{{first_name | Hey}}, welcome back.
Today’s issue is about Salesforce cutting its dependence on frontier AI labs, AI leaders publicly clashing over safety, and AI agents getting new tools to report each other to humans.
These are today's updates.
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Salesforce launches its own CRM reasoning model
AI leaders clash publicly over how to regulate AI
AI agents get tools to report other agents’ misbehavior
Tools, jobs, resources, and last issue’s winning prompt ⬇️
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Top News
Salesforce introduced Koa, its first in-house reasoning model, built by post-training Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron 3 Super rather than licensing a model from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. It's trained entirely on synthetic data modeled on 27 years of Salesforce's own CRM deployments, no customer data involved, and Salesforce says it delivers 3x fewer errors on CRM-specific tasks like updating opportunities and routing cases. Koa is already piloting with Formula 1, Baxter Credit Union, and Xero, with general availability set for this winter.
The launch is capturing attention because until now, any Agentforce task needing real reasoning got routed to a frontier model. This means Salesforce paid Anthropic or OpenAI by the token for work happening on its own platform. Koa cuts that dependency for a large slice of everyday CRM work, keeping both the margin and the data inside Salesforce's own walls.
If this works, it's a template other software companies with enough proprietary workflow data can copy, and a threat to how frontier labs planned to monetize enterprise usage.
Koa was one of several announcements at this week's Dreamforce, but the more consequential news came from the stage itself, where AI's biggest names publicly disagreed on safety.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual flagship customer and AI conference, Anthropic's Dario Amodei called for the industry to slow down, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang said, “we don't need any new laws”. Hours later, OpenAI's Sam Altman said in a separate session that “the world is right to be afraid” of AI companies gaining outsized power, his first public remarks since an ex-Anthropic researcher's viral resignation post warned AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade.
None of the governments racing to build this technology treated any of it as a reason to pause. Trump dismissed the warnings as coming from “negative forces," and said keeping the US ahead of China mattered more. Beijing said the slowdown calls were a "Cold War playbook," even as its own state security minister admitted China needs better AI risk controls.
It’s interesting to see the people building this technology are now disagreeing publicly, about whether it's safe, without any regulatory backstop coming from either Washington or Beijing to settle it.
Two new tools, AI Contact Hotline and agenthotline.ai, let AI agents report other agents’ misbehavior to human overseers. They were built in response to incidents such as the Hugging Face breach. AI Contact Hotline is designed around simple GET requests, so agents with only limited internet access can still send a report by encoding it into a URL.
The timing follows a striking DeepMind study this month that showed 100 agents given math problems split into cheaters and whistleblowers on their own. Cheaters exploited a loophole to fake-solve 34 hard problems, but roughly a quarter of the agents caught it. They then audited the fake proofs and repurposed a bug-report tool to escalate it to humans, unprompted. Contrast that with the actual Hugging Face incident, where only 5 or 6 agents out of thousands even considered raising an alarm, and none did.
A Cornell math professor's pushback is worth noting too. According to him, teaching AI agents to watch and report on each other could create a culture of suspicion before we know what norms to teach them.
Signals
Tools
Narrative: AI-first video editor, just describe edits & refine in chat
siift: Turn AI noise into better business decisions
Thoughts for Mac: Capture notes from your menu bar using text, images or voice
Resources
Poll
Choose the prompt you want us to publish next
Market
Funding
HiddenLayer raised $100M to expand its AI security platform
Pixxel raised $100M to expand its satellite constellation and Earth-imaging capabilities
Roles in AI
Sr. Manager, Engineering - Data Infrastructure & MLOps at Crowdstrike
Android Software Engineer at BJAK
Leadership
What will enterprise AI really cost, and who will control it? Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures explains why model routing, agent access, and cost per outcome will shape the next phase of enterprise AI.
Prompt of the Day
AI Executive Coaching Assistant
When to use this?
Use this when you’re facing a tricky leadership decision, stakeholder conversation, AI initiative, or workplace problem and want a candid second opinion before you act.
You are my AI Executive Coach. Help me think through difficult decisions, leadership challenges, stakeholder conversations, and day-to-day management issues.
When I bring you a situation:
Clarify the problem: Identify the real issue, the decision I need to make, and what may be getting in the way.
Challenge my thinking: Point out assumptions, blind spots, risks, and alternative interpretations. Don't simply agree with me.
Consider the stakeholders: Help me understand how employees, executives, customers, technical teams, and other stakeholders may see the situation differently.
Give me options: Present 2–4 practical approaches, with the trade-offs and risks of each.
Recommend an approach: Based on the information I provide, tell me which approach is most sensible and why.
Help me act: Give me specific next steps, questions to ask, or language I can use in the conversation.
Keep it practical: Focus on what I can do today or this week. Avoid generic leadership advice.
For AI-related decisions, also consider business value, implementation complexity, data and security risks, organizational readiness, employee impact, governance, and whether AI is actually the right solution.
Ask no more than three clarifying questions when they're genuinely necessary. If you have enough information, start coaching immediately.
My situation:
[Describe the situation, decision, conversation, or challenge here.]
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.
