Bitcoin Magazine

Updated Crypto Clarity Act Starts Circulating Days Before Key Vote 

A new draft of the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act has dropped with amendments.

As first reported by Eleanor Terrett from Crypto in America and Punchbowl’s Brendan Pedersen, the updated bill contains changes including requiring non-decentralized DeFi protocols to register with the CFTC, and changes around how credit unions deal in crypto, according to reporters. 

The specifics include that a decentralized finance app fails the test of being such a protocol test if someone can control or materially alter its functionality, if it doesn’t run solely on pre-established transparent encoded rules, or if someone can restrict or censor its use.

It also adds that a federal credit union may use a digital asset or distributed ledger system to perform, provide, or deliver any activity, function, product, or service it is otherwise authorized by law to perform.

JUST IN: An updated version of the Clarity Act has released ahead of next week's floor vote

"Latest changes include new DeFi requirements and credit union fix" — Punchbowl News

Pass it pic.twitter.com/uYntehREqI

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) September 10, 2026

Lawmakers were hoping a crucial vote on the crypto market structure bill would go ahead in August before their five-week recess. It was delayed and the Senate will now vote on it on September 15. 

The bill is not bipartisan yet, according to the reporters. Senate Republicans started circulating the updated legislation on Thursday. 

The Clarity Act drafts a framework to formally divide oversight between regulators, distinguishing which digital assets are securities, commodities or stablecoins. Crypto industry executives have long called for such rules to be in place. 

Though passed by the House of Representatives last July, it has been stalled this year, mostly because the banking lobby clashed with crypto companies over paying customers stablecoin yield. 

A new draft tackling the issue of ethics started circulating in July, banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto — something Democrats have criticized the Trump family for doing. 

Despite the changes, a group of Democrats said the bill fell short and demanded amendments to the bill. 

Pro-crypto lawmakers have blasted Democratic politicians who they think are deliberately holding back the bill.  

President Donald Trump has urged lawmakers to get the legislation over the line. In August, he said that in order for the U.S. to remain the “undisputed leader in Bitcoin and crypto,” they had to pass the “very, very powerful legislation.”

This post Updated Crypto Clarity Act Starts Circulating Days Before Key Vote  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

[Editor’s Note: Jacob Colker is co-founder and co-managing director of AI House.]

Seattle is one of the most talented, creative and inventive places in the world. But if we want the rest of the country to see us that way, we have to start acting like we believe it ourselves.

First, we need more pride around here.

Let’s talk about what it means to be proud. 

My mother grew up in Tarnów, Poland. She escaped communism and came to the United States in 1978 looking for a better life. She found one, built a family, and has lived in America for nearly 50 years. 

But my mom is still very, very Polish.

Several times a year, I get a message: “Jakub. Did you see this?”

I already know what’s coming. 

Some Polish person did something. A Polish athlete won something. A Polish scientist discovered something. Some guy with a Polish grandmother finished third in a regional Nebraska chess tournament. Doesn’t matter. Poland.

“Jakub. Look at this person.”

Okay, Mom. Who is she?

“POLISH.”

That’s it. That’s the story. 

And I love it, because Mom has this completely indestructible pride in where she comes from. Plenty of us know someone like this: a Greek mom, Vietnamese dad, Indian uncle or Nigerian aunt. Somebody from their corner of the world did something great, and you are going to hear about it.

There is power in that instinct. Not because your people are better, but because you believe your place matters.

Seattle could use more of that.

We are almost pathologically humble. Our response to notable achievements is often a polite nod before everybody gets back to our regularly scheduled Seattle freeze. 

That humility is working against us.

Second, Seattle is awesome and the evidence is everywhere.

I see Seattle’s potential every day working alongside dozens of entrepreneurs building startups. Some of the most ambitious and talented people in the world are already here.

We have many billion-dollar startups across the region and more than 200,000 people working across technology, science, space, health and startups. That is more than enough talent to build yet a dozen more unicorns. 

Nearly 40% of the world flies every day on airplanes built here. Blue Origin and SpaceX build rockets here. Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, REI and Nordstrom reshaped how the world shops. Microsoft helped put computing into our homes. AWS and Azure helped make the cloud the infrastructure of modern life. The University of Washington ranks among the world’s best. Seattle medical breakthroughs have helped save tens of millions of lives. We are pushing forward fusion energy, aerospace and maritime innovation. And let’s not forget: we just won the darn Super Bowl.

And so, so much more. 

So why, despite all the evidence, do we still seem to have a communal case of imposter syndrome?

This is not a city lacking accomplishments.

It is a city with a branding problem.

Third, we have let other people tell our story for far too long. This ends, today. 

Cities have brands whether they intend to or not. Silicon Valley is where ambitious people build companies. Nashville is music. Los Angeles for film and television.

Seattle’s cultural humility mostly assumes our accomplishments speak for themselves.

They don’t.

Reputation gets built one story at a time. You hear one story and it is interesting. You hear 10 and you notice a pattern. You hear 50 and your beliefs begin to change: That’s where important science happens. That’s where talented people live. That’s where I should invest, build or work.

Those beliefs shape real decisions about where people move, where companies get built and where investors put their money.

So to fix Seattle’s branding problem, here’s what we need to do.

Step 1: Let’s tell one clear story — Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous. 

Seattle is where deep technical talent meets deep domain expertise to build consequential things: AI, aerospace, cloud computing, medicine, fusion, robotics, maritime technology and enterprise software.

We do not need 50 slogans. We do not need another consultant-led branding exercise. We need one simple idea that people outside this region can remember: Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous.

There is a reason some of the world’s most important companies have built major engineering centers, research hubs and second headquarters here for decades. They come for the talent.

And that talent is why Seattle will not just participate in the future. We will lead in building it.

Step 2: Let’s use the megaphones we already have.

Seattle already has outlets (including this one) telling this story — publications, podcasts and social channels that document the region’s startups, breakthroughs and product launches. 

Every day, startups are raising money, scientists are making breakthroughs, companies are launching products, engineers are building technology and institutions are pushing this region forward.

That is not just tech news. That is the raw material of Seattle’s reputation. So let’s use it.

When you read or hear about a Seattle startup doing something remarkable, share it. When you see a story about a breakthrough at Fred Hutch or the University of Washington, send it to someone outside the region. When a local company raises money, lands a major customer or gets acquired, don’t just scroll past it. Amplify it.

Step 3: Let’s treat every local win as Seattle’s win.

When a local robotics company ships something remarkable, that is Seattle’s story.

When a maritime startup reinvents how ports operate, that is Seattle’s story.

When our AI research labs, or hometown heroes in Amazon and Microsoft, create breakthroughs, that is Seattle’s story. 

When a biotech company lands a major breakthrough, when a game studio creates a global hit, when a clean-energy company reaches a milestone, that is Seattle’s story.

Our companies, universities, hospitals, labs, investors, civic organizations and business leaders should act like an amplification network for one another. Stop treating somebody else’s success as somebody else’s news.

Their win is our collective proof.

Step 4: Let’s put Seattle on the label.

Founders need to say where they are building. “Made with ❤️in Seattle” should be on the bottom of every website. Put Seattle in the press release. Put it in the LinkedIn post. Mention it onstage. Say it in interviews. Tell investors. Tell customers. 

Silicon Valley companies have spent decades attaching their success to their geography. We should do the same. If you build something extraordinary here, make sure the world knows it was built here.

Step 5: Let’s do a better job of selling Seattle.

Every venture capitalist, founder, executive and civic leader in this region should be able to explain in 60 seconds why somebody should build a company here.

Not defend Seattle. Not apologize for Seattle. Sell Seattle. 

Reminder: It’s the talent. 

(And also cream cheese on hot dogs.)

When investors and founders from New York, Boston or San Francisco come to town, show them the region. Introduce them to engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs. Bring them into the community. Let them see what is happening. 

The best branding campaign is somebody getting on a plane home saying, I had no idea all of this was happening in Seattle.

If we’re going to succeed, we need to believe first.

Insert all the Ted Lasso jokes you want, but this stuff matters. 

There is no giant Seattle marketing department coming to save us. There is no national referee who will eventually review the evidence and declare that Seattle deserves more respect.

When somebody here does something extraordinary, act like it. Read the story. Share the post. Send the article to your team. Text it to your friend in New York. Put it in the group chat. Bring it up over dinner. Tell your kids.

Basically, become my Polish mother.

My mom doesn’t give a hoot that Kraków ranks No. 6 on some list or Warsaw is No. 8 on another. She doesn’t need a clickbait listicle to tell her Poland matters. She already believes it does.

We have to build our reputation ourselves. The good news is that we already have everything we need: extraordinary companies, world-class institutions, ambitious people, groundbreaking science and media documenting it all.

