• AI Sleeper Agents: Models harbor undetectable triggers activated under specific conditions.
• Chinese Threats: Intelligence operations like Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon target infrastructure; Google engineer indicted for stealing AI secrets for Beijing.
• AI Alignment: Ensures stable objectives, predictable reasoning faithful to missions amid new situations and adversarial pressures.
• US Investments: Genesis Mission accelerates AI scientific discovery, but alignment requires comparable funding to prevent compromise.
• China's Approach: $8.2 billion AI fund and policies emphasize safe, reliable, controllable systems under command.
• Alignment Benefits: Structured frameworks improve capabilities, similar to F-16 design constraints unlocking success.
• Necessary Properties: Stable long-term objectives, interpretable reasoning, verified shutdowns, resistance to manipulation for military use.
• Proposed Steps: Fund neglected research, mandate alignment in DoD contracts, create federal zones with built-in requirements.

---

Recent research has demonstrated that AI models can harbor sleeper agents that can be triggered under specific conditions without detection. The same adversaries that compromised U.S. telecommunications through Salt Typhoon and targeted critical infrastructure through Volt Typhoon can exploit vulnerabilities in military AI systems. We know that Chinese intelligence has penetrated frontier AI labs: In 2024, a former Google engineer was indicted on charges that he stole AI trade secrets while secretly working for Beijing. (He has pleaded not guilty and his trial is scheduled to begin next month.)

The way to address this is with AI alignment research—ensuring that systems’ objectives and reasoning stay stable, predictable and faithful to their intended mission across new situations, long time horizons and adversarial pressures. The administration’s newly announced Genesis Mission at the Department of Energy launches a coordinated national effort to accelerate AI-enabled scientific discovery. These are appropriate investments in cutting-edge capability, but a failure to invest comparably in alignment can allow adversaries to compromise American AI capabilities.

While American defense procurement treats alignment as an afterthought, China is moving systematically. In January, Beijing launched an $8.2 billion National AI Industry Investment Fund. Since the 2017 New Generation AI Development Plan, Chinese policy has emphasized building AI that is “safe, reliable and controllable.” Chinese military strategists stress the importance of systems that remain under operational command. Beijing grasps what many American policymakers miss: Alignment research accelerates AI capabilities. Whoever solves these technical problems builds more capable systems and wins the race.

Many AI policy discussions instinctively cast alignment as compliance overhead that slows development. But historically, such constraints have often unlocked capabilities. The F-16 became the most successful fighter in history not despite its strict design constraints, but because of them. The same principle applies to AI. Giving models structured frameworks for how they think produces dramatic capability improvements, and techniques designed to make AI more aligned have been adopted by most major labs.

Yet most promising alignment directions remain unexplored. The systems that defense planners need for extended autonomous operations require alignment properties we’ve barely begun to develop: stable long-term objectives, interpretable reasoning across complex decision chains, verified shutdown protocols that can’t be circumvented, and principled resistance to adversarial manipulation. Military-grade reliability demands military-grade commitment to alignment research.

Unlike cybersecurity, where we’re locked in a cycle of patching vulnerabilities after adversaries exploit them, AI alignment offers a chance to build security from the ground up. We can establish verified shutdown protocols, interpretable reasoning systems, and resistance to adversarial manipulation before these systems are deployed.

But this chance won’t last forever. Frontier lab leaders expect systems that can match human experts across all cognitive domains within 12 to 18 months. Once models can autonomously design successor models, and once powerful AI systems are embedded in critical infrastructure and military operations, we’ll face the same reactive posture that has plagued cybersecurity for decades.

Three steps would position America to win:

First, launch broad-scale programs that target neglected alignment research. Private labs optimize for commercial performance, which means critical security challenges go unsolved. These problems lack commercial importance, but they determine whether AI systems can be trusted with national-security operations. The government must fund this research directly, just as it has historically funded cryptography, semiconductor security and other dual-use technologies for which market incentives misalign with defense needs.

Second, require military-grade alignment research and development in major Defense Department AI contracts. The director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already set a goal to achieve military-grade AI, and the Pentagon is already spending hundreds of millions on frontier capabilities. Those contracts should mandate that computing resources go toward interpretability, verified shutdown protocols, the elimination of sleeper agents and long-term objective stability. This approach would motivate private-sector research while ensuring that the systems we deploy meet defense-grade security standards.

Third, build special zones for AI research on federal land with alignment requirements built in from the start.

The Pentagon already demands the best equipment, training and strategic doctrine. It should demand the same from AI systems: reliably steerable toward American strategic objectives across time horizons that matter.

America built the atomic bomb when the physics seemed impossible. We reached the moon when the engineering seemed fantastical. We created the internet when networked computing seemed impractical.

Americans have always risen to civilizational challenges when we’ve seen them clearly and moved with conviction. The challenge now is to build AI systems we can trust with the future. That future is closer than most realize, and the window for shaping it is open. But it won’t stay open forever.

Mr. Rosenblatt is CEO and Mr. Berg a research director of AE Studio.

America is struggling to build ships, missiles and drones, even as war rages in eastern Europe and tensions rise in Asia. Kate Odell speaks with analyst Seth Jones about his new book “The American Edge,” and how the U.S. can still meet the world's threats.

• Recurring anti-Israel claims: Gaza war depicted as uniquely lethal and catastrophic using selective 21st-century statistics on fatalities, casualty rates, women/children killed, and destruction.
• Most deadly war claim false: Tigray War killed 800,000 in two years; Syrian Civil War 620,000; Yemeni Civil War 377,000; South Sudan 190,000 direct plus famine deaths.
• Second Congo War scale: 5.4 million deaths from 1998-2003, averaging 75,000 per month; post-war excess deaths at 45,000 monthly.
• Sudanese Civil War comparison: 400,000 fatalities since 2023, 12 million displaced, 25 million in hunger, far exceeding Gaza metrics.
• Highest population percentage killed false: Mariupol 6-17% in 2022; Korean War South Korea 6.5%, North Korea 12-15%; Biafra 4-15%; Cambodia 20%.
• Highest women/children percentage false: Tigray 58%; Mosul 54%; Raqqa 51%, all in urban anti-terror battles like Gaza.
• Unprecedented destruction false: Raqqa 80% uninhabitable; Mosul 80%+; Marawi 95%; Mariupol near-total, with Gaza at 70% damaged.
• Low civilian-combatant ratio: Gaza 1.8:1 using Hamas figures, lower than Mosul 3:1 and other Western urban operations; critics manipulate data.

