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This week on Sinica, a rare treat: an in-person recording from Beijing with two dear friends who happen to be two of the very best in the business on technology and China — Samm Sacks and Paul Triolo, fresh off the exhibition floor of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. We dig into Xi Jinping's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive statement on AI to date, the launch of the World AI Cooperation Organization, Moonshot's release of Kimi K3, the Trump administration's reported push to shut Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. market, the coming age of agents, the untranslatable problem of ānquán, and what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue in September.8:51 – The view from the floor: heat, humidity, robot boxing grandmas, WeChat-gated free water, and the "AI+" vibe — why WAIC 2026 felt less like an AI conference than a sector-by-sector snapshot of China's entire economy being supercharged with AI, with attendance swelling to some 200,000 tickets16:32 – Why Xi showed up: what the leader's first in-person WAIC appearance and his most extensive AI statement to date signal, and why domestic drivers matter as much as geopolitics18:01 – Chapter and verse: which phrases from the speech will be put to work in the system — "secure and orderly development" and the governance of agents, and Xi's strikingly extensive language on AI safety after China was frozen out of the Paris process22:26 – The ānquán problem: one word meaning both "safety" and "security," the three buckets of AI risk, and how China's safety community has moved from bias and deepfakes toward CBRN and loss-of-control concerns — Black Mirror versus Star Trek28:14 – Shanghai's baby: how WAIC's ownership structure differs from the CAC-run World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Chen Jining's very visible host duties, and whether the center of gravity in AI policy is shifting to the Yangtze River Delta30:05 – WAICO: what the new World AI Cooperation Organization with its 29 founding members is actually for, Xi's concrete deliverables for the Global South — 5,000 AI training slots, regional cooperation centers, the MAZU early-warning system — and healthy skepticism about follow-through34:39 – Kimi K3: what's technically significant in Moonshot's big new model, why it's the fourth arguably frontier-class Chinese release in a single month, the two-way traffic in distillation accusations, and what it all says about the state of the frontier gap four years into export controls40:33 – Washington reacts: the reported menu of options for shutting Chinese open-weight models out of the U.S. — entity listings, a draft executive order, supply-chain security authorities — and why none of the tools actually fit the problem49:36 – Strange bedfellows: David Sacks versus the "closed lab duopoly," the FUD strategy, why some 80% of Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies reportedly run on Chinese open models, and how gating U.S. frontier models while Chinese weights flow freely supercharges the AI sovereignty argument worldwide54:55 – The model is infrastructure, the agent is the product: the ByteDance–ZTE agentic phone, the CAC's new initiative on agent trust and interoperability, and why agents fused into operating systems upend both super-app walled gardens and China's data protection regime1:02:27 – An exegesis of kěkòng: the many meanings of "controllable," the long history of ānquán kěkòng in Chinese tech policy, and the unanswered question of who — CAC, NDRC, or somebody new — actually owns AI safety in either system1:08:54 – The road to September: what to expect from the first U.S.-China AI dialogue, why Mythos tops the Chinese grievance list, the securitization feedback loop that starves trust-and-safety advocates of resources on both sides, and why recursive self-improvement makes this feel like a last, best chancePaying It ForwardPaul nominates Tony Peng, whose Substack RecodeChinaAI offers sharp, well-written analysis of the application side of China's AI industry — part of an impressive new generation of independent China tech writers. Samm gives a shout-out to Professor Zhu Yue of Tongji University Law School, published in Science and doing pioneering work at the intersection of disability law and AI law.RecommendationsSamm: The Land and Its People by David Sedaris — laugh-out-loud funny, especially the "Enough is Enough" chapter; Transcription by Ben Lerner, a perfect small novel about fathers, sons, memory, and technology as enabler or disabler of connection; and Didion and Babitz, on Joan Didion and Eve Babitz and the 1970s California rock scene.Paul: The Party's Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian — dense but beautifully written, and essential for understanding the current Chinese leadership.Kaiser: A fiction-only summer! Stoner by John Williams, a small life told most grandly in some of the most beautiful sentence-level writing anywhere; Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, an epistolary novel dense with distilled wisdom from a dying Iowa minister; and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age (黄金时代) in Yan Yan's excellent new translation — bawdy, hilarious, and super Beijing-y despite its Cultural Revolution setting.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
P.M. Edition for July 21. Recent AI models from China claim they're just as powerful as some of the most cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Journal reporter Amrith Ramkumar joins to discuss the latest reactions from Silicon Valley and the White House. Plus, General Motors had a strong second quarter as consumers kept buying pickup trucks and SUVs. And New Jersey says a software error led to almost 400 non-citizens voting in elections in the state since 2023. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president could still fire commissioners, as the Court now permits, but if those firings broke quorum, the agency would be unable to proceed until replacements were confirmed. The guardrail would
This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.There was an issue with this only going to paid subscribers, so sending it again. Apologies to those who get it twice. I appreciate being paid so feel free to upgrade if you enjoy TWTW.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president
On Open Line Friday, Erick Erickson breaks down why China's Kimi K3 model just seized the number one spot on the front-end code arena, shoving Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Elon Musk's Grok down the leaderboard, and he reads David Sacks's warning that permitting delays and over-regulation are how America loses the AI race. Erick […]
As part of our summer replay series, we're revisiting one of our most-discussed conversations from the past year. David Sacks joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg to discuss the intersection of AI, crypto, regulation, and American competitiveness. The conversation explores the Trump administration's approach to AI and crypto policy, open source AI, export controls, energy and infrastructure, the global race with China, and the role regulation plays in shaping innovation. They also discuss stablecoins, the future of AI development, permissionless innovation, and why they believe America's long-term advantage depends on enabling builders rather than slowing them down. Along the way, Sacks shares his perspective on AI safety, decentralized technology, federal versus state regulation, and what it will take for the U.S. to remain the global leader in emerging technologies. Resources: Follow David Sacks on X: https://x.com/DavidSacks Follow Marc Andreessen on X: https://x.com/pmarca Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
AI is officially a national security issue and Washington is moving fast. The Bitcoin Policy Institute's Zack Cohen, Zack Shapiro, and Ken Egan break down Palantir and Nvidia's sovereign on-prem AI architecture, OpenAI's government-coordinated 5.6 rollout, and reports that Beijing may curb exports of China's top AI models. Then Zack Shapiro lays out his highest-conviction thesis: the biggest AI fortune won't be made by frontier labs, but by the people who help industry actually absorb the technology. Plus, a major CLARITY Act update as law enforcement opposition softens on Capitol Hill.
