• Professional Background: David Heinemeier Hansson serves as the co-owner and CTO of 37signals.
• Product Development: The leadership role includes the creation of software products such as Basecamp and HEY.
• Technological Contributions: Open-source software development includes frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, and Kamal.
• Literary Works: Authorship encompasses business-focused books including REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE.
• Athletic Achievement: Professional experience includes a victory as a driver at the Le Mans race event.
• Investment Activity: Financial backing is provided to various startups based in Denmark.
• Corporate Philosophy: Operations at 37signals focus on providing software solutions for smaller-scale market participants.
• Date Reference: The provided profile snapshot and contextual information are current as of April 6, 2026.

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April 6, 2026

Panther Lake is the real deal

About David Heinemeier Hansson

Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, Kamal, Omarchy. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE. Won at Le Mans as a racing driver. Invested in Danish startups.

• Intelligence Sharing: Russian intelligence provided a list of 55 critical energy infrastructure targets in Israel to Iranian authorities.
• Infrastructure Categorization: Targets are classified into three levels of strategic importance, ranging from primary national power stations to regional industrial substations.
• Grid Vulnerability: Analysts identify Israel as an energy island, where the isolation of the national power grid creates a high susceptibility to total collapse from localized damage.
• Strategic Objective: The intelligence transfer intends to facilitate precision missile strikes against key energy facilities to induce prolonged, large-scale blackouts.
• Allied Cooperation: Military and intelligence collaboration between Moscow and Tehran encompasses the reciprocal provision of drone technology and actionable target data.
• Geopolitical Diversion: The transfer of knowledge and assets is viewed as a mechanism to escalate tension in the Middle East, thereby diverting international focus from the conflict in Ukraine.
• Technological Proliferation: Investigations indicate the presence of Russian components in drones utilized within the Middle East, suggesting a domestic expansion of Shahed-style drone production within Russia.
• Official Denials: Russian diplomatic representatives have formally refuted claims regarding the sharing of intelligence data with Iran, emphasizing existing security communication channels with Israel.

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Russian intelligence has provided Iran with a detailed list of 55 critical energy infrastructure targets within Israel, according to information obtained by The Jerusalem Post from a source close to Ukrainian intelligence.

The report, which highlights the deepening military and intelligence cooperation between Moscow and Tehran, suggests that the information that was shared enables Iran to launch precision missile strikes against Israel’s energy grid.

According to the findings, the targeted sites are divided into three categories based on their strategic importance:

Level 1: Critical production facilities. These are sites whose destruction would cripple the national energy system. The report specifically names the Orot Rabin power station as a primary target.

Level 2: Major urban and industrial energy hubs. These facilities are located primarily in central Israel and serve large population centers.

Israeli search and rescue personnel work on the site of a residential building that was destroyed by an Iranian strike in central Israel. (credit: Oren Ziv/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Level 3: Local infrastructure. These targets include regional substations that support industrial zones and smaller power plants.

The Russian assessment regarding Israel’s vulnerability is that “unlike many European nations, Israel’s power grid is characterized by a high degree of isolation”. Because Israel is an “energy island” that does not import electricity from neighboring countries, Russian intelligence reportedly told Iran that damaging even a few central components could trigger a total and prolonged energy collapse, leading to mass blackouts and technical failures that could not be easily mitigated.

Zelensky warns of growing Russia-Iran alliance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has grown increasingly vocal about the Russia-Iran alliance, warning that the “knowledge” Russia has gained on the battlefields of Ukraine is being exported to the Middle East.

“The Russians also helped them, like the Iranians helped [Russia] at the beginning of the war when they gave them Shaheds,” Zelensky told the Post in an interview two weeks ago. “They gained big knowledge on the battlefield and this impacting and will have an impact on other regions.”

Zelensky further claimed that Russia has begun providing Iran with Shahed-style drones manufactured on Russian soil. He alleged in an interview with the Post that “Russian components” were discovered in a drone recently downed in a Middle Eastern country, though he declined to name the specific location for security reasons.

“We saw some components; they had Russian details. We know it because Iranians didn’t produce it,” the President stated.

However, Ukrainian officials maintain that the motive behind the intelligence transfer is twofold: to embolden its primary ally in the region and to create a fresh crisis in the Middle East that would divert international attention and resources away from the war in Ukraine.

Russian ambassador Anatoly Viktorov responded to the allegations, stating, “Russia and Israel established contacts to discuss national security issues long ago. These contacts have been intensively maintained between relevant Russian and Israeli agencies. The most pressing issues have been discussed at the highest level. We value track record which has been accumulated in this area.

“Representatives of the Russian political leadership have repeatedly dissented from the ‘accusations’ that our country allegedly provides intelligence data to Iran,” he added.