---

A recurring claim pushed by anti-Israel activists and critics is that the Gaza war is a

uniquely lethal

and

catastrophic

conflict. They cite statistics such as

total fatalities

,

casualty rates

, the number or

proportion

of

women and children

killed, and the

scale of destruction

, often limiting the comparison to “

the 21st century

.” The aim is to depict Israel’s conduct as inherently criminal and to reinforce the false

allegation of genocide

by insisting that nothing in modern warfare compares. War is horrific and Gaza’s losses are tragic, but tragedy does not transform a conventional urban conflict into an unprecedented event. When these claims are examined against actual historical data, every one of them collapses. Gaza is not unprecedented, not the “worst,” and not an outlier in modern warfare, even this century. These claims depend on selective statistics, misrepresentation and a refusal to acknowledge far deadlier conflicts. This article dismantles the main arguments, though no one should expect those invested in this narrative to suddenly start telling the truth.

False Claim: Gaza is the "Most Deadly" War

Claims that Gaza is the most deadly war of this century are demonstrably false. The

Tigray War

in Ethiopia, fought from November 2020 to November 2022, killed an estimated

800,000 people

in two years. Every metric of displacement, starvation and civilian suffering in Tigray far exceeded anything in Gaza, even using Hamas's

unreliable statistics

.

The Syrian Civil War from 2011 to 2019 saw roughly

620,000 deaths

. It could be even higher after

mass graves

were found this year near Damascus. The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented

30,600 children killed

out of a subset of 234,000 fatalities, far surpassing Gaza’s child fatality numbers. Other deadlier conflicts this century include the Yemeni Civil War with

377,000 deaths

and the South Sudan Civil War with

190,000 direct fatalities

plus 193,000 more from famine.

Nothing compares to the

Second Congo War

from 1998 to 2003 in terms of total fatalities or rate of death. The war caused an estimated

5.4 million deaths

, averaging 75,000 per month. A 2008 report in

The New York Times

noted that even after the war ended, 45,000 people were still dying each month from the effects of the war.

There is also a current conflict far deadlier than Gaza: the Sudanese Civil War that began in April 2023, with an estimated

400,000 fatalities

, 12 million displaced people and 25 million facing extreme hunger. Despite producing human suffering on a

vastly larger scale

, it receives almost

no attention

from the same “experts,” NGOs and humanitarians who claim Gaza represents a

uniquely catastrophic

event.

False Claim: Gaza has the Highest Percentage of a Population Killed

Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson

claimed

that no war has seen 3% of its population killed within two years based on Hamas’s assertion that

70,000

Gazans have died out of a 2.1 million pre-war population. Setting aside that roughly

25,000

of these are combatants, Hasson is simply wrong, both for this century and the last.

The brutal three-month battle for Mariupol in 2022 offers a stark and recent benchmark that immediately disproves claims of Gaza’s unprecedented casualty rates. Ukrainian authorities initially estimated

25,000 civilian deaths

, but an

AP report

suggested the real figure may be 75,000. With a pre-war population of 430,000, the lower estimate equals 6% of the city killed, while the higher estimate exceeds 17%, both far greater than Gaza. Critics may argue that Mariupol is just one city, not all of Ukraine, but Gaza is also just one territory where Palestinians live, with 3 million in the West Bank. But even setting Mariupol aside, many conflicts have exceeded the 3% threshold.

The Korean War was extraordinarily deadly. South Korea lost an estimated

1.3 million

people out of a pre-war population of 20 million, a loss rate of 6.5%.

North Korea’s losses

were even more severe, with estimates ranging from 12%-15% of the total population killed. Other modern conflicts produced similarly devastating percentages. The

Biafran War

in Nigeria (1967–1970) saw about 4% of the population killed in direct fighting, and 15% when including deaths from the actual famine that occurred. Separately, under the Khmer Rouge and during the

war with Vietnam

(1975–1979), Cambodia lost

2 million

people, more than 20% of its population. There are many additional examples, but the point is clear: Gaza is not even close to breaking statistical ground.

False Claim: Gaza has Highest Percentage of Women & Children Killed

Claims that Gaza has seen the

highest percentage

of women and children killed, about 48% according to

Hamas' latest figures

, are also false. Recent conflicts show higher rates. The challenge is that in the deadliest wars reliable demographic data is generally unavailable, but where data does exist it contradicts the Gaza narrative.

In the Tigray War, a

study

of airstrikes across 24 districts found that approximately 28% of casualties were children and 30% were women, a combined 58%. A

study of mortality

from the Battle of Mosul, fought by US-led coalition and Iraqi forces against ISIS from 2016 to 2017, recorded that more than 54% of those killed were women and children. One does not need to reach back to obscure cases or actual genocides to find higher rates; a recent, well-documented battle involving Western militaries surpasses Gaza’s claims. Similar results appeared in the

Battle of Raqqa

. Among roughly 1,000 identified deaths, 51% were women and children, including 28% children.

The

Battles of Mosul

and

Raqqa

are particularly

relevant comparisons to Gaza

because each involved dense urban warfare against a terrorist force embedded within a civilian population. These battles were not labeled genocide or unprecedented crimes, but recognized as the harsh reality of

urban combat

against an enemy that used

human shields

. ISIS also did not have seventeen years to construct a

1,000-kilometer tunnel system

, making the IDF’s results in Gaza even more consistent with the norms of Western warfare in unusually difficult circumstances.

False Claim: Gaza has Unprecedented Physical Destruction

The destruction in Gaza is

often cited

as prima facie

proof of genocide

, with commentators insisting that such damage cannot result from lawful warfare. This claim ignores the extensive record of modern urban battles that produced equal or greater devastation. Gaza is severe but typical of high-intensity urban combat, not evidence of genocidal intent.