“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It's not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.Donald J. Trump, July 4th, 2020It's been ten years since the purges began, and I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Did so many of my friends really go along with it? Did institutions, corporations, and all of Hollywood allow themselves to be shamefully cowed by the fanatical mob? Yes. Not only did it happen, but it's become the new normal on the establishment Left — in Hollywood, in culture, in government. Everyone is still too afraid to say what they really think. Just appearing at the America 250 or the Kennedy Center will still ruin your career. The only difference now is that the wheel of oppression keeps spinning. Now it's illegal immigrants. Now it's “Free Palestine.”I don't know why I didn't see it sooner: this direct line from cancel culture to Communism. I thought it was mass hysteria after Trump's shocking win in 2016, and that eventually, as with other episodes of mass hysteria in the past, it would burst, and we could all go back to the way things used to be, where we weren't fighting a virtual Civil War.But now that three Democratic Socialists won their primaries in New York against one of the party's shining stars, Dan Goldman, all because of Israel, what we're seeing is Communism, but merged with Woke tyranny and radical Islam. It is essentially the perfect storm to destroy America.Now, we can clearly see what ten years of Cancel Culture have done to the Left. It has given them enormous power to force compliance, not just to those of us who dissented, but to members of their own party. In other words, the mob is about to come for them, too. What do they want? What the millionaires and billionaires have. They want what's coming to them after years of indoctrination that told them that they are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their gender ideology, or their ethnicity. America, they were told, was founded on White Supremacy and colonization, and they're owed something for it.They seem to have no place for the working class that Mamdani is always talking about, not if they're white. Bernie Sanders might have cared about the “white working class,” but not these folks. Some animals are more equal than others, and with this new fundamentalism, it is meant only to redistribute wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the white majority to the marginalized minorities.It isn't their fault exactly. They've been indoctrinated. None of us noticed this was happening right around Obama's second term, 2012. Racism, they believed, had infected the majority in America, and it had to be rooted out. They had to be re-educated on “correct” history.They were not taught the American dream. They were taught the American nightmare. Here is a video from Katharine Birbalsingh:And now, they've finally found their magic man in Zohran Mamdani, who is everything they need wrapped up in one charismatic leader. He's TikTok-friendly. He goes viral. He is pop-culture literate, and, most importantly, he's the Wokest of the Woke. He speaks their language. He wants what they want. He goes to the Pride Parade but not the Israel Parade, becoming the first Mayor of the city in 60 years not to attend.He doesn't just want to be the Mayor of New York. He wants to be a worldwide inspirational leader, which fits the new Left well since they don't really want to unite with the other half of America so much as with those other countries that are ideologically aligned, you know, like 1984?It might seem like one big party, but this is a disaster for the Democrats. Everyone knows that any Democrat who goes against them will be stalked, swarmed, and harassed before getting primaried out. All the Republicans have to be is the more normal side, and they can win. Some Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists are overtaking the party and will alienate people, even James Carville:No Democrat is safe from the mob, not even one of their most progressive politicians, Scott Weiner, in San Francisco, who was just harassed in public for not being sufficiently pro-Palestine. And obviously, for being Jewish.Dan Goldman was banned from a coffee shop for the same reason just before getting voted out. Mamdani and his acolytes shield their true selves behind a warm smile and a viral video, but there can be no mistaking the language of the Cancel Culture Left.The Democrats know what this means. Even the Ladies of The View know. The DSA wins in New York were driven by a small group of mostly white, pampered college kids who are very online. It is the fault of the Democrats for not seeing the accident before it happened. They might have fought harder for Goldman if they had any idea just how bad it would be for them if these candidates actually won.And it's bad.David Sacks from the All in Podcast:What people went through in Stalin's Soviet Union or China's Cultural Revolution is worse than anything any American has ever or will ever suffer, but let's not kid ourselves. We've already seen what the Left will do, from three assassination attempts on Trump's life, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, to their violent riots for the past ten years. Burning Teslas, trying to throw Trump off the ballot, the impeachments, the indictments. Now, they're threatening Nuremberg-like trials and another impeachment should they take back power in Congress, and the Right should do everything they can to make sure they don't. We know there are no limits on what they will do. We know because history tells us. George Orwell told us. We've seen this movie many times before. Utopias have only two paths forward: they collapse, or they become more authoritarian. These folks don't even know what words mean anymore, much less the point of 1984. No one ever taught them why Communism or tyrannical mobs are bad, so why wouldn't they behave this way? I noticed it for the first time when a small group of fanatics at Evergreen College chased Bret Weinstein off campus, calling him a racist and holding the administrators hostage until they gave them what they wanted.All of those pampered, spoiled, overeducated-yet-still-uneducated brats made their way into the workforce, boosted by using their identity categories to secure high-profile slots at newspapers and corporations. The threat was implicit: hire us or you're an “ist” or a “phobe” and we'll get loud about it. Only the Republicans have taken a consistent and principled stand against this madness and done so since it began. The Democrats, however, have stuck their head in the sand and denied it even exists. That's why they can't address crime in the major cities, or the rapes by illegal immigrants, and why their wheel of oppression has amounted to the party standing for only three things: Socialism, illegal immigration, and Palestine. No one seemed to take it seriously on the Left because they never took Cancel Culture seriously. No, we weren't being slaughtered by the millions or thrown into gulags, but we built this new civilization online and with it, the power to decide who can participate, who is accepted, and who must be hurled into the public square for character assassination and career ruination. No matter what the consequences were, it was wrong, and no one had the guts to stop it, and now, those chickens have come home to roost, and it's the Democrats' problem. They'd better get used to selling Democratic Socialism or else. This is what happened the last time the Centrists went up against the Socialists.Two years later, Al Franken would be chased out of the Senate by all of the top Democrats caught up in Cancel Culture and unable to stop the mass hysteria that drove it.And now, we have yet more insurrectionary behavior with Zohran Mamdani and some governors refusing to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling on sending back Haitian migrants, and many states aligning to protest the Great American State Fair. It looks like we have a Democratic Party that wants to secede from the Union, again.In the old days of Bernie Sanders' Democratic Socialism, they understood that taking care of American citizens required secure border programs like Medicare for All. Well, not now. The new kids want it all and believe they're entitled to it all. Borders? Who needs those? They are oppressed and therefore deserving of our tax dollars to absolve us of our white colonizer guilt. The big picture here should be frightening for all Americans. Unchecked migration with the oppressor/oppressed mindset, while also demanding the government and the “billionaires” pay for all of them - that is what the Democrats will have to sell to the American public because the Cancel Culture machine that they helped build and did nothing about will demand it. The Gray Champion Rides AgainThe Republicans have a unique opportunity now to change the course of history. They have been given a gift by the Left, whether they choose to take it or not. They are experiencing their own brand of crazy right now. It's starting to look a lot like Communists to the Left of me, Nazis to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.But if the sane Republicans can pull it together, they can bring in reasonable people, like Bill Maher:At the moment, the Democrats have the bigger headache on their hands. No one who seeks the nomination in 2028 will survive if they don't have Zohran Mamdani on their side. But honestly, the Republicans could be here too, depending on how their current war plays out. But if they want to win, they will have to open their doors to more moderate Democrats, perhaps giving up the old dream of outsider populism. They'll have to decide which they believe is the greater threat.Here is Larry O'Connor with Mark Halperin on 2-Way.America, the BeautifulIn 2020, I was hopeless and lost. No one on my side would talk about what all of us could see happening to our party, to our young people, with this unprecedented climate of fear and culture of silence.But then I heard Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore on July 4th, and even though I'd been told he was a dangerous fascist and racist, I heard the words that anchor me to my own patriotic pride, words that describe the country I know and love. These were and are subversive words, but necessary. This is the America I believed in.Ever since then, I've trusted Trump because he did not bend, did not break, and never, ever, ever surrendered. I'm sorry he'll be leaving office in two years. I can't imagine the fight without him, but he's carved a path and lit the way. Now, it's our turn to finish the job. The race to normal begins right now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe
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“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at least) more interesting than the real one. The bad news is that I'm back. The good news is it's been an interesting week in tech. That was the week in which the US Commerce Department told both OpenAI and Anthropic that they now need government approval for whom they can sell their frontier AI models. This is supposedly “voluntary” — for now, at least. Keith's TWTW editorial argues that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have spent over a year crying wolf about the dangers of their own technology, supposedly deliberately seeking government involvement as a regulatory moat against competitors. And now the government has walked through the door that Sam and Dario left ajar. Now, Keith argues, the US government is behaving as if it owns not just the door and the guest list, but the entire product roadmap. “Payback's a bitch,” Keith bristles in his editorial. The other major news this week is the rumour (via David Sacks) that OpenAI has offered the US government a 50% stake in a sovereign wealth fund. If true, this would change everything — not just in Silicon Valley, but in the political debate about public ownership of our AI economy. It's not just tech insiders like Sacks and Altman who are on board the sovereign wealth fund express, but also Bernie Sanders and other leftist critics of Big Tech. So maybe payback, at least when it comes to public investment in AI, isn't always such a bitch. Five Takeaways • The Fake Andrew Keen: An Hour of Work on a Local Nvidia Card: Keith ran last week's show solo with an AI-generated Andrew Keen: trained on a few episodes of the show, animated from a YouTube still, scripted from Keith's newsletter. No third-party service. Just a local PC with an Nvidia GPU, about an hour of work, three attempts. Andrew, listening back, second-guessed whether he was actually there. The result was “pretty bad compared to our normal actual live shows,” Keith says. But also: really good. The question hanging over this episode and every future one: which Andrew are you listening to? • Payback's a Bitch: How AI Companies Created Their Own Regulatory Trap: The US Commerce Department has told OpenAI and Anthropic they need government permission for who gets to use their latest models. Voluntary, for now. Keith's diagnosis: AI leadership spent more than a year crying wolf about existential risk — not because they believed it, but because government regulation creates a moat against competitors. Now the government has taken them at their word. Dario and Sam Altman wanted to be wrapped in government clothing. They are. The government now owns the door. They asked for this. They got it. • American and Chinese State Capitalism: Converging Models: Andrew raises the macro argument: what we're watching is the convergence of American and Chinese models of capitalism toward a more state-centric model. China has always been explicit about state control. America has prided itself on free enterprise — even when the internet, atomic technology, and now AI were all substantially government-funded or government-shaped. Keith agrees at this level: all governments seek to control things they frame as dangerous. The difference is the framing. The direction of travel is the same. • OpenAI's Rumoured 50% Stake Offer to the Government: Keith has heard — from sources including David Sacks, who should know — that OpenAI has offered the US government a very large stake, potentially 50%, in a sovereign wealth fund that would then distribute dividends to citizens. Sacks is not only unsurprised but in favour: he thinks 50% is too small. Andrew's question: why would OpenAI give away 50% of the company? Keith's answer: because it's the price of the regulatory moat. The government as partner rather than the government as regulator. A company that once aspired to “open” AI is now offering the state a controlling interest in its future. • Paul Kennedy and America's Inevitable Decline: Keith has Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers on his shelf. His conclusion from it: it is historically impossible for America to retain its first-place status. No country ever has. Newly capitalised countries produce things more cheaply; China, India, and large parts of Asia are where most future growth will be. Does the AI boom change this? Keith's honest answer: no. It may slow the decline. It will not reverse it. America will, like an older gentleman on a rocking chair outside the house, accept its fate. Europe won't even be in the rocking chair. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: • That Was the Week by Keith Teare — the newsletter on which this episode is based. • Azeem Azhar, The Exponential View — his report quantifying the AI economy at roughly $175 billion, referenced in the closing section. • Alex Lazarow, 99%Tech — referenced for his piece on the emergence of an AI trust layer, the “Lloyds of AI.” • Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers — on Keith's shelf; referenced in the America-China decline section. • David Sacks — referenced as the source for the OpenAI sovereign wealth fund rumour. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:38) - Introduction: the fake Andrew Keen from last week (01:14) - Keith explains how he did it: local Nvidia card, one hour, three attempts (02:11) - The big story: Commerce Department tells OpenAI and Anthropic they need permission ...
