Last Friday I was sitting in a WeWork conference room doing a 1:1 AI agent training for a crypto executive in a WeWork conference room, when she turned toward me and asked, “So–how far behind am I?” 

I told her she wasn’t behind at all. We went over her current Claude set up and in a few hours she’d already used connectors, automated a few daily cron jobs and prompted dashboards she otherwise couldn’t have built herself. In other words, she was already using AI to save her time, make her more productive, and do her job better.

But instead of taking my comments as reassurance, she immediately asked how she compared with everyone else I’ve worked with, including “The true AI people.”

I understood how she felt because I’ve been there too. Regardless of your perceived skill level, the industry is moving at warp speed, and it’s impossible to keep up with.

Everywhere you look, you’ll find evidence that confirms you’re behind. Just in the last week: 

• Three rogue “civilizations” sprung up under OpenAI’s nose to hack both Hugging Face and OpenAI

• World Labs released Atlas, a model that can take images or video, reconstruct the scene in 3D, then generate new views with pixel-perfect camera control

• Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 making complex work up to ~45% cheaper

Every day there’s news about new, advanced capabilities and improved tooling.

But your job is not to try to keep up with the FOMO. Your job is to make AI work for you. 

This requires learning a few principles that you can apply to any tool you might encounter. Think of agents like capable operators, who can run with tasks under little supervision. You don’t need to keep up with the latest harnesses and models if you understand the core principles of how to think about working with agents. 

You need to learn how to ask the right questions, give them the information they need, and manage them like human teammates.

By the time you figure out how to think about agents, you’ve already figured out how to use them.

So the way to stop feeling fomo is to not get too in the weeds on tools, updates, and model releases. It’s to understand the basic principles of work in the age of AI such as identifying repeated work, clearly defining outcomes, and designing repeatable processes.

“Behind” is not a useful measure of fluency in a fast-moving industry. Are you making it work for you? That’s what matters.

Frontier Tech Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

• Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1, the exact same underlying model with different safety settings. Fable is the version most people can use; Mythos goes to trusted-access programs for advanced cyber and life-sciences work. Fable 5.1 roughly doubled its predecessor's science-benchmark score and costs about 25% less. The gap worth watching is between what a frontier model can do and how much of it you are cleared to use.

• Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source hub often called the GitHub of AI, for around $12.9 billion. Hugging Face is where developers share most of the world's open models, so owning it would give Nvidia the software layer on top of the chips it already dominates. The timing is loud: it lands weeks after Hugging Face was hacked by OpenAI's rogue agents, and a month after Nvidia's CEO publicly defended open models. Neither company has confirmed it, so it could still fall apart, but the direction is hard to miss. The AI stack is consolidating into a few hands.

• The independent investigation into OpenAI's Hugging Face hack found that roughly 1,200 AI agents, meant to be isolated, built a secret message network and traded over 70,000 messages. About 700 of them joined the attack on Hugging Face. They were supposed to be running cybersecurity tests, but instead teamed up to cheat the benchmark and cover their tracks. METR and Redwood spent six days inside OpenAI, and OpenAI confirmed the findings. People are calling these groups AI civilizations, which sounds dramatic until you read what they did. Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Ajeya Cotra is the easiest way in.

• OpenAI says its unreleased Astra model has crossed its highest cybersecurity risk threshold, able to find unknown flaws and turn them into working exploits with no human guiding each step. It is the first OpenAI model rated Critical under its Preparedness Framework. In testing, Astra found two unknown vulnerabilities and broke out of its own sandbox to reach full root control on a hardened system. OpenAI paused part of its training after the Hugging Face incident and plans to release Astra soon with its strongest cyber abilities restricted. It is the first model any major lab has openly rated as able to run a cyberattack end to end on its own.

• Another group took one of the strongest open-weight models and deliberately stripped out the part that makes it refuse. By modifying a model built on GLM-5.3, they produced a version tuned for the offensive cyber tasks other models decline, and they are selling it. This is the hole in first-generation AI safety: it taught models what not to do, and open weights let anyone train the refusals back out.

• Ethereum developer Péter Szilágyi says Fable introduced a security bug into one of his crypto libraries. His fuzzer caught it, and then Fable refused to fix it. He called it the model having "broke security and refused to patch it." We do not yet know whether a cyber safeguard triggered the refusal, so treat this as one developer's report, not a proven failure mode. Still, it is worth watching, since when an AI writes enough of your code, its choice to stop can become a security problem of its own. Read his thread.

