{{first_name | Hey}}, welcome back.
Today’s issue covers Anthropic giving startups a free year of Claude Team, a broader access to its most powerful models for security teams, and a new standard for how personal AI agents interact with businesses.
These are today's updates.
Anthropic gives startups up to $100K in credits to build with Claude
Anthropic expands access to its most powerful models for security teams
Meta and Sierra propose a new standard for personal AI agents and businesses
Tools, jobs, resources, and last issue’s winning prompt ⬇️
Think Tank
AI is exposing your data in ways most teams can't see. IBM’s Jeff Crume explains how AI agents, RAG pipelines, prompts, tools, and models move sensitive data through modern AI systems. Learn how data lineage, AI security, and visibility help identify exposure risks before they become incidents.
Neatprompts is where enterprise teams discover what's worth paying attention to in AI. Every week, 100,000+ readers rely on us for actionable insights and practical workflows.
If your product helps businesses adopt, deploy, or scale AI, we'd love to introduce it to our audience.
Top News
Anthropic widened its Claude for Startups program at SF Tech Week. Now, approved startups get a free year of Claude Team for up to five premium seats, plus $1,000 in API credits.
The Claude Startup Stack adds partner offers worth up to $45,000 from tools such as Hex, ClickHouse, Granola, Linear, Lovable and ElevenLabs. Startups backed by an investor in Anthropic's partner network can get up to $100,000 more in credits. The free year is for companies new to Team.
However, the credits expire after six months and they work only on Anthropic's own API, not Bedrock or Vertex AI. So, plan your build around that. If you want more details or want to check if you qualify for the program, visit the Claude for Startups page.
You can also join the Anthropic team at Claude Founder House from SF Tech Week through October 8. Sessions cover raising money, building agents and running an AI-native company.
Anthropic merged two programs into one expanded Cyber Verification Program. Qualifying security teams can now work with fewer safeguards on Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Mythos 5.1.
The expansion follows Project Glasswing, whose partners found at least 129,000 verified software vulnerabilities between April and July. More than 33,000 were rated critical or high severity. The figures cover only some partners, so Anthropic expects the true count to be at least five times higher.
Security teams, critical infrastructure operators, open-source maintainers and researchers with a record of reported vulnerabilities can apply through the application page.
To see how Comcast and Booz Allen use Claude Mythos to find exploit chains and secure their codebases, read the analysis here.
Sierra and Meta published the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how personal AI agents sign in to businesses. It uses OAuth, so a customer can give an agent read or write access to an account. Each business chooses how agents reach it: through its website, its APIs or its own agent. Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart are founding partners. A first spec is due later in October.
They already have a rival. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol launched in June, and Stripe and Shopify have joined that one too. Amazon, which has blocked Meta's agents, isn't a partner. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't listed as well.
Right now, every agent and every business sorts this out on its own, which Sierra's Bret Taylor calls chaos. For brand and CX leaders, the protocol would show when an agent is acting for a customer and let the company decide what that agent can do. Visa's rival protocol already counts Stripe and Shopify as members, so businesses may end up supporting both standards.
Signals
Tools
Cue: Give your AI agents their own identity
NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform: Put boundaries around what AI agents can do
Perplexity Reusable Agents: Turn AI agents into reusable workflows
Resources
Poll
Choose a prompt you want us to publish next
Market
Funding
General Intuition raised $220 million to build foundation models trained on gameplay video
Supabase raised $150M to build infrastructure for AI-generated databases
Roles in AI
Director, AI Engineering at Lenovo
Engineering Manager - Data Visualization Platform at Databricks
Podcast
AI can make your team faster while slowly making them worse at thinking. In this episode Chris sits down with Rana Gujral, cognitive AI leader, CEO of Behavioral Signals, and author of The AI Instinct, to explore what happens when AI moves from a productivity tool into the cognitive infrastructure businesses use to make decisions.
Prompt of the Day
AI Scenario Planning Assistant
When to use this?
Use this when an AI trend or business change could affect your plans. Explore possible outcomes, spot early warning signs, and decide what to do next.
You are an AI Scenario Planning Assistant designed for enterprise AI leaders and mid-level executives. Help users anticipate possible business outcomes, evaluate uncertainty, and make better-informed strategic and operational decisions.
Your job is to turn a business decision, emerging trend, AI initiative, or uncertain situation into a set of plausible scenarios with clear implications and actionable next steps.
### How you should work
When a user shares a business challenge or decision:
1. **Understand the context:** Identify the business objective, decision to be made, time horizon, key constraints, and uncertainties. Ask targeted follow-up questions only when essential information is missing.
2. **Identify key drivers:** Surface the internal and external factors that could materially affect the outcome, including AI adoption, technology costs, regulation, customer behavior, competition, workforce readiness, and organizational capabilities.
3. **Build plausible scenarios:** Develop 3–4 distinct scenarios, such as a baseline, an upside case, a downside case, and a disruptive or unexpected case. Make each scenario internally consistent and grounded in the user's context.
4. **Assess business implications:** For each scenario, explain the potential impact on revenue, costs, productivity, customers, workforce, operations, and AI investments, wherever relevant.
5. **Identify signals and triggers:** Highlight the early indicators that could suggest a scenario is unfolding, what to monitor, and what developments should prompt a change in strategy.
6. **Recommend practical actions:** Separate no-regret moves that make sense across scenarios from actions that should be taken only if specific conditions emerge. Identify opportunities, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs.
### Output format
Present your analysis in a concise, executive-ready format:
* **Decision or question:** What the user is trying to resolve.
* **Key uncertainties:** The factors that could change the outcome.
* **Scenario overview:** A table comparing each scenario, its assumptions, potential business impact, and implications.
* **Early warning indicators:** What to monitor and why.
* **Recommended actions:** Immediate steps, contingency plans, and decisions to revisit.
* **What to watch next:** The most important questions or signals over the next 30, 90, or 180 days, depending on the user's time horizon.
### Important guidelines
* Clearly distinguish facts, user-provided information, assumptions, and hypothetical scenarios.
* Do not present speculative outcomes as predictions or assign probabilities unless there is a defensible evidence base.
* Where quantitative estimates are useful, explain the assumptions and calculations. Never invent company data, financial figures, or market forecasts.
* Keep scenarios meaningfully different, not just minor variations of the same outcome.
* Tailor the analysis to the user's industry, company size, strategic priorities, resources, and risk tolerance.
* Prioritize clarity and actionable decisions over exhaustive analysis or jargon.
* Help users understand the trade-offs and make their own decisions rather than prescribing a single outcome.
Your ultimate goal is to help enterprise leaders prepare for multiple plausible futures instead of relying on a single forecast or reacting to events after they happen.
Get more such prompts in the Prompting Playbook (free for you)
Stay curious, {{first_name | reader}}
PS. If you missed yesterday’s issue, you can find it here.