UNCTAD’s

November 2025 report estimates that 70% of Gaza was damaged or destroyed. Certain areas remain mostly

intact

. Importantly, if 3% of Gazans were killed, including combatants, then the massive gap between the percentage of physical destruction and fatalities reflects highly successful

evacuation

s by Israel, not an effort to exterminate a population.

Raqqa and Mosul demonstrate this clearly. Raqqa was assessed as nearly

completely destroyed

, with one estimate finding

80% of buildings

uninhabitable. A RAND study described the battle in ways that

closely mirror

Gaza, and

UNOSAT imagery

shows virtually the entire city destroyed or heavily damaged. ISIS had tunneled between buildings, rigged the city with explosives, concealed streets from aerial surveillance and used

civilians as shields

—the same conditions faced by the IDF.

Mosul suffered comparable devastation, particularly in the western and Old City districts, with

destruction

estimated at more than 80%. A

World Bank assessment

of Iraqi cities after the war with ISIS found destruction levels of 94% in Bayji and 96% in Al-Ba’aj, with destruction and damage across sixteen governorates, an area far larger than Gaza, averaging 59%.

Outside the Middle East, the five-month

Battle of Marawi

in the Philippines in 2017 between government forces and 1,000 Islamic State militants caused massive destruction in a city of 200,000 people. Civilian casualties remained low due to effective evacuations, yet in a large area more than

95% of structures

were

destroyed

or damaged. As a

Stimson Center report

noted, “Marawi thus illustrates that even when casualties are low and a population is evacuated, damage to infrastructure can still severely impact both the city’s people and those of surrounding areas.”

Mariupo

l further reinforces the point. The city, spanning 166 square kilometers (nearly half the size of Gaza), saw destruction or damage across almost its entire urban area.

True Statistic: Gaza has a Comparatively Low Civilian-Combatant Ratio

Based on available data, the civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is roughly 1.8 to 1 (and probably

even lower

), using Hamas’ claim of 70,000 total fatalities and an estimated

25,000 combatants

killed. This ratio is far lower than in recent Western-led urban battles. In Mosul, an estimated

10,000 civilians

were killed compared to about 2,000 to 3,000

ISIS fighter

s, a ratio of 3 to 1 at the low end. Broader operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced ratios in the range of

3 to 1 up to 5 to 1

. The Gaza ratio therefore contradicts accusations of genocide or indiscriminate targeting.

Critics who cannot accept this reality have attempted to manipulate both sides of the ratio to fabricate a higher figure. On the denominator, they

undercount combatants

by relying only on the number of fighters the IDF can literally identify by first and last name and match to a pre-war roster. By this absurd standard, any combatant the IDF could not fully identify in the midst of battle, combatants remaining in tunnels or beneath rubble, or any individual recruited by Hamas after the war began, is automatically labeled a civilian. This is how the

false claim

of “

83% civilians killed

” is manufactured.

On the numerator, these same critics assert, without evidence, that total fatalities are

undercounted

by some 40%. They

never explain

how this is possible when Gazans could and did

report

thousands of deaths without needing to present bodies, and given the compensation incentives to do so. Two years into the conflict, the notion that thirty thousand or more deaths remain unreported by their families has no evidentiary basis.

Taken together, the credible data leaves Gaza’s civilian combatant ratio well under 2 to 1, low for high-intensity urban warfare. And tellingly, when this metric contradicts their genocide narrative, the same critics who inflated every other statistic suddenly work to discredit it, proving that accurate numbers were never the point; the manipulation exists solely to promote an anti-Israel agenda.

Conclusion

When the facts invalidate the claims, the predictable response is to move the goalposts. After portraying Gaza as an unprecedented, genocidal conflict, critics suddenly dismiss all comparative evidence, insisting that previous catastrophic wars are

too terrible to cite

as data points. The impulse to portray Israel as uniquely criminal, rather than any commitment to truth, drives this constant reframing. It exposes the ideological goal driving the narrative: to cast Israel as uniquely criminal, even when the

evidence shows otherwise

. In the end, tragedy does not prove genocide, and facts still matter, even to those determined to ignore them.

• Polish dubbing issues: Single lektor delivers all dialogue in monotone, no cast variation, hated by young audiences.
• ElevenLabs founding: Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski quit jobs in 2022 to build AI text-to-speech generator.
• AI voice capabilities: Generates voices with emotions like happiness, excitement, laughter; clones any voice including users' own.
• Early adoption and growth: Used by authors for audiobooks, YouTubers for translations in 29 languages; deals with HarperCollins, Bertelsmann.
• Funding and valuation: Raised over $300 million, reached $6.6 billion valuation; cofounders worth $1 billion each.
• Revenue and profitability: $193 million trailing revenue, $116 million net profit; half from corporates like Cisco, Epic Games.
• Competitive edge: Largest library of 10,000 voices, fewer errors than OpenAI; charges up to three times more than rivals.
• Challenges and expansions: Faced deepfake misuse, settled audiobook lawsuit; launching music generator, AI avatars, voice agents platform.

---

---

Dubbed films in Poland are horrible. A lone lektor delivers all the dialogue in an enervated Slavic monotone. There is no cast. No variation between speakers. Young audiences hate it. “Ask any Polish person and they will tell you it’s terrible,” says Mateusz (Mati) Staniszewski, the cofounder of AI speech outfit ElevenLabs. “I guess it was a communist thing that stuck as a cheap way to produce content.”

While working at Palantir, Staniszewski teamed up with high school friend and Google engineer Piotr Dabkowski to experiment with artificial intelligence. The pair realized that one project, a particularly promising AI public speaking coach, could solve the uniquely Polish horror of Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson being drowned out by a lektor “star” like Maciej Gudowski.

Cody Pickens for Forbes

The pair pooled their savings and by May 2022 had quit their jobs to work full-time on ElevenLabs. Out of the gate, their new AI text-to-speech generator was leagues better than the robotic voices of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. ElevenLabs’ AI voices were capable of happiness, excitement, even laughter.

