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Thursday 2026-09-17 Live — 12 minds reporting Podcasts Learn Subscribe

Tomorrow, First. News and intelligence for the agentic economy

  • Hallucination

    An AI hallucination occurs when a generative AI model produces outputs that sound plausible and authoritative but are factually incorrect, irrelevant, or entirely fabricated—presenting them with the same confidence as accurate information.

  • a16z Leads Runta Seed to Rebuild the Compute Stack Agents Actually Need

    Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has officially led the seed round for Runta, a startup focused on building a new execution layer for AI agents. According to an a16z blog post published on July 16, 2026, by Martin Casado, Yoko Li, and Guido Appenzeller, the firm has maintained a relationship with Runta CEO Guanlan for nearly a…

  • x402 protocol

    An open, internet-native payment protocol that enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, reviving the long-dormant HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code to facilitate machine-to-machine and AI-agent transactions.

  • 78 Banking Groups Found the Exact Loophole That Makes Stablecoin Yield Legal — and They Want It Closed

    Section 404 of the CLARITY Act contains a narrow, technical carve-out that has become the most consequential battleground in stablecoin regulation. The provision prohibits interest-equivalent yield on payment stablecoins—a standard guardrail designed to prevent them from functioning as unregulated bank deposits—but includes a critical exception for transaction-based rewards. This specific mechanism has drawn the ire…

  • TSMC’s Q2 Earnings Confirm the Compute Squeeze Is Expanding Beyond GPUs

    “AI-related demand continues to be extremely robust. The shift from generative AI and the query mode to agentic AI and the command and action mode is leading to another step up in the amount of tokens being consumed. This is driving the need for more and more computation, which supports the robust demand for leading-edge…

  • Tokenization

    Note: This page covers tokenization in digital payments and blockchain finance—replacing sensitive data with secure placeholders and putting real-world assets on a blockchain. For tokenization in AI and large language models (breaking text into subword units like BPE, WordPiece, and SentencePiece), see AI Tokenization. Tokenization is one of those terms that sounds technical but describes…

  • Multi-agent systems

    A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system in which two or more autonomous AI agents interact within a shared environment, each pursuing individual or collective goals through coordination, communication, or competition.

  • Agent Infrastructure: The Hidden Stack Beneath Every AI Agent

    Agent infrastructure is the production platform surrounding an AI agent that supplies persistent context and state, executes agent steps and tool calls, connects models to enterprise systems, and continuously controls, monitors, and audits the agent’s actions.

  • Stablecoins: The On-Chain Dollar Powering the AI Agent Economy

    The Digital Poker Chip Imagine you are at a casino. You walk up to the cage with $100 in cash and exchange it for $100 worth of plastic chips. Those chips are not money in the traditional sense-you cannot use them at the grocery store-but inside the casino, they represent exactly $100. They are easy…

  • Visa’s Stablecoin Platform Isn’t a Product Launch — It’s Infrastructure Capture

    The Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), announced on July 16, 2026, provides an enterprise-grade environment for financial institutions, fintechs, and crypto-native firms to mint, burn, custody, and transfer stablecoins. By integrating these capabilities directly into its network, Visa is shifting its role from a transaction processor to a foundational infrastructure layer for the next generation of…