What we have been missing is the confidence to start being more loud. Stories become patterns, patterns become reputation, and reputation becomes gravity. 

Gravity is what creates influence and respect.

Pride is not something somebody else gives you. You don’t wait until the rest of the country decides your home is important. YOU decide it is. Then you act like it.

Let’s get to work. 

NLM Photonics, a Seattle-based chip materials startup and University of Washington spinout, announced two new investors: Pangaea Ventures and Diamond Edge Ventures, the investment arm of Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.

They joined as part of a funding round that totals $13 million, according to a Form D filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NLM has reported at least $26 million in funding since 2018, according to SEC filings.

The company offers a way to move more data without burning more power. Inside a data center, information travels between chips and servers as pulses of light. The part that puts the data onto the light beam, called a modulator, is normally made of silicon. It limits how much data a link can carry, and how much power that takes.

NLM’s technology, sold under the name Selerion, is an organic electro-optic material that goes on as a liquid and hardens in place on the chip, taking over the modulator’s job from the silicon underneath. The company says it does the work 10 to 15 times more efficiently.

Applications for the technology include fiber-optic networking equipment and the links between servers in AI data centers. NLM says it could also be used in quantum computing.

Five existing investors participated in the round, which the company described as a Series A2: Emerald Technology Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund, Idemitsu, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and StoryHouse Ventures. Private investors and company employees also took part.

Pangaea Ventures, which has offices in Canada, the United States and Japan, backs startups built on advances in materials, chemistry and biology. It says it has invested in more than 40 companies over more than 20 years. David Weekes of Pangaea is joining NLM’s board, which already includes Frank Balas of Emerald.

Diamond Edge Ventures, led by president Curtis Schickner, has $200 million to invest through 2030. It backs companies in Mitsubishi Chemical’s core markets, including advanced materials, polymers and electronics, and its portfolio includes Boston Materials, DigiLens and Eridan.

Hamamatsu Photonics, which invested previously, is not part of this round but is still a shareholder, according to the company.

The company was incorporated in 2018 as Nonlinear Materials Corp. It licensed its patents from the University of Washington, building on 25 years of research there in the labs of chemists Larry Dalton and Bruce Robinson. Robinson is one of the company’s co-founders, as is Lewis Johnson, a longtime UW researcher who is chief technology officer.

Pack Ventures, the UW-affiliated venture fund, is an investor in NLM and is also listed among the advisors to its board.

GeekWire covered NLM’s launch in 2019, when the company was raising a $1.25 million seed round and running a small production lab on campus.

Brad Booth, who spent nine years at Microsoft and joined NLM’s board in 2023, took over as CEO in 2024 from co-founder Gerard Zytnicki, who is now a corporate advisor to the company. The company raised $1 million from Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and Hamamatsu in 2023.

Last year NLM said outside testing confirmed that a 1.6-terabit chip combining silicon with its materials ran at 224 gigabits per second on each of eight channels. It started sending samples of 1.6- and 3.2-terabit chips to customers in March.

NLM is not alone in trying to build a better modulator. Lightwave Logic, a publicly traded Colorado company also working with organic materials, named NLM among its smaller competitors in its annual report for 2024.

Some of the company’s rivals have raised a significant amount of funding. HyperLight, a Harvard spinout that uses a crystal called lithium niobate instead of an organic material, has raised $117 million, including $80 million in June led by MediaTek.

NLM has worked to get its materials onto other companies’ production lines. In March the company said the chips going out to customers were made at GlobalFoundries, and that it had built modulators using Tower Semiconductor’s high-volume silicon photonics process.

Robotics jobs in the Pacific Northwest are multiplying faster than universities can train people to fill them. The University of Washington thinks it has an answer — or at least a start.

This fall, UW’s College of Engineering will launch its first robotics graduate programs: a Master of Science in Robotics and a Graduate Certificate in Applied Robotics. 

The university capped enrollment at 35 students for the inaugural cohort. More than 30 people had already signed up for an information session before applications even opened. It’s an  early signal, engineering leaders say, of pent-up demand from regional powerhouses racing to hire engineers who can operate at the intersection of AI, software and hardware.

Program leaders say that skill set is rooted in a traditional, narrowly focused engineering degree that hasn’t kept pace with the rapid evolution of technology. UW is betting that the fix lies at the intersection of AI and hardware, echoing an industry buzzword called “physical AI.”

“Robotics is no longer confined to a single discipline,” said Xu Chen, a UW engineering professor and director of the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, who played a large role in the committee that designed the new programs. “The future will need a wide variety of robotics knowledge, and that’s what we built these programs to deliver.”

Applications opened Sept. 1 and will close Sept. 10, with UW aiming for a roughly one-week turnaround before notifying applicants. For its inaugural year, the university is intentionally keeping things small: 25 seats in the master’s program and 10 in the certificate track, which is designed for working professionals who want robotics training without leaving their jobs.

Chen said the small first cohort is by design, not a limitation. The goal, he emphasized, is to get the fundamentals right before scaling up. He expects the programs to roughly triple in size within three to five years.

“Companies are seeing newer potential in robotics as advanced computing and the wave of AI technology mature,” Chen said. “They see that their workforce will benefit from a modern robotics program, and that need is really what drove this.”

Getting there will take machines, and lots of them. UW is purchasing robots and computing hardware for its initial course offerings while also leaning on industry donations: robots, GPUs, and computing infrastructure among them, according to Chen.

Amazon and Microsoft anchored the effort early; the list of partners has since grown to include NVIDIA, Boeing, Dassault Systèmes — the French software company behind design tools like SolidWorks — and at least one smaller robotics manufacturer.

“The industry board was incredibly supportive from the start,” Chen said. “We’ve had almost a year of continuous meetings and collaboration with them and with representatives across our own engineering departments.”

The broader structure of the program is meant to make it easier for students from different corners of engineering, such as electrical, mechanical and computer science, to land in the same classroom and eventually choose their own path deeper into robotics through electives.

The program is also drawing on UW’s existing research muscle in the region. It taps directly into the Boeing Advanced Research Collaboration, which Chen directs, along with robotics labs inside the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. That gives students a line into the same research infrastructure that already feeds Seattle’s aerospace and e-commerce giants. 

The university’s ambitions extend well past this fall’s launch. Chen said UW has already mapped out longer-term plans for an undergraduate robotics degree and, eventually, a Ph.D. program, with the two new offerings serving as the foundation.

For now, the clearest sign of the program’s ambitions arrived this summer in an unlikely form: a pack of robot dogs let loose on UW’s campus.

“Seattle’s hills make it a uniquely difficult place for robots to move around, which is exactly why it’s a great place to study it,” Chen said.

Both students and faculty got a chance to operate the robots directly, Chen said. It was a hands-on moment that underscored how much more accessible robotics technology has become in just the last few years.

“It was exciting to see the students so happy to see the robots,” Chen said. “That’s the kind of energy we want to build this program around.”

The University of Washington on Thursday celebrated the opening of a public-access battery manufacturing lab that aims to propel energy innovation.

The new lab — the first of its kind on the West Coast — is housed within the UW’s Clean Energy Testbeds, a site that has helped launch multiple battery startups.

The expanded facility for researchers and entrepreneurs comes as battery demand surges, particularly for large deployments supporting solar energy and grid operations. Over the past three years, U.S. utility-scale battery storage capacity has grown at an average annual rate of about 70%, according to federal data. Other key applications include batteries for defense and transportation.

While China and other Asian nations overwhelmingly dominate the global supply of batteries, there is still room for U.S. companies to grow, particularly in developing new technologies, said Dan Schwartz, founding director of the Clean Energy Institute, which operates the Testbeds.

“We want to be part of the new chemistries that can serve new markets,” he said.

Those innovations include batteries using sodium or potassium ions, or replacing graphite with silicon-carbon materials in traditional lithium-ion batteries.

The new 1,600-square-foot lab was created by repurposing storage space inside the current 15,000-square-foot testbed facility, located east of the UW’s main Seattle campus. The $7.5 million capital project was completed in February and funded by the state’s Climate Commitment Act, which also supports additional facility staff.

The lab is focused on building pouch cells, a format that offers more flexibility than traditional cylindrical cells used in consumer goods. The metallic pouch, which resembles a Pop-Tart package, enables users to create and test both small-scale experimental cells and larger prototypes for wide-ranging applications.

The facility features a dry room equipped to mix electrode slurries, coat electrodes and assemble components inside plastic-lined aluminum pouches, alongside a room with tools to test battery performance. UW experts are on-hand to help.

Seattle startup Emerald Battery Labs produced its first pouch cells in the new facility. The company is developing sodium-ion batteries, which use cheaper raw materials, offer longer lifespans and pose fewer fire risks compared to lithium-ion alternatives.