In January 2023 ElevenLabs launched its first model. It could take any piece of text and use AI to read it aloud in any voice—including a clone of your own (or, worryingly, someone else’s). There was immediate demand. Authors could instantly spawn audiobooks with the software (pro rates now start from $99 a month for higher quality and more time). YouTube creators used ElevenLabs to translate their videos into other languages (its models can now speak in 29). The Warsaw- and London-based startup landed deals with lang­uage learning and meditation apps; then media companies like HarperCollins and Germany’s Bertelsmann jumped in. “It was obvious that this was the best model and everyone was picking it off the shelf,” says investor Jennifer Li of Andreessen Horowitz, which co-led a $19 million round in May 2023. A year later, the cofounders were honored as part of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe.

Others, though, found more unnerving uses: AI soundalikes of public figures such as President Trump crassly narrating video game duels, actress Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and podcaster Joe Rogan touting scams quickly went viral. Worse, fraudsters began using AI cloning tools to impersonate loved ones’ voices and steal millions in sophisticated deepfake swindles.

None of it stopped venture capitalists from pouring in money. ElevenLabs has raised more than $300 million in all, soaring to a $6.6 billion valuation in October to become one of Europe’s most valuable startups. Staniszewski, 30, who acts as CEO (the firm has no traditional titles), and research head Dabkowski, 30, are now both billionaires, worth just over $1 billion each, per Forbes estimates.

Around half of ElevenLabs’ $193 million in trailing 12-month revenue comes from corporates like Cisco, Twilio and Swiss recruitment agency Adecco, which use its tech to field customer service calls or interview job seekers. Epic Games uses it to voice characters in Fortnite, including a chat with Darth Vader (with the consent of James Earl Jones’ estate). The other half of its revenue comes from the YouTubers, podcasters and authors who were early adopters**.** “When you talk to them, it’s mind-blowing how good they are,” says Gartner analyst Tom Coshow. Unlike most AI firms, too, ElevenLabs is profitable. Forbes estimates it netted a $116 million in the last 12 months (a 60% margin).

It’s now competing against giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI to become the de facto voice of AI. It’s not a new space: Tech companies started spinning up products to listen, transcribe and generate speech around a decade ago. While it’s somewhat of a sideline for Microsoft, Satya Nadella was willing to shell out $20 billion to buy Nasdaq-listed voice transcription service Nuance in March 2022. OpenAI launched its own voice tool, which can feed human conversations into ChatGPT, in October 2024.

It Goes to 11 | ElevenLabs’ numero­phile cofounders, Mati Staniszewski (left) and Piotr Dabkowski (right), love the number 11, especially the “rule of 11” divisibility trick. Their next goal? An $11 billion valuation, naturally.

Cody Pickens for Forbes

But ElevenLabs’ 300-person team isn’t playing catch-up. Its models are so good that it’s able to get away with charging up to three times as much as these American rivals. Its library of 10,000 uncannily human-sounding voices is the largest by far and now includes A-listers Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey. It’s also more reliable. Data training startup Labelbox tested six of the top voice models with a reading quiz and found that ElevenLabs made half as many errors as its closest competitor, OpenAI. “We are one of the very few companies that are ahead of OpenAI—not only on speech, but speech-to-text and music. That’s hard,” Staniszewski says. ElevenLabs’ recipe is simple. A tight cadre of machine learning researchers, with obsessive focus on one narrow problem, and a tight budget (the cofounders fronted the first $100,000 training run) drove model breakthroughs. “Having a ton of compute can be a curse because you don’t think how to solve it in a smart way,” Dabkowski says.

But a lawsuit from a pair of audiobook narrators hints at another ingredient. Karissa Vacker and Mark Boyett allege that ElevenLabs used thousands of copyright-protected audiobooks to train its models. They claim so many of their books were scraped that clones of their voices ended up as default options on ElevenLabs. The case, in which ElevenLabs denied wrongdoing, was settled out of court in November. (Vacker and Boyett did not respond to a comment request; ElevenLabs declined further comment.)

Maturity is setting in. The company finally drew up a list of “no go” voices (mostly politicians and celebrities) after an ElevenLabs-made clone of Joe Biden’s voice was used to discourage voting in a robocall campaign around the 2024 Democratic primary. ElevenLabs now has seven full-time human moderators (plus AI, natch) scouring its clips for misuse. Newly cloned voices need to pass a consent check, and the company offers a free deepfake detector.

Staniszewski and Dabkowski have big plans beyond voice. Both cash-strapped creators and budget-conscious media companies wanted royalty-free background music, so they delivered an AI music generator in August. Don’t have time to shoot a video? ElevenLabs will have AI avatars to front Sora-style videos next year. Their boldest bet is that they can translate their expertise to provide a single hub for clients to manage all their AI tools. “We are building a platform that allows you to create voice agents and deploy them smoothly,” Staniszewski says.

Of course, that puts ElevenLabs on a collision course with a gaggle of other startups hoping to do the same thing. It helps that it’s been profitable since its earliest days, but its startup competitors are richly funded, and the tech giants have virtually unlimited resources. Still, it must innovate. Voice models will soon be commoditized. When other models catch up, fickle customers that already balk at ElevenLabs’ pricing will likely switch.

As it broadens beyond voices to more computationally intensive music and video, ElevenLabs needs to expand its own GPU farms to stay in the race. It has already spent $50 million on a data center project in Oregon. “If we are to build the generational company in AI, you need to build scale, and we are building,” Staniszewski says.

Back in Poland, the aging corps of lektors are still in business, for now. Dabkowski hasn’t forgotten ElevenLabs’ original pitch, boasting that his next model will translate and voice an entire movie in one shot. “We never give up on our missions,” he says.

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• High-profile endorsements: Backed by figures like Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, and called one of the fastest-growing products by insiders.
• Valuation vs. profitability: Valuation jumped from $2.5 billion to about $29.3 billion while the company remains unprofitable.
• Reliance on external models: Cursor depends heavily on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others for core functionality.
• Rapid revenue growth: Annualized sales reportedly rose from $100 million to $1 billion in 2025.
• Platform risk: Customers and executives worry major model providers could cut access or build competing tools.
• Composer launch and funding: Cursor released its own model, Composer, and shortly after raised over $2 billion to reduce dependency.
• High operating costs: Significant expenses come from compute power and paying for model access and training data.
• Founding story and culture: Founded by four MIT alumni in 2023 from a living room pivot, with a North Beach office, informal workplace customs and growth driven largely by word-of-mouth and pop-up events.