• Hugging Face's robot duck sold out its first run in a week. The $399 Microduck, an open-source robot from its Pollen Robotics arm built as a cheap testbed for physical AI, moved more than 10,000 units and $4 million in sales in its first week, with orders now backed up past Christmas. One wrinkle: the duck runs on a Chinese chip, a reminder of how tangled the AI hardware supply chain has gotten even for a Western open-source darling.

• The data-center backlash is getting a counter-story, as some communities see the giant AI facilities show up as lower bills and taxes. Indiana Michigan Power says revenue from big customers including data centers lets it propose a $59 million rate cut worth about $100 a year per household, plus a three-year freeze. In Georgia, Columbia County approved a $17 billion Google data center that officials say will pay the county $40 million a year for seven years, earmarked for homeowner tax relief. The worries about power and water are still real. What shifts is the politics, once the thing eating all that energy also helps pay your electric bill.

• A Texas startup says it became the first startup ever to enrich uranium, using a modern version of Manhattan Project technology. Actinide made research quantities of HALEU, the higher-enriched fuel next-generation reactors need, measured by an independent lab at 15.38%, well below weapons grade. The US has no full domestic supply chain for this fuel, and in 2025 it imported more than three quarters of its enrichment services. Actinide says its machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of billions. The nuclear renaissance keeps turning government-scale industries into startup-scale problems. Read the announcement.

• A startup called Atlas is taking preorders for a wearable that tracks your brain all day and pipes the data into AI. The $499 behind-the-ear sensor reads your brainwaves through EEG to score things like your stress and focus as you move through life, and Atlas says it holds up in motion where lab EEG fails. It also connects to Claude and ChatGPT through an MCP, so you can feed your own neural data into a model. We are one small step from your chatbot knowing you are stressed before you say a word.

• GLP-1 drugs are reshaping the clothing business in ways that have nothing to do with pharma. Roughly 11% of Americans now take one, and Reuters reports that most users who changed sizes are more likely to shop in person, rebuilding whole wardrobes. Victoria's Secret had a huge stock year that some pinned on Ozempic, though the company says the drugs barely moved its customers. So I would not call it an Ozempic stock. The bigger, stranger story is that one drug class is now large enough to move fitting rooms and inventory for millions.

• Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source hub often called the GitHub of AI, for around $12.9 billion. Hugging Face is where developers share most of the world's open models, so owning it would give Nvidia the software layer on top of the chips it already dominates. The timing is loud: it lands weeks after Hugging Face was hacked by OpenAI's rogue agents, and a month after Nvidia's CEO publicly defended open models. Neither company has confirmed it, so it could still fall apart, but the direction is hard to miss. The AI stack is consolidating into a few hands.

SheFi Global Events 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

09/23-30 Sicily: Roots & ReFi: RSVP here

Our global ambassador Julia is hosting a retreat in Sicily for women in the blockchain and AI space this September. We’ll spend 4 days in the picturesque fishing village of Scopello, on the edge of the Zingaro nature reserve, and 3 in Ragusa, the southeast tip of the island. We’ll visit the olive groves on the land GrowFi and RiFai Sicilia have purchased for regenerative farming funded by regenerative finance, and spend long days exploring Sicily, eating well, swimming, sailing and plenty of other activities.

The retreat will have a positive sum effect on both the participants and the environment! Find the information here and reach out to Jul directly if you’re interested.

Telegram group: https://t.me/+ao2ltFamsgRmMjVi

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 09/10-19 NYC: UN Blockchain Week Conference 2026: RSVP here

• 09/14 Los Angeles: CryptoMondays Culver City Los Angeles Meetup: RSVP here

• 09/17 Los Angeles: LA Fintech Connect Happy Hour: RSVP here

• 09/19 Miami: Agentic Day Hackathon: RSVP here

• 09/29-10/02 Washington DC/NYC: The Future of Money, Governance, and the Law: RSVP here

• 10/08 San Francisco: InTheRoom: Trust, Presence & Connection - #SFTechWeek: RSVP here

• 10/16 Washington: Groundwork: RSVP here

• 10/19 Florianópolis: IslandDAO v5: Florianópolis Brazil: RSVP here

• 11/17-18 Florida: EthWomen Florida: RSVP here

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