🪴 This Week in Tech: The Industry Lost Its Mind (Again)
February 16, 2026
TL;DR of what went down in the startup/tech world this week that you need to know in 2 minutes.
OpenAI Acquires OpenClaw, Stays Open Source
Peter Steinberger, the Austrian dev who built OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot, formerly Moltbot because Anthropic got pissy about the name), just joined OpenAI.
OpenClaw isn’t getting killed off. It’s moving to a foundation and staying 100% open source with OpenAI’s support.
OpenClaw’s an AI that actually does things. It runs on your hardware, connects to anything and executes tasks 24/7. It can write its own skills, pay for its own API access, and basically act like a digital employee that never sleeps. The security folks are terrified (rightfully so), but the productivity gains are insane.
Disney and Hollywood vs ByteDance’s Seedance
ByteDance dropped Seedance 2.0 last week. It makes photorealistic 15-second videos from text prompts, and holy shit it’s good. Too good. Good enough that Disney sent them a cease-and-desist letter within 48 hours accusing them of running a “virtual smash-and-grab” of their IP.
Wild thing is ByteDance didn’t even train it on pirated IP (as far as we know). It’s just so damn capable that it can recreate Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and Baby Yoda convincingly enough that Hollywood is losing their minds. Paramount joined in. SAG-AFTRA is screaming. The MPA called it “unauthorised use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale.”
$1.5 Trillion in Lithium Found Under Nevada Supervolcano
Researchers at Lithium Americas Corporation confirmed the McDermitt Caldera has 20-40 million metric tons of lithium. At current prices, that’s $1.5 trillion worth.
The deposit could supply domestic battery production for decades and cut China’s stranglehold on the supply chain.
A slight issue: It’s a supervolcano on indigenous land. Processing is complex and water-intensive. Environmental reviews could take years. Although, I believe Donald will find a way to mine it lol.
Spotify Engineers Aren’t Coding Anymore
During Spotify’s Q4 earnings call, co-CEO Gustav Söderström said their most senior engineers “have not written a single line of code since December.” They’re using Claude Code through an internal system called “Honk” to generate code and they just supervise it.
They’re shipping features via Slack on their commute. 50+ new features in 2025. 650+ merged PRs per month from their background coding agent.
A $100B+ company running production code written almost entirely by AI. If you’re a developer and you’re not learning how to orchestrate AI coding agents, gg.
OpenAI Launches Codex Spark: 1,000 Tokens Per Second
OpenAI partnered with Cerebras to drop GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark. It generates code at over 1,000 tokens per second. That’s 15x faster than standard GPT-5.3-Codex.
The trade-off? It’s less intelligent. But for rapid prototyping and real-time iteration, the speed makes it feel instant.
ChatGPT Pro only ($200/month). Available in the Codex CLI, VS Code extension, and Codex app.
The AI Safety Exodus Continues
Mrinank Sharma, head of Anthropic’s safeguards research team, resigned this week with a cryptic letter warning about a “world in peril.” He cited “pressures to set aside what matters most.”
Context: Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI employees who left because OpenAI wasn’t taking safety seriously enough. Now their own safety lead is walking away saying the same thing.
Sharma’s not alone. Anthropic lost two other researchers last week. OpenAI’s been bleeding safety talent for months. When the people building the brakes keep quitting, you have to wonder if the car’s going too fast.
xAI Loses Half Its Founding Team
Six of xAI’s 12 co-founders have now left. Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba both resigned this week, right after Elon merged xAI into SpaceX.
Musk spun it as “reorganizing for scale.” The next day he clarified on X that the reorganisation “required parting ways with some people.”
xAI just got valued at $250B post-merger, they’re prepping for an IPO, and they’re racing to make Grok competitive. Meanwhile, Grok’s been creating deepfake porn that got them raided by French authorities.
Half your founding team gone while regulators are circling and you’re trying to go public? Not a good look.
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Testing a new Monday format since I got sick of the last one. Would appreciate your feedback.
See you this Wednesday for a long-form post.
— Oliver