• Weapon Accumulation Strategy: Iran has redirected significant national revenue toward the mass production of long-range ballistic missiles and drones rather than essential infrastructure.
• Financial Impact Of Diplomacy: International fund transfers, including those associated with the JCPOA agreements, provided liquid capital that accelerated Iranian military industrial output.
• Strategic Policy Miscalculations: Diplomatic efforts to reduce regional friction inadvertently empowered the Revolutionary Guard by prioritizing ideological objectives over security warnings from neighboring states.
• Nuclear Infrastructure Expansion: Industrial-scale nuclear enrichment facilities and weaponization sites were aggressively developed and expanded following the removal of international export restrictions.
• Internal Economic Neglect: The prioritization of military assets has led to chronic underinvestment in critical civilian utilities, most notably water desalination and power generation.
• Environmental And Humanitarian Crisis: Major population centers, including Tehran and Mashhad, face severe water shortages and potential desertification due to the regime's failure to address basic infrastructure needs.
• Repression And State Control: Internal dissent is effectively stifled through the use of state security forces armed with contemporary weaponry, mirroring historical precedents regarding the suppression of popular uprisings.
• Regional Security Imperatives: Ongoing military operations targeting Iranian missile production facilities are identified as necessary to mitigate direct threats to regional stability and critical infrastructure in neighboring nations.

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Edward Luttwak

Mar 17 2026 - 12:02am 5 mins

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Since October 2023, Iran has launched more than 1,000 ballistic missiles against Israel — and many more against its Gulf Arab neighbors. It has also launched thousands of drones, sending more than 1,500 toward the United Arab Emirates alone. How did the Islamic Republic accumulate such vast inventories of expensive weapons? And expensive they are: drones would only be cheap, as the media keeps claiming, if their number were not so large, while ballistic missiles are necessarily expensive because of their size. Iranian Shahab-3 missiles weigh 16 tons, while Korramshahrs come in at 25.

Just as with any other feat of accumulation, this too is the result of disciplined persistence. In the regime’s case, that meant allocating Iran’s limited foreign-currency earnings to what really mattered: not waterworks against desertification, not gas pipelines to bring cheap gas to the cities, not desalination plants to overcome water shortages even in Tehran, but rather the production of very large numbers of long-range missiles to attack Israel and other countries.

This enormous industrial effort has been underway for years, yet it was greatly accelerated by the transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran by the Obama administration. Officially, this was merely an overdue refund for canceled military orders dating back to the time of the Shah. But the payment’s first installment — $400 million in stacked banknotes — was sent on 17 January, 2016. This just happened to coincide with the release of several Americans from Iranian captivity, and the coming into effect of Obama’s grand diplomatic achievement: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

In those early weeks of 2016, one would hear the initials “J-C-P-O-A” proudly enunciated by Obama staffers even at lowkey Washington gatherings. Why? Because, its supporters claimed, the deal would definitively end Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. It limited Iran’s uranium-235 enrichment to just 3.67%, with dangerous levels only kicking in at 60%. Iran was also permitted a meager 300 kilos of nuclear material.

But for Robert Malley, head of Obama’s Iran team, this technical win was outweighed by a more emotionally satisfying achievement. Having grown up in a household where Algeria’s FLN nationalists were much celebrated, and where traditional Arab rulers and Israel were greatly deplored, Malley hoped the JCPOA would stop US-Iran frictions. That, in turn, would allow Obama to finally sideline both the embarrassing Saudis — with their over-the-top gold-bathtub polygamy — and the insufficiently humble but very demanding Israelis.

Given those tacit but clear preferences, one can understand why Obama disregarded all Saudi warnings about the Revolutionary Guards. This was a Shia supremacist organization, but its long-term plan was nonetheless to become the hero of all Arabs, Sunnis included, by defeating Israel and taking the Temple Mount. Mecca itself was another aim. Meanwhile, US diplomats in Saudi Arabia — who reported that Iranians arriving for the Mecca pilgrimage were seemingly eager to assert themselves by picking quarrels — were dismissed as having gone native.

Israel was worried too. It noted that the Revolutionary Guards were taking a rising proportion of Iran’s oil revenue — itself increased by the JCPOA — to build more missiles, to increase their number of U-235 separation centrifuges, and to expand both their own forces and those of auxiliaries abroad. Those warnings were too well-documented to be dismissed out of hand. Yet nothing was done, for action would have spoiled Obama’s great diplomatic success.

To be fair, Obama was not responsible for what happened next. After the JCPOA removed all export restrictions on Iran, the country’s hard-currency earnings from oil exports rose. The Revolutionary Guards swiftly demanded an even larger share of the total, even after oil prices started to dip.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, and who was famous for his slogan about the sofreh — the traditional tablecloths of modest households, focusing attention on the needs of Iran’s poor — seems to have complained. But Qasem Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guards were in the ascendancy with Ayatollah Khamenei. So while Ahmadinejad was set aside, the Revolutionary Guards claimed an increasing share of Iran’s oil revenues.