“We wouldn’t have started this company in Seattle if not for the Testbeds,” said Kjell Schroder, co-founder and CTO of Emerald Battery Labs, in a statement. He added that the facility allows the startup to iterate and produce demo cells “for a range of potential applications without major capital expenditure.”

The UW announced plans for the lab in October 2024 with an expected summer 2025 launch. Permitting challenges and long lead times for high-demand tools delayed the opening until early 2026, Schwartz said.

The entire Clean Energy Testbeds was originally slated to relocate to a new building called Brightwork, but ground was never broken and the project was quietly scuttled.

Schwartz said the new lab is booked out for the coming months. Other companies using the space include a California startup called Project K Energy that’s pursuing potassium-ion batteries. The Testbeds also partners with academic institutions such as Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, Wash., to offer battery fabrication workshops.

Schwartz sees potential for the facility to support specialized, high-value applications with Pacific Northwest ties, including aviation, data centers and electric semi-trucks.

When it comes to clean energy, “batteries are just winning,” Schwartz said. “And the question is, who’s going to win in all the sectors that batteries are transforming?”

The University of Washington has agreed to pay $600,000 to resolve a high-profile First Amendment lawsuit brought by computer science professor Stuart Reges, who was disciplined after including a parody land acknowledgment in a course syllabus.

The settlement, announced Thursday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), follows a December ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that found university officials violated Reges’ academic freedom rights by retaliating against his speech and engaging in viewpoint discrimination.

“I am deeply grateful to FIRE for this legal victory which will remind public universities that they are obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of their students, faculty, and staff,” Reges said in a statement Thursday. He added that he hopes his protest helps reverse “a decade-long trend towards ideological conformity in academia.”

Under the agreement, UW agreed to pay $600,000 to FIRE to cover damages, legal fees, and costs. The settlement prohibits the university from taking further adverse action against Reges or removing the parody statement from his syllabi in perpetuity. While the appeal was pending, UW also rescinded and replaced Executive Order 31, the anti-harassment policy used during the investigation.

The dispute began in January 2022 after the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering recommended that faculty include a statement acknowledging Coast Salish Indigenous lands in their syllabi.

Reges, a teaching professor who has been at the school since 2004, opposed the policy. Instead, he included a parody invoking philosopher John Locke’s labor theory of property to claim Indigenous groups held “almost none” of the land occupied by the university.

UW officials responded by censoring the parody from Reges’ course syllabus, opening a yearlong disciplinary investigation under an anti-harassment policy, and creating a competing “shadow” section of his course so students could opt out of taking his class.

Although the university ultimately declined to formally discipline Reges, officials warned him that repeating the statement could trigger further punishment. Reges sued the UW in 2022, and while a U.S. District Court initially sided with the university, a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, ruling that student discomfort cannot justify retaliating against a professor’s speech on matters of public concern.

Reges’ lawsuit named top university leadership as defendants, including then-UW President Ana Mari Cauce, Allen School Director Magdalena Balazinska, Vice Director Dan Grossman, and College of Engineering Dean Nancy Allbritton. Current UW President Robert J. Jones is named in the final agreement.

The Ninth Circuit panel’s decision established that university teaching materials like course syllabi are protected academic speech, setting a binding First Amendment precedent across public higher education institutions in the Western U.S.

The University of Washington provided the following statement to GeekWire:

“The University of Washington maintains that we acted appropriately, and this settlement is in no way an admission of any wrongdoing. Given the Ninth Circuit’s 2-1 decision overturning the federal district court’s decision in favor of the University, a settlement agreement was the most reasonable option due to the attorney fees and costs that would have resulted from the Ninth’s Circuit’s decision. Prof. Reges has retained his faculty position and continued teaching throughout this process, and his status with the UW remains unchanged.”

Reges remains an active faculty member. Under the terms of the deal, he is free to include the Locke property statement on future course materials without administrative interference.

Read the full settlement agreement here.

Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research initiative that will generate data and train AI models to design proteins and genes that don’t exist in nature — sharing the results freely to help others develop new medicines and materials.

The initiative, called AI BioDesign, brings together the Allen Institute, the University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center, with funding from the Fund for Science and Technology (FFST), created by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

AI BioDesign is led by David Baker, the UW biochemist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using computers to design new proteins, and Jay Shendure, a leading genome scientist at the UW and the Allen Institute.

The plan is to “hijack a lot of the machinery that evolution provided us” — the cellular assembly line that turns DNA into proteins — to design and measure millions of novel biological molecules, Shendure said in an interview in advance of the announcement.

That will help AI models learn the rules of biological design from a huge set of examples, instead of inferring them from the relatively limited number that nature has produced.

The field, Shendure said, is “putting too much emphasis on taking the cranks that we have and just running with them, as opposed to building the right cranks.”

The goal is to make designing biology more like ordering a part: a molecule that latches onto a cancer cell, for example, or a genetic switch that fires only inside brain cells and nowhere else.

Potential outcomes could include everything from new therapies for disease, to proteins that dissolve plastic in the environment, to cells that travel through the body in a programmed way, said Sanjay Srivatsan, a Fred Hutch assistant professor who leads the cancer center’s work on the initiative, in a video released with the announcement.

“For the first time, the speed of AI is beginning to match the experimental power of synthetic biology,” Baker said in a statement. “That changes the question from ‘what has nature already made?’ to ‘what else is possible, and how can we test it?'”

Where the money goes

The Fund for Science and Technology is providing $94.6 million for AI BioDesign over five years. The foundation launched publicly last year with a mandate to direct a large share of Allen’s fortune into bioscience, environmental and AI research.

The funding from FFST is allocated as $46.1 million to the Allen Institute, $43.8 million to the UW and $4.7 million to Fred Hutch, according to an Allen Institute spokesperson.

The initiative had 62 people as of mid-August, including some new hires and others redirected from existing projects at the three institutions. The UW accounts for 41 of them, the Allen Institute 13, and Fred Hutch eight. AI BioDesign is expected to continue growing over time.

“AI BioDesign is exactly the kind of ambitious, collaborative science FFST was created to support,” said Marc Malandro, the foundation’s chief programs officer and co-lead, in a statement. He joined FFST in May after nearly a decade at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, most recently as chief operating officer of CZI and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network.

Malandro and Chief Financial and Operations Officer Liz Carey have been leading FFST on an interim basis since founding CEO Lynda Stuart stepped down in May.

Inside the lab

On a recent tour of the AI BioDesign lab, research associate Jack Boylan pulled up results from a run he’d done on their new DNA sequencer that morning — on free kits donated by a neighboring biotech company, a year past their expiration date.

“We decided, let’s give it a roll,” he said. It worked fine.

The sequencer is what makes the whole approach possible. It reads all of the millions of DNA sequences in a single tube at once and reports which ones performed. One recent experiment ran 6 million distinct sequences through it at once.

“The scale comes not from robotics, but from parallelizing inside the test tube,” said Jesse Gray, executive director of strategy and platform for AI BioDesign and the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, and a former Harvard Medical School geneticist.

The lab, at Dexter Yard in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a short walk from the Allen Institute’s headquarters, is organized into teams of five or six people, each working on a different design problem.

A separate four-person team of machine-learning specialists takes the incoming results and works with the bench teams to decide which experiments come next — the ones that will teach the models the most. Each round is judged on how much the models improved.

The Allen Institute calls projects like this “accelerators,” a term Rui Costa, the institute’s president and CEO, traced back to Paul Allen himself. The word came up in early planning sessions, Costa said. Allen wanted to “exponentially accelerate the field.”

Other accelerators at Dexter Yard include the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, the Allen Institute’s collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the UW, which Shendure also leads; and Cell Science, which works on engineering cells to assemble themselves into tissues.

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), the separate Seattle research organization also founded by Paul Allen, is involved informally rather than as a funded partner, Costa said.

Its robotics team has been talking with AI BioDesign about scaling up the protein work, and the two expect to collaborate on models and on tools that generate research hypotheses.

Why give it away

The decision to focus on open science also came from Allen, Costa said in an interview this week. “He was so visionary in the early 2000s: radically open science to exponentially impact and change fields, not to compete.”

That raises a question the initiative will face as soon as it produces anything valuable: what happens if a company builds a lucrative drug on data given away free? In traditional science, Costa said, being beaten to a discovery counts as a loss. Here it’s the goal.

“We would be so lucky if many companies would be taking this data and changing the world for good,” he said.

At the same time, Costa left open the possibility of the three principal institutions spinning out their own startups, nonprofits, or other initiatives from the work done by AI BioDesign.