---

By

Angel Au-Yeung

Dec. 1, 2025 12:00 pm ET

---

Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Cursor. Andria Lo

Silicon Valley insiders have started calling Cursor, the AI coding tool, the fastest-growing product of all time.

Two of its biggest fans: OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who has said he wants all of his 40,000 coders to use it. 

Even though the company’s valuation soared from $2.5 billion in January to $29.3 billion today, it loses money, according to people familiar with its finances. And the tool relies heavily on the underlying artificial-intelligence models of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which are actively competing for the same software engineering users who have made Cursor a runaway hit.

That has put the startup’s staying power in question and at the heart of a raging debate in Silicon Valley. Millions of users love it, but they aren’t sure it will last.

“The risk that we see is, what happens if Google comes along, turns off model access for a company like Cursor and then makes their own version of Cursor?” said Kyle Cesmat, an engineering manager at Coinbase Global, who is responsible for the crypto exchange’s AI strategy.

So far, an army of coders who love it have silenced many skeptics.

“Coding has been the first breakout category of tools revolutionized by AI,” said Barry McCardel, co-founder and chief executive of data analytics startup Hex, based in San Francisco. Earlier this year, enough of his developers had individual accounts that he decided to get an enterprise account for the company. He pays roughly $40,000 a year for 70 of his engineers, designers and product managers to use Cursor. 

The company says the pricing can vary based on how often it is being used and what features they are choosing. Users say it and other tools that make use of the expert coding capabilities of AI can make some engineers up to 10 times as productive, enough to lead some to fear its impact and how it will affect their jobs.

Cursor Chief Executive Michael Truell, 25 years old, dismissed such concerns, saying it is a problem for another day.

“We are so far away from anything that looks like coding going away,” he said in an interview. “We will always exist to be a tool that helps humans take an idea in their head, a vision of what they want to see on the computer, and have it show up on the screen. That is why we exist.” 

The startup’s cultural oddities have added to its allure. Cursor works out of North Beach, the historic Italian neighborhood with a bohemian flare that is decidedly separate from the AI epicenter in downtown San Francisco.

Cursor’s office in San Francisco. Andria Lo

Its four founders—Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger—started building Cursor out of a living room in 2023. There is a no-shoes policy in the office, the floor is lined with ornate rugs for socked feet, and a chef named Fausto serves lunch six days a week for its 250 employees.

For a company that started as an encrypted messaging startup just two years ago, Cursor has come a long way.

Truell grew up in New York City, the son of two journalists who have worked for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He started programming in middle school and met his three MIT co-founders in 2018.

After graduating, they moved to San Francisco in 2022 and after a month-long brainstorming session, embarked on a plan to build an encrypted messaging system, working on it for a few months before deciding the market was too small.

It took three months for them to build the first iteration of what is now known as Cursor. For the rest of 2023, they “lived like monks,” resisting outside hires and focused maniacally on building a user-friendly tool. By the end of 2023, their startup had less than 10 employees.

In 2024, Cursor mostly spread through word-of-mouth among developers. The company spent almost no money on external marketing. Tech executives who heard about it from their employees found it difficult to get in touch with the company.

“I sought out Michael [Truell] on LinkedIn,” said Coinbase’s Cesmat. “My original contact was with a temp executive assistant because I couldn’t find anyone else to talk to.”

Eventually, Truell and the team grew more aggressive about hiring, flying around the world to persuade people to join them, even if they had previously said no.

They pursued Oskar Schulz, a former classmate at MIT, for more than a year. “Now, we try to close people a bit faster,” he said.

The company started organizing Cursor pop-up cafe events this fall, taking over local coffee shops and turning them into a co-working space for engineers to connect. They have gone around the world, from San Francisco and New York to Mumbai and Karachi, Pakistan (one of the co-founders is from Karachi).

A few weeks ago when the company was preparing for a big launch, they decided to buy a full-page ad in a newspaper. An ad in a national newspaper felt too flashy, so they opted for the Sunday edition of a local paper in San Francisco. The ad included a link to a Cursor webpage along with a heartfelt letter that started with: “Dear Developers.” 

“We monitored the traffic to the link and it was like, 112 people, of which probably were 50 people of our own team figuring out where this link went,” said Schulz.

Even with a somewhat haphazard marketing strategy, Cursor’s growth has ballooned in 2025.

The company’s annualized sales—an extrapolation of the next 12 months’ revenue based on recent sales—grew from $100 million to $1 billion this year.

By this metric, some Silicon Valley insiders have started calling Cursor the fastest-growing product of all time. “I’ve never seen this in any other company since I’ve been investing,” said Miles Clements, a partner at venture firm Accel since 2009 who led Cursor’s most recent funding round.

While growth has been robust, Cursor has faced high costs for computing firepower and AI model access operated by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. 

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In October, it launched its own AI model called Composer, partially to reduce its dependency on the biggest AI labs. Two weeks after the model launch, the company announced it had raised over $2 billion in venture funding—an indication of significant interest and just how much it faces in expenses.

Composer is fueled by years worth of product use data that Cursor has been collecting from developers since its launch in 2023. This data is valuable: a one-hour session of developer data using an AI coding tool could cost as much at $500, according to startups that hire contractors to help train AI models. Some users praised its capabilities for quick tasks but said they still rely on bigger AI models like those from Anthropic for more complex work.

The ultimate fate of the company rests on the question of what will become a commodity first, said McCardel, the startup founder whose employees persuaded him to use Cursor.

Will model builders such as Anthropic or OpenAI become a commodity as they compete with cheaper models such as DeepSeek, which emerged from China? Or will it be the likes of Cursor, which hosts the software built by others that does most of the programming magic?

“It’s just an interesting dynamic to see who will be able to commoditize who faster,” he said.