It was then that the Natanz complex was hugely expanded to accommodate two immense centrifuge cascades, of 25,000 centrifuges each, while an entire separate centrifuge cascade was installed deep underground at Fordow. Meanwhile, a weaponization facility was established in Isfahan, to go with one at the Parchim base near Tehran.

I have never heard a convincing explanation for these projects: far more than needed even for many bombs, let alone civilian electricity production, and especially in a country with unlimited natural gas. Corruption is hard to prove in a dictatorship with so much oil money sloshing around. But even here, graft cannot always stay hidden. When Mossad killed the chief nuclear scientist of the Revolutionary Guards in November 2020 — using a remote-controlled machine gun placed inside a parked Nissan van — he was being driven on his hour-long twice-daily commute from Tehran to Absard: a fashionable hill town where rich Iranians go to escape the capital’s pollution. Families without personal chauffeurs tend to visit Absard only on weekends, and generally settle for simple lodgings. But this nuclear scientist seems to have been unusually wealthy by Iranian standards.

At the same time, the Revolutionary Guards also spent immense sums on ballistic missile fuel and other components — including the multiple “cluster” warheads now causing much damage in Israel. The sheer scale of Iran’s missile production is itself amazing too, with 3,000 the low estimate for the longer-range types targeting Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.

All the same, neither Israel nor any other country has been as harmed by the Revolutionary Guards as Iran itself. Because the Islamic Republic has overspent its oil export earnings — not at all huge for a country of 90 million — it has neglected to make investments elsewhere. Especially urgent is water supply, needed for major cities including Tehran, whose 13 million inhabitants now face the possibility of desertification-driven evacuation. Mashhad, with three million inhabitants and Iran’s second-largest city, is in the same predicament. Located near the Afghan border, its problems are aggravated by Taliban dam building, as are many smaller cities, including ancient Yazd with its Zoroastrian eternal flame.

“Neither Israel nor any other country has been as harmed by the Revolutionary Guards as Iran itself.”

What all these places desperately need is a new supply of desalinated seawater, pumped all the way from the Persian Gulf. With three times as much natural gas as the US, Iran could produce all the water it needs, just as Israel is doing — but that would have required vast investments starting decades ago. Iran’s grossly insufficient electrical supply is another victim of Revolutionary Guard overspending, with frequent power cuts whenever temperatures fall and more heating is needed.

We keep being told that Iran’s population cannot liberate itself for the simple reason Trotsky long ago identified: popular insurgency could conquer the Bastille in 1789, but by the Twenties Trotsky’s Red Army had Maxim machine guns that could mow down any number of demonstrators. Iran’s Basij and Revolutionary Guards have done just that, and can do so again.

That being true, the US-Israeli war still has a purpose: to destroy Iran’s missile and drone factories and inventories. For as long as they exist, they will permanently threaten the Gulf states, just as they have already closed the world’s largest airport in Dubai, and which continue to menace water-desalination plants in Qatar and oil-separation facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Whatever their leaders say in public, nobody of consequence on the western side of the Gulf wants Trump or the Israelis to stop undoing the damage that began with Obama’s once-celebrated JCPOA. That deal, it is now clear to see, did not stop nuclear enrichment towards the bomb — and indeed accelerated every other danger emanating from the Islamic Republic.

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Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.

ELuttwak

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• Technological Optimization: A founder leveraged over a dozen artificial intelligence tools to automate coding, marketing, customer service, and business process analysis.
• Rapid Scaling: The startup Medvi reached high revenue milestones quickly by utilizing existing telehealth infrastructure to facilitate the distribution of prescription medications.
• Capital Efficiency: With only two employees and minimal initial investment, the enterprise reported substantial annual sales and profit margins surpassing traditional competitors.
• Automation Focus: Operations are structured around AI agents and software systems that handle day-to-day business functions, reducing the need for significant human staff.
• External Partnerships: The business model relies on third-party platforms to manage clinical requirements, including interactions with medical doctors and physical product fulfillment.
• Lean Philosophy: The founder deliberately avoids large-scale hiring based on previous experience suggesting that human teams can complicate decision-making and increase fixed costs.
• Agile Iteration: The company continuously expands its product offerings, moving into new categories like men’s health and nutrition through automated operational adjustments.
• Strategic Philanthropy: A portion of generated profits is allocated toward a private foundation intended to support social causes, including homelessness and animal welfare.

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Matthew Gallagher, 41, built his start-up, Medvi, with artificial intelligence and few humans.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

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By Erin Griffith

Reporting from Los Angeles

• April 2, 2026

Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.

From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.

His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.

Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.

A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of superefficient company in 2024. A one-person business worth $1 billion “would have been unimaginable without A.I.,” he said on a podcast, “and now it will happen.”

Now as A.I. tools spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their start-ups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption, too. Pinterest, Block and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by A.I.

Mr. Gallagher, who formerly ran a start-up that sold wristwatches, said he thought Mr. Altman’s prophecy of a one-person $1 billion company would be a firm that built A.I. He was excited when he realized he may have done it, taking an old idea — being a middleman for weight-loss drugs — and using A.I. to turbocharge it.

“It’s not an A.I. company, but I did it with A.I.,” he said.

In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech C.E.O. friends over when such a company would appear, and that he “would like to meet the guy” who had done it.

Medvi is technically not a one-person $1 billion company, since Mr. Gallagher hired his brother and has some contractors. The start-up, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation. But many highly valued tech companies can only dream of hitting $1 billion in revenue with so few workers. Medvi is also profitable, Mr. Gallagher said.

The New York Times was given access to Medvi’s financials to verify its revenue and profits and interviewed Mr. Gallagher’s business partners.

On a recent afternoon at the Soho House club in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, sporting unkempt curly hair, a baggy T-shirt and tattoos on his arms and hands, said the last 18 months had been a whirlwind.

He works on Medvi from his house basically anytime he’s not showering, sleeping or spending time with his two children, he said during a two-hour conversation. He even made an A.I. clone of his voice to help manage his personal life, using it to call and schedule appointments so he would have more time to work.

Not everyone can build such an A.I.-enabled company, though many may try. Mr. Gallagher is suited to the moment because he knows marketing and how to use cutting-edge A.I., said Kobie Fuller, an investor at the venture capital firm Upfront Ventures who has advised him.

“Those folks that have those skills, it’s kind of like their superpower,” Mr. Fuller said. “This is an extreme example, but I don’t think it’s going to be the last by any stretch.”

Mr. Gallagher has told hardly anyone about his company, which he said was raking in more than $3 million a day. He was nervous to talk publicly about it, he said.

“I mean, it’s crazy, right?” he asked, before answering himself. “It’s crazy.”

Spotting Opportunity

Mr. Gallagher had an itinerant childhood, living out of motels and cars for a time before landing in Cincinnati when he was 12. That was where his uncle gave him a laptop, which he used to teach himself to code so he could make a Weird Al Yankovic fan page.

As a teenager, Mr. Gallagher began building websites for local businesses. He always had a hustle, including selling candles and Samurai swords on eBay. At 18, after building a web hosting business, he sold it for $6,000.

Mr. Gallagher briefly attended the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University but did not graduate. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. He eventually returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs.

In 2016, he built Watch Gang, a start-up that sold wristwatches via subscription. It had fans but never turned a profit, even as Mr. Gallagher chased revenue growth and hired 60 people.

OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022 inspired Mr. Gallagher to start tinkering with A.I. Two years later, he met Jiten Chhabra, a co-founder of CareValidate, a medical start-up in Atlanta.

CareValidate offers what is essentially a telehealth-in-a-box kit. Companies, employers or retailers that want to sell customers prescription drugs can use CareValidate’s technology and network of online doctors to set up a business. The company’s software connects patients with doctors and pharmacies, which write, fulfill and ship the prescriptions. CareValidate charges fees for its software.

Mr. Gallagher saw an opportunity for his own telehealth business. He could use A.I. to do the branding and marketing and let CareValidate and a similar platform, OpenLoop Health, handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. He planned to start with GLP-1s.

He was entering an established market. For nearly a decade, Hims & Hers Health, Ro and other companies have sold drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss online, using an online network of doctors to write the prescriptions. Hims, which went public in 2021, has 2,442 employees and generated $2.4 billion in revenue last year.

Hims and Ro had already expanded into GLP-1 drugs, but Mr. Gallagher thought he could do the same thing faster and more efficiently with A.I. and the doctor-on-demand platforms.

He used many A.I. tools to build Medvi’s website, including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. He created custom tools, including A.I. agents, or bots that perform tasks on their own, to get his software systems to communicate with one another. He tested A.I. voice tools from ElevenLabs and others for communicating with customers. And he used the image and video generators Midjourney and Runway to create media for his website and ads.

Altogether, he spent $20,000 on the software and the first month of marketing.

Medvi’s initial website featured photos of smiling models who looked A.I.-generated and before-and-after weight-loss photos from around the web with the faces changed. Some of its ads were A.I. slop. A scrolling ticker of mainstream media logos made it look as if Medvi had been featured in Bloomberg and The Times when it had merely advertised there.

But Mr. Gallagher was most concerned with getting Medvi’s checkout to work smoothly and making sure his A.I. customer service system stuck to the task at hand. He tested it by asking the system for lasagna recipes; it took some tweaking to get it to stop supplying them, he said.