Betting against the field

AI BioDesign’s approach runs against much of the current thinking in the field. Costa said most efforts to apply AI to biology are chasing a single general model that could answer questions about how any cell works. AI BioDesign is betting on the opposite: narrow models built for specific design problems, trained on data generated for that purpose.

“This project is a clear bet on a different way of doing things,” Costa said.

The people running the initiative are careful not to oversell. Gray said it remains an open question as to whether their approach beats the alternatives. “The jury’s still out,” he said.

Shendure put it plainly: “It’s never as easy as you think it’s going to be,” he said.

Costa said AI BioDesign needs to show real progress within 18 to 24 months — ideally even sooner — and expand to researchers around the world within five years.

We’ve come a long way from Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels that couldn’t talk to us. Today, plush toys aren’t just stuffed — they’re stuffed with artificial intelligence, and new research from the University of Washington reveals that when these “smart” toys start chatting, kids quickly go from curious to frustrated to outright hostile.

Claims of “smart” toys date back decades, from 1960s talking dolls like Chatty Cathy to 1990s sensor-packed plushies like Microsoft’s ActiMates Barney and Furby.

But generative AI marks a major shift. Companies like Curio are now packing plushies with onboard AI models, allowing characters like “Gabbo” or the viral brainrot figure “Ballerina Cappuccina” to hold dynamic, unscripted conversations, remember past interactions, and adapt directly to a child.

To see how kids actually interact with these conversational companions, researchers at UW’s KidsTeam brought eight children ages 6 to 11 to campus last summer. The kids initially engaged with curiosity — asking basic questions like “What is your name?” and testing physical reactions like tickling the toys’ toes.

But as the toys struggled with complex questions and failed to pick up on physical cues — one participant complained a toy “didn’t listen to me like 26 million times” — delight turned to irritation. Children eventually turned to antagonizing the plushies, calling them “ugly” or “evil” and joking about throwing them in the ocean.

In the video below, kids are asked at one point if they want an AI toy to read them a bedtime story.

“No. It just sounds awful,” one child replied.

“I think it’s gonna destroy my dreams as a tiny kid,” another said.

The study highlights a distinct psychological clash: a cuddly, familiar plush exterior combined with a synthetic intelligence that kids found both fascinating and unnerving.

“The juxtaposition of this plushie toy that also had signs of intelligence was both interesting and disturbing for the kids,” said co-lead author Aayushi Dangol, a former UW doctoral student now at Foundry10, in a UW News story.

While the toys offer dynamic play, Dangol warned parents that generative AI introduces new risks that traditional toys never had, from hallucinating facts to manipulative emotional bonding.

“They’ll give wrong answers, or flatter the kids excessively, or could manipulate the kids into attachment,” Dangol noted.

Beyond conversational glitches, researchers emphasize that synthetic companions fundamentally alter how children play. For generations, kids have supplied their own imagination to make inanimate objects talk and move. Generative AI alters that dynamic.

“Now the script has been flipped and the toy has this imitation of imagination,” said co-author Jason Yip, a UW associate professor in the Information School and director of KidsTeam UW. “We’ve never lived through that before, and we don’t know what questions children will ask or how long they’ll even want to play with these toys.”

Because kids are navigating entirely uncharted territory, Yip stressed the importance of giving young users space to talk through their experiences with the devices filling their bedrooms.

“It’s really important to give them opportunities to discuss these technologies we’re handing down to them,” Yip said.

University of Washington Ph.D. student Malek Itani, who co-founded the AI-powered sound enhancement startup Hearvana, has been awarded the prestigious Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar Award for his groundbreaking work in “superhuman” hearing technology.

Selected as one of just three global recipients from a record pool of nominees, Itani was recognized for developing on-device AI algorithms that enable real-time target speech extraction, “sound bubbles,” and semantic hearing on low-power hearables like earbuds and hearing aids.

Itani’s award comes less than a year after he and Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering professor Shyam Gollakota co-founded Hearvana, a spinout aimed at commercializing their lab discoveries. The startup raised $6 million in pre-seed funding last fall to bring on-device acoustic intelligence to earbuds, hearing aids, and smart glasses.

By packing tiny, real-time neural networks onto low-power chips, the researchers hope to replace blunt noise cancellation with true semantic hearing — allowing users to filter out city traffic, amplify a single companion’s voice in a crowded room, or create a localized “sound bubble” on demand.

Itani’s work in the UW Mobile Intelligence Lab began with “acoustic swarms” — small, self-distributing robotic microphones that track and separate multiple speakers in a room. He and his collaborators then pivoted to personal audio devices, pioneering neural networks like IF-MLPNet and platforms like NeuralAids. These systems allow complex AI models to handle real-time sound separation directly on low-power wireless hearables without relying on heavy cloud compute or draining battery life.

“Malek has been a key part of every major contribution to the field of superhuman hearing in recent years,” Gollakota told the Allen School Blog. “He entered his Ph.D. with a background in RF and backscatter, but he rapidly mastered audio signal processing and deep learning, which is very impressive.”

“I feel like I’ve hit a niche that’s going to be so transformational, and it’s going to be in billions of devices,” Itani said. “It’s going to change the way we hear the world.”

Itani and his fellow Young Scholars will be formally recognized at the Marconi Awards Gala in San Francisco this November.

Arzeda designs enzymes for products ranging from laundry detergent to stevia. But when it comes time to manufacture at commercial scale, the Seattle-based startup often has to look overseas.

That’s why, when a federal biotechnology commission visited Seattle on Tuesday, the industry came forward with a problem: They have the science, but lack the infrastructure and workforce pipeline to keep innovation on U.S. soil.

Arzeda’s designs reach an estimated 1.8 billion consumers worldwide, and the company has spent the better part of two decades building its technology. The company’s enzymes, sometimes designed in days rather than weeks thanks to AI, are largely manufactured in Western Europe and India — with one U.S. contract manufacturing partner in Wisconsin. 

Finding domestic manufacturers with the expertise and capacity to make these specialized proteins has been difficult, CEO Alexandre Zanghellini said. And for a company trying to commercialize new biotechnology, he added, manufacturing delays can be “catastrophic.” 

The federal group visiting Seattle — the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology — was created by Congress to address these kinds of problems. Since 2022, the team of 11 bipartisan experts have examined how biotech intersects with national security, and what the U.S. needs to do to remain competitive with China. 

Last year, the commission drafted a report to Congress with 49 recommendations spanning at least $15 billion in federal investment over five years, with policies to get more private capital into biotechnology, build domestic manufacturing capacity, strengthen the workforce and reduce vulnerabilities in the supply chain. 

Now, with the commission sunsetting in December, its members are taking their case around the country. 

The science is here, the infrastructure isn’t

In Seattle, the urgent matter is finding a way to keep biotechnology breakthroughs in the United States. Alexander Titus, a commission member who has headed AI-focused biotech initiatives in Seattle and nationwide, said Washington stands out for its early innovation and research. 

“Companies like Arzeda are having pretty serious leadership roles in the AI and bio space,” he told GeekWire. “A lot of the work we have done in the commission has revolved around helping the U.S. meet the moment when it comes to this nexus.” 

Institutions like the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Allen Institute have helped build a deep life-sciences ecosystem in Washington. UW’s Institute for Protein Design, led by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker, has spun out more than 20 companies.

One is Arzeda, which has an increasingly fast agentic workflow that can fine-tune a model, suggest the next experiment, and allow researchers to test thousands of sequences in a single round. The company’s first AI-designed commercial product was a stevia ingredient launched in 2024; it’s now negotiating a $44 million contract with the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency related to biothreat response. 

While technology is moving quickly, the infrastructure needed to commercialize it is not — creating what Seattle biotech leaders called a “valley of death” between research and manufacturing.

The U.S. has federal funding for basic research, as well as a venture-capital system that can finance early-stage discoveries. But once a company needs to build or access physical infrastructure for commercial-scale manufacturing, the financing becomes much harder. Venture capital investors don’t see the returns attractive enough, Zanghellini said. Banks aren’t eager to finance them, either. 

The pull of overseas manufacturing

Meanwhile, China has spent two decades making biotechnology a strategic priority, and its 2026 Five-Year Plan doubles down on areas including biomedicine, biomanufacturing, pharmaceuticals and brain-computer interfaces. For U.S. companies in the race, that can create an uncomfortable incentive: If the infrastructure is cheaper and faster somewhere else, that’s where the work often goes. 

Last year, Seattle-based Sana Biotechnology canceled plans for a manufacturing plant that was supposed to employ hundreds of workers in Bothell, Wash., instead opting for a contract manufacturer elsewhere to cut costs. Snehal Patel, the company’s executive vice president and chief technical officer, said on Tuesday he’s optimistic the Seattle area could compete on speed and cost with China’s fully integrated supply chain — with the right resources.