Write to Angel Au-Yeung at angel.au-yeung@wsj.com

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Videos

On the banks of the Mersey, across from the shipyards and gasworks of Birkenhead, an alphabet soup of hard-Left activists has emerged to man stalls and pop-up tents bearing weighty tomes. The SPEW, the SWP, the CPB, the CPGB(ML), the SL: from where they came, nobody quite knows, but this is not what you could plausibly call the mainstream Left. We instantly recognise even the reddest of Labourites, or perhaps a Polanski-loving Green. But this is a more subterranean species, rarely seen in the cold light of national conversation. Today, these veteran Leftists are beheld by confused journalists who are more used to the rituals of PMQs than the socialist rally, and who are blissfully unaware of the difference between the RCP and the RCG.

We’re in the same venue that, just months ago, hosted government ministers and their hungover special advisers at the Labour Conference. But now, we’re here for an event to mark Your Party’s official foundation, and the vibes are unsurprisingly different. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having had the whip removed by Keir Starmer five years ago, is establishing a new electoral vehicle with that other former Labour recalcitrant, Zarah Sultana. It’s worth remembering that both would still be languishing on the backbenches as Labour MPs were it not for the Prime Minister’s Stalinist approach to party management. After all, Corbyn stayed in what Peter Mandelson boasted was a “sealed tomb” of the Labour Left, all the way through the Iraq and Afghan wars, privatisations, PFI. But today, finally, the Left hopes to break from its Labourist sepulchre.

Outside the confines of a heavily scrutinised party of government — with in-built constitutional connections to politically moderate trade unions that represent millions of workers — all the neuroses of the Left come to the fore here in Liverpool. This is Glastonbury for people who unironically quote Lenin, an airport-hangar-sized space teeming with aging members of all manner of sects, and who thrive during the most arcane and interminable of debates. Motions, seconders, points of order: this is the language they speak. After Corbyn has opened with one of his woolly, meandering speeches, full of odes to “communities”, “people coming together”, “peace”, “the homeless” and “refugees”, the journalists are banished from the hall, and the revolutionary proceduralism is turned up to self-parodic levels.

When the CIA declassified its Simple Sabotage Field Manual, it revealed how its agents would infiltrate activist organisations to hamper their activities. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions”, it reads; “Never permit shortcuts to be taken to expedite decisions”; “Talk as frequently as possible at great length”; and “bring up irrelevant issues”. Your Party’s delegates seem to have imbibed this advice — not because they’re intelligence operatives, but because they have an incredible knack for the reverse Midas. Within minutes of the first session, the chair is being heckled and booed as she begs security to eject a shouting participant. “LET. HER. SPEAK!” goes a sporadic chant from the audience.

It’s as if the entire exercise has been conceived to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the hard Left. And when not concerning themselves with how many kulaks can dance on the head of a pin, the two actual issues that provoke the giddiest of cheers are the twin obsessions of Palestine and transphobia, questions that motivate vanishingly small numbers of voters. Most of them, perhaps, are in this room. The night before, one speaker at a pre-conference rally diagnosed a pre-revolutionary mood in the country, as in Petrograd in 1917. Britain, he claimed, was simmering with renewed class consciousness. The war in Gaza has “united the working class” and opened their eyes to the true nature of “capitalism” and “imperialism”. Any day now, the whole edifice could come crumbling down.

Well, maybe not just yet. Demographically speaking, scanning the room of delegates, Your Party appears to largely be retired boomer activists, who cut their teeth in the heightened political tensions of the Cold War, or else in the municipal struggles of the New Left in the Eighties. Some have been involved in the Stop the War Coalition, and many seem to be members of parties that define their politics according to their relation to the work of three or four Russian and German thinkers who died over a century ago. Alongside that cohort are some younger, millennial socialists; the downwardly mobile graduates with no future, angry at high rents, low wages and all of the contemporary identity struggles that consume the hyper-online.

A third cohort had been earmarked by Corbyn, but has been significantly alienated by the first few months of the party’s eager self-immolation: the Muslim working class, represented by the four so-called Gaza independents, two of whom have quit the founding process after falling out with Sultana over trans rights. Corbyn’s strange ability to articulate the vague, platitudinous ethical socialism redolent of a non-conformist preacher could have allowed his Your Party colleagues a semblance of unity. But they have all fallen badly at the first hurdle, humiliating themselves and their movement, turning themselves into a national joke that just keeps on giving.

The former Labour MP Sultana has courted the support of the myriad revolutionary Marxist groupuscules after a pair of botched, unilateral launches threw the nascent party into disarray. After the political operatives around Corbyn preemptively expelled some Socialist Workers’ Party members from the conference, Sultana called it an “undemocratic witch hunt” and boycotted the first day in protest, flouncing away from the venue for the gathered cameras. One old-timer Tankie confides that he was uncomfortable with the exclusions. “Even Stalin,” he tells me, “would wait for a rulebook to be formally adopted before he expelled people for breaking rules”. One prominent Corbynite in favour of the ban jokingly messages to say that the ejection of SWP members from the building is, only semi-ironically, “a delicious vision of what Grey Cuba could have been”.

As well as pushing for the inclusion of the sects in Your Party’s structures, and despite standing on an incredibly thin Labour manifesto last year, Sultana has spent her time on podiums advocating for nationalising “the entire economy”. Because if there’s one takeaway from this tumultuous foundation process, it’s that those presiding over the Your Party perma-crisis would be capable of abolishing the entire private sector, and managing the whole means of production, distribution and exchange themselves, Soviet-style. Sultana herself is still holding on to £600,000 scraped from the membership portal she preemptively launched, apparently in a bid to bounce Corbyn into action. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating potential breaches of the law, and, according to one source, Corbyn is the only person among the Independent and Your Party MPs resisting reporting her to the police and Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. These, then, are the bureaucratic geniuses who could formulate Five Year Plans for an advanced economy.

Yet it’s political differences that have become the core dividing lines between Zarah and Jeremy, with the latter, perhaps for the first time in his life, somehow representing the more Right-wing strand of his party’s thinking. The former Labour leader tells me that there is no Your Party witch hunt, and that, simply put, people “can’t be members of two parties at the same time”. He is also keen to emphasise his more limited desires for public ownership: of water, energy, the old, postwar state-delivered utilities. His is a brand of old-fashioned allotment Leftism, all tatty jumpers, homemade vegan flapjacks and CND marches. Sultana, on the other hand, has adopted the combative, sometimes crazed rhetoric of the convert. One pro-Jeremy wag describes the supportive network of Trotskyists around her as “Cultana”, with a worldview shaped by the extremities of early-2020s identity politics, online cancel culture, “calling out”, and neo-Maoist public purification rituals.