Medvi opened for business in September 2024. It was perfectly timed. Americans wanted cheap GLP-1s, delivered without going to a doctor’s office. The start-up charged as little as $179 for the first month’s supply of the drugs, in line with competitors.

Image

To build Medvi, Mr. Gallagher used A.I. tools including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Midjourney and Runway.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

The Sky’s the Limit?

From the beginning, “growth was insane,” Mr. Gallagher said.

Medvi quickly became one of CareValidate’s and OpenLoop’s top clients. The companies said they were blown away by the start-up's speed and scale.

“You’re like, ‘Do you have an army of people behind you somewhere?’ And he’s like, ‘Nope,’” CareValidate’s Mr. Chhabra said of Mr. Gallagher.

Dr. Jon Lensing, OpenLoop’s chief executive, said Mr. Gallagher had started sharing tech tips with his company. “Matthew’s native tongue seems to be A.I.,” he said.

There were snags. Medvi’s customer service chatbot sometimes made up prices for the drugs. (Mr. Gallagher honored those.) Or it hallucinated, claiming Medvi sold hair-loss drugs when it didn’t.

If customers wanted to talk to a person, Medvi’s customer service chatbot had been trained to transfer them to Mr. Gallagher’s cellphone. That led to more than 1,000 customer service calls, he recalled.

To manage the onslaught, he integrated programs from OpenLoop and CareValidate that fielded customer service calls. Mr. Gallagher soon graduated from using the online legal site LegalZoom to using a law firm, and from using A.I. accounting tools to using an accounting firm. He also hired media agencies to help buy ads to entice customers.

As sales took off, Mr. Gallagher asked Mr. Fuller, the venture capital investor, if he should raise venture funding. Mr. Fuller told him that if he didn’t need the money, he shouldn’t raise it.

“You should just keep building,” Mr. Fuller said he had told Mr. Gallagher. Mr. Gallagher later thanked him for the advice.

In March last year, Mr. Gallagher changed something minor on Medvi’s website and then went on a hike. From the trail, he got a call from one of his media agencies asking whether it was odd that there had been no orders for the last hour.

Mr. Gallagher realized that his update must have broken something. With no one to fix it, he sprinted home. The downtime lost him around 200 potential customers, he said.

Still, he was hesitant to hire anybody. At Watch Gang, having 60 employees had not helped the company grow.

“It just increased my costs, and then it delayed my decision-making because I had more people to deal with,” he said. Medvi’s biggest advantage was his ability to move quickly, he said.

Mr. Gallagher added two engineers on contract and decided to hire only Elliot, his 36-year-old brother in Cincinnati in April. Elliot’s job includes intercepting and filtering communication so Matthew can focus on his priorities.

“I just helped take a lot of the weight off of him,” Elliot Gallagher said in an interview.

That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers. Some photos on Medvi’s homepage remain A.I.-generated.

By the end of last year, Medvi had reached $401 million in annual sales and amassed 250,000 customers. It produced 16.2 percent in net profit, or $65 million, with spending going to the fees for telehealth platforms, marketing and then software. Hims, by contrast, had a net profit of 5.5 percent last year.

Mr. Gallagher is reinvesting some of Medvi’s profits into expansion. He considered buying companies that provide other health products, but decided it was just as easy to build himself.

In February, Medvi started selling men’s health products, including erectile dysfunction drugs. That business hit 50,000 customers in the first month and is on track to eclipse the GLP-1 business in four months, Mr. Gallagher said.

Last month, Medvi added healthy meal delivery plans, which OpenLoop handles. Next up is women’s health, including hormone therapy drugs. Hair-growth drugs, supplements and skin care products are also on the agenda.

Medvi’s total profit of $70 million to $80 million so far has made Mr. Gallagher emotional, given his upbringing.

“For the first time, I’m not in survival mode,” he said.

Last year, he set up a foundation with $1 million and donated to a Los Angeles cat rescue organization, with plans to also donate to a nonprofit that helps young people experiencing homelessness. His goal is to run most of Medvi’s profits through the foundation. For fun, he invests in films and buys historical items, including a pocket watch from the 1700s.

Mr. Gallagher does not anticipate hiring more people. He said he just didn’t see how it would help Medvi, though he misses the camaraderie of colleagues.

“At this point, I kind of want to hire people because I’m lonely,” he said.

But some human touch is still needed.

In September, Medvi began assigning human account managers to a subset of customers. When those customers call, text or email with a question, they connect to the same account manager. The idea is that the account managers will get to know clients and remember details like birthdays or children’s names, creating higher customer satisfaction.

Medvi’s seven account managers, all hired on contract, now have several hundred clients each. To manage that many relationships, they are using A.I.