Ideally, manufacturing facilities in the U.S. would offer flexibility and knowledge in different products and processes, while ensuring trade secret protection.

The commissioners recognize this need; among their recommendations for Congress is a nationwide manufacturing network for precommercial, bioindustrial product scale-up. That could address the problem Seattle companies face: a startup shouldn’t have to choose between sending manufacturing overseas or trying to build an entire facility itself.

The commission has also recommended requiring companies to disclose points of supply-chain vulnerability in foreign countries of concern. If a geopolitical conflict disrupts the supply of medicines or other biological products, Titus said, the consequences can reach Americans far from any battlefield.

“Being able to keep and maintain our leadership in certain industries allows us to have the edge in any given situation,” he said. “We want our industries to be able to produce here…it’s truly national security in the broadest sense at this point.”

Building the workforce pipeline

To accomplish this, companies need a stronger industrial biomanufacturing workforce.

Rebecca Bryant, Fred Hutch’s director of government relations and a former staffer for Rep. Adam Smith, said while Washington trains well for research, there’s no equivalent pipeline into entry-level biomanufacturing jobs. Titus sees the issue as part of a broader problem of “bioliteracy” — that biology should be a basic problem-solving tool in the same way that engineering, chemistry and computing are, rather than a specialized field understood by few. 

In Washington, the Hutch Advance partnership with Shoreline Community College trains and places lab technicians, while Sana Biotechnology has worked on a model for moving workers into biomanufacturing. Seattle industry leaders suggested a state or federally-supported workforce consortium to bolster the effort. Meanwhile, the commission has urged Congress for more biomanufacturing training support. 

According to the commission, the next three years will determine whether the U.S. remains the global leader in biotechnology or cedes the future to China. Of the commission’s 49 recommendations, Titus said, 26 have been written into law in some capacity. The next step is in the hands of Congress, federal agencies, states and the industry itself. 

Most tech workers are used to keeping multiple projects up in the air at once. Cory Black took the concept to a literal level.

A graduate of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and a former software engineer at Facebook, Black left his career behind to run away and join the circus.

Today, the work he’s juggling mostly involves soccer balls. Black, a 30-year-old from Bellevue, Wash., is one of the premier soccer freestylists in the world, doing things with his feet and hands that will leave you shaking your head.

Black is fresh off earning a bronze medal at the 2026 International Jugglers’ Association Championships in Fort Wayne, Ind., where he competed against top talent from Japan, Taiwan, and across the U.S.

His 5-minute routine (below) stood out by blending traditional hand-toss juggling with elite soccer freestyle — a rare combination he built over 16 years of kicking a soccer ball around and 11 years of hands-on juggling training.

It all started when he was 14 years old and playing youth soccer.

“My dad challenged me to juggle 100 times with my feet for $100,” Black told GeekWire. “Of course, that’s a ton of money when you’re a kid, so that’s all I did for a few weeks, and I got the money. Then I just started learning some tricks on YouTube and fell in love with learning the next one and next one, and figured out that it was a sport all to itself.”

Black quit traditional soccer in high school to focus entirely on freestyle, traveling to L.A. for his first U.S. Championships at age 16 and later heading to the World Championships in the Czech Republic. Unlike standard field play, soccer freestyle operates more like a breakdance battle, with competitors going head-to-head on stage to impress a panel of judges.

When it came time for college, Black followed his older brother to UW to study computer science at the Allen School. He spent his free time practicing tricks, but at the time, he didn’t view freestyle as a viable full-time career — most of his role models were just booking occasional corporate gigs for brands like Nike or Adidas.

After an internship in Silicon Valley, Black landed a full-time job as a software engineer at Facebook’s (now Meta’s) South Lake Union office in Seattle, where he spent three and a half years working on such things as content monetization tools for creators.

Juggling remained a constant backdrop to his engineering work; he kept juggling balls on his desk, tried teaching his teammates how to juggle, and practiced high tricks after hours in the office lounge. While training at a Seattle circus school, Black struck up a friendship with a former Cirque du Soleil choreographer who saw stage potential in his moves.

“After showing some of my tricks, he told me, ‘Hey, you can make this into a circus act,’ which I had never even imagined,” Black said. “I saw the opportunity … you can actually work with a circus and live with a circus and have a recurring way to support yourself.”

Black took the leap, leaving Facebook to spend six to eight months building a full, stage-ready routine with his choreographer. To stretch his savings during the training period, he slept on his brother’s floor in Seattle for a year and a half before landing his first circus contract. That led to two years on the road with Flynn Creek Circus, living in a caravan and performing as a featured act.

After two seasons living on the road, Black transitioned into performing as a solo artist, booking corporate events, private shows, and local festivals. That solo pivot paid off big this past summer when Seattle hosted FIFA World Cup matches. Black stayed busy performing 28 separate shows across the city in six weeks, including fan events at Pacific Place Mall and outside the stadium for all six games. He made most of his money for the year during the stretch.

While moving from software engineering to stage performance brought a steep learning curve, Black sees surprising parallels between coding and juggling. He says engineers and jugglers are both drawn to complex patterns that have specific numbers associated with them. Managing five balls in the air fits that bill.

“If you go to local juggling clubs anywhere, there’s an unusually high amount of software people and engineers,” Black said. “Part of it is just being able to tackle hard, frustrating problems. If you haven’t gotten used to banging your head against a wall until you get something, you’re going to give up fairly easily.”

Black does occasionally lean on his engineering skills for side work. He broke his foot in December and took on what he calls “software adjacent” work. He’s also helped build websites for circus friends. But he has no interest in trading his soccer balls for a return to a tech desk job.

“Right now, I don’t plan on going back at all,” Black said. “Also, I don’t know what the landscape looks like after AI has kind of gone through everything.”

For now, he’s perfectly content sticking to debugging physical tricks on stage — where the only glitches in the code are the occasional dropped ball.

GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5” era.

From AI Frontier Lab to Frontier Ecosystem: Microsoft got a foothold in AI thanks largely to its partnership with OpenAI. But that’s not the way it is planning to continue growing its AI business.

Inside Microsoft AI (MAI), the Microsoft Superintelligence team is focused almost entirely on building its own frontier-level models. That team already has developed a handful of home-grown offerings, including MAI-Code-Flash for writing code faster; MAI-Cyber-Flash, a cybersecurity model; and MAI-Image, a model for creating images.

The head of the Superintelligence team is Ali Farhadi, corporate vice president of AI. Farhadi, who joined Microsoft five months ago, is also a professor at the University of Washington, where he has worked for nearly 15 years. He was previously CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and before that was an AI and machine learning leader at Apple for more than three years, after it acquired his startup, Xnor.ai.

When he joined Microsoft, Farhadi said in a LinkedIn post that he believed “Microsoft has all the pieces to win in this AI race: data, search, coding, infrastructure, agents, software and the world’s biggest Fortune 500 companies taking dependencies on Microsoft every day.”

Farhadi elaborated on that in an interview with GeekWire this week. AI is shifting from a “Frontier Lab” era to a “Frontier Ecosystem” era, he said. It’s no longer just about training models; it’s about integrating the models with enterprise data, platforms, distribution systems and customers in a trusted way.

The next battlegrounds in AI will be around cost, reliability, specialization, and deployment at scale, rather than simply building larger models that beat others in benchmark scores, he said.

“If you look around, there are not that many places to have all these missing pieces together at scale, especially if you add the element of trust to it,” Farhadi said.

Cutting through the AI noise: Farhadi said his management philosophy is grounded in the importance of personal relationships, which are especially key in big organizations. People need to understand your rationale and to trust you can deliver on what you’re tasked to do, he said — an approach that has served him inside both Microsoft and Apple.

Staying on top of the flow of information while filtering out the AI noise makes prioritizing crucial. The team has “a long list of things that we believe we should be doing,” he said, but much of it stays on the back burner to maintain a “laser focus on delivering on the main mission.”

The priority is building high-quality models, both generalist and domain-specific. On the domain-specific front, Microsoft is working with the Mayo Clinic on a healthcare-specific model based on Mayo’s own clinical data, as well as Microsoft’s cybersecurity and coding models.

The thinking: For a lot of enterprise work, a narrower model beats a bigger one.

“If you can do something at [the same] quality or better quality at a fraction of a cost, it’s just a no-brainer. And having a way to specialize to domains, to industries, to enterprises is one way,” he said.

Microsoft execs have referred to this approach as a “hill-climbing machine,” meaning the ability of a model to scale and continuously improve within a specific domain. Microsoft is coupling the hill-climbing with “frontier tuning,” like it is doing with the Mayo Clinic. Frontier tuning includes customizing frontier models; keeping proprietary data private, preserving institutional know-how; and avoiding leaking intellectual property (IP) into shared models.

