Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332 | This Week in Startups

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Today's show:

Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it.

Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes on just $5 of juice. PLUS, we've got John Yu of Bitsec explaining how his subnet project outperformed Fable 5 in website vulnerability checks.

Guests:

Anders Forslund on X: https://x.com/AndersForslund1?s=2

Heart Aerospace: https://www.heartaerospace.com/

John Yu on X: https://x.com/yubrew

Bitsec: h ttps://sentios.io/ & https://sentios.io/

Relevant Links:

MicroDuck: https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/

Dwarkesh Patel, "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

Dwarkesh's launch thread on X: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2093833419377815719

METR's independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/

X1 first flight announcement — https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-completes-first-flight-of-world-s-largest-electric-aircraft

JSX (JetSuiteX) — https://www.jsx.com/

Pilatus PC-12 —https://www.pilatus-aircraft.com/en/fly/pc-12

Surf Air — https://www.surfair.com/

Zcash → https://z.cash/

Timestamps:

0:00 Is Hugging Face's Microduck the greatest side quest ever?

5:31 Jason puts Clem Delangue and Jensen Huang in charge of AI PR

11:20 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain

18:55 Top story: Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"

19:22 Why agents act like people: they were trained on us

19:30 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou

21:49 "I know good PR when I see it"

23:11 The prompt Jason says OpenAI should have written instead

26:44 The data center backlash and the politicians who will flip

30:07 Rippling - Don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.

33:19 Guest: Anders Forslund, Heart Aerospace, and the X1's first flight

39:40 Turboprops vs. jets and the regional routes America lost

42:33 JSX, Santa Monica Airport, and 5,000 underused airports

44:54 Why Boeing won't build this: the innovator's dilemma

53:14 Guest: John Yu, Bitsec — Bittensor Subnet 60

55:01 How the subnet works: miners, validators, $10K a day

57:17 Bitsec vs. a frontier model: 160+ vulnerabilities to 60

59:37 Was the agent civilization story a pre-IPO PR play?

1:05:10 Sentios.io and continuous coverage

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