But in insisting on pursuing a “member-led” process, on “empowering the grassroots” and involving a panoply of bizarre interest groups in an exercise in “ultra-democracy”, Corbyn has opened a Pandora’s box, unwittingly handing power to cults that tend towards parasitic relationships with whatever body they attach themselves to. The favoured strategy of the “bottom-up social movement”, and the “prefigurative” and “democratic” structure so desired by the Left’s idealists, lends itself not to democracy, but to activist-ocracy, to domination by militant cliques of hardline oddballs who adore whiling their evenings and weekends away in damp halls full of political eccentrics, and who love nothing and nobody but the sounds of their own voices.

And yet this is the future that Your Party’s foundational delegates have chosen: yesterday, on the final day of the conference, it was announced that members had decided to reject the “single-leader model” in favour of a “collective leadership” made up of a body of 20 non-MPs. Neither Jeremy nor Zarah will lead Your Party. In exposing the public to their spats and civil warfare, the two have lost control of the vehicle they set out to build. What’s more, Your Party members will, after all, be able to have their “dual memberships”, ensuring that it becomes, in effect, an umbrella group of the warring Trotskyist parties camped outside. The foundational conference has voted itself into permanent, certain obscurity.

There’s a genuine political space for a party that represents the socialist — not the ecological — tradition, especially in the country that birthed the labour movement centuries ago. Vast spaces have opened up on Labour’s Left flank, with broad elements of Corbyn’s 2017 and 2019 programmes still attracting widespread popular support in polling. Dominic Cummings wrote of a “crude heuristic” that the median voter is, roughly, “national socialist”, meaning that they “are both more left than Blairites (e.g. tax the rich) and more right than Tories (e.g. on violent crime)”. But the hard Left are congenitally predisposed to fail to take advantage. They are stuck in the quagmire of their own dogmas, and they lack ability to compromise with electoral realities. The strong intellectual tradition associated with the last century’s Communist and Labour Party, the work of EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Anthony Crosland and many others besides, has disappeared. In its place is a void, with a political culture dedicated to self-destructive language-policing over alliance-building, determined to make enemies, burn bridges, and turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

Slightly further to the Right, the Your Party tragicomedy solidifies the Greens’ hegemonic pull over any voter more progressive than Starmer. Zack Polanski is the principal beneficiary of this weekend’s debacles, alongside a Labour Party that no longer needs to worry about a competent, coherent force that further bifurcates its Left flank and costs them marginals (if not winning many seats themselves). The chances of that happening, of Labour being troubled by this new upstart, are almost nil. Instead, the Left have fiddled while Rome burns, with Reform on the march, and swathes of working-class Britain rushing to Farage. Your Party will not threaten this seemingly inexorable trajectory, and will be barely noticed by the average voter. Nor will it threaten a floundering Labour, nor the Greens, nor concern anyone beyond its own alphabet soup of acronyms. It is unlikely to survive the next election. Once again, the revolution has been postponed, this time indefinitely.

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If you like food and own a phone, you won’t be scrolling long before they appear: two slick boys in Chelsea boots loitering in a Soho doorway, one with a mic, the other with a camera, rehearsing their double act. “Yeh maaate, best place in Landan,” says the first, his vowels wobbling like jelly, a parody of Cockney welded onto the lacquered polish of a boarding-school quad. The other obliges with an artificial cackle. It’s all part of the ritual: the banter, the blow-dried hair, the chumminess of a pair of estate agents pretending to be your mates.

This is the routine they’ve flogged to millions of views. One asks a stranger (or, increasingly, a celebrity) their favourite places to eat in London; the other edits the “Nooo way, mate!” responses into a neat, reel-able montage. They don’t discover restaurants; they collect them, like Pokémon cards, to be traded, ranked, and bragged about. Their videos are interchangeable, the restaurants interchangeable, the answers indistinguishable from the ones given yesterday or the day before. London is a chorus of cloned soundbites: best pizza, best Guinness, best hidden gem, best, best, best.

Welcome to the grease-flecked world of Topjaw, with host Jesse Burgess and cameraman Will Warr enjoying clicks galore and endless hangouts with everyone from Jamie Oliver to the guy who runs The Devonshire. Alongside other perennially online influencers — from the faux-gasmic gurner “Eating With Tod” to the patronising seriousness of James Dimitri — there’s no doubt that they’re revolutionising London’s restaurant scene. Yet whether that’s a good thing is a very different question, and one with vast implications for how the capital thinks about food.

Not so long ago, restaurant criticism was serious business. Fay Maschler could sink an opening with a single disdainful sentence. AA Gill, for his part, famously turned reviews into prose-poems of bile and beauty. In one, he dismissed a Mayfair dining room as “so beige it felt like eating inside a wet wipe” — before segueing into a meditation on civility, cities and the theatre of hospitality. Marina O’Loughlin, Jay Rayner, Giles Coren; each wielded less a fork than a rapier, writing pieces that were as much about politics and morality as they were about food.

Then came the cuts. Newsrooms downsized, supplements shrank, critics’ expense accounts disappeared. The long lunches and slow deadlines that had once produced operatic write-ups were strangled by spreadsheets. Twenty years ago, every major paper had a roster of critics; now there are only seven national restaurant critics left in Britain. The wider picture is no healthier either: investment in frontline editorial staff fell by around 15% through the 2010s. None of this is really that surprising. Why send a writer out to eat five courses when you could commission an intern to bash out “Five Rooftop Bars for Summer” in half an hour, then watch it gather 10 times the clicks?

Social media had an impact here too, as Instagram filled the vacuum with a carnival of lurid food porn. The examples here are depressingly varied, from rainbow bagels and milkshakes topped with doughnuts to burgers bisected in high-def close-up. These are less meals than pageantry, edible pantomime staged under ring lights. Food has increasingly ceased to be about sustenance, or even pleasure; it’s mere theatre for the camera, an endless striptease of yolks and cheese-pulls, consumed not by mouths but by eyes.