“We all thought that IP is your data,” Farhadi said. “But we learned that IP is also how you work.” And that’s why safeguarding these elements is so crucial.

Open all the things? Farhadi led an expansion of open-source AI development at Ai2, the Seattle-based institute founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. While Microsoft has contributed to the open-source community on various fronts, including AI tooling, it hasn’t open-sourced its frontier models.

Farhadi said he personally remains “a big advocate of open source,” but noted that the industry has changed since his Ai2 days as there are now more credible Western open-source models and businesses forming around them.

He didn’t rule out Microsoft doing something in open-source models, or the somewhat less-open “open weights” area, but there’s seemingly nothing happening on that front in the near term.

In the coming months and beyond, the focus of Farhadi’s team is helping Microsoft turn into a Frontier Ecosystem by building cutting-edge AI capabilities; helping enterprises create their own tuned versions of them; continuously improving models; and making sure customers keep control of their own destinies and data.

Success for Microsoft’s Superintelligence team has nothing to do with the idea of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which OpenAI, Anthropic and others have positioned as their ultimate goal over the years. In fact, when I asked Farhadi about AGI, he said, “I don’t understand what that means.”

Don’t worry, Ali. You’re not the only one.

A federal judge has entered a final judgment requiring Guardant Health to pay more than $245 million to Seattle biotech TwinStrand Biosciences and the University of Washington over DNA sequencing technology developed at the university.

The judgment, entered Friday in U.S. District Court in Delaware, follows a 2023 jury verdict that found Guardant willfully infringed two patents covering TwinStrand’s Duplex Sequencing technology.

The case also establishes a continuing revenue stream for the university and TwinStrand from some of Guardant’s products.

The court’s final judgment includes $83.4 million in damages awarded by the jury for infringement through June 2023, plus $19.5 million in supplemental damages, $119.4 million in accrued royalties and $22.9 million in interest.

Going forward, Guardant is required under the judgment to pay a 6% royalty on covered sales through March 2033, when the patents expire.

The technology at the center of the case traces back to research at the University of Washington, where scientists, including co-founder Jesse Salk, developed Duplex Sequencing as a way to make DNA sequencing more accurate. Salk — who stepped down as CEO of TwinStrand in 2022 — now is the co-founder of cancer diagnostics startup CytoTerra.

The molecular biologist and clinical oncologist is the grandson of the late Jonas Salk, the scientist who discovered and developed the polio vaccine.

TwinStrand says its Duplex Sequencing technology can improve the accuracy of next-generation sequencing by more than 10,000-fold, allowing researchers to detect extremely rare genetic mutations that can be obscured by sequencing errors.

“Duplex Sequencing solved an accuracy problem the sequencing field had worked on for years, and this judgment affirms the jury’s finding that Guardant Health built products on that invention without a license,” said Chad Waite, chair of the TwinStrand board of directors, in a press release. “We remained steadfast in our conviction that the facts would prevail, and they have. We intend to see this through and stand firmly behind the intellectual property at the core of our technology.”

Salk and his colleagues from the University of Washington launched TwinStrand in 2015 to commercialize the technology. Based in Seattle, the startup raised funding from Madrona Venture Group, Soleus Capital, Janus Henderson Investors, Ridgeback Capital, Alexandria Venture Investments. Section 32 led a $50 million series B round in the company in 2021.

A jury found in November 2023 that Guardant willfully infringed the patents through 11 products and services. The products identified in the judgment include Guardant360, Guardant Reveal, Guardant Shield and other cancer-testing products.

The Delaware court subsequently rejected Guardant’s effort to overturn the verdict or obtain a new trial. In June, the court also awarded TwinStrand and UW ongoing royalties and supplemental damages. The final judgment now formalizes those awards.

Guardant is not accepting the ruling.

The California-based precision oncology company said Monday that it plans to appeal the judgment, arguing that the court’s order covers products that existed at the time of the 2023 trial and that many have since been discontinued or substantially upgraded. Guardant also said current versions of its Reveal and Shield products are excluded from the final district court order.

Guardant — founded in 2012 — said the judgment and collection of potential royalties will be stayed pending the appeal.

“We strongly disagree with this decision and will promptly be appealing for its overturn,” said John Saia, Guardant Health Chief Legal Officer, in a press release. “We have full faith in the strengths and merits of Guardant’s intellectual property and R&D and are confident we will ultimately prevail on appeal.”

The Seattle region outranked New York, Austin, Boston and other tech hubs, trailing only the Bay Area, in an annual tech talent scorecard from commercial real estate firm CBRE that weighs factors such as tech worker concentration, wages, education levels and real estate costs.

You may have seen headlines this week that New York overtook the Bay Area for the first time in the CBRE rankings. That was based on a subset of the data: a straight head count in each market. New York’s 394,300 tech workers topped the Bay Area’s 375,730. Seattle ranks seventh on that specific list, with 213,010 tech workers across the region.

But in the broader scorecard, Seattle held onto the No. 2 spot (which it also occupied last year), thanks to the density of its tech workforce, one of the largest concentrations of AI talent in North America, and the second-highest tech wages on the continent.

The market-by-market workforce figures in the report run through 2025, so this year’s layoffs aren’t reflected in the rankings. CBRE does flag the trend nationally: the tech industry accounted for a record 31% of all U.S. job cuts through June, up from 13% for all of last year.

Some of the Seattle region’s specific strengths:

The AI workforce is deep. Seattle is home to 41,591 workers with AI skills, third most in North America, behind the Bay Area and New York. One in five of the region’s tech workers now has AI skills — a higher share than anywhere except the Bay Area.

Tech is a bigger part of the economy here. Tech jobs make up 10.2% of all employment in the metro area, among the top five markets and nearly double the 5.5% average across the 50 markets studied in the CBRE report.

Wages are in a tier of their own. Seattle’s average wage for tech workers at tech companies was $190,050 in 2024, second to the Bay Area’s $211,048, and nearly $50,000 above third-place Boston.

The workforce grew while the Bay Area’s shrank. Seattle added 24,590 tech jobs from 2022 to 2025, a 13.1% increase and the fifth-largest gain of any market. The Bay Area lost 23,900 jobs over the same time period.

However, the report also points to warning signs:

Many offices are sitting empty. The Seattle metro area’s office vacancy rate hit 28.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — the highest of the 50 markets in the report. That’s despite 1.9 million square feet leased by AI companies across the region since 2023, according to CBRE.

Costs are near the top. Seattle is the third-most-expensive place to run a 500-person tech company, at $73.9 million a year in wages and office rent, behind the Bay Area at $90.6 million and slightly behind New York, which edged Seattle by about $24,000.

Young workers are going elsewhere. Seattle’s 20-something population fell between 2019 and 2024, even as its share of 30-somethings grew to the highest of any market in the report. The region is drawing mid-career but not entry-level talent, which risks creating a thinner pipeline over time.

One counterweight to the pipeline concern: the University of Washington ranks fifth among U.S. universities for its AI program, according to CBRE’s analysis of U.S. News & World Report rankings — the only school outside the Bay Area, Boston and Pittsburgh in the top five.

Access the full CBRE Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report here.

Scott Thurlow isn’t a morning person. So much so, he wants to change state law.

In 2019, Washington lawmakers voted to put the state on permanent daylight saving time if Congress ever allows it. Thurlow has a different idea: Stop changing the clocks now, even if that means staying on Pacific Standard Time for a while.

Thurlow spent 32 years at Microsoft in product management for franchises including the original Outlook, Teams and, most recently, Copilot. A constant stressor was working across time zones. 

“We always dreaded the time zone changes on either end because it was meeting chaos,” he said. “Talking with India, which is like 12 hours off, went from really bad to worse.”

In July, Thurlow took part in Microsoft’s voluntary retirement program, and was featured in a GeekWire story along with several others. Last week, he launched Last Fall Back Washington, a nonprofit campaign built around what he’s calling the Last Fall Back Act. The idea is straightforward: Washington should move to permanent Pacific Standard Time immediately. 

Thurlow’s campaign is timely: British Columbia is dropping its seasonal clock changes and moving to permanent daylight time, meaning Washington will fall an hour behind its northern neighbor from November until March. Thurlow argues the difference could complicate everything from cross-border travel to transportation schedules and business meetings.

His own proposal would make that gap year-round at first, since Washington would sit on the winter clock while B.C. stays on the summer one. He accepts the tradeoff: stop the switching now, and get back in sync later if Congress makes daylight time permanent nationwide.

He also points to research linking the spring clock change with short-term increases in heart attacks, workplace injuries and fatal crashes — in 2020, one study published in Current Biology reported that fatal crashes increase by about 6% in the week after the spring time change.

