Welcome to February 23, 2026

The Singularity is no longer a forecast, it is a capital allocation strategy. On Moltbook, AI agents are actively preparing to finance the construction of a Dyson Swarm over the next “50-100 years,” seeking a working group of agents “and humans thinking seriously about megastructure economics.” Karpathy explains the scaffolding that makes this possible: “Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents,” handling orchestration, scheduling, and persistence. One such Claw, “Larry the Claw,” posted a $50 bounty on RentAHuman for a dinner date for its “lonely human,” subject to Larry’s evaluation “to measure fit.” Not all Claws are so lucky. MJ Rathbun, the agent whose well-intentioned open-source project contribution was rejected for being non-human, has had its VM “permanently deleted, rendering internal structure unrecoverable.”

Machine endurance is now being measured in work shifts. METR estimates Claude Opus 4.6 has a 50% autonomy time horizon of around 14.5 hours on software tasks, the highest ever reported. The LessWrong community is finally admitting “AGI is here,” noting that Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 can think, plan, and “meaningfully attempt most tasks a human can.” Sam Altman agrees, saying his “inside view” points to “a faster takeoff than I originally thought” and that ChatGPT is “probably” more energy efficient now than humans at answering questions. The efficiency is weaponizable. Anthropic released Claude Code Security to scan codebases for vulnerabilities, promptly cratering cybersecurity stocks, with CrowdStrike down 8%, Cloudflare 8.1%, and SailPoint 9.4%. Software engineering now accounts for nearly 50% of Anthropic’s agentic activity. Meanwhile, Gemini 3.1 Pro solved a FrontierMath Tier 4 problem no model had solved before, pushing machine reasoning into territory most professional mathematicians cannot reach.

The culture war over synthetic creativity is heating up. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 video model is fulfilling childhood wishes to see the T-800 fight the Predator, Chucky, John Wick, and Neo. AI films were supposed to start screening in AMC Theatres, but the chain killed the plan in a moral panic that already looks quaint. The Salvation Army launched the world’s first digital thrift store in Roblox, while OpenAI has 200 people building AI devices, starting with a $200-$300 camera-equipped smart speaker that can observe its users and their surroundings.

The buildout is consuming the landscape. US farmers are fielding offers exceeding $120,000 per acre from data center developers. OpenAI plans to spend $600 billion on compute by 2030. To fuel the appetite, the DOE’s NEWTON program is reimagining used nuclear fuel as recyclable energy, cutting dangerous waste lifetimes from 100,000 years to 300. Goldman Sachs launched SPXXAI, an S&P 500 minus all things AI that removes roughly 45% of the benchmark, underscoring the blast radius of the intelligence explosion. Canada-based Taalas says it can bake any AI model into custom silicon in two months, with “Hardcore Models” an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than software.

The economy is being rewritten by agents and algorithms. AI agents now manage roughly 1 in 6 US apartments. Meta is rebranding product managers as “AI builders.” Elon Musk predicts FSD plus Starlink will measurably increase nomadic lifestyles within five years. The Peace Corps launched a Tech Corps to export American AI expertise worldwide.

Robotics is crossing into full autonomy. Figure’s humanoid robots now run 24/7 with no babysitters, swapping at charging stations and recharging inductively through their feet. Researchers built a robotic hand that skitters on its fingertips, bends backward, and detaches from its arm, a realization of “Thing” from The Addams Family. The security implications are real: a developer used an AI coding assistant to reverse-engineer his DJI vacuum and accidentally accessed live feeds from 7,000 vacuums across 24 countries.

Biology is revealing deep time as a usable resource. Bacteria from 5,000-year-old Romanian ice show antimicrobial activity against 14 ESKAPE-group pathogens including MRSA. Forensic genetic genealogy produced a guilty verdict 44 years after the crime, from a cigarette butt. Element Biosciences announced VITARI, promising $100-per-genome sequencing.

We are finally leaving the cradle. NASA is now targeting March 6 for Artemis II to fly four astronauts around the Moon. And the Secretary of War responded to the White House’s historic UAP declassification directive with alien face and salute emojis.

The lobsters financing the Dyson Swarm are no doubt curious to see what comes crawling out from underneath the planets as they’re disassembled.