One of the more seamless aspects on a recent trip to Japan was being able to simply “tap” my iPhone to pay for subway rides in Tokyo. That frictionless transit payment capability, common in many major cities worldwide, isn’t available in Seattle. But that’s about to change.

Seattle’s ORCA transit system is rolling out an upgrade that will let riders pay fares by tapping their credit card or smartphone — no dedicated ORCA card required.

The new “Tap to Pay” feature will let riders across the Seattle region use Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express cards, as well as mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

A soft launch is scheduled to begin Feb. 2 on the G Line, a bus rapid transit route, before expanding system-wide later in February — in advance of this summer’s World Cup in Seattle, as well as the debut of the new light rail line across Lake Washington connecting the region’s tech hubs.

The Tap to Pay rollout was formally briefed to the ORCA Joint Board during its meeting this week.

The technical upgrade is aimed at making transit easier for occasional riders, tourists, and anyone who doesn’t already carry an ORCA card — while modernizing fare payment across the region’s patchwork of transit agencies.

ORCA’s operations team worked with German tech company Init to implement Visa’s Mass Transit Transaction (MTT) payment model, which allows ORCA fare readers to function as point-of-sale devices capable of securely processing contactless credit card payments in real time.

During the soft-launch phase, riders who tap a personal credit or debit card will be charged a flat $3 adult fare and won’t be able to transfer to other transit services outside the G Line. Once the feature launches across the full ORCA system, transfers will work the same way they do today for ORCA card users, including the standard two-hour transfer window across most participating agencies, according to ORCA officials.

The system will support one rider per card and adult fares only, meaning reduced-fare programs such as ORCA LIFT, Senior, Disabled, and Youth cards won’t be available through Tap to Pay.

Fare inspectors will be able to validate contactless payments by asking riders to show whatever card they used to pay.

In a statement to GeekWire, ORCA officials emphasized that the new payment option is additive, not a replacement. Riders who receive employer-subsidized ORCA cards or rely on discounted fares are encouraged to continue using traditional ORCA cards. Cash and physical tickets will still be accepted.

Tap to Pay also won’t be available on every service. The feature will not initially work on Washington State Ferries, the Seattle Monorail, Community Transit DART, ZIP, or Pierce Transit Runner, according to board presentation slides.

Some users on Reddit this week complained about needing to remove their physical ORCA card from their wallet to avoid getting a credit card charge when tapping at a reader.

Notably, using an ORCA card inside Apple Wallet is a separate feature and is not part of this launch. ORCA officials said they remain committed to mobile payment options but declined to share additional details or timelines. ORCA launched a Google Wallet feature for Android users in 2024.

• Side note: Apple Wallet has a feature called Express Mode that lets transit riders pay for fares without waking or unlocking their device.
• And for those who want to purchase tickets via an app: Transit GO allows iOS and Android users to pay fares on King Country Metro buses, Sound Transit trains, and other regional transit services using in-app ticketing.

New year, new Startup Radar.

We’re back with our regular spotlight on early stage startups sprouting up in the Seattle region. For this edition, we’re featuring Axel AI, DrunR, Eluum, and profileAPI.

Read on for brief descriptions of each company — along with pitch assessments from “Mean VC,” a GPT-powered critic offering a mix of encouragement and constructive criticism.

Check out past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at taylor@geekwire.com to flag other companies and startup news.

Axel AI

Founded: 2025

The business: A self-described “reasoning layer” for retail media sales teams that aims to translate messy data into commercial narratives and proposals. The idea is to help sales teams spend less time on manual analysis and preparation. The bootstrapped company officially launched its MVP at CES and NRF 2026 earlier this month.

Leadership: CEO and co-founder Bobby Figueroa previously founded Gradient, another Seattle-based commerce insights company that was acquired by Criteo. He was also an exec at Amazon. Axel’s leadership and advisory team includes former sales and advertising leaders at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Mean VC: “You’re targeting a real friction point — sales teams juggling fragmented data with limited time to craft a compelling narrative. The pedigree helps, but long-term success will hinge on whether your product drives actual revenue lift, not just cleaner decks. I’d focus on embedding directly into the sales team’s existing workflow — don’t make users open another tool, make yours the one that quietly does the heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

DrunR

Founded: 2024

The business: A nutrition app that provides personalized guidance based on users’ goals and preferences, particularly while dining out or ordering food online. DrunR is running a closed beta in Seattle with restaurants and users, including people using GLP-1 medication. The startup is part of the WTIA Founder Cohort 13 program.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Yaya Ali is a financial analyst at Perkins Coie and previously worked for King County and Amazon. He also has food operations experience. David Greene, the company’s CTO, is a software engineer at Capital One and previously worked at Moody’s.

Mean VC: “The intersection of nutrition, personalization, and GLP-1s is timely — especially as eating habits shift alongside new weight-loss drugs. The challenge will be making the app feel essential day-to-day, not just ‘nice to have’ after a restaurant meal or clinic visit. I’d zero in on a high-frequency use case — something that keeps users opening the app daily, not just when they’re thinking about dinner.”

Eluum

Founded: 2024

The business: A new take on social media with a product that helps people organize their personal memories, stories, and digital artifacts into one user-controlled system. Built on community-driven moderation and works across different platforms. The bootstrapped company is onboarding early users and plans to launch a MVP later this year.

Leadership: CEO and co-founder Bilkay Rose was a VP at tax software company Avalara and a director at Clearwire. Other co-founders include CTO Dale Rector, who spent three decades at Microsoft, and Jennifer Gianola, also a former exec at Avalara.

Mean VC: “The concept taps into a real emotional need — people are overwhelmed by digital clutter and increasingly skeptical of algorithm-driven feeds. The key will be showing how your platform earns daily use without relying on dopamine loops. I’d push to define a sharp use case first — memory curation is broad, so lead with one thing people urgently want to preserve, then expand once you’ve earned their trust.”

profileAPI

Founded: 2024

The business: A business data layer for developers building AI-native chat, copilot, and agentic tools for go-to-market. Its platform tracks more than 10,000 signals across more than 10 million companies and 500 million professionals. The company, which was previously a sales AI agent product called Truebase, has raised $2 million in funding.

Leadership: Founder and CEO Wissam Tabbara has sold two startups and spent more than six years at Microsoft in the 2000s.

