It's Wednesday, July 29th. Block shipped Buzz, where every agent carries its own cryptographic key and signs what it does. OpenAI put voice inside Codex, so you can steer several agents by talking. Claude's voice mode moved up to Opus and Sonnet. Identity and speech, same week.
In Today’s Top Tools, we spotlight some of the most innovative, creative AI apps that we recommend adding to your stack.
TOOL SPOTLIGHT
🔧 Block Built A Workspace Where Agents Sign Their Own Work
Image from Buzz
Give each agent its own keypair, so every patch it submits traces back to the human who authorized it.
Run Claude Code, Codex, or Block's goose in the same room through the open Agent Client Protocol.
Self-host the whole stack, a Rust relay with Postgres, Redis, and S3 storage, or point your team at Block's free hosted relay.
Free desktop builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the code on GitHub. Buzz launched at v0.4.21 and reached v0.5.0 a week later, so expect it to keep moving.
Cryptographic identities turn a messy multi-agent setup into an auditable one. Every commit carries a signature, so a team can hand agents real work and still trace who authorized what. The real test now is whether open protocols like ACP can keep setup friction low enough for non-engineers to adopt it.
TOOL SPOTLIGHT
⚡ OpenAI's Codex Now Takes Voice Commands Across Parallel Agents
Image from 9to5Mac
OpenAI brought Voice to the ChatGPT desktop app. It runs a duplex setup, with GPT-Live handling the live conversation while GPT-5.6 Terra starts and coordinates the actual tasks.
Start a task by voice, then ask ChatGPT to check or steer work already running in another thread.
Send the frontmost Mac window into the chat with a double Command press, and Appshots carries the text sitting outside the visible scroll area too.
Drive Codex from your phone on iOS or Android, or from another Mac or Windows machine.
Voice runs on a plan-based allowance in rolling five-hour windows, roughly 15 to 30 minutes on Plus and about 45 minutes on Business, and any task you start by voice still draws on your Codex budget.
Voice changes your job from writing lines to directing a team of agents. Talking directly to running tasks lets you steer, correct, and multi-task across several agent threads in real time without breaking focus. The key challenge will be keeping mental track of what three parallel agents are doing while you talk to a fourth.
In this section, we feature a few standout opportunities at leading AI companies, non-profits, policy groups, and other organizations.
🔬 Work at a Lab/AI Safety
Roles at frontier labs, safety organizations, and research institutions
RESEARCH ENGINEER, INTERPRETABILITY | Anthropic | San Francisco, CA | $315,000 to $560,000
SENIOR RESEARCH ENGINEER, OLMO AND MOLMO | Allen Institute for AI | Seattle, WA | $146,880 to $220,320 base
MEMBER OF TECHNICAL STAFF, EVALUATION EXECUTION | METR | Berkeley, CA | $285,548 to $503,116
MEMBER OF TECHNICAL STAFF, POST-TRAINING AND RL | xAI, listed as SpaceXAI | Palo Alto, CA | $180,000 to $600,000
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, CHEM-BIO | UK AI Security Institute | London, UK | £65,000 to £145,000
🚀 Work in Industry
Roles at funded AI startups and private companies
AI RESEARCH SCIENTIST, DATADOG AI RESEARCH | Datadog | New York, NY | $320,000 to $400,000
AI ENGINEER, ECOSYSTEM | Brex | Seattle, WA | $171,000 to $240,000
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, AI SDK | Vercel | San Francisco or New York, hybrid | $196,000 to $294,000
AI ENGINEER, FORWARD DEPLOYED | Databricks | Remote, United States | $152,900 to $210,155
AI APPLIED SCIENTIST | Figma | San Francisco or New York, NY | $153,000 to $376,000
🏛️ Work in AI Policy / Governance
Roles in government, think tanks, NGOs, and policy organizations
RESEARCH RESIDENT, AI AND BIO THREATS | RAND Corporation | Washington, DC | $90,400 to $274,300, a band spanning Associate to Expert level
RESEARCH FELLOW | GovAI | London or Washington, DC | £84,000 to £103,500, or $134,500 to $170,000
FRONTIER AI RESEARCH LEAD | CSET, Georgetown University | Washington, DC | $100,000 to $190,000
MANAGER, AI SAFETY AND SECURITY POLICY | Federation of American Scientists | Washington, DC | $75,000 to $90,000
RESEARCHER, EVALUATIONS | Epoch AI | Remote | $115,000 to $200,000
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🧑💻 About the Editors
About Noah Frank
Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI and the workforce. His work and body of research explores the economics of emerging technology and organizational strategy. Outside of AIC, Noah heads research for Centaurian AI.
About Joy Dong
Joy is a news editor, writer, and entrepreneur at the intersection of AI and blockchain. Whether she is demystifying complex systems in her newsletter, TEA, or building streamlined solutions through her automation agency, Ownly, Joy’s mission is to make emerging tech accessible and actionable for everyone.
About Lindsay Gross
Lindsay is an AI engineer, researcher, and writer focused on how AI systems behave in practice and what it takes to make them safe. Her work sits at the intersection of AI safety, governance, and product design, and at AIC she writes about the questions that matter most as these systems scale.