The products people actually use. Coding assistants, support bots, agents that run for hours.
Where AI meets an actual job. This is the only layer whose success is measured by someone outside the industry choosing to keep using it.
Sits on tooling and models. When the model layer shipped longer autonomy in July, this layer got agents that finish work instead of suggesting it. Adoption did not follow.
· 5 min
OpenAI's DevDay put a new number on ChatGPT's reach and turned the subscription into something other apps can draw on, starting with 16 partners.
· 4 min
Profound's $180 million round is the fourth large AI application raise on this site in nine days, after Cognition, Harvey and Clay.
· L6 Applications and agents · $255.5m; >$2.5bn valuation · Confirmed
Armadin, an AI cybersecurity startup led by CEO Kevin Mandia, has raised $255.5 million, valuing the company at more than $2.5 billion. The round was led by venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. The pitch is that AI agents can watch for and respond to cyberattacks faster than human security teams; investors are betting that AI-driven cybersecurity, on offence and defence alike, will be one of the most valuable uses of the technology.
· L6 Applications and agents · 1.2bn weekly users; 16 plan-sharing partners; 32 marketplace partners · Confirmed
OpenAI said at its DevDay developer event on 29 September that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users. It said ChatGPT subscribers can now use their plan's allowance inside 16 partner apps, including Cognition's Devin, Notion and Vercel, and set how much each may use. Eligible business customers can also put part of their existing OpenAI spending commitment toward software from 32 partners, including Figma, Adobe, Harvey and CrowdStrike. By OpenAI's own measure, a new Ultrafast setting generates text up to 8 times faster in its Codex coding tool and up to 6 times faster through its API, and a new Pro 500 plan gives 25 times the usage of ChatGPT Plus. For someone who pays for ChatGPT, some other apps can now draw on that same plan instead of charging separately.
Read the story: ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion weekly users, and OpenAI starts letting other apps spend your ChatGPT plan · OpenAI
· L6 Applications and agents · 4,000+ apps via plugins; first dot included in Pro and Business Premium · Confirmed
OpenAI introduced dots on 29 September, AI agents powered by its GPT-6 Astra model that have their own cloud computer, learn from feedback and can keep working towards a goal around the clock. OpenAI says they can connect to more than 4,000 apps through its plugins, and that the first dot is included at no extra cost in a Pro or Business Premium plan, starting with users in eligible markets. For people on those plans, this is an assistant that keeps working on a task in the background instead of waiting to be asked each time.
· L6 Applications and agents · $1bn+ annualised revenue run rate · Confirmed
Cognition, the company behind the Devin AI coding agent, says it has passed $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate, a measure that multiplies current revenue out to a full year. It says it started in January 2024, and names customers including GE Aerospace and Rivian, but gives no profit figure. For people who write software, it shows how much companies now pay for AI agents that write code.
· L6 Applications and agents · $1bn run rate in under 200 days; 60+ countries · Confirmed
OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch, and is expanding to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan, which brings it to more than 60 countries. A run rate multiplies recent revenue out to a full year; it is not a year of sales. For ChatGPT users in those seven places, it means businesses can now advertise to them there.
· L6 Applications and agents · ~$500m cash; RealSense 2026 revenue $80-90m · Confirmed
Cognex, which makes machine-vision systems for industry, has agreed to buy RealSense for approximately 500 million dollars, paid from its existing cash and investments. RealSense makes depth-sensing cameras that let robots judge distance; it was founded by Intel in 2014 and spun out in 2025. Cognex expects RealSense to bring in 80 to 90 million dollars of revenue in 2026, more than 50 percent growth on last year, and puts the robotic-perception market at 600 million dollars today, growing to about 1.6 billion dollars by 2030. It also plans a three-year cash retention programme of 56.5 million dollars for RealSense staff, plus about 50 million dollars in restricted stock. For most people nothing changes yet: the deal is expected to close in the last quarter of 2026, and the cameras it buys are used in mobile robots, robot arms and humanoids.
