prompts.