How Thrum researches
What Thrum looks for, where it looks and how far back — for every beat. This page is built from the same settings Thrum uses, so it always matches.
Rules for every beat
- Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, searches the web for the most viral or consequential stories on each beat — usually three per run.
- It searches worldwide and in many languages, prefers primary sources and reputable outlets, and writes in English.
- A story is only included if its source could be read; every briefing links to that source.
- Stories already covered are skipped, so the same story doesn't return.
- Each story gets an impact score from 0 to 100: Critical 85–100, High 65–84, Medium 40–64, Low below 40.
- Our publisher reads what Thrum finds and selects what is published. The research and writing are Claude's, and every post says so.
The beats
Corporate AI Moves
Viral or leaked internal corporate memos and announcements about AI: AI-first mandates, AI-driven layoffs or hiring freezes, strategy pivots, internal AI usage policies.
Leadership Voices
CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, chief AI officers, founders and other senior executives taking strong public positions on AI: predictions about the future of work, warnings about risk, statements of company AI strategy. Look at LinkedIn posts, shareholder letters, earnings calls, interviews, podcasts, conference keynotes, CIO.com and the WSJ CIO Journal.
Law Firms & AI
What law firms are doing with AI: firm-wide rollouts, proprietary tools, AI policies or bans, legal-AI vendor deals, new AI practice groups, court sanctions over AI misuse, bar association guidance.
Agents in the Wild
Autonomous AI agents acting out in the real world: notable incidents of agents misbehaving, going rogue, being exploited or causing harm; striking real-world deployments of agents acting on their own; research or disclosures about agent behaviour in the wild. Look at Hacker News, Reddit (r/artificial, r/singularity), the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai) and security-research blogs.
Open-Weights Releases
New open-weights large language model releases from anywhere in the world: who released it, model size, licence, headline benchmark claims, and where the weights can be downloaded. Watch labs worldwide: Qwen (Alibaba), DeepSeek, Kimi (Moonshot), GLM (Zhipu), Mistral, Falcon (UAE), Sarvam (India), Sakana (Japan), Apertus (Switzerland), Meta Llama, Google Gemma, AI2 OLMo. Look at Hugging Face, r/LocalLLaMA, lab blogs, and Chinese-language sources (search in Chinese too).
Open Models in Use
What people are building and doing with open-weights models: striking projects, fine-tunes and community versions, running models locally or on phones, open models deployed in hospitals, schools, governments, newsrooms or small businesses, especially outside the US. Look at r/LocalLLaMA, Hugging Face (trending models and Spaces), GitHub trending, Ollama, Hacker News, Rest of World and local-language tech press.
AI Warnings
Leading AI scientists and researchers warning about AI risk (for example Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, or researchers at the major labs): open letters, testimony to lawmakers, protest resignations, safety reports and viral interviews. Look at their posts on X and Bluesky, the Future of Life Institute, the Center for AI Safety, government AI safety institutes and congressional or parliamentary hearings.
AI Inventions
Striking new things AI can do: viral demos, breakthroughs in science and medicine, robots, new tools and products that make people say "wow". Look at demos on X and YouTube, Hugging Face trending, new arXiv papers, Product Hunt and lab announcements.
AI Headlines
The biggest AI news stories of the week that everyone is talking about, of any kind. Look at Techmeme, The Verge, TechCrunch, Wired, Ars Technica, Reuters and newsletters such as Import AI, The Neuron and Ben's Bites.
AI for Good
AI making the world better, anywhere in the world: breakthroughs in medicine and science, climate and environment, education, accessibility, farming and food, disaster response, access to justice, and help for poor or underserved communities. Look at Nature, Science, the UN's AI for Good programme, Rest of World, Our World in Data, research-lab science teams, and non-profits and NGOs using AI.
iManage
News about iManage (the document and knowledge management platform used by law firms and professional services): product releases and AI features (Ask iManage, the iManage Platform, MCP and AI-tool connectors), cloud migrations, major customer wins, partnerships and integrations (for example with Harvey, Legora, Microsoft), acquisitions, leadership changes, security incidents, and community discussion among iManage administrators. Look at imanage.com news and blog, iManage's LinkedIn, Legaltech News, Artificial Lawyer, Legal IT Insider, ILTA and the iManage community forums.
Made by AI
Viral culture that an AI created: AI-generated songs or artists charting or streaming widely, virtual influencers, synthetic images or videos that fooled or delighted millions, AI-coined words or memes, AI-made art, books or games that broke through. Include disputed cases where people argue over whether AI made it.
Suggestions for a beat — a source we should watch, or a topic we're missing — are welcome at hello@thrumwire.com.