Erin Griffith covers tech companies, start-ups and the culture of Silicon Valley from San Francisco.

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“Thanks, Mr President, but no thanks.” That is what Benjamin Netanyahu should have said when Donald Trump responded to Israel’s request for “resupply priority” by intervening directly in its air assault on Iran. Israel, after all, has always craved US weapons — which were rigorously denied when they were most needed in the years before the 1967 war — but its leaders never wanted America to do any of the fighting. When, for instance, US Patriot batteries and their crews were rushed in to counter Iraqi missiles during the Gulf War, Israeli operators took over very quickly, compressing weeks of training into a matter of days. 

The US has too many other interests — both in the Middle East and beyond — to be Israel’s unconstrained ally in its endless fight for survival. And then there is the sharp “post-heroic” asymmetry between the two nations. American tolerance for war casualties is certainly still higher than Europe’s, where President Macron abandoned 1.9 million square miles across the Sahel, long secured by just 5,000 French troops, to the jihadis, apparently terrified that 10 might be killed at once. When that number of French troops died on a single day in Afghanistan, President Sarkozy’s presidency was irredeemably ruined. 

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has lost 1,152 soldiers without political consequence — whereas Trump would be impeached, with plenty of Republican votes, if a population-proportionate 50,732 Americans were killed while fighting Iran. The same is probably true even if that number were halved, or quartered.   

More generally, meanwhile, Netanyahu should have declined Trump’s heart-warming offer to be Israel’s superpower ally because of the very same free-wheeling pragmatism that induced Trump to get involved. Pragmatism has its virtues, and so does Trump’s perpetual optimism. But there are still some unyielding realities in this world, including geographic ones. One of these is that about a fifth of the world’s oil, about a fourth of its liquid natural gas, and over 10% of its fertilizer, travels through the Strait of Hormuz. 

Iran’s naval warships and submarines are no more, and even the Revolutionary Guards’ motorboats are mostly destroyed. But there are still at least 10 islands that must be denied to infiltrated Revolutionary Guard units to ensure the Persian Gulf’s navigable channels are truly safe. There are also some 1,500 miles of Iranian coastline, every mile of which must be constantly surveilled, in granular detail, to detect and destroy any anti-ship missile launcher or similar threat.

That calls for quite a lot of deployable troops — many more than the 5,000 Marines bandied about these days — with the resultant exposure to casualties. The US may be more willing to bear casualties than Europe, but each death nonetheless entails a political cost much higher than was the case during the Vietnam War, whose soldiers were born when the US fertility rate was well over 3.5. Every death is a tragedy, obviously, but losses must be even more intolerable now that few families have more than one child. 

One can see why some perfectly reasonable people respond to all this by asserting the simple truth that American power is ultimately generated by its own magnificently inventive society, kept in funds by the world’s most courageous investors — European financial prudence is now the biggest obstacle to European progress — and not by anything beyond America’s shores. It is now very possible to imagine a US that is still the leading superpower, by virtue of its vastly superior technology, but without being a global power. 

Abandoning the Persian Gulf to Iran’s Shia supremacists, who would quickly control the Arab side as well, would be a very long step in that direction, and there are even good excuses to assuage the shame factor. That is the “defection” of the European allies, whose very existence as independent states originated in the US decision to remain in Europe after the end of the Second World War. 

This defection was already very plain last year, with the frankly astonishing refusal of most European allies to acknowledge the deadly peril of Iran’s roughly 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium which, as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency patiently explained at the time, would allow Iran to produce at least 10 fission bombs in short order.

Yet when dozens of Israeli fighter bombers — and seven US B-2 stealth bombers — demolished Iran’s nuclear installations on 25 June last year, there was no outburst of gratitude across European capitals, each of which would otherwise have had to contend with nuclear-armed Revolutionary Guards, whose willingness to kill tens of thousands of their own citizens suggests a readiness to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of Western unbelievers. 

But there was no applause, no gratitude, no support — only more “anti-colonial” polemics against Israel, and even more anti-American resentment, as if the conjunction of nuclear weapons with fanatics waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam and the “end of history” were not a danger unprecedented in history. 

This time around, when Israel’s aim was to prevent its own destruction from a gigantic barrage of Iranian missiles, by attacking missile factories and underground storage sites, and the US aim was to destroy the headquarters and depots of the Revolutionary Guards and their murderous Basij militia, with the faint hope of an uprising, the response was not just a lack of gratitude. It was outright sabotage through the denial of access to US bases or the prohibition of overflights. The first defector was Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s impeccably elegant bourgeois prime minister, who rules his country by herding over a dozen Leftist and regional separatist parties in coalition. 