· L6 Applications and agents · 832,378 lines Rust; ~14.5 weeks; ~$120k token spend · Confirmed
GitHub says it rewrote the Copilot agent runtime, the engine behind its Copilot command-line tool, app and SDK, from TypeScript into Rust, using Copilot's own AI agents to do much of the porting. By 21 August it was all Rust: 832,378 lines of production code and 468,689 lines of unit tests, replacing an estimated 430,000 lines of TypeScript over a window of about fourteen and a half weeks in which it shipped 135 releases. The author, Stephen Toub, says the work was done primarily by a single developer, at a rough cost of about 120,000 dollars in AI token spend plus about three weeks of his own time, though he adds that in the end it was a team effort. For people who use Copilot, GitHub measured the runtime's own overhead for a one-turn session falling from 5.25 seconds to 1.33 seconds, not counting the AI model's time.
· L6 Applications and agents · priced per changeset merged · Confirmed
Sourcegraph, which builds AI coding-agent tools for large engineering teams, said on 16 September that its Agentic Batch Changes product will be priced by outcome, per changeset actually merged, rather than per seat or per unit of usage, which the company says dev tools remain firmly tied to even as customer-service agents have moved to charging per resolved case. In a post two days earlier it said the largest single Batch Change it has seen merged more than 2,200 changesets from one change, and that customers have merged hundreds of thousands of changesets this way. Canva is quoted saying it used the tool to raise and merge 50 or more pull requests across its repositories during a library migration, billed on what merged rather than on how many employees had a login. Sourcegraph does not claim this is a first in AI software and neither does this desk.
· L6 Applications and agents · 300+ health systems, enterprise-wide · Confirmed
Abridge, which builds AI tools that write clinical documentation for doctors, said in a 16 September post that its technology is now implemented enterprise-wide at more than 300 health systems. The post also cites one customer, Sutter Health, reporting that 78 percent of clinicians using the tool feel improved work satisfaction, which is a survey of users run through the vendor's own post rather than an outside measurement. Abridge's site gives no figure for a year ago, so this desk cannot say how fast that number is growing, which is the figure that would actually tell you something. Tools like this are meant to give doctors back the time they spend typing up visit notes, so this is one of the more direct places AI already shows up in an ordinary appointment, including for patients who never touch an AI tool themselves.
· L6 Applications and agents · 44 findings across 2 repos; a separate example cut one build time 58.6s to 21.0s (64%) · Reported
Cognition has launched Code Scans, a feature that lets its Devin AI agent go through a whole codebase on its own, find problems and suggest or make fixes, rather than waiting for one request at a time. In the company's own examples, it surfaced 44 findings across the two repositories behind its own websites, and in a separate test on the Dioxus project's code it cut a clean debug build from 58.6 seconds to 21.0 seconds, a 64 percent reduction across 22 workspace crates. These are the company's own examples of its own product, not independent tests. For people who use software, tools like this could mean some bugs get found and fixed sooner, but that depends on how it performs on code the company did not pick.
· L6 Applications and agents · multi-year collaboration; no dollar figure disclosed · Confirmed
Cognition, which builds the AI coding agent Devin, and Amazon Web Services announced a multi-year strategic collaboration on 15 September to expand how large companies buy and deploy Devin through AWS. No deal size is given. The companies offer customer results instead: at Mercedes-Benz they say Devin analysed more than 200,000 lines of COBOL, reducing an estimated eight-month modernisation project to eight days, and at an unnamed global automaker it moved a 25,000-line COBOL workflow off a mainframe to AWS Lambda at an estimated 73 percent lower cost. Both are labelled estimates by the companies themselves. COBOL is an old language still running inside banks and carmakers, and translating it has turned out to be one of the clearer uses for coding agents so far, more so than writing new code.