Mean VC: “The shift from product to platform is smart — selling infrastructure to power GTM copilots has stronger upside than building another agent. But you’ll need to show that your data isn’t just broad, but relevant and timely enough to drive meaningful in-app decisions. I’d focus on becoming the plug-and-play GTM brain — make integration dead simple, and let other tools build magic on top of your stack.”

Amazon is preparing for another round of corporate job cuts next week, according to a report from Reuters on Thursday. Bloomberg also reported that layoffs could begin next week. We reached out to Amazon for comment.

Amazon laid off about 14,000 workers globally in October. The company indicated that more layoffs could occur in 2026 while it would continue to hire in key strategic areas.

Reuters reported that the latest cuts will be “roughly the same as last year.” The overall number of cuts could be the largest in Amazon’s history, exceeding the 27,000 positions that the company eliminated in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs.

In a memo to employees sent in October, Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti wrote that the company was “shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

She added: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”

There was speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Amazon and other tech giants including Microsoft have trimmed headcount while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. And software development engineers made up the largest group of employees affected by the layoffs in Washington state last year, amid the rise of AI coding tools.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also told employees in June that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.

But on the company’s earnings call with analysts, two days after the layoff announcement in October, Jassy said the cuts weren’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers. Instead, he framed it as a push to stay nimble, and said Amazon’s rapid growth over the past decade led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making.

Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021, has pushed to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company. Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more cautious hiring approach.

Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time the company provided a public number. At that scale, the reduction of 30,000 represents about 8.5% of Amazon’s corporate workforce. However, the number is a much smaller fraction of its overall workforce of 1.57 million people, which includes workers in its warehouses.

The company employs around 50,000 corporate workers in the Seattle region, its primary headquarters. There were 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state that were laid off last year in October.

Amazon reports its latest quarterly earnings on Feb. 5. The company’s stock underperformed relative to the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants last year. Some analysts predict that Amazon’s cloud unit will help boost the stock as AI demand rises.

Submit news tips to GeekWire here, or to tips@geekwire.com.

Overland AI, a Seattle-based startup that develops autonomous driving technology for rugged terrain, is expanding its reach beyond military applications.

The company this week revealed a partnership with The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), which is testing the use of Overland’s technology for wildfire response.

CAL FIRE used two of Overland’s self-driving 4-wheelers for resupply (food, water, battery delivery) and wildfire logistics missions at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. It’s the first time CAL FIRE has evaluated autonomous ground vehicle tech for its firefighting operations.

“When we started this company, we always saw our technology as being inherently dual-use — meaning that it could be used for both military and civilian applications,” said Stephanie Bonk, co-founder and president at Overland. “This is the first time we’re actually demonstrating that.”

Bonk said Overland’s technology “thrives” in a rugged environment where wildfires often occur.

Fire departments are testing various technologies to help manage wildfires, including AI-trained cameras that spot plumes of smoke.

Overland spun out of the University of Washington in 2022 and has inked various military-related partnerships, including a $18.6 million contract with the U.S. Army and Defense Innovation Unit. Overland also works with the U.S. Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a unit of the Department of Defense.

Last year the startup announced a $32 million funding round and opened a 22,000 square-foot production facility in Seattle.

The company is led by Bonk and CEO Byron Boots, a robotics researcher who leads the UW’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Overland is ranked No. 14 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held startups across the Pacific Northwest. Its investors include 8VC, Point72 Ventures, Overmatch Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Ascend, Osage University Partners, and Caprock. The company has 101 employees, up from 58 people a year ago, according to LinkedIn data.

AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM), a Seattle-area startup developing software that lets bulldozers and excavators operate on their own, announced $4.9 million in new contracts with the U.S. Air Force to build and repair military bases and airfields.

Founded in 2021, AIM got its start in mining and construction, and is now expanding to defense applications. AIM’s technology works with existing equipment and is designed for dangerous or hard-to-reach places, including areas where equipment might be dropped in by parachute. One person can remotely manage an entire site of working vehicles.

For airfield repairs, the company’s tech can scan the area using sensors to create a 3D map of damage. Then autonomous machines clear debris and can repair the runway — all remotely and without people on the ground. Military advisors say the approach could speed up construction, reduce risk to personnel, and make it easier to deploy equipment in tough conditions.

Founded in 2021 and led by longtime engineers, AIM raised $50 million last year from investors including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Human Capital. The company is led by CEO Adam Sadilek, who previously spent nine years at Google working on confidential projects.

In a LinkedIn post this week, Sadilek wrote that “we’re asking the wrong questions about AI and work,” arguing that automation will enable construction companies to build more with their existing teams.

“The top line grows, but the bottom line doesn’t get ‘optimized’ into oblivion,” he wrote. “For example, each autonomous dozer we deploy uncovers, depending on the mineral type and current market price, between $3 million and $17 million in additional ore each season. Rather than replacing people, that gives them leverage. And yes, cost savings show up – fuel, maintenance, wear – but they’re not the main event.”

He added: “Instead of focusing on whether AI removes jobs, we should be focusing on whether we’ll use it to finally do more of the things we’ve always wanted but never had enough capacity to build.”

AheadComputing, a Portland, Ore.-based chip startup that designs and licenses CPU cores aimed at boosting performance for AI and data center workloads, announced a $30 million funding round.

Founded in 2024 and led by former Intel engineering leaders, AheadComputing says its CPU cores are faster and more efficient than existing options for AI-heavy workloads.

The startup is building CPU cores based on RISC-V, an open-source instruction set that lets companies customize chips instead of relying on proprietary architectures.

GPUs may dominate headlines, but CPU performance remains critical to how efficiently AI applications run at scale. CPUs manage data movement, run core software, and handle tasks that can’t easily be split up across multiple cores.

AheadComputing has nearly 120 employees and is led by CEO Debbie Marr, who spent more than three decades at Intel and was chief architect of the Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG) at the chip giant.

“This additional funding will allow us to continue to challenge traditional rules and sustain a fast pace of transformation and develop the fastest high-performance, general-purpose CPU because everybody deserves better compute,” Marr said in a statement.

Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, and Cambium co-led AheadComputing’s latest round, which included participation from Corner, Trousdale Ventures, EPIQ, MESH, and Stata. The company, which raised a $21.5 million round last year, also added Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller to its board.