June 19, 2026: Anthropic's Fable 5 shutdown appears to be tied to SK Telecom, Project Glasswing, Amazon researchers, the White House, David Sacks, and a dispute over whether Anthropic should fix or de-deploy the model. Fortune 500 companies just hit record revenue, profit, revenue per employee, and profit per employee while shrinking headcount for the second year in a row, raising a bigger question about productivity gains without job growth. New data from LV8 founder Griffin Hadrill shows AI-generated creative ads are underperforming human-made ads by 3 to 5 times, which is a reminder that originality, emotional connection, and human judgment still matter.
The Fable 5 drama continues.... but what does it really mean?
El 10 de junio Dario Amodei, fundador de Anthropic, publicó una reflexión en la que pedía una regulación seria y vinculante para la inteligencia artificial. Dos días antes su empresa había lanzado Fable, una versión recortada de Mythos, el modelo de lenguaje más potente del momento. El viernes 12 de junio el Gobierno Trump le concedió el deseo de la peor manera posible. Por segunda vez en cuatro meses descargó una bomba sobre Anthropic. El Gobierno prohibió el uso de Fable y Mythos para los extranjeros escudándose en razones de seguridad nacional. Eso implicaba que nadie que no fuese estadounidense podía usar estos modelos, incluyendo a muchos empleados de la empresa que los ha desarrollado. Anthropic respondió apagándolos por completo, ya que cumplir esa orden les resultaba imposible. Mythos lo empleaban en ese momento unas 200 empresas e investigadores para monitorizar y parchear fallos de software en sectores como la banca, la sanidad y la industria. Todos se quedaron sin la herramienta de un día para otro. El origen de todo estuvo, según parece, en Andy Jassy, consejero delegado de Amazon, inversor en Anthropic y a la vez su competidor. El equipo de Jassy aseguraba haber conseguido que Fable revelara vulnerabilidades de seguridad nacional si se le hacían las preguntas de un modo concreto. A partir de ahí las versiones varían. David Sacks aseguró que el Gobierno pidió a Amodei arreglar o retirar Fable y que se negó. Anthropic habla solo de una orden de bloquear a los extranjeros. Tampoco ha quedado claro el soporte legal, los analistas apuntan al mismo reglamento de control de exportaciones que impide la venta de cierto tipo de chips a China. Para muchos el objetivo verdadero era simplemente castigar a una empresa concreta a la que Trump considera de izquierda radical y de estar fuera de control. No es, recordemos, la primera vez que el Gobierno carga contra ella. Hace unos meses Pete Hegseth sacó a Anthropic del Pentágono. Para la empresa esta polémica no podía llegar en peor momento, están ultimando su salida a Bolsa este otoño y sus principales competidores como OpenAI lo aprovecharán hasta el final. Varios expertos en ciberseguridad han relativizado la amenaza que supone Fable y Mythos. Aseguran que las pruebas solo han destapado vulnerabilidades menores ya conocidas. El domingo un grupo de expertos muy reconocidos en el ámbito de la seguridad informática firmaron una carta colectiva en la que pedían levantar el veto, ya que está dejando sin las mejores herramientas precisamente a quienes vigilan la seguridad de la red. Para los aliados más próximos como Australia, Canadá o el Reino Unido la imposibilidad de poder utilizar estos modelos es una bofetada que les equipara a Rusia o Irán. Pero esto de la IA se ha convertido ya en una lucha de carácter geopolítico y ahí no hay amigos, o los hay pero hasta cierto punto. En La ContraRéplica: 0:00 Introducción 3:28 Castigo para Claude 30:09 Endesa Empresas - https://endesa.com/empresas 31:45 La venezuelización de PSOE 41:16 Abusos de la Hacienda autonómica 45:08 Elecciones en Colombia · Canal de Telegram: https://t.me/lacontracronica · “Contra el pesimismo”… https://amzn.to/4m1RX2R · “Hispanos. Breve historia de los pueblos de habla hispana”… https://amzn.to/428js1G · “La ContraHistoria del comunismo”… https://amzn.to/39QP2KE · “La ContraHistoria de España. Auge, caída y vuelta a empezar de un país en 28 episodios”… https://amzn.to/3kXcZ6i · “Contra la Revolución Francesa”… https://amzn.to/4aF0LpZ · “Lutero, Calvino y Trento, la Reforma que no fue”… https://amzn.to/3shKOlK Apoya La Contra en: · Patreon... https://www.patreon.com/diazvillanueva · iVoox... https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-contracronica_sq_f1267769_1.html · Paypal... https://www.paypal.me/diazvillanueva Sígueme en: · Web... https://diazvillanueva.com · Twitter... https://twitter.com/diazvillanueva · Facebook... https://www.facebook.com/fernandodiazvillanueva1/ · Instagram... https://www.instagram.com/diazvillanueva · Linkedin… https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernando-d%C3%ADaz-villanueva-7303865/ · Flickr... https://www.flickr.com/photos/147276463@N05/?/ · Pinterest... https://www.pinterest.com/fernandodiazvillanueva Encuentra mis libros en: · Amazon... https://www.amazon.es/Fernando-Diaz-Villanueva/e/B00J2ASBXM #FernandoDiazVillanueva #claude #anthropic Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan. This week, Elon Musk managed — not for the first time — to be simultaneously in the stars and the gutter. SpaceX's IPO valued his rocket company at $2 trillion — making Musk, officially, a trillionaire, the richest person in the world by a very large margin. The space Musk — the defiant genius who bet everything on a reusable rocket and the promise of a cosmic monopoly — is astonishing. The Wall Street Journal called the IPO a Goldilocks debut with Musk starring as the three bears. But there is another Musk — the one in the gutter, promoting white nationalist violence from his platform on X. This week Musk not only stoked the anti-immigrant riots in Belfast but reiterated his support for the English white supremacist gangster Tommy Robinson. So is this another Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella? Keith Teare, publisher of That Was the Week, certainly thinks so. While Keith is in awe of Musk's entrepreneurial genius at SpaceX, he seems to excuse Musk's support for Tommy Robinson's paramilitarism. “I'm not even sure I like him,” Keith confesses in his musings on “civilisation.” Nor do the rest of us. But I wonder if this good/bad Elon narrative is too convenient. There is an uncomfortable symbiosis between Musk's journey to SpaceX and to white nationalist violence. For all the utopian cornucopia of space, our earthly reality is one of scarce land and fear of immigrants — Trump, Tommy Robinson, and this weekend's Swiss referendum on capping its population at 10 million. For all the Muskian promise of cosmic abundance, today's Muskian politics is paranoid and exclusionary. So maybe it's not just Elon. Everyone these days is simultaneously in the gutter and looking up at the stars. Five Takeaways • SpaceX: From El Segundo Warehouse to $2 Trillion Juggernaut: SpaceX is 25 years old. It started in a warehouse near Los Angeles, in an area with a concentration of rocket scientists. Musk bet almost all of his Tesla gains on the idea of a reusable rocket — and nearly lost everything. Then a rocket worked. Since then: iterative improvement, the rockets getting bigger and more reliable, a virtual global monopoly on delivering payloads to space, Starlink (satellite internet that actually works at gigabit speeds), and NASA subcontracting its launches. Now: $2 trillion at IPO, Musk a trillionaire. Wall-to-wall applause from the startup world. Wall-to-wall pylon on social media. Both simultaneously true. • The Grimace vs the Applause: Andrew vs Keith's Media Diet: Keith says most commentators are grimacing at the valuation and Musk's net worth. Andrew says the serious press — the Wall Street Journal, even the New York Times — is largely applauding. The exchange reveals the media bifurcation: mainstream outlets cover the achievement; social media — X, Facebook, LinkedIn — is wall-to-wall outrage about a trillionaire in a world of growing inequality. Keith's verdict on Musk: he doesn't care whether people like him. Neither, in Keith's view, should we. You judge him not on likability but on criteria: civilization or net worth. Different criteria, different judgment. • California and Europe: The Failure of Government: Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: California is a case study in failed government. Andrew had Jonathan Weber on the show this week — City on the Edge, the historic dysfunctionality of San Francisco city government. Fukuyama