# The Dodo Digest: The Report Is the Product > Anthropic turned eight months of threat intelligence into a public report. Why every startup should document what it learns, plus v1.113.28: Reports, grace periods, and blocklists. - **Author**: Rishabh Goel - **Published**: 2026-09-15 - **Category**: Newsletter - **URL**: https://dodopayments.com/blogs/newsletter-september15 --- ### TL;DR - Anthropic's latest threat intelligence report was one of the more eye-opening things I've read recently because it shows just how quickly AI misuse is evolving. - One detail particularly stood out: Anthropic documented a campaign where a single person built and operated an entire AI-assisted platform for mass attacks. - It got me thinking about something much more positive: **every startup should have its own version of a report.** Not necessarily a 100-page threat report, but a clear record of what you're learning, what you're seeing, and what you're building toward. - Reports aren't just documentation. Done well, they can become a way to demonstrate expertise, build trust, and show customers how you think. - This week, we also shipped **[Dodo Payments v1.113.28](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#1-reports)**, including a new Reports tab, subscription grace periods, manual payment retries, customer blocklists, and several other improvements. Hello everyone, I came across Anthropic's latest threat intelligence report this week, and I found it genuinely fascinating. It's rare to see a company share this much about how its technology is actually being misused. The report looks at eight months of activity across cyberattacks, surveillance, scams, influence operations, and other areas. Anthropic says these were some of the most notable cases its team had seen. One detail really caught my attention. They describe a campaign where one person built an entire platform for mass attacks, using AI to help find vulnerabilities, run attacks, and process stolen data. Anthropic calls it one of its clearest examples of AI-assisted software engineering being used at that scale by a single person. That's obviously a pretty disturbing example of what can go wrong. But it also got me thinking about something else. If a company can take what it's learning from the edge cases around its product and turn it into something this useful, why aren't more startups doing the same? Anthropic's report landing page, headlined "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026", with sections for cyber operations, surveillance, influence operations, scams and fraud, and more ## The Signal I think there's a huge opportunity for startups to turn what they learn into something people can actually read. When you're building a company, you're constantly learning. You're seeing which problems customers keep running into, how people use your product, what breaks, what works, and what keeps changing in your market. But most of that knowledge never leaves the company. It stays in Slack messages, customer calls, dashboards, support tickets, and the heads of the people building the product. Anthropic did something different. It took what its threat intelligence team was learning and turned it into a public report that other companies, governments, and researchers can learn from. One of its goals is to help others recognize similar patterns and strengthen their own defenses. And I think there's a version of that idea for almost every startup. You don't need Anthropic's resources to publish something valuable. If you're seeing a problem repeatedly, spotting a trend in your customers, or learning something nobody else is talking about yet, there's probably something worth sharing. Your learning can become your content. A post from @AnthropicAI announcing their most detailed threat intelligence report to date, explaining that they disrupted every operation covered and published it so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms ## Why This Matters I think founders sometimes underestimate how much they already know. You're spending every day close to a problem that customers may only think about occasionally. After a year of building, you've probably seen patterns they haven't. That's an advantage. A report is a simple way to turn that knowledge into something useful. It could be a benchmark, a monthly analysis, or simply what you've learned from your customers. Anthropic's report works because it's based on what they actually observed, not generic advice. And for an early-stage startup, that knowledge can compound. A useful report can bring in customers, give journalists something to reference, start conversations with other founders, and establish expertise before your company is large enough for people to assume you have it. You don't always need to create more content. Sometimes you just need to document what you're already learning. ## What We Shipped That same idea of making information easier to understand is reflected in Dodo Payments [v1.113.28](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#1-reports). This week, we launched the new [Reports tab](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#1-reports), bringing balance, fees, payouts, and reconciliation into one place. You can now access: - **Balance & Payout Summary** - see how your balance changed and what was paid out. - **All Fees** - a transaction-level view of fees. - **Four downloadable reports** - Transactions, Adjustments, Payouts, and Ledger Reconciliation. - **Report history** - generated reports are saved so you can access them again without rebuilding them. Alongside Reports, we shipped: - **[Subscription Grace Periods](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#2-subscription-grace-period)**, allowing businesses to keep customers active for 1-30 days after a failed renewal while they resolve their payment issue. - **[Manual Payment Retry](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#4-manual-payment-retry)**, so merchants can retry failed subscription payments directly from the payment detail page. - **[Customer Blocklists](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#3-customer-blocklist)**, allowing businesses to prevent specific customers or email addresses from purchasing again. - **[Payment Activity Logs](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#5-activity-log-on-payments)**, giving every payment a chronological history from initiation through capture, refunds, and disputes. - **[Georgian Checkout](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#10-georgian-checkout)**, bringing checkout to 22 supported languages. - **[Card-Optional at $0 Price](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#11-card-optional-at-%240-price)**, allowing subscriptions to begin without collecting a payment method when nothing is due. - **[Mandatory Tax ID at Checkout](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#12-mandatory-tax-id-at-checkout)** for businesses that need to collect tax information from B2B customers. - Improvements to discount creation, subscription cancellation, plan-change payments, KYC retries, and subscription notifications. A lot of these improvements are about something that isn't particularly exciting until you need it: knowing exactly what's happening inside your business. And as a company grows, that visibility becomes increasingly important. The new Dodo Payments Reports tab, showing Balance and Payout Summary and All Fees cards alongside four downloadable exports: Transactions, Adjustments, Payout, and Ledger Reconciliation ## One Last Thought The thing I took away from Anthropic's report wasn't just how capable AI has become. It was how much value there is in documenting what you learn. The companies building interesting products are sitting on an enormous amount of information that nobody else has. Your customers are telling you things. Your product is showing you things. Your team is learning things. Don't let all of that disappear into internal conversations. Turn some of it into something people can read. Because sometimes the most valuable thing your startup can publish isn't another announcement about what you built. It's what you've learned from building it. Also, join our loving [Discord community](https://discord.gg/dodo-payments-1305511580854779984)! Best, **Rishabh Goel** **Co-Founder, Dodo Payments** --- - [More Newsletter articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs/category/newsletter) - [All articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs)