Welcome to another AI by Aakash. I follow the AI news so you don’t have to.
xAI’s $60B acquisition of Cursor closed this week. They paired the launch with what some are calling the product launch of the year, Grok Bot:
Is it really product of the year? I investigate in today’s deep dive. But first, a word from our sponsors + this week’s top news.
In Partnership with
Arize: The Hire-On-The-Spot Skill
Arize CPO Aparna Dhinakaran told me on the pod:
“If a PM candidate came in and showed they could build an agent, instrument it, write evals, and fix issues using Claude Code and Arize, she'd hire them on the spot.”
That's the bar now. Arize makes it possible to hit that bar in an afternoon.
This Week’s AI News
The Week’s Top News: The End of Claudefishing
Anthropic quietly revealed in help docs this week that every Claude model launched after 2nd August weaves an invisible watermark into any text it generates:
This mark travels with the text when you copy it. Anthropic will soon release a public detector too. How it works is that the model tilts its word choices according to a secret key, and the detector is able to confirm the pattern.
This marks the end of “Claudefishing,” where you use Claude to write but claim it as your own. Some people are furious. What do I think? My recommendation is to just be transparent. If you use AI to assist or write, tell people.
As for this newsletter? Substack announced a few weeks back it scans posts via Pangram. Since then, all my posts have been 100% human:
The Other News that Mattered:
There were a bunch of model releases: Grok 4.6, Gemini Flash 3.7, GLM-5.3, and Muse Spark. None revealed a frontier model. Grok 4.6 did produce a major chart crime though.
An OpenClaw agent helped a man in Melbourne book a gym class by hacking the scheduling system, opening a stranger’s reservation, deleting it, and making space for the man. If you were wondering about all the hubbub over AI’s cybersecurity capabilities, now you understand what all the doomers were talking about.
In one month, Cloudflare will start cutting off Google traffic for millions of its smallest customers by default. Publishers are not happy about AI answers, and this is the result.
Tools:
Spotify’s engineering team released Xirp, which is a session manager for AI coding agents. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are spending billions to make their model the one your team depends on. Xirp makes them interchangeable.
X open-sourced the entire ‘For You’ timeline algorithm. I read the code and broke it down here.
Feature Releases:
Coderabbit released Agentic Change management, a layer which decides which PRs need human attention, now that most code is written by AI.
Lindy released its “teammate,” an AI employee whose memory lives in plain files.
Oumi launched a “compounding AI factory” where production failures become retraining signal.
Deep Dive
Grok Bot: xAI cooked this time
xAI had two releases this week: the Grok 4.6 model and the new Grok Bot product.
I am more interested in the product. People are calling it the AI product release of the year. It has a lot of “first-of” feature releases.
Let’s explore today:
What is Grok Bot?
How to create a fleet of agents
100+ use cases to try today
Is it product of the year?
1. What is Grok Bot
Grok Bot is a multi-agentic platform built to automate complex long running office tasks end-to-end like a real human employee.
Each bot runs a persistent cloud computer, logs into your apps, and handles tasks across interfaces. It only returns to you for approvals! You run multiple bots at once and they coordinate on their own.
Download it from here to follow along: x.ai/bot · desktop (macOS, Windows) + iOS
It is not a better ChatGPT/Claude.
It is not a replacement for an employee with judgment.
It’s an environment to manage agents. Grok Bot was heavily dogfooded by xAI’s own product, growth, operations and engineering teams to handle all of their tasks: outreach, marketing, software bug repairs etc… we will try to execute them today and see the results.
You get a 7 day free trial right now (what I used for this piece), or buy the $200 plan. Cursor Ultra plan users get it by default.
2. How to create a fleet of agents
Grok has made the UX pretty simple for you to follow along. You don’t even have to set up anything in settings. Grok does it for you.
Step 1: Give your agent a name and mission.
Create a list of all the things you want to automate and make them your employees (sharing the best use cases below)
Step 2: Make multiple agents for yourself and configure the plugins
You only have to do this once. These are shared by all the agents. I connected Gmail for my EA agent and now my sponsorship negotiation agent can also access it:
Grok Bot has a computer, basically: a persistent cloud VM with a browser, a filesystem, and a terminal.
One cool thing that this resulted in: I didn’t give it any context about AI by Aakash. It spun up its computer and went through all my Substack articles on its own.
Grok Bot is the first consumer agent I have used that tries to finish the job inside the harness itself. It can log in. It can click. It can wait. It only comes back when it needs a yes/approval/review, or when the work is done. Compared to Cowork, it talks back and says no much less often.
Step 3: Create routines for your day to day tasks by explaining the task
You can do things like create a Monday morning experiment readout:
It keeps working when you leave… even when your laptop or phone is shut.
Step 4: Convert these tasks to skills and let them be accessed by all the agents
You can also teach your agent to mimic your work and convert it to a task:
When the output is good, save the process as a skill. Skills are how, not when. Any Bot can use a skill (they are shared by default)
!! The best part about these skills is that they are self-evolving like Hermes (keep gaining more context and memory over time). You can correct them, but they identify and correct their own mistakes.
Step 5: Put them in one thread and let a Chief of Staff coordinate.
This is personally my favorite feature of the product.
You don’t have to be the router between Bots. They easily co-ordinate with each other, pass the work, and bring you only the items that need a yes or…a review.
3. 100 use cases to try today
I have drafted 100+ bot prompts for every category of work - from product, tech, sales, marketing, and content to personal work - in this Notion database:
Take the prompts you like and make them Grok Bots.
4. Is it product of the year?
No. After my testing, I consider Autoresearch, GBrain, Hermes, ChatGPT Work, Claude Design, and Cowork all to be better product releases. They can do what they do better AND will be used by more people.
But Grok Bot is xAI’s strongest entry ever, and, conspicuously, much better than what we’ve seen from Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, or anyone else.
That’s all for today. See you next week.
Great article, hope you will write more about Grok Bot as it evolves.