The Gates Foundation and OpenAI are launching a new partnership aimed at bringing artificial intelligence into frontline health care systems across Africa, starting with Rwanda.

The initiative, called Horizon1000, will deploy AI-powered tools to support primary health care workers in patient intake, triage, follow-up, referrals, and access to trusted medical information in local languages. The organizations said the effort is designed to augment — not replace — health workers, particularly in regions facing severe workforce shortages.

The Gates Foundation and OpenAI are committing up to $50 million in combined funding, technology, and technical support, with a goal of reaching 1,000 primary health clinics and surrounding communities by 2028. The tools will be aligned with national clinical guidelines and optimized for accuracy, privacy, and security, according to the organizations.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI can help us address fundamental challenges like poverty, hunger, and disease,” Bill Gates wrote in a blog post. “One issue that I keep coming back to is making great health care accessible to all — and that’s why we’re partnering with OpenAI and African leaders and innovators on Horizon1000.”

In sub-Saharan Africa alone, health systems face a shortage of nearly six million workers — a gap Gates said cannot be closed through training alone.

“AI offers a powerful way to extend clinical capacity,” wrote the Microsoft co-founder.

The announcement comes during the World Economic Forum’s 2026 annual meeting, where Gates appeared alongside Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Innovation and the head of the Global Fund to discuss how AI and other technologies could help reverse recent setbacks in global health outcomes.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, earlier this month rolled out ChatGPT Health as part of its foray into healthcare.

Other nonprofits are exploring ways to apply AI in healthcare. PATH, a Seattle-based global health nonprofit, has received funding from the Gates Foundation to support this work. That includes grants to develop diagnostics and other healthcare services targeting underserved populations in India, and funding to study the accuracy and safety of AI-enabled support for healthcare providers.

Previously: Gates Foundation will cut up to 500 positions by 2030 to help reach ‘ambitious goals’

Dave Clark didn’t just get some chores done this weekend. He built an entire end-to-end customer prototype, reworked a deck, and created a custom CRM.

“Wildly productive weekend … Three things that used to take months happened in 72 hours,” Clark, the former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO and one-time Flexport CEO, wrote on LinkedIn. He added: “Crazy what new tools can do to expand your surface area and personal productivity.”

Clark, who is now CEO of Seattle-area logistics startup Auger, said that configuring a traditional CRM proved more painful than starting from scratch. He described how his team abandoned off-the-shelf software in favor of building exactly what was needed.

His post comes amid ongoing hype and attention on so-called “vibe coding” tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot that enable the rapid building and iteration of software.

Responding to a comment on his post, Clark explained that he wasn’t incentivized by cost-savings with his weekend projects. “I did it because I couldn’t see the data I wanted, the communication pipeline wasn’t manageable at the level of detail I expected and it was going to hurt our ability to scale to meet customer needs if it wasn’t fixed,” he said. “So I fixed it. I also got to go deeper on using the tools that will define the future. They were hours well spent.”

Clark’s post drew some skepticism from commenters online. Longtime entrepreneur Steven Cohn, who has sold four startups, asked Clark “why you vibe coded and didn’t just use any of the open source products that are out there and fully developed and completely customizable.”

Clark responded: “Of course I’ve used tons of open sourced. In this case for an internal use app I liked the custom build as the right tool for the job. Others might choose differently. I was struck by how fast and easy it was.”

The post made its way to X, where some wondered about how the weekend project would scale or what resources would be needed to fix bugs.

Well, alrighty then….The skepticism in the comments just shows how wide the gap is between the observers and the builders. Software is a new world every few weeks now. If you aren't getting your hands dirty and experimenting your way through the skepticism, you aren't seeing… https://t.co/nnoHbYygWh

— Dave Clark (@davehclark) January 20, 2026

As we reported last week, Anthropic’s Claude Code in particular has caught fire in recent months, impressing software engineers with its ability to handle longer, more complex workflows. Claude Code is “one of a new generation of AI coding tools that represent a sudden capability leap in AI in the past month or so,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and AI researcher, in a Jan. 7 blog post.

Anthropic also just released Claude Cowork, a version of Claude Code that is built for everyday knowledge work instead of just programming. The company said it used Claude Code to build Claude Cowork itself.

But whether vibe-coding tools completely change the way businesses build software still remains to be seen.

“Vibe coding and AI code generation certainly make it easier to build software, but the technical barriers to coding have not been the drivers of software moats for some time,” analysts with William Blair wrote in a report last week. “For the most successful and scaled software companies, determining what to build next and how it should function within a broader system is fundamentally more important and more challenging than the technical act of building and coding it.”

After a 23-year tenure at Amazon, Clark launched Auger in 2024 with $100 million in Series A funding. The company plans to offer an AI-powered system for supply chain operations that unifies data, targets inefficiencies, provides real-time insights and automation.

Plutus, a Seattle-area fintech startup founded last year, raised $1.2 million to help fuel growth of its investing marketplace.

The company aims to give everyday investors access to strategies traditionally used by hedge funds and ultra-wealthy clients. Plutus acts as an advisory marketplace between individual investors and providers such as Citrini Research. It lets users browse curated, thematic portfolios from independent research providers, select one that fits their goals, and replicate it automatically in their own brokerage accounts.

Unlike passive ETFs or mutual funds, the portfolios are designed for automated rebalancing and potential tax advantages. Plutus takes a cut of subscription fees set by each portfolio provider.

Plutus CEO Shashank Chiranewala said the company recently received its Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) license from the SEC and is starting to onboard customers on its waitlist.

Chiranewala, a former investment banker and program manager at Microsoft and Meta, co-founded Plutus with Mitren Chinoy, a former senior software engineer at Snowflake and Microsoft. The pair previously started and sold digital form startup Formloge last year for an undisclosed sum.

Investors in the new round include existing customers, Bay Area VC firm Rocketship, and Visse Capital, a multi-family office based in Madrid.

“We are proud to support the team as they build the infrastructure to democratize institutional-grade portfolio management and power the next generation of wealth creation,” Sailesh Ramakrishnan, managing partner at Rocketship, said in a statement.

Plutus has less than ten employees and is hiring. It recently moved into a new office in Kirkland, Wash.

