Tech Brew Ride Home - Clawdbot Is Now Moltbot

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Meta earnings good. The street like the AI spending. Microsoft earnings bad. Why is growth in their cloud business not as robust all of the sudden? Elon is following through on taking Tesla all in on robots and AI. The AI inspired layoffs are NOT just for the tech industry. And are you actually technical enough to run that Clawdbot? Zuckerberg teases agentic commerce tools and major AI rollout in 2026 (TechCrunch) Microsoft stock drops 7% on slowing cloud growth, light margin guidance (CNBC) Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for first time (FT) Dow to Cut 4,500 Employees in AI Overhaul (WSJ) Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica (TechCrunch) Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta’s Llama (TechCrunch) Clawdbot sheds skin to become Moltbot, can't slough off security issues (The Register) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the tech brew ride home for Thursday, January 29th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Meta earnings good. The street likes the AI spending. Microsoft earnings bad. Why is growth in their cloud business not as robust all of a sudden? Elon is following through on taking Tesla all in on robots and AI. The AI-inspired layoffs are not just for the tech industry anymore. And are you actually technical enough to run that cloudbot? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Everyone seems to be deploying AI agents right now. but the thing is, sometimes AI agents mess up. They go off script or make changes you didn't authorize, forcing you to diagnose and fix it. The good news is Rubric Agent Cloud helps prevent that extra work. It's the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern, and rewind AI agent actions.

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I'm going to run down a bunch of earnings news here, all-in-one segments, starting with meta, who reported earnings yesterday that were fine. Meta stock is up nearly 8% this morning, and that comes even as Meta said, it expects its 2020 CAP-X spend to be 115 to 135 billion. billion. That compares to a $110.6 billion analyst estimate and the $72.2 billion it spent on CAPEX just last year. This is all, of course, driven by investments in their superintelligence labs and quoting TechCrunch. In 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program, Mark Zuckerberg said on an investor call Wednesday, referring to the company's recently restructured AI lab. Over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products, and I expect

us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the new year, end quote. But while Zuckerberg didn't give specific timelines or products, he highlighted AI-driven commerce as a particular area of focus for meta. This also has implications for commerce, Zuckerberg continued. New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right set of products from the businesses in our catalog. That proposal echoes broader interest in AI-powered shopping assistance across the industry, both Google and OpenAI have built platforms for agent-enabled transactions with companies like Stripe and Uber signed on as partners. But while other AI labs have already built significant technical infrastructure, Meta believes its access to personal data

will prove uniquely valuable. We're starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our interests, our content, and our relationships, Zuckerberg said on the call. A lot of what makes agents valuable is the unique context that they can see, and we believe that meta will be able to provide a uniquely personal experience, end quote. So that was meta. Good. The street seems to buy into that AI narrative and are sanguine about continued spending to get there, I guess. But conversely, Microsoft, not good.

Down almost 12% this morning. 12% in one day is pretty, pretty not good, right? So what's up here, quoting CNBC? The software maker showed slowing growth in its Azure cloud segment, which declined to 39% growth from 40% growth in the company's first fiscal quarter. Investors closely watch the segment as a stand-in for measuring enterprise AI demand. At the same time, capital expenditures and finance leases in the quarter jumped 66% to 37.5 billion, surpassing the $34.31 billion expected by analysts pulled by visible alpha as the company supports demand for its cloud and AI segment. The company also said it's struggling with compute capacity constraints as demands continue to outweigh supply.

Microsoft Finance Chief Amy Hood said Azure would have grown 40% if the company had funneled all of its new GPU chips in the first and second quarter into its Azure business, end quote. Microsoft also said its cloud contracted backlog grew 110% to $625 billion, around 45% of which comes from OpenAI. alone. So that's basically money that should come into Microsoft someday, in theory, if no bubbles burst. Also, I want to note a third company, S.K.K. Heenix has surpassed Samsung an annual operating profit for the very first time. S.K. Heenix posted a record profit of around $33 billion in 2025, well, Samsung posted $30.5 billion. The reason here, well, they can't sell those memory chips fast enough. Again, AI. bunch of Tesla news this morning. Tesla plans to scrap its premium S and X models and convert its California factory into an optimist manufacturing hub as Elon Musk refocuses the company on robotics and AI, quoting the FT.