It was not that Sánchez denied the support of his country’s armed forces — which feature such wonders as a pair of proudly Spanish-made submarines that cost as much as nuclear subs, and an army which has 150 generals for perhaps 4,000 combat-ready soldiers. What Sanchez denied was the use of the Rota naval station, and the Torrejón and Morón airbases, important for US deployments to the Middle East as the first refueling stops after crossing the Atlantic.  

President Macron, who long ago gave up his attempt to modernize France, followed by also denying US military overflights and, more ambitiously, trying to deny freight overflights carrying cargo for US bases. Even Giorgia Meloni — the same one who kept flying to Palm Beach to seek favor at Trump’s court — denied the use of the Sigonella airbase in Sicily.

The British government has been altogether more cooperative, quietly allowing unfettered use of US fighters stationed at RAF Lakenheath, and also the use of RAF Fairford with its especially long runways for the refueling transits of US bombers. Even so, Britain farcically demanded the right to approve individual targets; as if they were not routinely switched in the course of operations.

Trump’s reaction to the performative anti-Americanism of Sánchez, Macron and Meloni has an extra edge. But even Americans who intensely dislike Trump understand that a new elite anti-Americanism now exists across Europe, an embittered reaction to its glaring failure to keep up with US innovation. Yet now that the US has left Iran without an airforce or a navy, Trump has invited the Europeans — the very countries that need oil and gas from the Gulf — to send their own armed forces to secure the Strait. At the very least, they can gain recompense from the Arab states that Iran attacked. 

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• Composite Methodology: The platform aggregates 10 independent AI benchmarks into a single normalized 0-100 score updated every Saturday.
• Tiered Weighting: Algorithms assign higher importance to contamination-resistant, objective pass/fail benchmarks over those susceptible to crowdsourced manipulation.
• Selection Criteria: Models are required to demonstrate performance across at least five distinct benchmarks to qualify for inclusion in the rankings.
• Performance Ranking: GPT-5.4 currently holds the lead position by maintaining high performance across multiple Tier 1 benchmarks despite lower individual rankings in some areas.
• Integrity Concerns: The ranking system explicitly devalues platforms like Chatbot Arena due to reported procedural issues and potential developer bias.
• Model Diversity: The index tracks 40 distinct models from 18 separate laboratories, categorizing them into open-weight and commercial classifications.
• Embeddable Infrastructure: Developers may integrate the rankings into external websites using a provided JavaScript widget hosted on GitHub.
• Historical Consistency: Initial charts utilize 12 weeks of backfilled data to ensure all newly introduced models begin from a standardized baseline.

---

Implicator.ai on Friday released the AI Top 40, a weekly chart that scrapes 10 independent benchmarks and boils them down to one number per model. Forty models from 18 labs made the cut. The chart updates every Saturday and anyone can embed it for free.

The system pulls raw scores from Chatbot Arena, SWE-bench Verified, GPQA Diamond, ARC-AGI, Humanity's Last Exam, LiveCodeBench, MMLU-Pro, HELM, Artificial Analysis, and the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard. It normalizes them using Z-score standardization and applies a three-tier weighting system we call the Implicator Algorithm.

Key Takeaways

• The AI Top 40 aggregates 10 independent benchmarks into a single 0-100 composite score, updated every Saturday
• Contamination-resistant benchmarks like SWE-bench and ARC-AGI carry 4x the weight of Chatbot Arena in the composite
• GPT-5.4 leads with 100.0 despite Claude Opus 4.6 topping Arena, because it qualifies on 8 benchmarks vs. Claude's 5
• The chart ranks 40 models from 18 labs and is free to embed on any website via a public GitHub widget

AI-generated summary, reviewed by an editor. More on our AI guidelines.

How the weighting works

Not all benchmarks carry equal influence. The algorithm assigns 2.0x weight to five Tier 1 benchmarks that resist data contamination and use objective pass/fail scoring: SWE-bench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA Diamond, ARC-AGI, and HLE. HELM, Artificial Analysis, and HuggingFace get 1.0x as Tier 2. Chatbot Arena and MMLU-Pro sit at 0.5x, meaning Tier 1 benchmarks contribute four times more to a model's composite than Tier 3.

That last decision will draw attention. Chatbot Arena, the crowdsourced benchmark that has become AI's most influential ranking, gets the lowest weight. The reason is blunt: the game is rigged. The "Leaderboard Illusion" paper by researchers at Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Allen AI audited 2 million Arena battles and found that select labs could privately test dozens of model variants before publishing only the best score. Meta tested 27 private Llama-4 variants in a single month before the public launch. Twenty-seven.

A model must appear on at least 5 of 10 benchmarks to qualify. An earlier experiment with a minimum of 3 caused statistical inflation, allowing models that happened to score well on a narrow set of favorable tests to outrank models measured honestly across eight.