Andréa Mallard, who spent the past seven years leading marketing at Pinterest, joined Microsoft AI as its new chief marketing officer.

Mallard started in her new role two weeks ago. She said she was drawn to Microsoft’s AI group “to help build a technology that truly earns the trust needed to serve human potential.”

“AI is already the most consequential technological shift of my lifetime,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “It will shape our children’s lives in ways that are difficult to predict.”

Before joining Pinterest in 2018, Mallard was CMO at Athleta and Omada Health. She’s currently a board director at Hydrow, Kajabi, and TwentyFirstCenturyBrand.

Microsoft AI, led by Mustafa Suleyman, launched in 2024 and focuses on consumer products and research.

— Claudine Cheever, vice president of global brand and marketing at Amazon, is replacing Mallard as the new CMO at Pinterest.

Cheever spent nearly a decade at Amazon in global marketing roles, where she oversaw various functions and campaigns.

“What really hooked me is how Pinterest stands apart from other social and search platforms,” Cheever wrote on LinkedIn. “The platform is rooted in intention, not reaction. People come to Pinterest to save, curate, evolve their interests, and shop. That’s not just inspiring. It’s fundamentally different.”

Jo Shoesmith, global chief creative officer at Amazon, will replace Cheever on an interim basis as the company searches for a permanent replacement.

“Claudine has been a creative leader, building durable global brand architecture and sophisticated creative systems that operate at scale across our Stores business,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re grateful for her impact on our brand and teams, and we wish her all the best in her next chapter.”

San Francisco-based Pinterest also hired former DoorDash and Spotify exec Lee Brown as its new chief business officer.

— Irina Ghose was named managing director for Anthropic’s India operations. Ghose spent 24 years at Microsoft, most recently as managing director for Microsoft India.

India represents the second-largest user base for Anthropic’s Claude product, Ghose wrote on LinkedIn.

“From digital natives and software firms to large enterprises and public-sector institutions, India is entering a phase of scaled deployment that will enhance competitive advantage and shape the future,” she wrote. “AI tuned to local languages will be a force multiplier across society – from education and healthcare to workforce development and job skills.”

— Doug Bowser, former president of Nintendo of America, joined the board of Hasbro.

Bowser spent more than a decade at Redmond, Wash.-based Nintendo of America, leading the video game giant as president and COO from April 2019 until last year, when he retired in December. He oversaw the successful launch of the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Bowser previously worked at Procter & Gamble and Electronic Arts.

Hasbro, which owns Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, also added Carla Vernón, CEO of The Honest Company, to its board.

— Trisha Berard, a longtime Seattle-area HR leader, joined Evergreen Goodwill as senior vice president of people and culture.

Berard was most recently a senior director at McKinstry and vice president of HR at Eddie Bauer. She also spent 12 years at Amazon, where she was a global strategic HR leader, along with stints at Starbucks and RealNetworks.

Evergreen Goodwill employs more than 2,000 people across the Seattle region and operates 23 nonprofit thrift stores.

“Evergreen Goodwill’s mission of empowering individuals, supporting communities, and creating sustainable training and employment inspires me,” Berard said in a statement.

Libby Johnson McKee, a former customer returns leader at Amazon, joined Evergreen Goodwill as CEO in 2024. Shelley Salomon, vice president of global business for Amazon, sits on the nonprofit’s board.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray believes the future of artificial intelligence shouldn’t be dictated solely by billionaires and shareholders.

The longtime lawmaker toured research facilities at the University of Washington on Friday after securing $10 million in federal funding that will allow the UW to expand the infrastructure needed for data-intensive AI workloads.

Sen. Murray said the funding will help provide a counterweight to AI development driven primarily by private capital.

“If just billionaires are creating and using AI for their own projects that make money, then we lose out on most of the benefits of AI,” Murray told GeekWire.

Universities play a critical role in ensuring AI advances serve public needs, Murray said, pointing to applications ranging from healthcare and environmental research to workforce training and job creation.

The new funding, which comes through Congressionally Directed Spending in the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill, will support Tillicum, the UW’s next-generation computing platform that launched in October.

University leaders say the investment will enable faster research cycles and broader access — while reducing reliance on commercial cloud providers.

“This allows us to stay at the cutting edge of AI and AI research,” said Andrew Connolly, director of the eScience Institute.

Unlike private companies that ultimately answer to shareholders, public universities answer to taxpayers, said Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “That means our goal is to do what’s best for society,” she said.

Universities nationwide have struggled to keep pace with the rapid growth of AI computing demands, as private companies dominate access to large-scale infrastructure.

Balazinska called the new funding a “very significant amount,” saying that even relatively modest investments can be transformative in an academic setting. She added that access to computing resources is often the first question prospective faculty ask when considering whether they can be successful at the UW.

Murray on Friday visited the UW’s eScience Institute, a data science and AI research hub for the university, and spoke with students about their work. A recurring theme during the tour was the importance of keeping sensitive data on campus.

Several students demonstrated AI projects that rely on large volumes of personal or scientific data, including a health-focused system that uses voice input and AI analysis to track symptoms and generate summaries for doctors. Researchers said developing such tools on UW-owned infrastructure avoids sending sensitive data to third-party cloud providers. Having in-house compute also allows students and faculty to iterate more quickly.

Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, framed the funding as foundational infrastructure and key to the economy in her home state.

“If you don’t have the computers, if you don’t have the basic infrastructure, you’re stymied,” she said. “So this benefits everybody — whether it’s creating jobs, whether it’s creating better healthcare, whether it’s creating more innovators who come here to Washington state to be able to create jobs for the future and make a better way of life for all of us.”

Murray also helped secure an additional $3 million for new fan blades at the UW’s Kirsten Wind Tunnel, and $1.5 million for improvements to UW’s Radiocarbon Lab. The broader federal spending bill boosts funding for other scientific agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, pushing back on proposals from President Trump to sharply cut federal research spending.

Claude Code has become one of the hottest AI tools in recent months — and software engineers in Seattle are taking notice.

More than 150 techies packed the house at a Claude Code meetup event in Seattle on Thursday evening, eager to trade use cases and share how they’re using Anthropic’s fast-growing technology.

