On Wednesday night, Runlayer and Rippling dropped their respective lawsuits against each other. No settlement was made. No money changed hands. Not even lawyers’ fees, according to court documents seen by TechCrunch.

Rippling celebrated by instantly releasing its MCP gateway, the product at the heart of the dueling lawsuits and the one that competes with Runlayer’s offering.

This public fight is a cautionary tale to founders: In the age of AI, when building new software has become almost trivial, you never know who your next competitor will be. It might even be a prospective customer.

To recap the short-lived legal brouhaha: Runlayer is an early-stage startup that launched out of stealth in November, 2025 and has raised a total of $42 million from VCs like Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis. It’s led by third-time founder Andrew Berman (previous companies: baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing tool, Vowel, that sold to Zapier in 2024).

After Rippling tested Runlayer’s MCP gateway for more than a year, with the two engineering teams working closely together, Rippling never signed on to become a customer, according to Runlayer’s lawsuit. Instead, Berman received a text from a Rippling employee that said his employer was building its own MCP gateway and planned to release it as a product. This employee described Rippling’s product as a clone of Runlayer’s.

Runlayer sued, claiming that Rippling violated contractual agreements covering the tests of its products.

An MCP gateway securely handles an enterprise’s AI agent requests for data from other software systems. So, for instance, when a hiring professional asks for details on the top five candidates for a job, including their emails, that data must be retrieved from the company’s recruitment system. The gateway handles the retrieval process, rather than granting agents direct access to the company’s software systems. It can then also layer on other features like employee role-based access control (managers getting different access than interns), observability (logs and usage trails) and so on.

Then Rippling countersued, alleging that Runlayer was violating some of its patents. The move was seen by Runlayer as a way to induce it to drop its suit while ratcheting up legal expenses.

Runlayer dropped its suit after spending the last three weeks in discovery. Rippling also dropped its own suit and again, didn’t collect a settlement either.

So, while the lawsuits didn’t lead to anything but a lot of public flaming, there is a deeper takeaway for founders. The AI landscape is changing so rapidly that the long-running technical shoot-outs that enterprises love to impose on startups need to be rethought. Between the time an AI startup enters into one and however-many months later, an enterprise’s needs and desires may have drastically changed.

In the meantime, in the span of weeks, Rippling, who’s bread and butter has historically been payroll and benefits management, has now entered the AI Gateway market with a tool that can route to different models while dashboarding token spend by employee. The product is competing with the likes of Stripe, Ramp and Databricks.

Now Rippling is also in the AI security business with this MCP gateway that ties AI access to employee roles. It competes with the likes of Runlayer, Docker and Amazon Bedrock.

As for Runway, its pitch is a broader bundle of agent security services tied to the gateway, ranging from agent creation to spotting shadow AI agents running in an enterprise unbeknownst to IT.

As AI continues to kill traffic to websites, Google on Thursday threw a bone to those publishers negatively impacted by the change. It’s now allowing readers to push a button on a publisher’s website to indicate it’s a “favorite source” they’d like to see highlighted more often across Google Search, Discover, and Google News.

The tech giant said it’s making this new, interactive “Preferred Sources” button available to online publishers to embed on their own websites.

The launch follows Google’s rollout of Preferred Sources in May to Google’s AI experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews. The option was previously available in Top Stories.

The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they’re searching for content or interacting with Google’s AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news. As of May’s launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method.

To add a site as a favorite publisher, you can visit Google’s source preferences page, then search for a publisher by name or website.

Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers’ websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses.

Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google’s app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they’d like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real-time.

The search giant is not the only company turning to AI to offer feed-tuning tools powered by AI. In recent months, a number of top social media apps have launched user-controlled algorithms that allow people to fine-tune the content that is recommended to them.

In addition to personalizing the Discover feed, Google says Android users will be able to customize their audio daily briefings in the Google News app, as well.

Castelion, a missile startup founded by former SpaceX executives, has raised a $1 billion Series C at a $13 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Carlyle, and JP Morgan Chase.

Founded in 2022, Castelion set out to manufacture hypersonic weapon systems at a lower cost and at faster speeds than traditional defense primes. Since then, the startup has secured more than $500 million in U.S. military contracts.

The funding for the startup is timely. The Pentagon has been looking to procure more of these weapons, since the U.S.’s stockpile of hypersonic missiles capable of travelling at speeds above Mach 5 hasn’t kept pace with China’s. Castelion is betting it can help close the gap with its faster manufacturing process.

The Torrance, Calif.-based startup will use the fresh capital to produce its Blackbeard missiles, named after a fierce English pirate, and other hypersonic weapons in its New Mexico production facility.

The funding round, which included participation from existing backers including Lightspeed, General Catalyst, and Altimeter, comprised $800 million in equity and a $250 million revolving credit facility.