is trying to be optimistic about Europe's liberal future. Keith's counter: Fukuyama ignores the structural problem — top-heavy EU bureaucracy that overrides countries, producing dislike of the EU in every European nation, even France, which built it. Populism, Keith argues, is not the disease. It's the symptom. The disease is twenty years of bad policy. • Bernie Sanders Finally Had an Insight: The Sovereign Wealth Fund: Sanders has proposed a sovereign wealth fund owning 50% of all high-growth AI companies, giving every citizen ownership shares. Keith, who last week said 50% wasn't enough, this week credits it as the first genuine insight Sanders has had. The kicker: David Sacks — arch right-winger, former PayPal Mafia, Andreessen Horowitz — agreed on his podcast and said it should be 75%. Keith's observation: when David Sacks and Bernie Sanders can agree on the direction, left-right labels stop helping. The question is just how to make capitalism's gains flow to everyone. • Planning Beats Complaint: Keith's editorial closer. The choice is not between liking Musk and hating Musk, not between celebrating SpaceX and resenting its valuation. The choice is between complaining and planning. John O'Farrell, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, resigned and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times: “We can't let my former venture capital colleagues buy off democracy.” Gary Tan organised an Asian-American reaction against San Francisco's school board and won. Citizens who act beat citizens who complain. That's the week's lesson. That's Keith's lesson. Andrew is away next week. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: • That Was the Week by Keith Teare. • Fareed Zakaria, “How California Became a Case Study in Failed Government,” Washington Post — referenced in the conversation. • John O'Farrell, “We Can't Let My Former Venture Capital Colleagues Buy Off Democracy,” New York Times — referenced in the conversation. • Francis Fukuyama on the liberal vision of Europe — referenced in the conversation. • Episode 2938: Jonathan Weber on City on the Edge — referenced at the opening. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: SpaceX IPO, ...
Anthropic's trillion‑dollar AI “pause” call sparks a clash over safety vs. regulatory capture, as PBD, Tom and David Sacks' camp debate recursive self‑improvement, China's AI race, and whether government or big tech will own the future.
A single backroom phone call between Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, David Sacks and President Trump just killed the one executive order that could have put guardrails on the most dangerous AI models ever built. No public debate. No congressional vote. The people with the most to gain financially made the call and America is now racing into an AI future with zero oversight. Lance Wallnau and Mercedes Sparks break down exactly what was in that executive order, why Anthropic's Mythos model triggered the whole conversation, and what it means that the same AI systems capable of taking down power grids and banking infrastructure are now completely unregulated. Lance and Mercedes also unpack the uncomfortable truth that every person who talked Trump out of signing is financially incentivized to keep government out of the AI space entirely. This is not a left versus right issue. This is a power versus everyone else issue. 00:00 The Backroom Call Explained 02:30 What Anthropic's Mythos Model Actually Did 06:00 Zero Day Vulnerabilities and Critical Infrastructure 09:00 Why Elon and Zuckerberg Fought the Order 12:00 The AI Arms Race Against China 14:00 What a Christian Worldview Says About Unchecked AI 16:00 The Digital Bill of Rights and Intellectual Property 18:00 Where This Is All Headed LIKE if you knew Big Tech was calling the shots all along COMMENT: Drop BACKROOM in the comments if you think the American people deserved a vote on this. Subscribe so you never miss a live breakdown. Podcast Episode 2134: The Backroom Call That Changed America's AI Future | don't miss this! Listen to more episodes of the Lance Wallnau Show at lancewallnau.com/podcast
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
Photographer Rick Sammon shows how AI is transforming creative work and what happens when the Pope issues a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and invites tech skeptics and true believers to weigh in? The Pope's AI encyclical: technology, ethics, and human dignity Amazing interior, controversial exterior: Ferrari's first electric car Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI Search There's a new way to create Google Docs with your voice White House, Anthropic near deal for spy agencies to use AI Claude Mythos preview uncovers 10,000+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Project Glasswing Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes ElevenLabs's new music generation model can switch genres mid-track David Sacks's 11th-hour plea led to Trump's backtrack on AI executive order I'm tired of talking to AI In Memoriam: Don Newhouse Picks of the Week: KMart Muzak Infinite Jeffs isaiprofitable.com Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Guest: Rick Sammon Download or subscribe to Intelligent Machines at https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/intelligent365 zscaler.com/security
The Pope said WHAT about AI?
Im Musk-vs-Altman-Prozess kommt Greg Brockmans Tagebuch zur Sprache, Polymarket sieht Musks Chancen weiterhin überraschend hoch. OpenAI öffnet GPT 5.5 Cyber als Antwort auf Anthropics Mythos für Cybersecurity-Firmen und Banken. David Sacks verteidigt OpenAI plötzlich öffentlich. Anthropic ist auf Shopping-Tour: nach Google, XAI und CoreWeave folgt jetzt Akamai mit einem $1,8 Mrd. Deal. Das Colossus-Data-Center von XAI war kaum ausgelastet, was den Cursor-Deal nachvollziehbarer macht. Musk hat im Podcast keinen klaren XAI-Masterplan. The Information: OpenAI spart bis 2030 rund $100 Mrd. durch den neuen Microsoft-Deal. OpenAI macht $6,6 Mrd. Tender für Mitarbeiter-Shares. Anthropic warnt vor unauthorized Stock Sales und Investment Scams. Kuaishou spaltet Kling AI bei $20 Mrd. Bewertung ab. Substack vs. Ghost und Beehiiv. Wir besprechen die Earnings von Monday.com. Isomorphic Labs raised $2 Mrd. Brad Pitt wirbt für Trade Republic und steht Helsing vor einer $1,2 Mrd. Runde bei $18 Mrd. Bewertung. Unterstütze unseren Podcast und entdecke die Angebote unserer Werbepartner auf doppelgaenger.io/werbung. Vielen Dank! Philipp Glöckler und Philipp Klöckner sprechen heute über: (00:00:00) Intro (00:03:49) KI-Halluzinationen & Tool Use (00:08:11) Musk vs. Altman: Brockman-Diary & Polymarket (00:11:53) OpenAI Mythos / GPT 5.5 Cyber & David Sacks (00:18:30) Anthropic-Akamai: $1,8 Mrd. Cloud-Deal (00:26:36) XAI Colossus-Auslastung (00:31:10) Musk im Podcast: Kein XAI-Masterplan (00:35:08) Microsoft-OpenAI-Deal: OpenAI spart fast $100 Mrd. (00:38:21) OpenAI-Tender: $6,6 Mrd. an 600 Mitarbeiter (00:39:35) Anthropic warnt vor unauthorized Stock Sales (00:47:00) Substack (00:51:48) Monday.com Earnings & SaaS-Schnäppchenjagd (01:03:20) Isomorphic Labs raised $2 Mrd. (01:04:51) Brad Pitt für Trade Republic & Helsing $18 Mrd. Shownotes OpenAI GPT 5.5 als Cybersecurity-Modell - axios.com Anthropic schließt $1,8 Mrd. Cloud-Deal mit Akamai - theinformation.com Anthropic-SpaceX-KI-Deal mit Musk - wsj.com OpenAI spart $97 Mrd. bis 2030 durch Microsoft-Deal - theinformation.com Kuaishou plant Spin-off von Kling AI bei $20 Mrd. - theinformation.com Substack Tax: Ghost vs. Beehiiv-Konkurrenz - theverge.com Monday.com Earnings: Aktie unter Druck - barrons.com Googles Isomorphic Labs raised über $2 Mrd. - bloomberg.com Brad Pitt wirbt für Trade Republic - t-online.de Helsing vor $1,2 Mrd. Runde bei $18 Mrd. Bewertung - handelsblatt.com Elon Musk's xAI Is Failing - youtube.com
David Sacks has played a key role in shaping AI policy for the Trump administration. He was formerly the White House AI and crypto czar. Now, he's the co-chair of the President's Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sacks approaches the issue with a “let them cook” philosophy. Meaning, he thinks the way for the United States to win the global AI race is to move fast with minimally disruptive regulation. But with that comes a lot of questions about AI disruption to the workforce, who should be held responsible for harm caused by AI platforms, and the fear and division within America over the future of the technology. Sacks joins Dasha Burns in a wide-ranging interview to discuss it all.
Anthropic kündigt für Dienstag ein Financial Services Briefing an – möglicherweise wackelt der ganze Bankensektor. Amazon launcht Connect Talent als Hiring-Lösung. Google bekommt mit Preferred Sources die News-Quellen-Auswahl. Big-Tech-Earnings-Woche: Googles Earnings begeistern, vor allem die Cloud-Sparte explodiert. Amazons AWS-Geschäft beschleunigt sich solide. Apples Earnings sind ordentlich. Metas Earnings wachsen stark, doch die Aktie crasht wegen vorsichtigem Ausblick und steigenden Kosten. Microsofts Cloud wächst zwar weiter, enttäuscht aber gegenüber Google. Reddits Logged-In-User-Wachstum bremst stark ab. Robinhoods Krypto-Umsatz halbiert sich, denn Prediction Markets fressen das Trading. Spotifys Premium-Wachstum verlangsamt sich. Stargate-Projekt von OpenAI/Microsoft/SoftBank fällt heimlich zusammen – Data Center in UK, Norwegen und Texas storniert. Tencents neues Modell wurde mit Anthropic-Hilfe trainiert. Im Musk-Altman-Prozess gibt Musk zu, dass xAI Distillation von OpenAI gemacht hat. SpaceX-IPO-Filing: Nur Class-B-Holder können Musk feuern und diese Shares gehören Musk selbst. Neue S&P-500-Regeln sollen SpaceX-Aufnahme erleichtern. Unterstütze unseren Podcast und entdecke die Angebote unserer Werbepartner auf doppelgaenger.io/werbung. Vielen Dank! Philipp Glöckler und Philipp Klöckner sprechen heute über: (00:00:00) Anthropic Financial Services Briefing am Dienstag (00:04:08) Amazon: Produkt-Podcasts und Connect Talent Hiring (00:14:32) Google Preferred Sources für News-Suche (00:20:33) Google Earnings (00:33:54) Amazon Earnings (00:38:52) Apple Earnings (00:41:24) Meta Earnings (00:52:45) Stargate-Projekt fällt zusammen (00:55:12) Microsoft Earnings (00:58:09) Reddit, Robinhood, Spotify Earnings (01:06:25) Anthropic-Distillation (01:15:55) SpaceX-IPO: S&P-500-Sonderregeln und Musk-Governance (01:22:30) David Sacks demystifiziert Mythos Shownotes Anthropic kündigt Financial Services Briefing an - linkedin.com Amazon-Produkt-Podcasts: KI-Werbeformat - xcancel.com Amazon Connect Talent: Hiring-Lösung vorgestellt - youtu.be Google Preferred Sources: Eigene News-Quellen wählen - blog.google Google Q1 2026: Cloud +63%, Search +19% - cnbc.com Amazon Q1: Cloud +28%, Werbung +24% - xcancel.com Apple Q2 2026 Earnings - cnbc.com Zuckerberg: Iran-Krieg und KI-Kosten belasten Meta - wsj.com Stargate - ft.com Reddit Q1: Logged-In-User wachsen nur 7% - cnbc.com Robinhood: Krypto-Umsatz halbiert sich - cnbc.com Spotify Q1: Premium-Wachstum unter 10% - cnbc.com Tencents neues Modell mit Anthropic-Hilfe - theinformation.com Musk gibt zu: xAI hat OpenAI-Modelle distilliert - wired.com SpaceX: Neue S&P-500-Regeln könnten IPO erleichtern - marketwatch.com Reuters: Nur Musk kann Musk feuern bei SpaceX - reuters.com David Sacks demystifiziert Mythos auf X - xcancel.com
David Sacks has played a key role in shaping AI policy for the Trump administration. He was formerly the White House AI and crypto czar. Now, he's the co-chair of the President's Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sacks approaches the issue with a “let them cook” philosophy. Meaning, he thinks the way for the United States to win the global AI race is to move fast with minimally disruptive regulation. But with that comes a lot of questions about AI disruption to the workforce, who should be held responsible for harm caused by AI platforms, and the fear and division within America over the future of the technology. Sacks joins Dasha Burns in a wide-ranging interview to discuss it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The FDA has approved Regeneron's gene therapy for a rare form of inherited deafness, and it's free for Americans. Regeneron CEO Leonard Schleifer discusses the breakthrough treatment, drug pricing, AI's role in medical innovation, and what breakthroughs might come next. Co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology David Sacks was one of the original executives at PayPal, alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. As an AI and crypto advisor to President Trump, the All In Podcast co-host is helping shape AI regulation and policy in the United States. He comments on the government's complicated relationship with Anthropic and the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Plus, a U.S. soldier was arrested for his winning Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and Intel reported a blowout quarter. David Sacks - 17:43 Leonard Schleifer - 29:21 In this episode: Becky Quick, @BeckyQuick Joe Kernen, @JoeSquawk Andrew Ross Sorkin, @andrewrsorkin Katie Kramer, @Kramer_Katie Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career ✓ Claim : Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Keith Rabois was an early executive at PayPal (part of the famous PayPal Mafia), COO at Square, VP of Corporate Development at LinkedIn, and an early investor in Stripe, DoorDash, Airbnb, YouTube, Ramp, and Palantir. Currently he's managing director at Khosla Ventures. Also, he hasn't touched a computer since September 2010 (he does everything from an iPad).In our in-depth conversation, Keith shares:1. The barrels vs. ammunition hiring framework (and how to spot barrels)2. Why talking to customers is actively harmful for consumer products3. How to identify undiscovered talent4. Why the PM role is dying5. The three traits of the best-performing companies right now6. The specific interview question he asks every senior candidate7. Why CMOs (not engineers) are becoming the #1 consumer of tokens—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUsVanta—automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI—Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/hard-truths-about-building-in-the-ai-era—Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0—Where to find Keith Rabois:• X: https://x.com/rabois• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/keith• Website: https://www.khoslaventures.com—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Keith Rabois(01:59) Why Keith hasn't used a computer since 2010(04:52) The team you build is the company you build(07:40) How Keith learned to identify talent at PayPal(10:05) Tactics for getting better at hiring(15:31) The barrels vs. ammunition framework(18:52) What makes someone a barrel(22:36) How to attract the best talent(26:18) Building companies on undiscovered talent(27:53) Why better performance requires more pressure(32:36) Career advice in the age of AI(35:14) The future of the product triad(41:03) Why design and code are merging(49:35) What practicing law taught Keith about entrepreneurship(51:22) Contrarian takes on customer feedback(1:02:33) Identifying great AI opportunities(1:05:13) Advice for evaluating statrups (1:12:36) Criticizing in public vs. private(1:15:05) Failure corner(1:17:29) Lightning round—Referenced:• Square: https://squareup.com• Jack Dorsey on X: https://x.com/jack• Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens• Simon Willison's Weblog: https://simonwillison.net• Vinod Khosla on X: https://x.com/vkhosla• Peter Thiel on X: https://x.com/peterthiel• Max Levchin on X: https://x.com/mlevchin• David Sacks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidoliversacks• Tony Xu on X: https://x.com/t_xu• David Sze on X: https://x.com/davidsze• Faire: https://www.faire.com• Max Rhodes on X: https://x.com/MaxRhodesOK• Jeffrey Kolovson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreykolovson• Uncapped | Comparative Advantages w/ Keith Rabois: https://www.khoslaventures.com/posts/uncapped-comparative-advantages-w-keith-rabois• Lattice: https://lattice.com• Taylor Francis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-francis-4ba49640• Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-product-at-stripe-jeff-weinstein• The art of hiring: insights from Khosla Ventures, Airbnb, Ramp and Traba: https://ramp.com/velocity/the-art-of-hiring-insights• Eric Glyman: Seek out super individual contributors (ICs): https://ramp.com/velocity/the-art-of-hiring-insights#Eric-Glyman:-Seek-out-super-individual-contributors-(ICs)• Eric Glyman on X: https://x.com/eglyman• Mike Moore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-moore-802223177• Brian Chesky's new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach• Why you should work much harder RIGHT NOW: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/03/why-you-should-work-much-harder-right-now.html• Opendoor: https://www.opendoor.com• The Craft of Early Stage Venture | Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark | Uncapped with Jack Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRiblwiXt-Q• Lovable: https://lovable.dev• The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-paid-to-vibe-code• Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-lovable-anton-osika• Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn't even started yet: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/marc-andreessen-the-real-ai-boom• Jeremy Stoppelman on X: https://x.com/jeremys• The design process is dead. Here's what's replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-design-process-is-dead• Andy Warhol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol• Curation and Algorithms: https://stratechery.com/2015/curation-and-algorithms• Ernest Hemingway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway• William Shakespeare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare• Evan Moore on X: https://x.com/evancharles• Andrew Mason on X: https://x.com/andrewmason• Read Taylor Swift's Full Viral Speech After Record-Breaking Awards Sweep: https://www.newsweek.com/entertainment/read-taylor-swift-full-acceptance-speech-record-breaking-awards-sweep-11745941• The Chainsmokers: Stories Behind the Songs, AI's Impact on Music, and Venture Investing | Uncapped with Jack Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMSC-2pYnw&list=PLtpH7YnTL8ihy0nR2BV32n5VkRtqlDAS1&index=16• How to spot a top 1% startup early: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-spot-a-top-1-startup-early• David Weiden on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidweiden• Alfred Lin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linalfred• Keith's post about vertical integration on X: https://x.com/rabois/status/870673635375104000• Jon Chu on X: https://x.com/jonchu• Kanu Gulati on X: https://x.com/KanuGulati• Rogo: https://rogo.ai• Profound: https://www.tryprofound.com• Basis: https://www.getbasis.ai• Spellbook: https://www.spellbook.legal• Roelof Botha on X: https://x.com/roelofbotha• Delian Asparouhov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/delian-asparouhov-87447742• Lessons From Keith Rabois, Essay 1: How to become a Venture Capitalist: https://delian.io/lessons-1• Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/velocity-over-everything-how-ramp• Nuremberg on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/nuremberg/umc.cmc.3sg4y0382byupy76bfy7307k4• Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com• “NO DAYS OFF”—Bill Belichick on X: https://x.com/SNFonNBC/status/829036279069364224—Recommended books:• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012• The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of One Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls: https://www.amazon.com/Jordan-Rules-Sam-Smith/dp/0671796666• The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It: https://www.amazon.com/Upside-Stress-Why-Good-You/dp/1101982934—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com
Keith Rabois was an early executive at PayPal (part of the famous PayPal Mafia), COO at Square, VP of Corporate Development at LinkedIn, and an early investor in Stripe, DoorDash, Airbnb, YouTube, Ramp, and Palantir. Currently he's managing director at Khosla Ventures. Also, he hasn't touched a computer since September 2010 (he does everything from an iPad).In our in-depth conversation, Keith shares:1. The barrels vs. ammunition hiring framework (and how to spot barrels)2. Why talking to customers is actively harmful for consumer products3. How to identify undiscovered talent4. Why the PM role is dying5. The three traits of the best-performing companies right now6. The specific interview question he asks every senior candidate7. Why CMOs (not engineers) are becoming the #1 consumer of tokens—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUsVanta—automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI—Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/hard-truths-about-building-in-the-ai-era—Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0—Where to find Keith Rabois:• X: https://x.com/rabois• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/keith• Website: https://www.khoslaventures.com—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Keith Rabois(01:59) Why Keith hasn't used a computer since 2010(04:52) The team you build is the company you build(07:40) How Keith learned to identify talent at PayPal(10:05) Tactics for getting better at hiring(15:31) The barrels vs. ammunition framework(18:52) What makes someone a barrel(22:36) How to attract the best talent(26:18) Building companies on undiscovered talent(27:53) Why better performance requires more pressure(32:36) Career advice in the age of AI(35:14) The future of the product triad(41:03) Why design and code are merging(49:35) What practicing law taught Keith about entrepreneurship(51:22) Contrarian takes on customer feedback(1:02:33) Identifying great AI opportunities(1:05:13) Advice for evaluating statrups (1:12:36) Criticizing in public vs. private(1:15:05) Failure corner(1:17:29) Lightning round—Referenced:• Square: https://squareup.com• Jack Dorsey on X: https://x.com/jack• Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens• Simon Willison's Weblog: https://simonwillison.net• Vinod Khosla on X: https://x.com/vkhosla• Peter Thiel on X: https://x.com/peterthiel• Max Levchin on X: https://x.com/mlevchin• David Sacks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidoliversacks• Tony Xu on X: https://x.com/t_xu• David Sze on X: https://x.com/davidsze• Faire: https://www.faire.com• Max Rhodes on X: https://x.com/MaxRhodesOK• Jeffrey Kolovson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreykolovson• Uncapped | Comparative Advantages w/ Keith Rabois: https://www.khoslaventures.com/posts/uncapped-comparative-advantages-w-keith-rabois• Lattice: https://lattice.com• Taylor Francis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-francis-4ba49640• Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-product-at-stripe-jeff-weinstein• The art of hiring: insights from Khosla Ventures, Airbnb, Ramp and Traba: https://ramp.com/velocity/the-art-of-hiring-insights• Eric Glyman: Seek out super individual contributors (ICs): https://ramp.com/velocity/the-art-of-hiring-insights#Eric-Glyman:-Seek-out-super-individual-contributors-(ICs)• Eric Glyman on X: https://x.com/eglyman• Mike Moore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-moore-802223177• Brian Chesky's new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach• Why you should work much harder RIGHT NOW: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/03/why-you-should-work-much-harder-right-now.html• Opendoor: https://www.opendoor.com• The Craft of Early Stage Venture | Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark | Uncapped with Jack Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRiblwiXt-Q• Lovable: https://lovable.dev• The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/getting-paid-to-vibe-code• Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-lovable-anton-osika• Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn't even started yet: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/marc-andreessen-the-real-ai-boom• Jeremy Stoppelman on X: https://x.com/jeremys• The design process is dead. Here's what's replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-design-process-is-dead• Andy Warhol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol• Curation and Algorithms: https://stratechery.com/2015/curation-and-algorithms• Ernest Hemingway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway• William Shakespeare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare• Evan Moore on X: https://x.com/evancharles• Andrew Mason on X: https://x.com/andrewmason• Read Taylor Swift's Full Viral Speech After Record-Breaking Awards Sweep: https://www.newsweek.com/entertainment/read-taylor-swift-full-acceptance-speech-record-breaking-awards-sweep-11745941• The Chainsmokers: Stories Behind the Songs, AI's Impact on Music, and Venture Investing | Uncapped with Jack Altman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMSC-2pYnw&list=PLtpH7YnTL8ihy0nR2BV32n5VkRtqlDAS1&index=16• How to spot a top 1% startup early: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-spot-a-top-1-startup-early• David Weiden on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidweiden• Alfred Lin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linalfred• Keith's post about vertical integration on X: https://x.com/rabois/status/870673635375104000• Jon Chu on X: https://x.com/jonchu• Kanu Gulati on X: https://x.com/KanuGulati• Rogo: https://rogo.ai• Profound: https://www.tryprofound.com• Basis: https://www.getbasis.ai• Spellbook: https://www.spellbook.legal• Roelof Botha on X: https://x.com/roelofbotha• Delian Asparouhov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/delian-asparouhov-87447742• Lessons From Keith Rabois, Essay 1: How to become a Venture Capitalist: https://delian.io/lessons-1• Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/velocity-over-everything-how-ramp• Nuremberg on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/nuremberg/umc.cmc.3sg4y0382byupy76bfy7307k4• Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com• “NO DAYS OFF”—Bill Belichick on X: https://x.com/SNFonNBC/status/829036279069364224—Recommended books:• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012• The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of One Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls: https://www.amazon.com/Jordan-Rules-Sam-Smith/dp/0671796666• The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It: https://www.amazon.com/Upside-Stress-Why-Good-You/dp/1101982934—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com
Growing Up? Winning Wars Involves Losing Battles.Anthropic won a First Amendment ruling against the Pentagon. OpenAI killed Sora. One insisted on principle. The other chose discipline.Meanwhile: software trades below the S&P 500 for the first time ever, Jensen pitched a trillion-dollar token factory, and David Sacks left the building.Intelligence is getting cheaper. The question is who earns trust while it happens.This week's That Was The Week: https://thatwastheweek.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thatwastheweek.com/subscribe
Crypto News: David Sacks says his time as Trump's crypto and AI czar has ended. White House clears review of proposal to allow crypto in 401(k) retirement plans. Coinbase, Fannie Mae bring crypto-backed mortgages to homebuyers.Brought to you by
In this episode of Crypto Town Hall, Scott and the panel dive into the chaotic crypto regulatory landscape, with heavy focus on the ongoing stablecoin yield debate, Coinbase's role in stalling the Clarity Act, and Senator Lummis' warning that America can't wait until 2030. They discuss David Sacks stepping down from his crypto/AI role, Bitcoin's resilience amid broader market weakness, and whether current legislation fights are truly about consumer protection or legacy banking interests. The conversation also touches on Ethereum's recent weakness versus Bitcoin, the broader implications for DeFi, and why patience and discipline matter more than ever in volatile times.
Bitcoin has dropped sharply toward the $66K level as major developments in crypto policy and industry leadership shake market sentiment. Coinbase is facing growing backlash after refusing to support the latest version of the Clarity Act, raising concerns about delays in U.S. crypto regulation, while David Sacks steps down from his role advising on crypto and AI policy—adding to uncertainty around the future direction of regulation. At the same time, debates over stablecoin yield and broader market structure continue to divide lawmakers and industry leaders. With political shifts, regulatory tension, and weakening sentiment all hitting at once, the big question is whether this is just a temporary pullback—or the start of a deeper move.
Bitcoin plunges below $67K as Iran war fears, rising Treasury yields, and oil spikes trigger liquidations and retail selling, with Bitcoin ETFs seeing their biggest outflow in three weeks. Tether commits to a full KPMG audit for USDT amid U.S. expansion plans, while David Sacks exits his White House crypto role. Institutional custody expands (Anchorage adds TRX), but macro headwinds dominate—markets remain fragile with options expiry looming and extreme fear prevailing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As the Trump administration makes a bid to hire more young people in the federal government via the Tech Force, the leader of the Office of Personnel Management told lawmakers he doesn't believe stability is the biggest draw for the next generation. Director Scott Kupor told lawmakers on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government at a Wednesday oversight hearing that he doesn't “think young people actually think about 40-year careers. I think they think about small increments.” Kupor said that's why the Tech Force — the administration's program to fill federal tech vacancies with early career workers — was designed to be two years. He later stated that he doesn't “think stability for young people is the most compelling message.” The comments arose in an exchange between Kupor and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the ranking member of the subcommittee, about the message that OPM is sending to attract younger people to the federal government. The technology industry is heavily represented in President Donald Trump's first list of appointees to restock a White House science and tech advisory panel. Among the 13 appointees to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) were Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Google's Sergey Brin, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. That panel will be co-chaired by David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto czar, and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.The PCAST has been around for decades as a way for the White House to receive feedback from scientists, engineers, technologists, and representatives from the private sector. While Trump announced the re-establishment of the council via executive order in January 2025, there hadn't yet been details on its membership. In addition to the Wednesday list, the White House said it expects to announce more appointees “in the near future along with information about the Council's first meeting.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
A top advisor to Donald Trump, billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks, warned that, if the war on Iran continues, "Israel could just be destroyed", or it could even use a nuclear weapon. Ben Norton explains how Washington sabotaged multiple peace deals and negotiations with Tehran, putting the world on the path toward catastrophe. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo9IHy0y8mo Topics 0:00 (CLIP) US official warns of nuclear war 0:22 Israel's nuclear weapons 2:04 UN vote against nukes in Middle East 3:00 US hypocrisy on Israel & Iran 3:34 Trump advisor David Sacks 4:55 (CLIP) Trump advisor on Israel & Iran 6:04 David Sacks, Silicon Valley billionaire 8:35 US military escalates war on Iran 9:24 This war is unpopular 10:00 Iran wants deterrence 10:53 Israel is running out of interceptors 13:33 Reports of damage in Israel 14:09 Censorship in Israel & Gulf regimes 16:36 Limited water in Persian Gulf 17:48 (CLIP) Gulf regimes in danger 18:56 Dangerous to be a US "ally" 20:31 Ali Khamenei opposed nukes 21:38 New leader Mojtaba Khamenei 22:35 Iranian military criticized fatwa 23:37 Will Iran get nuclear weapons? 25:16 Iran negotiations with USA 26:48 US-Israeli surprise attack in 2025 27:19 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) 28:09 Conclusion 29:27 Outro
Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump threatens treason charges on media, Tucker says CIA criminally referring him, David Sacks warns Israel may nuke Iran. Maz: https://x.com/MazMHussain To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
“Whether you like Amodei or not, at least he's a leader.” — Andrew KeenDario Amodei is the most interesting man in America right now. Not because he runs a $500 billion company or because he's suing the Trump administration or because Anthropic's Claude topped the iPhone charts. But because he's doing something nobody else in Silicon Valley has the balls to do: he's acting like a human being in public. He has principles, he states them, and he accepts the consequences. That's leadership. It shouldn't be remarkable. In 2026, it is.This week's That Was The Week is about how America both loves and hates AI. An NBC poll found 60–70% of Americans are concerned about AI — making it even less popular than the Democratic Party (quite an achievement). A hundred planned data centers have been cancelled because of local protests. 10,000 authors published an anti AI manifesto at the London Book Fair this week. Each week, in contrast, a billion people used ChatGPT, but these users often seem oblivious to its weaknesses. So Keith's AI-generated video for the show was, by universal agreement (including his own), not going to win an Oscar tomorrow. Except for Most Sloppy AI generated video.Every road this week led back to Amodei who is anything but sloppy. He's become a Rorschach test for the entire industry. Tech progressives Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are lauding him. The MAGA crowd — including David Sacks, Trump's AI czar — on the All In podcast are doing the opposite. Keith thinks Dario is a naive CEO making bad business decisions — comparing him to his own doomed battle in the late Nineties against Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. It's a fair point. Should a tech CEO really be setting AI policy? Keith's answer is no — that's for people like David Sacks appointed by executive, legislative, and judicial branches. I'm not so sure. In an America defined by its dysfunctional political system, we need leaders like Amodei to take ethical stands. If not, then who?The IPO race this year between Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI makes this particularly interesting. I wonder whether Amodei might use the IPO itself to force a public debate that nobody in government is willing to have. Not just about guardrails or weapons — but about what kind of society AI is building and who gets to decide what does and doesn't get used. Musk, by publicly embracing white racists and other groups of hate, is making his politics clear. Sam Altman, as always, is wearing every hat simultaneously. Amodei, in contrast, knows his hat. Rather than MAGA, it should say: The Most Interesting Man in America. He's got my vote. Even if he's not running for office. Five Takeaways• AI Is Less Popular Than the Democrats: An NBC poll found 60–70% of Americans are concerned about AI. A hundred data centres have been cancelled due to local protests. 10,000 authors published an anti-AI manifesto at the London Book Fair. Close to a billion people use ChatGPT each week — but the haters are the non-users, and they outnumber the lovers by a wide margin.• Amodei Is the 21st Century's First Real Leader: He's suing the Trump administration. He's refusing to let Claude be used for autonomous weapons. He's accepting the business consequences. Keith thinks he's naive. I think he's the only person in Silicon Valley acting like a human being in public. The debate between us is the show.• Keith Compares Amodei to His Own Doomed Battle Against Ballmer: In the late Nineties, Keith fought Microsoft with RealNames and lost. He sees Amodei on the same trajectory — noble, principled, already finished. I compared Keith to Pete Hegseth declaring the Iranian regime defeated. The MAGA crowd on All In, including Trump's AI czar David Sacks, agree with Keith. That alone should give him pause.• The IPO Race Will Force the Debate: Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI are all expected to go public this year. Amodei could use the IPO to force a conversation about what kind of society AI is building — a conversation nobody in government is willing to have. Musk is making his politics clear by embracing white racists. Altman is wearing every hat. Amodei knows his.• In the Absence of Leadership, Fear Thrives: Keith's best point of the week. Nobody is setting AI policy. The politicians are clowns. The tech CEOs are children. In the vacuum, fear wins. Amodei is trying to fill it. Whether he succeeds or not, at least he's trying. That's more than anyone else can say. About the GuestKeith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week and co-founder of SignalRank. He is a serial entrepreneur, former CEO of RealNames, and a regular sparring partner on Keen On America.References:• That Was The Week: AI Loved and Hated — Keith Teare's editorial.• Rex Woodbury, “Why Does Everybody Hate AI?” — Digital Native.• Josh Dzieza, The Verge — on lawyers, PhDs, and scientists in the AI gig economy.• Noah Smith — “Something Feels Weird About This Economy.”• Meta's acquisition of Moltbook — the AI agent social network.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: AI loved and hated (01:17) - NBC poll: AI less popular than the Democrats (03:10) - Rex Woodbury and the haters: is it really AI people hate? (04:21) - AI slop and Keith's terrible video (07:28) - The adoption curve: AI companies are isolated from mainstream opinion (07:51) - Dario Amodei as the answer to both lovers and haters (10:14) - Keith vs Ballmer redux: why Amodei has already lost (12:09) - OpenAI and Google employees rush to Anthropic's defense (14:24) - Woodbury, The Verge, and AI taking jobs (16:51) - Keith's Apple TV app: vibe coded in a weekend (19:29) - AI will destroy universities: cheating at apocalyptic levels (21:41) - Noah Smith: something feels weird about this economy (27:00) - The IPO race: Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX (30:42) - Could Amodei blow up the IPO proce...