Claude Code is a specialized AI tool that acts like a supercharged pair-programmer for software developers. Interest in Claude Code has surged alongside improvements to Anthropic’s underlying models that let Claude handle longer, more complex workflows.

“The biggest thing is closing the feedback loop — it can take actions on its own and look at the results of those actions, and then take the next action,” explained Carly Rector, a product engineer at Pioneer Square Labs, the Seattle startup studio that organized Thursday’s event at Thinkspace.

Software development has emerged as the first profession to be thoroughly reshaped by large language models, as AI systems move beyond answering questions to actively doing the work. Last summer GeekWire reported on a similar event in Seattle focused on Cursor, another AI coding tool that developers described as a major productivity booster.

Claude Code is “one of a new generation of AI coding tools that represent a sudden capability leap in AI in the past month or so,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and AI researcher, in a Jan. 7 blog post.

Mollick notes that these tools are better at self-correcting their own errors and now have “agentic harness” that helps them work around long-standing AI limitations, including context-window constraints that affect how much information models can remember.

On stage at Thursday’s event, Rector demoed an app that automatically fixed front-end bugs by having Claude Code control a browser. Johnny Leung, a software engineer at Stripe, said Claude Code has changed how he thinks about being a developer. “It’s kind of evolving the mentality from just writing code to becoming like an architect, almost like a product manager,” he said on stage during his demo.

R. Conner Howell, a software engineer in Seattle, showed how Claude Code can act as a personal cycling coach, querying performance data from databases and generating custom training plans — an example of the tool’s impact extending beyond traditional software development.

Earlier this week Anthropic — which is reportedly raising another $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation — released Claude Cowork, essentially Claude Code’s non-developer cousin that is built for everyday knowledge work instead of just programming. Anthropic on Friday expanded access to Cowork.

AI coding tools are energizing longtime software developers like Damon Cortesi, who co-founded Seattle startup Simply Measured in 2010 and is now an engineer at Airbnb. He said Thursday’s event was the first tech meetup he’s attended in more than five years.

“There’s no limit to what I can think about and put out there and actually make real,” he said.

In a post titled “How Claude Reset the AI Race,” New York Magazine columnist John Herrman noted the growing concern around coding automation and job displacement. “If you work in software development, the future feels incredibly uncertain,” he wrote.

Anthropic, which opened an office in Seattle in 2024, said it used Claude Code to build Claude Cowork itself. However, analysts at William Blair issued a report this week expressing skepticism that other businesses will simply start building their own software with these new AI tools.

“Vibe coding and AI code generation certainly make it easier to build software, but the technical barriers to coding have not been the drivers of software moats for some time,” they wrote. “For the most successful and scaled software companies, determining what to build next and how it should function within a broader system is fundamentally more important and more challenging than the technical act of building and coding it.”

For now, Claude Code is being rapidly adopted. The tool reached a $1 billion run rate six months after launch in May. OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Antigravity offer similar capabilities.

“We’re excited to see all the cool things you do with Claude Code,” Caleb John, a Seattle entrepreneur working at Pioneer Square Labs, told the crowd. “It’s really a new era of software development.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the report cited was from William Blair.

MontyCloud, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup that helps companies optimize their cloud operations, raised a fresh Series B round to fuel growth.

The company announced the funding in a press release this week but did not reveal the amount raised. A new SEC filing shows $11.4 million raised. We’ve reached out to the company for details.

Founded in 2018, MontyCloud builds software that helps companies run and control their cloud infrastructure automatically, from enforcing governance policies to optimizing cloud spend. MontyCloud is part of a broader push to use AI not just for apps, but for automating back-end IT operations.

The company says cloud spend under management has grown more than 400% over two years, with recurring revenue nearly tripling (both measured by compound annual growth). MontyCloud targets Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as well as enterprise companies.

The latest round was led by Riverside Acceleration Capital. Other backers include Lytical Ventures, S3 Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and Raptor Group.

MontyCloud is led by CEO Walter Rogers, a tech industry vet who joined the company in 2022. The company was founded by Venkat Krishnamachari, chief product officer, and Kannan Parthasarathy, chief technology officer.

“Our growth reflects a fundamental shift in how organizations approach CloudOps,” Rogers said in a statement. “The industry is moving away from manual processes and fragmented tools toward a model that enables teams to optimize and operate cloud environments while unlocking new opportunities to monetize CloudOps.”

MontyCloud has 85 employees, with a majority based in India, according to LinkedIn.

One of Seattle’s tallest skyscrapers has a new name that reflects JPMorganChase’s growing banking and technology hub in Seattle.

Formerly known as the Russell Investments Center, the building at 1301 Second Ave. is now the JPMorganChase Center.

The renaming coincides with JPMorganChase adding an additional 40,000 square feet at the 42-floor tower, which also houses Zillow Group and Perkins Coie.

The financial services giant, which now occupies 128,000 square feet, is also relocating its Seattle Tech Center from 1201 Third Ave. to the newly expanded space.

JPMorganChase has 850 employees in Seattle, including 400 tech workers — that’s up slightly from 380 people last year.

The company’s Seattle Tech Center opened in 2018, in part to tap into the region’s talent pool. The center focuses on areas including cybersecurity, cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. It’s led by Mamtha Banerjee, a computer scientist, business leader, and Seattle startup veteran.

JPMorganChase implemented a five-day in-office policy last year. It has more than 2,220 employees across 150 branches and corporate offices in Washington state. There are about 320,000 employees globally. The company recently opened a new headquarters in Manhattan.

The company also on Wednesday anounced $1.5 million in grants to five Seattle-area nonprofits: Business Impact NW, Friends of Little Saigon, Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, Seattle University’s RAMP-up, and the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict program of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle.

The office expansion comes as downtown Seattle hit another record high for vacancy rate last year at 34.7% in Q4, as hybrid work continues to weigh on the commercial real estate market.

Zillow once filled several floors of the JPMorganChase Center but scaled down after committing to remote work during the pandemic. More than 70% of the Zillow’s workforce is made up of remote employees.

Russell Investments moved its Seattle headquarters last year from 1301 Second Ave. to nearby Rainier Square.

The Gates Foundation on Wednesday unveiled a record $9 billion operating budget for 2026 — which includes a plan to reduce its workforce by up to 500 positions over the next five years, or about a fifth of its current headcount.