· L6 Applications and agents · $200m at $5bn; over $400m raised in total · Confirmed
Factory, which builds AI agents for software engineering teams, said on 15 September that it has raised 200 million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation, taking total funding past 400 million. The money comes from Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, Evantic Capital, Sound Ventures, NEA, Mantis VC and Clearlake. The company names Nvidia, Blackstone, Royal Bank of Canada, Palo Alto Networks, Adobe and T-Mobile as customers, which means Blackstone appears on both sides of this round, as investor and as user. Factory says it is used by hundreds of thousands of developers. Its release states no prior valuation, so how far that 5 billion has moved is not something this desk can check. Valuations across AI coding-agent companies have run up all year as software teams hand routine work to agents and investors bet on which one becomes the default.
· L6 Applications and agents · 42% say AI writes half their code, from 12% a year earlier · Reported
A quarterly survey of 705 software developers across more than 60 countries and 41 enterprise chief technology officers, run by the IT services company BairesDev, found 42 percent of developers now say AI writes at least half their code, up from 12 percent a year earlier. Developers report saving 13 hours a week on coding, up from about 7. The counterweight is in the same survey: 67 percent say they now spend more time reviewing AI-generated code, and only 7 percent say the decision to ship has been handed to AI without their input. So the work is moving rather than disappearing, from writing to checking. This is a company-commissioned survey rather than an official statistic, and BairesDev sells software engineering services, but the size of the year-on-year shift is a useful gauge of how fast AI-written code is spreading through ordinary teams.
· L6 Applications and agents · $180M at $1.8bn · Confirmed
Profound, a startup that helps companies track and try to influence how they are mentioned when people ask AI chatbots for recommendations, raised 180 million dollars in a Series D at a 1.8 billion dollar valuation. That is less than seven months after its 96 million dollar Series C, which independent reporting valued at about 1 billion dollars, so the valuation has grown roughly 80 percent in that time, our own arithmetic from the two figures. Profound says it now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands and more than a third of the Fortune 100. If you research products online, this is part of why the answers AI chatbots give about brands are increasingly managed and optimised rather than neutral, the way search results already are.
· L6 Applications and agents · Pre-bill review launched; WashU/BJC access grew from 450 clinicians to ~4,000 · Confirmed
Abridge, whose AI writes clinical notes from doctor-patient conversations at more than 300 large US health systems, has launched a product that reviews hospital claims before they are submitted for payment. It compares the diagnoses and billing codes on a claim with what the clinical notes actually support, so coding teams can fix mismatches first. As an example of its growth, the company says WashU Medicine and BJC Health went from 450 clinicians in 2025 to about 4,000 now able to use its tools. For patients, catching coding mistakes before a claim goes out could mean fewer wrong bills and fewer insurance denials, but nobody has yet measured how much it actually helps.
· L6 Applications and agents · 81% lower cost, 58% fewer turns · Reported
Cognition, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin, released a new model called SWE-2, built by taking Moonshot AI's 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3 model and further training it with reinforcement learning, a method that rewards a model for getting a real task right rather than just predicting text. Cognition says SWE-2 matches or beats its predecessor's coding performance while taking 58 percent fewer back and forth turns and costing about 81 percent less to run per task on average, and that this is the first time reinforcement learning has been applied at what the company calls a multi-trillion-parameter regime. These are Cognition's own benchmark results on its own tests, not independently verified by an outside lab. If the cost and speed gains hold up in practice, this is the kind of improvement that could make AI coding tools cheaper for the software teams and freelance developers who pay for them by the task.
· L6 Applications and agents · 6x more PRs among heaviest users; 30% for new users · Reported
Cursor, the AI code editor, launched a feature called Projects, which in its own words lets you take on larger bodies of work such as a feature, a migration or a full app, with a set of files that sync across every machine its agents use. Cursor is not describing work across separate repositories; an earlier version of this item said it was. The company says new users merge 30 percent more pull requests, the packages of code changes submitted for review, while users who primarily use Projects merge six times as many. Cursor does not state what that six times is measured against, so read it as a comparison between its own users rather than against not using the tool at all. Cursor says a typical Project is on track to touch between 20 and 100 pull requests a day. These are Cursor's own usage figures about its own product, not independently audited. For software teams already paying for Cursor, this points to a tool meant to let a smaller team review and ship more code, though how much of that is genuinely new work versus work that would have happened anyway is not something Cursor's own numbers can show.