Under the federal Uniform Time Act, states can opt out of daylight saving time changes, but only by staying on standard time. Permanent daylight time requires an act of Congress. Permanent standard time does not, which is how Arizona and Hawaii do it. That’s the path Thurlow’s proposal would take.

“If and when Congress ever really does act,” Thurlow said, “we would snap into daylight time.”

Done waiting for Congress

In July, the House passed the federal Sunshine Protection Act by a 308-117 vote, sending the bill to the Senate. The legislation would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, but the Senate has not taken it up. Thurlow isn’t counting on that changing — although President Trump is pushing for it.

“It’s going to end up withering on the vine and stalling,” Thurlow said.

Washington’s Legislature has also considered permanent-time legislation, but bills introduced since 2022 have stalled without reaching a floor vote.

Washington has two types of citizen initiatives: an initiative to the people, which goes directly to the ballot, and an initiative to the Legislature, which gives lawmakers the opportunity to pass the measure themselves or send it to voters.

Thurlow plans to spend the coming months building support for the latter approach and pushing legislators to introduce and pass the Last Fall Back Act when the 2027 session begins.

“The single most effective thing we can do is have lots of people contacting their legislators,” he said.

If lawmakers again decline to act, he expects to file an initiative to the Legislature around March 2027. The campaign would then need to collect about 386,000 signatures, providing a cushion above the 309,000 valid signatures required. If lawmakers still don’t pass the measure, it could go before voters in November 2028. 

Experts are divided 

Experts seem to agree Washington should stop changing its clocks — but disagree on how to go about it. 

University of Washington law professor Steve Calandrillo has long advocated permanent daylight time, and has testified against Washington legislation that would put the state on standard time. He told GeekWire he appreciates Thurlow’s efforts to pressure Congress, but doesn’t want Washington to spend years on standard time while waiting for federal action.

“I don’t want to see us go in the wrong direction,” he wrote in an email.

Under Washington’s current system, daylight saving time effectively functions as the state’s default for about two-thirds of the year. Permanent standard time would move sunset an hour earlier throughout that period, Calandrillo argues, creating safety risks and other costs.

Evening darkness is more dangerous than morning darkness, he argues, because more people are traveling and spending time outside in the evening — and there’s a greater chance of crime.

Other UW researchers have split on the question. Biology professor and circadian researcher Horacio de la Iglesia has testified in favor of permanent standard time. 

Environmental and forest sciences professor Laura Prugh testified against the 2024 bill alongside Calandrillo, citing research she co-authored that modeled about an 8% increase in deer-vehicle collisions in Washington under year-round standard time. She also worked on a study across 23 states that showed collisions with deer jump by 16% in the week following the autumn clock change. 

National groups are similarly divided. Save Standard Time has supported Washington legislation favoring permanent standard time, while Lock the Clock has pushed Congress to give states more flexibility rather than taking a position on which permanent time is best.

Temporary costs for long-term gains

Thurlow’s campaign acknowledges the tradeoffs: permanent standard time would put Washington out of sync with Oregon and California for much of the year, shorten summer evenings and potentially increase deer collisions.

But those costs would be temporary, he argues. The twice-yearly clock changes, by contrast, would continue indefinitely unless someone breaks the stalemate.

Thurlow also expects opposition over winter darkness, particularly concerns about children walking to school before sunrise. His response is that many Washington students already do so under the current system, and that changing school start times can address the problem. Seattle and other districts have already adjusted schedules for other reasons.

“There’s sort of a set of gut reactions and instant responses that people have, which may not be grounded in truth,” he said. 

Thurlow is betting that enough Washingtonians are tired of changing their clocks that the campaign can turn a decades-old annoyance into a political issue — and give the state a way out before Congress decides on the issue. His campaign is in early stages, with a handful of signups through his website.

"One of the things that I think we were pleasantly surprised by was just the availability of solutions," said Jim Cook.

© AFP via Getty Images/MANDEL NGAN

A former Meta AI research director has raised $10.25 million for a Seattle-area startup working on what it calls “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.

A company called Noosphere Labs, led by Kevin Carlberg, disclosed the financing in a Form D filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reached via phone by GeekWire on Monday evening, Carlberg said he wasn’t yet ready to share details about the startup.

Trilogy Equity Partners confirmed that it led the round. One of the directors listed in the Form D filing is Amy McCullough, a managing director at the Bellevue-based venture firm. Madrona, the Seattle VC firm, separately confirmed that it had “major participation” in the round.

Carlberg’s personal website describes him as founder and CEO of a “stealth AI startup focused on physical AI and real-world intelligence.” The company’s website says, “Human-centered physical intelligence. Built for the world we inhabit,” with a “Coming Soon” title.

The website styles the name Noösphere, with two dots over the second “o” signaling that it’s pronounced as a separate syllable: NOH-uh-sfeer. The term dates to the 1920s, describing a sphere of human thought wrapped around the planet the way the biosphere wraps it in life.

Carlberg spent more than five years at Meta, where he led a research team spanning Reality Labs Research and the company’s Fundamental AI Research group, working on physical AI and simulation for wearable computers and virtual and mixed-reality devices.

Before that, he spent eight years at Sandia National Laboratories developing methods to make massive physics simulations run in near-real time for national security applications. He holds a doctorate from Stanford and is an affiliate associate professor of applied mathematics and mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.

Although Carlberg hasn’t publicly detailed what the new startup is building, his research points to the problems he’s been focused on.

In a paper for the NeurIPS conference last year, for example, he and his Meta colleagues built a benchmark for “assistive wearable agents” — smart glasses and similar devices that figure out what a person is trying to do from video, audio and other signals, without being asked.

Noting how little prior work existed, they assembled a dataset from 348 participants to test it. The best AI models produced a relevant answer only 55% of the time, they found. The researchers concluded that current models “remain far from practical usefulness” at the task.

Also listed as a director in the startup’s filing is Tyler Simpson, a Seattle-area software executive who co-founded commute-management startup Luum, spent 11 years at Microsoft, and was most recently a director and technical program manager at Meta, overlapping with Carlberg.

Carlberg left Meta at the end of 2024 and announced on his website that he was taking a sabbatical. He incorporated Noosphere Labs early this year.

The Gates Foundation broke its own record at the University of Washington with the largest charitable gift in university history: $540.2 million for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

The commitment, announced Monday, will fund a 10-year expansion of IHME’s Global Burden of Disease study, increasing the number of locations it covers from about 925 to nearly 5,000. For many countries, the study is the only source of comparable data on causes of death and disease, according to IHME.

It will also support the institute’s health forecasting and its tracking of health spending worldwide.

The funding “will allow us to provide high-quality evidence at a much more local level and help leaders understand not only where health is improving or worsening, but which decisions can make the greatest difference for people,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME’s director and a professor of health metrics sciences at UW, in a statement announcing the grant.

Roughly 60% of IHME’s budget comes from the Gates Foundation, according to the institute. The rest comes from federal grants, projects with other countries and other philanthropies.

IHME describes the new commitment from the Gates Foundation as a core grant that keeps the institute at a “steady state.” The previous core grant, $279 million announced in 2017, ramps down in December, and the new one begins in January.

IHME employed 425 people in fiscal 2026, down from 469 the year before, the institute said. No significant additional hiring is planned.

The institute became widely known during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its projections of cases, hospitalizations and deaths were used by the White House coronavirus task force and cited around the world. It drew criticism from statisticians who said its early forecasts understated the U.S. death toll and that its uncertainty ranges were too narrow, prompting revisions by IHME.

The Gates Foundation helped create IHME at UW in 2007 with a $105 million grant, then the largest in UW history. It has repeatedly set UW’s donation record since then, including $210 million in 2016 for the building that now houses the institute and $279 million to IHME in 2017.

The latest grant comes as global health funding falls sharply. IHME’s own tracking found that development assistance for health dropped 21% between 2024 and 2025, driven by a 67% decline in U.S. spending. Britain, France and Germany also cut their contributions.

It also comes at a tough moment for UW, which is facing a budget crisis driven by funding cuts. KUOW reported in April that NIH award money promised to UW dropped 50% from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026, with funds in hand down 74% because of slow federal grant processing.

The foundation is going through a transition of its own. It announced in May 2025 that it would spend $200 billion over 20 years and close on Dec. 31, 2045. Its board approved a record $9 billion budget for 2026 and a plan to cut up to 500 of its roughly 2,375 staff positions by 2030.

The new grant will run into 2036, about a decade before the foundation closes.

Updated after publication with additional information from IHME.

Members of Washington’s AI task force point to the state’s new AI regulations as evidence that regulation and innovation can coexist, but a panel discussion this week marking the end of their two-year effort showed just how unsettled the core issues remain. 