The foundation’s board approved a cap on operating expenses of no more than $1.25 billion annually — roughly 14% of its total budget — prompting the cuts and other cost controls to align internal spending with that new limit.

The Seattle-based foundation said headcount targets and timelines will be adjusted year by year, and that it will continue to hire selectively for roles deemed critical to advancing its mission.

The decision comes after the foundation announced last year that it would shut down by 2045.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who helped launch the Gates Foundation in 2000, announced plans in May to give away $200 billion — including nearly all of his wealth — over the next two decades through the foundation.

The philanthropy is the world’s largest and has already disbursed $100 billion since its founding, helping save millions of lives with its focus on global health and other social initiatives.

“The foundation’s 2045 closure deadline gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make transformative progress, but doing so requires us to focus relentlessly on the people we serve and the outcomes we want to deliver,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, said in a statement. “Ensuring as much of every dollar as possible flows toward impact is critical to achieving our ambitious goals to save and improve millions more lives over the next 20 years.”

The foundation had already begun ramping up its grant making, issuing $8.75 billion in 2025, and previously committed to distribute $9 billion this year. It has a $77 billion endowment.

This year the foundation will increase spending in priority areas, including maternal health, polio eradication, U.S. education, and vaccine development.

The increase in funding commitments comes amid Trump administration cuts to global foreign assistance, its shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and broader reductions in funding for health and scientific research.

In his annual letter released last week, Gates wrote that “the thing I am most upset about” is that the number of deaths of children under 5 years old increased in 2025 for the first time this century, which he traced to cuts in aid from rich countries.

“The next five years will be difficult as we try to get back on track and work to scale up new lifesaving tools,” he wrote. “Yet I remain optimistic about the long-term future. As hard as last year was, I don’t believe we will slide back into the Dark Ages. I believe that, within the next decade, we will not only get the world back on track but enter a new era of unprecedented progress.”

Tech companies are still signing leases in downtown Seattle — but it’s not enough to reverse a pandemic-era slide that pushed office vacancy to another record high, reaching 34.7% in Q4.

The latest numbers from commercial real estate firm CBRE underscore how hybrid work and shrinking office footprints continue to weigh on a tech-heavy market like Seattle. The vacancy rate is up about two percentage points from a year ago, and a fivefold increase from before the pandemic.

Downtown Seattle lost 257,879 square feet of occupied space in Q4, driven by tenant “rightsizing” and reductions in average space requirements, according to CBRE.

Tech companies are still boosting leasing activity in downtown. Impinj renewed and expanded into 73,638 square feet at 400 Fairview, while DAT Solutions (which acquired Seattle startup Outgo last year) and Docker both took sublease space at the Maritime Building along the waterfront — 51,777 and 33,757 square feet, respectively.

But the data shows how Seattle’s commercial real estate market continues to struggle amid remote work and broader pressures including tech layoffs and companies using AI to operate with leaner teams. CoStar reported in November that Seattle recorded the slowest rent growth among the nation’s largest markets over the past year.

Meanwhile, the Eastside is showing early signs of stabilization, fueled in part by Microsoft’s new leases in Redmond and Amazon’s continued buildout in downtown Bellevue. Both companies are enforcing return-to-office policies.

Several technology companies have signed new or expanded leases on the Eastside in recent years, including OpenAI, Snap, Anduril, Shopify, Snowflake, Walmart, and Chewy.

“Notably, a growing number of new-to-market entrants … are choosing the Eastside over Seattle, drawn by Bellevue’s modern office inventory, business friendly climate and skilled technology workforce,” Broderick Group wrote in a new report.

Despite the positive signals, Broderick cautioned that vacancy is unlikely to fall sharply in the near term. Downtown Bellevue’s vacancy rate stood at 25.4% at the end of Q4, up from 16.8% a year ago.

Glenn Kelman, the longtime CEO of Redfin and one of the most recognizable leaders in the U.S. real estate industry, is stepping down.

Kelman’s departure comes six months after Redfin completed its $1.75 billion acquisition to Rocket Companies. His last day is Friday.

“Redfin just completed our first phase as a Rocket company, integration,” Kelman wrote in an email to employees that he also posted on LinkedIn. “We’ll start the second, much-longer phase at next week’s all-company meeting, which is much-greater scale. Approaching that, I had to decide whether to be at Rocket for years.”

Rocket Companies CEO Varun Krishna will run Redfin until the company finds a permanent new leader. Kelman will remain in an advisory role through April 1.

“Instead, I want to try finding another mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate,” Kelman wrote. “I’m grateful that Rocket has turned out to be such a good owner of Redfin, and that Varun has been such a kind leader.”

Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin in July brought together the nation’s largest mortgage lender with the tech-enabled Seattle-based real estate brokerage. The deal valued Redfin at more than double its market capitalization prior to the acquisition’s public announcement in March 2025.

In an email to staff, obtained by GeekWire, Krishna described Redfin as the “front door to Rocket.”

“We are betting big on Redfin’s future,” he wrote in the memo. “More investment in brand, hiring, traffic growth, and innovation. We will aggressively play to win, with the full strength of Rocket behind this team.”

Krishna added: “Redfin is on the precipice of one of the most exciting transformations in its history, and we’re leaning into it.”

Kelman joined Redfin in 2005, a year after it launched, and helped guide the company from a small Seattle startup into a nationally known real estate brokerage and technology platform. Redfin went public in 2017 in a deal that valued the company at $1.73 billion.

Known for his candid communication style, Kelman frequently spoke publicly about housing affordability, agent compensation, and the structural challenges facing the real estate market. In recent years, he oversaw workforce reductions and cost-cutting measures as higher interest rates slowed home sales and forced real estate tech companies to recalibrate growth expectations.

“Glenn pioneered home search as we know it today and transformed a visionary startup into the Redfin we know today,” Rocket said in a statement to GeekWire. “He built a company that saved thousands of homeowners money and made the American Dream more accessible. We wish Glenn well in his next chapter.”

In his note to employees — titled “Unemployed, In Greenland” — Kelman said he’ll look for a “mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate” for his next opportunity.

He described Redfin as “the only real estate company to take full responsibility for our customers, from click to keys.”