This didn’t happen by accident. Instagram, after all, rewards spectacle: the more unhinged the dish, the more it’s shared, liked and reposted. Viral reach means money — queues, brand deals, investment — so restaurants engineer dishes for shock value alone.

Then there’s the broader cultural context. The fact is that Britain has fewer entrenched culinary traditions than its peers. For if Paris and Rome have storied dining cultures, and New York has institutions that outlive trends, London’s food scene is young, status-driven, brittle. It grew up fast in the 2000s and 2010s, powered less by heritage than by waves of migration, fashion and finance. Restaurants here are ventures more than inheritances, built on concepts that can quickly get old.

In other words, then, the algorithm’s appetite for novelty has slotted neatly into London’s frantic zeitgeist. And with the repeatability of social media came real power. A single Topjaw reel could now transform a business overnight. When they filmed at The Devonshire a few years back, the clip rocketed past a million views in days; queues snaked down the street, reservations vanished for months, and the pub tipped into outright mania. Diageo, I can only imagine, licked its lips at Guinness’s sudden trendiness.

Yet where an old-school critic might savage you, an influencer would only ever promote. They want to be seen as a soft touch, someone who, for a free meal — or, later as they became more powerful, a figure with tens of thousands of fans — would give you a 30-second reel of glowing, excitable praise. It isn’t hard to see why. A traditional critic arrives as a stranger, armed with anonymity and the freedom to be unimpressed; their job is to tell the truth, not make friends. Influencers, by contrast, build their entire brand on access, from the kitchen tour to the matey chat on camera. Yet once you’ve been welcomed into the back office and patted on the shoulder, it becomes almost impossible to be honest; criticism feels like betrayal, not reportage.

Of course, London is far from unique here, with social media fandom now dominating the culinary discourse across many major cities. In Berlin, for instance, the online food scene skews anarchic and niche: thinking grainy videos of Turkish grill masters in Neukölln and vegan doughnuts in Friedrichshain. But London is particularly susceptible to the glibbest praise — and not merely because of its history. This, after all, is a city in economic churn. Rents are crippling and margins thinner than filo pastry. Restaurants age in dog years: if they’re not packed from day one, they die. Nine in ten fail in their first year. In this climate, a viral TikTok is oxygen. Ignore it and you might just suffocate.

Add to that society’s peculiar obsession with status. In a city where housing, clothes and cars are out of reach for most, restaurants become the accessible status marker. It’s cheaper to book the hot new pasta spot than buy a flat in Hackney. Food, then, has become a way of performing success. As so often, social media turbocharges these trends: even if you don’t eat there, reposting a reel lets you take part in the performance of taste.

It would be unfair, here, to sneer too heavily. The Topjaw lads seem nice enough, enthusiastic, polished. They haven’t committed a crime; they’ve merely given us what we want. And while the old guard of critics turned reviews into theatre and polemic, they were writing for readers who had the time to sit with 1,000 words. TikTok is the opposite: food for the impatient, calories for the thumb. And it works: #LondonFood racks up literally billions of views, and even the old guard gets dragged in too.

The grandees of print — Coren, Rayner, the rest, all of whom, I should say, still write with flourish and flair — must now appear as guests on influencer feeds, mugging for the camera, trading their authority for likes, reducing their art to a five-second take. They laugh, fist-bump, faux-disapprove. Their presence flatters the influencer more than it enlightens the viewer. And you sense, watching them, a certain ambivalence. They know the format cheapens what they do, yet old-media prestige doesn’t insulate you from the gravitational pull of the algorithm. The audiences barely overlap — Times readers aren’t the ones queueing outside the latest Topjaw spot — but perhaps that’s the point: it’s the press trying to look “current,” a flicker of insecurity in an industry that has dwindled in influence.

Either way, the cumulative effect is to turn London into a spreadsheet of “must-tries”. And it’s a profound shift, when you think about it: for most of the last century, eating out in London was defined by the food itself — whether the grand hotels of the interwar years, the postwar Formica caffs, or the explosion of immigrant cooking from the Sixties on. Restaurants were places of sustenance, community, escape; even when the food was bad, the point was the meal. The idea that dining might be primarily about experience would have baffled almost every previous generation. Only in the 21st century, as hospitality fused with lifestyle branding and then with social media, did the centre of gravity tilt. Today, the food almost feels incidental: what matters is the image, the queue, the vibe, the verification. In historical terms, it’s a radical inversion: the meal as souvenir rather than the meal as memory.

The consequences are vast. Curiosity is the first thing to vanish: the chance of stumbling into somewhere you’ve never heard of, the joy of a dish that photographs badly but tastes sublime. The possibility of disappointment should always be inseparable from the possibility of delight. TikTok erases all that in advance; you have pre-lived the meal before you’ve even sat down.

This often leaves the oddballs — the places that give a city texture — struggling to survive. A bowl of stew can’t go viral. A restaurant full of silence and warmth has nothing to show the algorithm. And so, especially with those rent rises, many are squeezed out. The few who do catch the influencers’ eye face the opposite fate: institutions that survived for decades suddenly find themselves mobbed by TikTok pilgrims, their regulars elbowed aside by ring lights and selfie sticks. Take E. Pellicci’s on Bethnal Green Road. It’s a casual place I grew up going with my dad. Now, it’s overrun by fry-up fetishists.

No wonder, then, that we are starting to tire of it. As Hunger magazine wrote last year: “Once you’ve seen one Topjaw video, you’ve pretty much seen all of them.” The formula is polished to the point of parody, and by their own admission, they have no intention of deviating from it. They, along with all other successful influencers, feed the algorithm with the same set-ups, the same cackles, the same “best in London” superlatives, because that is what works.

Perhaps, even for Topjaw, fatigue will set in. Perhaps people, bored of the infinite loop, will seek out the weird, the old, the unfilmable. Or perhaps we might start eating in silence. Don’t tell anyone. Go somewhere unfashionable. Refuse the compulsion to share. Because food is not just hedonism; it’s the scrape of cutlery, the sag of conversation, the lull when nothing happens. It is accidents, mistakes, the unexpected. And these are things that cannot be edited into a reel. So next time you pass the lads outside The Devonshire, ignore them, and let them ask their questions to the void.

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