GPT-5.4 holds the top spot

The current rankings, published March 28, put OpenAI's GPT-5.4 at #1 with a perfect 100.0 composite. Claude Opus 4.6 sits at #2 with 93.2. Grok 4 takes third at 86.6. Sharp-eyed readers will notice every model currently shows 12 weeks on the chart. That is because we seeded the system by backfilling 12 weeks of historical data from the same benchmark snapshot. Everyone entered on the same starting line. The counter will start diverging as new models qualify and older ones drop off in future weeks.

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That result contradicts Chatbot Arena, where Claude Opus 4.6 holds #1 with an Elo rating of 1,504. But Arena carries 0.5x weight in the composite. GPT-5.4 qualifies on eight benchmarks, including all five in Tier 1. Claude qualifies on five and is absent from GPQA Diamond, MMLU-Pro, and HELM, three benchmarks where GPT-5.4 scores near the top.

Same logic as a decathlon. Win the 100-meter sprint by a mile, still lose to the athlete who placed well in eight events. The algorithm rewards breadth of verified performance, not dominance on a single structurally compromised leaderboard.

The open-weight picture

Alibaba's Qwen 3 235B ranks #8 overall. That makes it the highest open-weight model on the chart, sitting above Claude Opus 4, o3, o4-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-4.1. DeepSeek's two entries, R1 at #16 and V3 at #21. Meta's Llama 4 Maverick landed at #31.

Eleven of the 40 qualifying models carry open weights. The chart splits into three views generated from the same underlying data: an Open Weights board (green), a Commercial board (gold), and an All Models board covering both. Here is the live Open Weights board:

Why another ranking

Benchmark data is abundant but scattered across a dozen sites with a dozen scoring systems. SWE-bench reports percentage of resolved GitHub issues. Arena spits out Elo ratings. MMLU-Pro gives you a number out of 100. Lining those up side by side tells you nothing, and cherry-picking whichever benchmark makes your model look best has become standard practice among labs announcing new models. Anyone who's tried to compare five models across five leaderboards knows the frustration firsthand.

The AI Top 40 sits alongside Implicator.ai's LLM Popularity Meter, where the editorial team assigns subjective satisfaction scores based on daily use. Vibes vs. data. Both update weekly, and they complement each other: the Popularity Meter captures which model a writer reaches for at 2 AM on deadline, while the AI Top 40 captures which model survives ten independent exams.

The format borrows from music

Casey Kasem would recognize it. The name pays tribute to the radio host who turned chart countdowns into a weekly American habit, and the design borrows accordingly. Rank numbers sit inside circles. Movement arrows show who climbed and who fell. "New entry" badges flag first appearances. Open it on your phone and the feeling is immediate: you're reading a printed chart from 1986, monospace type and all, except the entries are language models instead of pop singles.

Publishers and developers can grab the chart for their own pages. The widget ships as one JavaScript file, wrapped in a Shadow DOM so it stays out of your stylesheet's way. Two lines of HTML gets it running. Four chart variants, data from a public GitHub repository, cached on jsDelivr. Free to embed, attribution required. The Commercial board below is a live embed, running right here on this page with the same two lines of code:

Next update drops April 5. The full chart, methodology breakdown, and embed codes are live at implicator.ai/ai-top-40.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the AI Top 40?

A weekly composite leaderboard from Implicator.ai that ranks large language models by aggregating scores from 10 independent benchmarks into a single 0-100 score using Z-score standardization and tier-weighted scoring.

Why does GPT-5.4 rank above Claude Opus 4.6 when Claude leads Chatbot Arena?

Chatbot Arena carries only 0.5x weight in the composite due to documented integrity issues. GPT-5.4 qualifies on 8 benchmarks including all five Tier 1 tests, while Claude qualifies on 5 and is absent from GPQA Diamond, MMLU-Pro, and HELM.

Which benchmarks carry the most weight?

Five Tier 1 benchmarks get 2.0x weight: SWE-bench Verified, LiveCodeBench, GPQA Diamond, ARC-AGI, and Humanity's Last Exam. These resist data contamination and use objective pass/fail scoring.

How many models qualify for the chart?

Forty models from 18 labs currently qualify. A model must appear on at least 5 of the 10 benchmarks to make the cut. Eleven are open-weight, 29 are commercial.

Can I embed the AI Top 40 on my website?

Yes. The embeddable widget requires two lines of HTML and is free to use with attribution. Four chart variants are available: all models, open weights, commercial, and a three-board combo. Code and data live in a public GitHub repository.

AI-generated summary, reviewed by an editor. More on our AI guidelines.

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Tech translator with German roots who fled to Silicon Valley chaos. Decodes startup noise from San Francisco. Launched implicator.ai to slice through AI's daily madness—crisp, clear, with Teutonic precision and sarcasm. E-Mail: marcus@implicator.ai