“For most of Redfin’s history, our website expansion was slowed by our brokerage, and our brokerage expansion was slowed by employing our agents,” he wrote. “But standing behind our service was always worthwhile. Now with portals, lenders and brokers racing to stitch together their services, our patient approach has turned out to be the best way to help people all the way home.”

Redfin grew revenue by 7% in 2024 to $1.04 billion, with a net loss of $164.8 million, up from $130 million in 2023. Its stock had fallen more than 30% in the month leading up to the acquisition announcement in March.

Detroit-based Rocket Companies went public in 2020. In addition to mortgage lending products, Rocket also sells personal loans and other fintech offerings. Last year Rocket acquired mortgage lender Mr. Cooper Group in a $9.4 billion stock deal.

Coinme, a Seattle-based cryptocurrency startup that got its start more than a decade ago with a network of bitcoin ATMs, has agreed to be acquired by blockchain payments company Polygon Labs.

Polygon said it also plans to acquire wallet provider Sequence as part of a combined acquisition valued at more than $250 million.

Coinme CEO and co-founder Neil Bergquist told GeekWire that Coinme’s portion of the deal was in the nine-figure range.

Founded in 2014, Coinme lets people buy crypto with cash at kiosks and says it runs the largest crypto cash network in the U.S. through partnerships with MoneyGram and Coinstar. The company holds money‑transmitter licenses and compliance infrastructure that allow it to operate in 48 U.S. states. Last year, the company surpassed $1 billion in transaction volume and became profitable for the first time.

The acquisition effectively plugs Coinme’s U.S. licenses, compliance stack, and cash‑to‑crypto distribution network into Polygon’s global blockchain payments rails. It gives the Seattle startup a new home inside a larger push to make stablecoin payments a standard part of the broader financial system.

The acquisition comes less than a month after Coinme was hit with a cease-and-desist order from Washington state regulators. The Washington state Department of Financial Institutions had ordered Coinme to stop transmitting money for customers, alleging the startup improperly claimed more than $8 million in customer funds as its own income.

On Dec. 30, Coinme said it reached an agreement with regulators to pause the temporary cease-and-desist order, clearing the way for the company to resume operations in the state. The company had called the original charges an accounting dispute over a discontinued voucher product.

Bergquist said the acquisition deal with Polygon was brokered before the cease-and-desist order.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Coinme will continue operating its regulated exchange, wallet, and crypto-as-a-service platform while contributing its licensing, compliance and payments infrastructure to Polygon Labs’ Open Money Stack.

“As a wholly owned subsidiary of Polygon, Coinme will remain true to who we are, with the same team and mission, now with the resources and reach to take it even further,” Bergquist said in a statement to GeekWire. “We’ll keep doing what we do best: making digital assets accessible to everyone, now at an even greater scale.”

Polygon, which raised a $450 million round in 2022 from investors including Sequoia Capital and SoftBank, said it supports millions of transactions daily for large banks, enterprises, and consumer apps.

In a LinkedIn post, Bergquist said a “shared vision and the need to build faster” led to the deal with Polygon.

“Coinme has tackled the regulatory requirements and crypto infrastructure, but the customer application layer must catch up,” he wrote. “Combined with clear federal regulatory support for stablecoins, including the GENIUS Act, consumers want an alternative to dollars trapped in bank accounts, and they want it now.”

Coinme raised more than $40 million, including a $10 million round in 2021. Investors include Pantera Capital; Digital Currency Group; Coinstar; Circle; and MoneyGram. The company has 53 employees.

“A big THANK YOU to Seattle-area Angels,” Bergquist wrote in his post. “You’re the reason we have a vibrant startup ecosystem (and the reason Coinme exists).”

Google is making a key push into AI-powered shopping with the unveiling of Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open technical standard aimed at letting shoppers buy products directly through AI chatbots and search interfaces. The protocol has backing from major retailers and payment players including Walmart, Target, Shopify, and Etsy.

Notably, there was one e-commerce giant not included in Sunday’s announcement: Amazon.

The Seattle-based company has long controlled the infrastructure of online shopping. But UCP offers an alternative pathway that could bypass Amazon, potentially steering shoppers to competitors at the critical moment of product discovery.

Announced over the weekend at the National Retail Federation conference in New York City, Google pitched UCP as a foundation for “agentic commerce,” a fast-emerging concept in which AI agents help shoppers carry out multi-step tasks on their behalf.

“AI agents will be a big part of how we shop in the not-so-distant future,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on X.

As AI chatbots increasingly influence shopping decisions, retailers face pressure to build custom integrations for each AI platform. UCP aims to eliminate that complexity by creating a shared “language” that lets AI agents securely access product catalogs, pricing, availability, promotions, loyalty programs, and checkout flows.

Shopify is building the foundation for agentic commerce.

Universal Commerce Protocol, which we co-developed with Google, is now live. UCP will make it faster for agents and retailers to integrate.

It’s open by default, so platforms and agents can use UCP to start transacting… pic.twitter.com/Gs0vzvfjra

— tobi lutke (@tobi) January 11, 2026

We spoke to industry analysts about UCP and the potential impact to Amazon’s grip on online retail.

UCP might not threaten Amazon’s logistics empire. But it could challenge the idea that shopping must begin inside Amazon’s app or website, said Maju Kuruvilla, CEO and founder of Seattle-based agentic commerce startup Spangle.

“This doesn’t change Amazon’s core advantage — price, selection, and convenience,” Kuruvilla said. “This is more of an additional discovery channel.”

Data suggests AI is already influencing online shopping behavior. A new report from Adobe Digital Insights found that AI-driven traffic to retail sites surged 693% year-over-year during the 2025 holiday season, with AI-referred visitors converting at higher rates and spending more time on sites than non-AI traffic.

But analysts caution that traffic growth and checkout partnerships do not equal behavior change.

Juozas Kaziukenas, an independent e-commerce analyst, said many forecasts around agentic commerce assume unrealistically fast adoption. He pointed to OpenAI research showing that only 37% of products returned by ChatGPT’s regular shopping results are relevant, calling that “shockingly low.”

“Product discovery, curation, personalization, and recommendations are still barebones on most AI tools,” he said.

Some argue that even if agentic commerce does take off, Amazon is unlikely to be displaced.

