The team from Bluesky has built another app — and this time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that allows you to design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and, one day, vibe-code your own app.

At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky’s former CEO, Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, presented the AI app, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will become the initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short).

“It’s a new product — it’s not a part of the Bluesky app,” explains interim CEO Toni Schneider in an interview. (In addition to his CEO role, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one that’s built by Jay’s new team.”

With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by typing in commands in natural language, the same as if they’re chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with their Atmosphere login (meaning their login for any app that runs on atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will immediately understand what you’ve been talking about, what sort of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps.

You can ask Attie questions, like what posts you might like to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own custom feed, personalized to you.

“You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” Schneider says. “It’s the beginning of just having a lot more people be able to build on top of the Atmosphere.”

Plus, he adds, “It is an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-focused … We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure that we use it to build things that really benefit people.”

At launch, Attie can be used to build and view these feeds, which will later become available to you within Bluesky or any other atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie’s users to vibe-code their own social apps as well as build tools for other people.

Schneider says that Graber and her team began working on the app a few months ago, which was around the same time she decided to return to building, instead of running the company.

“I think she realized that there was so much more that she wanted to build, and just doing the CEO job kept her busy, and she felt like she wanted more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “As she spent more time, [and] got freed up, I think it became clear that this is her happy place. She’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her building more things and not worrying about operating the company,” he says.

Graber says today, AI is being used by the major platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase people’s time spent in their apps, harvesting data, and controlling their algorithms.

“We think AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in her announcement of Attie. “An open protocol puts this power directly in users’ hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise.”

Graber’s decision to once again focus on protocol and product was followed by the company’s announcement that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes that news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to be around.

“It means we have three-plus years of runway, which is great. That means stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means that Bluesky’s team has time to tackle the bigger challenges ahead, which include adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding a way to monetize the social network of 43.4 million users.

One thing that Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite the financial backing from multiple crypto investors. That’s something that had worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool.

“It’s the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they were investing in things built on the blockchain that were super decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “This is decentralized social, so it fits those who are invested to believe in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity.”

Instead, the company may experiment with other means of monetization. The team hasn’t yet decided if Attie will ultimately require a fee, as it’s only a private beta for the time being. Other ideas being batted around include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on the protocol.

Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, the home of publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for the Atmosphere as being similar to WordPress in this way.

“At the center of [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system, so anybody can participate,” he says. “You can have all of these independent, decentralized pieces that work together. With WordPress, that turned into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars — over $10 billion a year, now — flowing through it.”

Schneider continues, “So it’s gotten very big, even though it’s completely decentralized. And this is what we’re hoping for, for the Atmosphere to have that similar ability for lots of these apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem.”

When an 82-year-old Kentucky woman was offered $26 million from an AI company that wanted to build a data center on her land, she said no. Sure, that same company can try to rezone 2,000 acres nearby anyway, but as AI infrastructure stretches further into the real world, the real world is starting to push back. 

That tension is everywhere this week, from OpenAI shutting down its Sora app to courts finally starting to hold social platforms like Meta accountable. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what it looks like when the AI hype cycle meets reality. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on. 

“We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on Friday.

It’s the tech giant’s most recent affirmation that Apple devices with Lockdown Mode can withstand government spyware attacks, after first making the claim a year after the security feature’s debut.

Apple in 2022 announced Lockdown Mode, an opt-in series of security protections that switches off certain features in iPhones and other Apple devices that are commonly exploited to hack targets with spyware. Apple specifically released this security mode to help at-risk customers defend themselves from the threats posed by government spyware made by companies like Intellexa, NSO Group, and Paragon Solutions.

In recent years, Apple has conceded that its customers can be hacked by spyware and has been more proactive about notifying customers who have been targeted.

Apple has sent numerous batches of notifications to users in over 150 countries, alerting them that they may have been hacked with spyware, which shows how much visibility the company now has on these types of attacks. Apple has never said how many users it has notified, but it’s likely fair to assume there have been dozens, if not more.

Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, the head of the security lab at Amnesty International, where he has investigated dozens of spyware attacks, said that he and his colleagues “have not seen any evidence of an iPhone being successfully compromised by mercenary spyware where Lockdown Mode was enabled at the time of the attack.”

Digital rights organizations like Amnesty International and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab have documented several successful attacks on iPhone users, none of which have mentioned a bypass of Lockdown Mode. In at least two cases, Citizen Lab researchers publicly said they had seen Lockdown Mode actively block spyware attacks, one carried out with NSO’s Pegasus, the other with Predator spyware, made by a company now part of Intellexa.

In at least one documented case of a spyware attack targeting iPhones, security researchers at Google said the spyware would bail out of trying to infect the victim if it detects Lockdown Mode, likely as a way to evade detection.

Patrick Wardle, an Apple cybersecurity expert and critic, says that Lockdown Mode is an important feature that makes it more difficult for spyware makers to attack Apple users.

“I think it’s safe to say, Lockdown Mode is one of the most aggressive consumer-facing hardening features ever shipped,” he told TechCrunch. 

Wardle explained that by “shrinking the attack surface,” Lockdown Mode eliminates many techniques normally used to exploit the iPhone, and forces spyware makers to use more complex and expensive techniques to develop.

“It kills entire delivery mechanisms/exploit classes,” he added, “as it blocks most message attachment types, restricts WebKit features. This is really a huge reduction in remotely reachable attack surface, especially for zero-click exploit chains,” referring to hacks that can target people over the internet without any interaction from the victim.

It’s possible that Lockdown Mode has been bypassed, and neither Apple nor independent investigators have caught the attack. But given that Apple is typically publicly tight-lipped at the best of times, its latest statement marks a significant milestone for Lockdown Mode.

I have used Lockdown Mode for years, and I barely think about it — except when it pops up notifications that can be occasionally confusing. Some features that have been switched off require you to take an extra step, such as copying and pasting links from text messages to your browser. That’s why I, and several digital security experts, recommend anyone worried about being targeted by spyware or digital attacks to switch on Lockdown Mode.