Tesla plans to scrap two models and invest $2 billion in Elon Musk's XAI as the electric vehicle pioneer accelerates a charge into robotics and artificial intelligence following its first drop in annual revenue. In the clearest sign yet of where Musk is steering Tesla, the company said it would end production of the premium S and X models next quarter and convert its California factory into a manufacturing hub for its optimist robots. The announcements came as Tesla's fourth quarter results laid bare the damage to the carmaker from a year dominated by the Trump administration's ending of EV tax incentives, Musk's polarizing politics, and the continued rise of low-cost Chinese rival BYD. announcing the decision to ditch the premium S and X models, Musk said that is slightly sad, but it's part of our overall shift to an autonomous future. The world's richest man has gambled Tesla's future

on self-driving cybercabs and AI-enabled humanoid robots. The group has begun calling itself a physical AI company. Tesla has also pressed ahead with a $2 billion investment in Musk's XAI as part of its January funding round, despite lukewarm shareholder support for that move. SpaceX, the billionaire's rocket company, has already invested $2 billion in XAI as he seeks more financial support for the capital-intensive business. The move to link Tesla more closely to Musk's AI group came after a non-binding shareholder resolution in November pushed for such an investment. While the measure received more votes in favor than against, the combined number of abstentions and no votes showed a majority of shareholders were not behind the move, end quote. Maybe it's not just tech companies. Dow, chemical maker Dow says it plans to cut 4,500 staff to save costs and will rely on AI to boost productivity, resulting in $1.1 to $1.5 billion in charges. Dow currently employs around 34,000 people. Quoting the journal, Dow said it is embarking on a program dubbed Transform to Outperform, which would employ artificial intelligence and automation to reduce expenditure and catalyze growth and productivity, yielding an additional $2 billion in operating earnings before interest depreciation

and amortization. Chairman and CEO Jim Fedorling said the program represents a comprehensive and radical simplification of our operating model. The company currently employs about 34,000 people and operates sites in 29 countries. Dow anticipates several charges and other costs associated with the program, including $600 to $800 million in severance costs and $500 to $700 million in other one-time costs. In 2027, Dow said the overhaul would result in $1.2 billion in incremental operating EBITDA with charges of about $300 to $500 million. In 2008, the program would add $300 million in operating EBITDA with no further charges, end quote.

Waymo says one of its robotaxies struck a child at six miles per hour near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23rd, resulting in minor injuries. Quoting TechCrunch. The NHTSA has opened an investigation into the accident, and Waymo said in a blog post that it will cooperate fully with them throughout the process. Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at six miles per hour after breaking hard from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian, quote, suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV moving directly into our vehicle's path. The company said in its blog post, Waymo said its vehicle immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement

cleared the vehicle to leave the scene, Waymo wrote in the post. News of the crash comes as Waymo faces dual investigations into its robotaxies illegally passing school buses. The NHTSA opened a probe into the problem in October shortly after the first report of the incident in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Transportation Safety Board opened its own investigation last week after around 20 incidents were reported in Austin, Texas. According to the NHTSA, the accident occurred within two blocks of the elementary school during normal school drop-off hours. The safety regulator said there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked

vehicles in the vicinity. The NHTSA's Office of Defect's investigation is investigating whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop-off hours and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users, end quote. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your

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only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter. U.S.-based AI startup Akri. has released Trinity Large, a 400 billion-perameter open-weight model that it says compares to Meta's Lama4 Maverick 400B on some benchmarks. I'm flagging this because, look, it's not just the Chinese. We can make impressive open-weight models right here in the good old US of A, quoting TechCrunch. Many in the industry think the winners of the AI model market have

already been decided. Big Tech will own it. Google, Meta, Microsoft, a bit of Amazon, along with their model makers of choice, largely open AI and anthropic. But Tiny 30-person startup Acri AI disagrees. The company just released a truly and permanently open Apache license general purpose foundation model called Trinity. And ACRI claims that at 400 billion parameters, it is among the largest open source foundation models ever trained and released by a U.S. company. Acre says Trinity compares to Meta's Lama for Maverick 400B and ZAI's GLM 4.5, a high-performance open source model from China's Tishinga University, according to benchmark tests, conducted using base models, very little post-training. Like other state-of-the-art, S-O-T-A models, Trinity is geared for coding and multi-step processes like agents. Still, despite its size, it's not a true

soda competitor yet because it currently supports only text. More models are in the works. A vision model is currently in development, and a speech-to-text version is on the roadmap. C-T-O-Lukas-A-Kin's told TechCrunch in comparison, Medaslama 4 Maverick is already multimodal supporting text and images. But before adding more AI models to its roster, Akri says it wanted a base LLM that would impress its main target customers, developers, and academics. The team particularly wants to woo U.S. companies of all sizes away from choosing open models from China. Ultimately, the winners of this game and the only way to really win over the usage is to have

the best openweight model, Akins said. To win the hearts and minds of developers, you have to give them the best. best. The benchmarks show that the Trinity-based model currently in preview, while more post-training takes place, is largely holding its own and in some cases slightly besting Lama on tests of coding and math, common sense, knowledge, and reasoning. The progress ACRI has made so far to become a competitive AI lab is impressive. The large Trinity model follows two previous small models released in December, the 26B parameter Trinity Mini, a fully post-trained reasoning model for tasks ranging from web apps to agents, and the 6B parameter