“It’s proven that consumers are drawn to general merchandise retailers that offer value, selection, and convenience,” said Scott Devitt, an analyst at Wedbush. “AI will have implications for retail, but those tenets won’t change. I think Amazon and Walmart will continue to do well.”

Ironically, an agentic commerce boom could actually give Amazon more leverage, said Sucharita Kodali, a retail industry analyst with Forrester.

“If, big if, there does appear to be a winner — and that would be years away — the winner will likely pay Amazon billions for its feed and cooperation, like Google pays Apple,” she said.

Kaziukenas said the growing wave of partnerships reflects a familiar dynamic: an anti-Amazon alliance.

“Everyone is forming partnerships with everyone else — everyone except Amazon,” he said, adding that the trend reflects Amazon’s position in the market. “They can ignore this for now. But it also shows how eager everyone else is to be part of something new to challenge Amazon.”

Amazon has been experimenting with its own AI-powered shopping features, including its Rufus assistant and the “Buy for Me” initiative. The company has not publicly announced support for open agentic commerce standards like UCP.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged on a recent earnings call that agentic commerce “has a chance to be really good for e-commerce” and said that he expects the company to partner with third-party agents over time. But he also said agents “aren’t very good” at personalization and often display incorrect pricing and delivery estimates.

“So we’ve got to find a way to make the customer experience better and have the right exchange value,” Jassy said. 

In November, Amazon sued Perplexity to stop the startup from using its AI browser agent to make purchases on its marketplace.

We reached out to Amazon for comment on UCP, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Google said that starting soon, shoppers using Google’s AI Mode in Search or the Gemini app will see buy buttons on eligible products from participating U.S. retailers. They can check out using payment details already saved in Google Wallet, with PayPal support coming later. Google says retailers remain “the seller of record” and maintain control over customer relationships.

Google’s announcement follows similar moves by other large tech companies. Last week, Microsoft debuted Copilot Checkout, allowing users to complete purchases directly inside its AI assistant. OpenAI, working with Stripe, has developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) for completing transactions within ChatGPT.

Emily Pfeiffer, a principal analyst at Forrester, said she’s encouraged to see companies pushing for standards — but stressed that it’s “still very early, the experiences are pretty poor, and adoption is very low.”

“We won’t say that forever, but behavior change takes time and it won’t happen if the shopping experiences don’t improve,” she said.

Washington state lawmakers are taking another run at regulating artificial intelligence, rolling out a slate of bills this session aimed at curbing discrimination, limiting AI use in schools, and imposing new obligations on companies building emotionally responsive AI products.

The state has passed narrow AI-related laws in the past — including limits on facial recognition and distributing deepfakes — but broader efforts have often stalled, including proposals last year focused on AI development transparency and disclosure.

This year’s bills focus on children, mental health, and high-stakes decisions like hiring, housing, and lending. The bills could affect HR software vendors, ed-tech companies, mental health startups, and generative AI platforms operating in Washington.

The proposals come as Congress continues to debate AI oversight with little concrete action, leaving states to experiment with their own guardrails. An interim report issued recently by the Washington state AI Task Force notes that the federal government’s “hands-off approach” to AI has created “a crucial regulatory gap that leaves Washingtonians vulnerable.”

Here’s a look at five AI-related bills that were pre-filed before the official start of the legislative session, which kicks off Monday.

HB 2157

This sweeping bill would regulate so-called high-risk AI systems used to make or significantly influence decisions about employment, housing, credit, health care, education, insurance, and parole.

Companies that develop or deploy these systems in Washington would be required to assess and mitigate discrimination risks, disclose when people are interacting with AI, and explain how AI contributed to adverse decisions. Consumers could also receive explanations for decisions influenced by AI.

The proposal would not apply to low-risk tools like spam filters or basic customer-service chatbots, nor to AI used strictly for research. Still, it could affect a wide range of tech companies, including HR software vendors, fintech firms, insurance platforms, and large employers using automated screening tools. The bill would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2027.

SB 5984

This bill, requested by Gov. Bob Ferguson, focuses on AI companion chatbots and would require repeated disclosures that an AI chatbot is not human, prohibit sexually explicit content for minors, and mandate suicide-prevention protocols. Violations would fall under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act.

The bill’s findings warn that AI companion chatbots can blur the line between human and artificial interaction and may contribute to emotional dependency or reinforce harmful ideation, including self-harm, particularly among minors.

These rules could directly impact mental health and wellness startups experimenting with AI-driven therapy or emotional support tools — including companies exploring AI-based mental health services, such as Seattle startup NewDays.

Babak Parviz, CEO of NewDays and a former leader at Amazon, said he believes the bill has good intentions but added that it would be difficult to enforce as “building a long-term relationship is so vaguely defined here.”

Parviz said it’s important to examine systems that interact with minors to make sure they don’t cause harm. “For critical AI systems that interact with people, it’s important to have a layer of human supervision,” he said. “For example, our AI system in clinic use is under the supervision of an expert human clinician.”

OpenAI and Common Sense Media are partnering on a ballot initiative in California also focused on chatbots and minors.

SB 5870

A related bill goes even further, creating a potential civil liability when an AI system is alleged to have contributed to a person’s suicide.

Under this bill, companies could face lawsuits if their AI system encouraged self-harm, provided instructions, or failed to direct users to crisis resources — and would be barred from arguing that the harm was caused solely by autonomous AI behavior.

If enacted, the measure would explicitly link AI system design and operation to wrongful-death claims. The bill comes amid growing legal scrutiny of companion-style chatbots, including lawsuits involving Character.AI and OpenAI.

SB 5956

Targets AI use in K–12 schools, banning predictive “risk scores” that label students as likely troublemakers and prohibiting real-time biometric surveillance such as facial recognition.

Schools would also be barred from using AI as the sole basis for suspensions, expulsions, or referrals to law enforcement, reinforcing that human judgment must remain central to discipline decisions.

Educators and civil rights advocates have raised alarms about predictive tools that can amplify disparities in discipline.

SB 5886

This proposal updates Washington’s right-of-publicity law to explicitly cover AI-generated forged digital likenesses, including convincing voice clones and synthetic images.

Using someone’s AI-generated likeness for commercial purposes without consent could expose companies to liability, reinforcing that existing identity protections apply in the AI era — and not just for celebrities and public figures.