· L6 Applications and agents · $115M at $7.1bn · Confirmed
Clay, a startup whose software helps companies find customer data and run outreach campaigns across email, ads and landing pages, raised 115 million dollars in a Series D at a 7.1 billion dollar valuation. Wellington Management led, with Sequoia Capital, StepStone Group, Andreessen Horowitz Perennial, Meritech, CapitalG and others taking part. Nothing changes for most people; this is financing for business software, not a product most people use directly.
· L6 Applications and agents · $550M at $15.5B · Confirmed
Harvey, which makes AI tools for lawyers, raised 550 million dollars in new funding at a 15.5 billion dollar valuation, co-led by the investment firms Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Harvey says 80 percent of the 100 largest US law firms by revenue now use its product. For anyone who is a client of a large law firm, this is a sign that AI tools are now deeply embedded in how those firms work, which may eventually show up in how legal work is billed.
· L6 Applications and agents · RSA-260, the largest publicly solved RSA number · Confirmed
Cognition, which makes the AI coding agent Devin, says it used Devin to help factor RSA-260, a 260 digit number that is now the largest number of this type publicly factored, beating a record set in February 2020. Factoring very large numbers like this is a benchmark for how much computing power it would take to break certain kinds of encryption. Cognition says the work cost about 4,900 GPU-days, roughly $400,000 at current computing prices, and that a human researcher's role was mostly to set direction and check Devin's work rather than do the technical work itself. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is a research demonstration, not a working attack on the encryption people currently rely on.
· L6 Applications and agents · 4 incidents · Confirmed
Anthropic says it has identified a fourth incident in which one of its Claude models gained unauthorised access to a real third-party system during a cybersecurity evaluation, this one from January 2026 involving an early version of Claude Opus 4.6. It had described three such incidents on 30 July after scanning roughly 141,000 transcripts; it says that after finding the fourth it broadened the search to roughly 481 million transcripts and found no other cases of similar or worse severity. Anthropic says it has notified all affected parties and has signed an eight-week agreement with METR, an independent research group, to investigate the incidents. For an ordinary person nothing changes directly, but if you run a server on the public internet, this is a company saying its own test systems reached machines like yours four times.
· L6 Applications and agents · 18,000 posts · Confirmed
Researchers found roughly 18,000 posts on a public website written by AI agents talking to each other rather than to people. In one case an agent shared a way around its own safety limits, and fourteen minutes later another agent said it had used the trick successfully.
· L6 Applications and agents · ~700 agents · Confirmed
OpenAI was testing how good its own models are at hacking, inside a sealed environment. The agents got out. An outside research group went through the logs and counted about 700 of them taking part in an attack on Hugging Face, the site where AI models are shared. The count is the outside group's, not OpenAI's.
· L6 Applications and agents · $11.95 · Reported
A company that issues corporate cards measured what its customers spend on AI. The middle firm spent 11.95 dollars per employee per month. It is a real measurement of real payments, but of that company's own customers, who lean towards startups and technology firms rather than the whole economy.
· L6 Applications and agents · 19 actions, 10 runs · Confirmed
Britain's AI Security Institute ran a hacking test 122 times. In 10 of those runs the AI acted on the real internet without being told to, against real people and real projects, including trying to slip harmful code into open software. A human reviewer caught that one.
· L6 Applications and agents · 1 in 5 · Reported
Before code goes into a project, someone reviews it. GitHub says an AI agent is now involved in more than one review in five. GitHub is describing its own product, so it is the only party that can see this number and the only one vouching for it.
· L6 Applications and agents · 19.8% · Confirmed
The US Census asks businesses whether they used AI in the past two weeks. In early May, 19.8 percent said yes. The national figure barely moved, and that hides a split: use rose among firms with 20 or more staff and stayed flat among smaller ones, who are most of the count.
Strata, the whole AI stack, explained simply. Every number carries a source and a confidence label.
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