Trinity Nano, an experimental model designed to push the boundaries of models that are tiny yet chatty. The kicker is, Akri trained them all in six months for $20 million in total using 2048 Nvidia Blackwell B300 GPUs. This out of the roughly $50 million the company has raised so far, said founder and CEO Mark McQuaid. That kind of cash was a lot for us, says Atkins, who led the model building effort. Still, he acknowledged that it pales in comparison to how much bigger labs are spending right now, end quote. Finally today, some news about Claudebot. First,

it's no longer called Claudebot. Anthropics lawyers finally came calling, I guess, so now it is officially MaltBot. But second, security researchers have a warning for all of you out there tinkering with this thing. They caution that Maltbot requires a specialist skill set to use safely, as data exposure risks persist even when it is set up correctly. Quoting the register Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet? Claudebot, now known as Maltbot, has gone viral in AI in developer circles in recent days with fans hailing the open source AI personal assistant as a potential breakthrough. The long and short of it is that Maltbot can be controlled

using messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram in a similar way to the Gen AI chatbots everyone knows about. Taking things a little further, its agentic capabilities allow it to take care of life admin for users, such as responding to emails, managing calendars, screening phone calls, or booking table reservations, all with minimal intervention or prompting from the user. All that functionality comes at a cost, however, and not just the outlay so many seem to be making on Mac Mini purchases for the sole purpose of hosting a Maltbot instance. In order for Moldbot to read and respond to emails and all of the rest of it, it needs access to accounts and their credentials. Users are handing over the keys to their encrypted messenger apps, phone numbers,

and bank accounts to this agentic system. Naturally, security experts have had a few things to say about that. First, there was the furor around public exposures. Maltbot is a complex system, and despite being as easy to install as a typical app on the face of it, the misconfigurations associated with it prompted experts to highlight the dangers of running Maltbot instances without the proper know-how. Jameson O'Reilly, founder of Reddit teaming company Dvon, was among the first to draw attention to the issue, saying that he saw hundreds of Codbot instances exposed to the web potentially leaking secrets. He told the register that the attack model he reported to Maltbots' developers, which involved proxy misconfigurations and local host connection auto authentication is now fixed.

However, if exploited, it could have allowed attackers to access months of private messages, account credentials, API keys, and more, anything to which Claudebot owners gave it access. According to his Shodend scans, supported by others looking into the matter, he found hundreds of instances exposed to the web. If those had open ports allowing authenticated admin connections, it would allow attackers to access the full breadth of secrets in Maltbot. Eric Schwaake, director of cybersecurity strategy at Salt Security told the registrar a significant gap exists between the consumer enthusiasm for Claudebots' one-click appeal and the technical expertise needed to operate a secure agenetic gateway. While installing it may

resemble a typical Mac app, proper configuration, requires a thorough understanding of API posture governance to prevent credential exposure due to misconfigurations or weak authentication. Many users unintentionally create a large visibility void by failing to track which corporate and personal tokens they've shared with the system. Without enterprise-level insight, into these hidden connections, even a small mistake in a prosumer setup can turn a useful tool into an open backdoor risking exposure of both home and work data to attackers. The security concerns surrounding Maltbot persist even when it is set up correctly, as the team at Hudson Rock pointed out this week. Its researchers said they looked at Moldbots code and found that some of the

secrets shared with the assistant by users were stored in plain text markdown and JSON files on the user's local file system. The implication there is that if a host machine, such as one of the Mac minis being bought en masse to host Maltbot, were infected with Info-Steeler malware, then it would mean the secrets stored by the AI assistant could be compromised. Hudson Rock is already seeing malware as a service families implement capabilities to target local first directory substructures, such as those used by Moldbot, including Redline, Luma, and Vidar. It is fathomable that any of these popular strains of malware could be deployed against the internet-exposed Maltbot instances.

to steal credentials and carry out financially motivated attacks. If the attacker is also able to gain right access, then they can turn Moldbot into a back door, instructing it to siphon sensitive data in the future, trust malicious sources, and more. Claudebot represents the future of personal AI, but its security posture relies on an outdated model of endpoint trust, said Hudson Rock.

Without encryption at rest or containerization, the local first AI revolution risks becoming a goldmine for the global cybercrime economy. Quote, nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.