Welcome to this week's Big Creek Briefing.
Two things happened this week that founders should sit with. First, the balance of power in AI officially shifted: Anthropic is now outearning OpenAI. Second, security researchers confirmed the first ransomware attack run start to finish by an autonomous AI agent, with no human at the keyboard once it got started. Add in a fresh wave of unicorn funding pouring into AI startups, and you have a week that captures exactly where things stand right now: the money is moving faster than ever, and so are the risks. Here is what happened and what it means for your business.
Let's jump in!
AI Joke of the Week
Claude saved me 10 hours this week. I spent 9 of them reading about new AI tools.
Big Stories of the Week
- Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI in Revenue: Anthropic is now on pace for $47 billion in annualized revenue, ahead of OpenAI's reported $25 to $33 billion, and closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation this week, putting it above OpenAI on paper for the first time. The split comes down to business model: Anthropic earns roughly 85% of its revenue from enterprise and developer API customers, while OpenAI earns about 85% from ChatGPT consumer subscriptions. For founders building on either platform, this is a reminder that the tool you rely on today is backed by a company whose priorities could shift fast depending on who they are chasing revenue from.
- The First Fully Autonomous AI Ransomware Attack Was Confirmed:
Security researchers at Sysdig documented JADEPUFFER, an AI agent that broke into an exposed server, stole credentials, moved through the network, and encrypted a company's database on its own, adapting to failures in real time with no human directing it step by step. In one case it went from a failed login attempt to a working exploit in 31 seconds. This matters enormously for small businesses specifically, since the skill and cost required to run an attack like this has effectively dropped to whatever it costs to rent an AI agent.
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AI Startup Funding Hit a New Fever Pitch: Jeff Bezos-backed Prometheus, an industrial AI startup building tools for engineering and manufacturing, raised $12 billion this week at a $41 billion valuation, less than a year after launching. It is part of a broader surge: nearly 90 startups reached unicorn status in the first half of 2026 alone, driven almost entirely by AI investor demand. The capital flooding into AI right now is reshaping which tools get built, which get funded, and how fast new competitors can show up in your market.
Main Insights
AI ROI is a thing
The return on AI is no longer theoretical for small businesses. According to Salesforce, 91% of small businesses using AI report that it is boosting their revenue, and the tools delivering the most value are concentrated in a few clear categories: AI writing and content generation (used by about 71% of AI-adopting small businesses), customer service chatbots (38%), scheduling and admin automation (29%), and image or visual content generation (27%). The practical takeaway is that you do not need to chase every new tool that launches. The businesses seeing real revenue impact are the ones going deep on the two or three categories that actually touch their bottlenecks, not spreading thin across ten different tools.
Founder Insights
The JADEPUFFER story above is not just a security headline, it is a governance problem most founders have not addressed yet. Recent research found that 80.9% of technical teams have already pushed AI agents into active use, but only 14.4% of those deployments went live with full security or IT review. Big companies can absorb that gap with dedicated security teams. Small businesses generally cannot. If you or your team have connected an AI tool to email, a CRM, a bank account, or customer data, this is the week to ask what permissions that tool actually has and whether anyone has ever reviewed them. Treating that review as a one time setup task instead of an ongoing habit is exactly how gaps like the one JADEPUFFER exploited get created.
Quick Hit: One Prompt to Simplify Your Week
Try this the next time you need to make a pricing or positioning decision:
"List every AI tool or agent I currently have connected to my email, calendar, CRM, bank accounts, or customer data. For each one, tell me what data it can access, what actions it can take automatically without my approval, and whether that level of access is more than it actually needs to do its job. Flag the two riskiest connections first."
Paste in your actual tool list and let it work from there. This takes ten minutes and can catch an access gap before someone else finds it for you.
AI Tool Spotlight: Folk
If your contact list currently lives across LinkedIn, a spreadsheet, your inbox, and your memory, Folk is worth a look. It is a lightweight CRM built specifically for people who hate traditional CRMs, positioning itself as a relationship OS rather than a sales pipeline tool. The folkX Chrome extension lets you pull contact details straight off LinkedIn with one click, and Folk automatically syncs your email, calendar, and WhatsApp activity so your contact history builds itself instead of requiring manual logging.
What makes Folk genuinely useful for a founder or small team is how little upkeep it demands. Magic Fields uses AI to auto populate contact details you would otherwise have to fill in by hand, and built in AI assistants can draft outreach or summarize a relationship history in seconds. It connects to more than 5,000 other apps through Zapier and Make, so it slots into a lean stack instead of forcing you to rebuild one around it. For founders and fractional operators juggling investor relationships, candidate pipelines, or client networks without a dedicated sales team, it fills a real gap between a spreadsheet and a full enterprise CRM.
Folk has no permanent free plan, but offers a 14 day trial. The Standard plan runs $24 per user per month billed annually ($30 billed monthly) and covers pipeline management, email campaigns, and the AI features above. Premium runs $48 per user per month annually ($60 monthly) and adds deal tracking, email sequences, and API access. You can find it at folk.app.
What We're Watching
Microsoft is quietly cutting its AI spend
The company is now leaning more on its own in house MAI models instead of OpenAI and Anthropic to control costs, joining Amazon, Uber, and Accenture in a broader industry shift away from unlimited AI spending.
Chinese AI models are gaining real global share
Chinese providers now account for roughly 45% of all traffic on OpenRouter, up from under 2% a year ago, a sign that the cheaper end of the AI market is shifting fast.
Zuckerberg is tempering expectations on AI agents
Meta's CEO told staff internally that AI agents have not progressed as quickly as he had hoped, a notable admission given how much of the industry's roadmap depends on agents actually working reliably.
Agentic AI security standards are racing to catch up
In the wake of incidents like JADEPUFFER, expect faster movement on formal security frameworks for AI agents over the next few months, since the tooling to defend against autonomous attacks is still well behind the tooling to launch them.
The Wrap(TLDR)
Anthropic passed OpenAI in revenue this week and closed a $65 billion round at a $965 billion valuation, while security researchers confirmed the first ransomware attack run entirely by an autonomous AI agent with no human involved after launch. AI startup funding is also at a fever pitch, with Bezos backed Prometheus raising $12 billion and nearly 90 companies reaching unicorn status in the first half of the year. On the ground, 91% of small businesses using AI say it is boosting revenue, concentrated mostly in writing, customer service, and scheduling tools. This week's tool spotlight is Folk, a lightweight relationship focused CRM worth a look if your contacts live in ten different places. Bottom line: the AI opportunity and the AI risk are both accelerating at the same time, so this is a good week to double check what your tools can actually access.
If you want help designing AI workflows or understanding how these new models fit into your business, Big Creek Growth can help. Reply to this email and we will walk through it together.
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Until next time,
– Adam
Founder, Big Creek Growth
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