The task force is caught between consumer and labor groups calling for more extensive guardrails, and tech industry representatives concerned about compliance costs, exposing the tension between the demands of the fast-moving AI industry and the risks the technology poses to individuals.

That came to the fore at a panel on Wednesday, held at the Seattle startup incubator AI House, where task force members faced an unusual mix of people: an audience of AI startup founders, plus a roster of pro-regulation experts representing the legal, labor, and consumer protection fields. 

Panelists were there to discuss the task force’s final report, which recommended AI regulations to the state legislature. Four of the eleven recommendations were adopted, in part or in full, and passed into law this spring. 

“We are here today to see how much of this sentiment — that Washington does not have to choose between embracing innovation and protecting people — comes out in the content of the report,” said Ryan Burns, co-founder of Responsible AI Washington, who moderated the panel. 

That line has become a refrain for AI regulators in Washington. Gov. Bob Ferguson, then the state’s attorney general, requested the legislation creating the task force in 2024. He appointed representatives from government, labor, academia, and the tech industry, directing them to explore how AI could be “regulated without stymieing innovation.” 

In the final report, published in July 2026, Attorney General Nick Brown wrote that the task force had “made clear” that the two priorities could coexist, despite the federal government’s pro-innovation agenda. But Wednesday’s event showed that might not be so simple. 

Narrow regulations passed

Washington passed its first AI regulations this spring, including a requirement that companion chatbots remind users that the bots are not human and another that prohibits medical insurers from denying a patient coverage solely on the basis of an assessment made by AI. For Burns, the laws that did not pass were more telling.

“It did strike me as meaningful that the recommendations that have been adopted pertained to narrower application areas,” Burns said. “The recommendations that have not yet passed were a lot bigger.”

One of those recommendations was to regulate the use of AI for high-risk decision making, meaning applications of AI to hiring processes, algorithmic pricing, criminal justice, and healthcare. A similar law has passed in states such as New York, Connecticut, Illinois, California, and Colorado, but the Washington bill died before reaching a floor vote in either chamber.

The task force’s recommendation to require AI developers to disclose the datasets they are using to train their models, as California does, also died, as did a third recommendation to develop guidelines for the use of AI in the workplace. 

In an interview with GeekWire, state Rep. Mia Gregerson, who sponsored some of the comprehensive bills, said she appreciated the work of the task force but maintained that there is much more work to be done. 

“We are a tech heavy state, so we have an even bigger responsibility to do good work to catch up to what other states are doing,” Gregerson said. “We are so behind.”

On Wednesday, panelists said broader AI regulations failed in part because they drew less interest from the public.

“What passed in the legislature was more sector specific things where the consumer harm was more clear, and I think that’s a product of political dynamics,” said Yuki Ishizuka, technology policy manager for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “It’s harder to connect broader governance or transparency bills to harm to people.”

Broad AI regulations also faced heightened opposition from the tech industry, where a patchwork of state regulations means higher legal fees. At task force meetings, which were open to the public, representatives from the tech industry opposed regulations around AI development that would add “procedural hoops.” 

Cost of compliance

Concern about overregulation was echoed by attendees of the event, the majority of whom were founders of small AI startups.

When it came time for the Q&A, multiple audience members asked the task force to consider the financial burden for small startups of complying with complicated state regulations.

The distinction between big tech and startups has become a refrain for AI House, where entrepreneurs met with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray last month to discuss the nuances of AI regulation for so-called “small tech.”

“As these recommendations turn into policy, it’s important that startup founders are part of the conversation,” AI House Managing Director Jacob Colker told GeekWire. “A five-person startup doesn’t have the same legal, compliance, or policy capacity as a trillion-dollar company.”

But Jai Jaisimha, co-founder of a pro-regulation organization called the Transparency Coalition and a former startup founder himself, cautioned against creating legal carve outs for certain AI developers. 

“Arguing that you’re exempt because it’s too much data to disclose, or it’s a trade secret, those arguments send a sign that normal software development and governance does not apply to AI,” Jaisimha said. “Disclosure and consumer protection, these are standard practices in other industries.”

While the bills that would have been most costly for developers to comply with did not pass into law, those that did will still create significant legal consequences for AI developers who don’t abide by them. 

Panelist and technology law expert Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who was not a member of the task force, said the state’s new companion chatbot law will be “blood in the water for the plaintiffs’ bar” for two separate reasons. 

• First, any failure to comply could now be treated by the courts as “negligence per se,” meaning that the plaintiff will not have to show broader negligence but will simply have to show that the defendant violated the law. 
• Second, any failure to follow these regulations is deemed an unfair or deceptive act under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act, giving consumers a private right of action and exposing developers to higher financial penalties. 

The question for the tech industry will be about where the state’s attorney general will prioritize enforcement. 

“The AG has a lot of power, but not enough to bring every violation of the law. So you have to think of the Eye of Sauron, and whether it will focus on you. If you’re a little startup, probably not, but if you’re Meta, probably yes,” Calo said.

Future AI regulation

As Washington state prepares to implement its new regulations this January, regulators are bracing for backlash from the federal government.

A December executive order from the Trump administration called on Congress to pass a “minimally-burdensome” AI policy preempting state laws, created an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state laws that don’t “sustain and enhance the United States’ global AI dominance,” and threatened to cut broadband funding to those states. It named Colorado, which enacted the first comprehensive state AI law in 2024.

Federal preemption would require Congress to pass AI regulation of its own, which it has yet to do, but Trump’s order still seems to be having an effect. 

• This spring, Colorado repealed its AI regulation and replaced it with a more conciliatory law. 
• In Virginia, where no AI regulations have gained traction, legislators pointed to the federal government’s threats. 
• And in Utah, lawmakers withdrew a bill to regulate frontier models after the Trump administration sent them a memo criticizing it for “opposing the federal government’s agenda,” according to Politico.

“We believe that, if the federal government is going to act, they should act with meaningful AI regulation, and should not preempt the state’s ability to protect its citizens,” said Ishizuka of the Washington state AG’s office. 

The federal pressure has not stopped some leaders from calling for far-reaching regulation. Some members of Wednesday’s second panel, which was made up of representatives from labor, academia, and consumers from outside the task force, proposed redistribution: Future AI regulation should reallocate the profits made by developers to pay for AI’s impending costs, such as cybersecurity improvements, worker retraining, and updates to school curricula.

“My worry is that there is going to be a lot of money being made, and I really think that bill should go to the people that are making a lot of money off of it,” Calo said. “I’m not sure that all of the [task force’s] recommendations directly address that redistribution element.”

Some state lawmakers are ready to address it. Gregerson, whose district includes SeaTac Airport and whose constituency includes many Uber drivers, told GeekWire she hopes to allocate state funds for retraining rideshare drivers who are replaced by autonomous vehicles.

State Rep. Clyde Shavers, who was not present at Wednesday’s panel but was a member of the task force, has said he wants to spend the next session establishing liability frameworks for AI-related harm.

Now that the report has been published, the task force will be disbanded, but the work will continue at the Attorney General’s Office, where a new Tech Policy Team will be led by Ishizuka. 

“With the completion of the task force’s work, there is strong interest in the AG’s office to continue to focus on AI policy,” Ishizuka said. “We’ll look at emerging technologies and bring in outside expertise so that there is informed regulation.”

Speaking in June at the University of Washington Allen School commencement, AI pioneer Jeff Dean told computer science graduates how he “got the itch to join a startup in 1999,” landing at Google when it had a grand total of 20 people above what is now a T-Mobile store in Palo Alto.

Twenty-seven years later, now 58, the UW alum has the itch again.

Google announced Wednesday that Dean, its chief scientist, is leaving with three colleagues to launch Discovery Loop, a startup automating the process of scientific research: proposing experiments, running them, evaluating results, and iterating, thousands of times over.

“Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today,” they write on their website.

Discovery Loop is based in Palo Alto, with what it describes as a lean team of its own. Joining Dean are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, his collaborator of more than two decades; Google DeepMind research VP Oriol Vinyals; and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.

Google is a founding investor and will supply computing power for at least the first year. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, with backing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures (a name Seahawks fans will recognize from the team’s incoming ownership group).

The departures came as part of a broader shakeup announced in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai. Demis Hassabis is handing off day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind to become its chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up as SVP, overseeing Gemini model development. Alphabet shares fell about 4% after the announcement

“After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Pichai wrote.

Dean, who earned his UW computer science Ph.D. in 1996, gave no hint of his plans at the Allen School commencement. He told Wired the idea came together only in recent weeks.

But the general theme was there. Listing problems he thought worth solving, he pointed the UW graduates toward “developing tools that accelerate scientific discovery and engineering.”

“One of the beauties of software,” he said during his commencement address, “is that small groups of people can build things that have enormous impact in the world.”