“They're both naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the absence of clarity to their own advantage. Neither one of them is an authoritative leader of opinion with the interests of everyone at heart.” — Keith TeareWhat a difference a week makes. Last Saturday, Keith Teare was arguing that Anthropic was wrong to push back against the US government's use of AI in warfare. This week his editorial is entitled “No Good Guys.” He's used AI to put images of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegseth around the same table—and found all three guilty of poor leadership. According to Keith, Amodei is “ideologically” (whatever that means) driven. Altman is commercially driven and Hegseth is just following orders. None of them is asking the all-important questions about AI policy. And the man who should be—Trump's AI czar David Sacks—is absent-without-leave. All four should be court martialed.Yes, a lot has happened in seven days. Altman publicly supported Amodei's position on surveillance and autonomous weapons—then pulled a classic Sam u-turn and signed a contract with the Department of War. Amodei's internal memo was leaked to The Information, revealing that he'd interpreted the government's “no unlawful use” language as meaning there is no law. And the US military used Claude in the Iran war anyway. As Keith puts it: they're all naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the gaps to their own self-advantage.The only problem, of course, is that this isn't a playground game. And that these men are all shaping the lives (and deaths) of countless people around the world.Meanwhile, Om Malik's “Post of the Week” offers a devastating contrast between Xi's China and Trump's America. China, Om argues, has published a five-year AI plan built on open-source software and bottom-up adoption. America, in contrast, has AI theater. No strategy, no policy, no leadership—just contracts, leaks, and perpetual spin. Then there's the Startup of the Week, Jobright, which hit $5 million in annual revenue with nine people, suggesting that the companies of the future may not need humans at all. Keith's own SignalRank has four people and claims to be going public. We seem to be heading for post-human companies before we've figured out who's managing the humans.Maybe we should court martial everyone. What a difference a week makes. Five Takeaways• No Good Guys: Keith Teare's editorial puts Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegseth in the same room—and finds all three guilty of bad leadership. Amodei is ideologically driven, Altman is commercially driven, and Hegseth is just doing his job. None of them is asking the big questions about AI policy. The real culprit may be the invisible AI czar, David Sacks.• Altman Said One Thing, Then Did Another: Last week Altman publicly supported Amodei's position on surveillance and autonomous weapons. This week he signed a contract with the Department of War. The contract uses “no unlawful use” language—which, as Amodei's leaked memo points out, effectively means there is no law.• The US Used Claude in Iran Anyway: Despite the very public dispute between Anthropic and the government, the US military used Claude in the Iran operation. The government doesn't need your permission to use your product. It just needs an API key and a credit card.• China Has a Plan. America Has Theater: Om Malik's “Post of the Week” contrasts China's published five-year AI strategy—built on open-source software and bottom-up adoption—with America's complete absence of AI policy. The Chinese approach is more inclusive and practical than anything coming out of Washington or Silicon Valley.• The Future Company Has Nine Employees: Startup of the week Jobright hit $5 million in annual recurring revenue with just nine people. Keith's own company, SignalRank, has four people and is going public. The implication: the companies of the future will be run mostly by software agents, not humans. We're heading for post-human companies. About the GuestKeith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, founder and CEO of SignalRank, and a recurring sparring partner on Keen On America. A serial entrepreneur and investor, he is the co-founder of TechCrunch and RealNames. He joins the show every Saturday for the weekly tech roundup.ReferencesEssays, posts, and interviews referenced:• Keith Teare, “No Good Guys” — That Was The Week editorial• Om Malik, “The Great AI Game versus AI Theater” — Post of the Week• Ross Douthat, “If AI Is a Weapon, Who Should Control It?” — New York Times• Ben Thompson, Stratechery — on “no unlawful use” and the absence of international law• Paul Krugman on the economics of technological change — technology, jobs, wages, and monopolies• Tim O'Reilly, “How We Bet Against the Bitter Lesson” — skills and the future knowledge economy• Yascha Mounk and Danielle Allen on participatory democracy and AI governance• Previous Keen On episodes: Tom Wells on the Kissinger tapes; Michael Ellsberg on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers• Startup of the Week: Jobright — $5M ARR with nine employeesAbout Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: What a difference a week makes (01:14) - “No Good Guys”: Keith's editorial and Om Malik's wake-up call (02:30) - Amodei, Altman, Hegseth: three self-interested players (04:02) - How the Iran invasion changed the AI debate (05:28) - “No unlawful use”: a meaningless phrase in a lawless context (06:50) - The US used Claude in Iran despite the Anthropic dispute (08:15) - Naughty boys in the playground: spinning vs. leadership (09:31) - Bobby Kenn...
(0:00) David Sacks introduces Saagar Enjeti and Michael Tracey (1:04) Reacting to the arrest of Prince Andrew in the UK, Epstein's global finance network (11:24) Who was Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this story really about? (34:10) Michael Tracey explains "Epstein Mythology" (1:14:23) Kevin Bass joins to discuss Reid Hoffman's history with Epstein (1:32:52) Michael Tracey responds to criticism Follow Saagar: https://x.com/esaagar Follow Michael: https://x.com/mtracey Follow Kevin: https://x.com/kevinnbass Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2024276079888732649 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/19/world/uk-prince-andrew-arrest-epstein https://signalohio.org/les-wexner-deposed-by-house-oversight-committee-over-epstein-ties https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-money-scams-investigation.html https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2023941188588290502 https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2024276084401828260 https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2023941213951512966 https://x.com/presentwitness_/status/2024522531542356447
It's an Emmajority Report Thursday on the Majority Report On Today's program: AP publishes a leaked memo instructing ICE and CBP border agents to forcibly enter people's homes without a judge-issued warrant, asserting that so-called "administrative" warrants are sufficient. ICE uses a 5-year-old boy as bait to arrest his father who is in an asylum process. Union leaders throughout Minnesota are calling for a general strike in the twin cities on Friday, January 23. Publisher of the Global Currents newsletter, Jostein Hauge joins the Emma to breakdown the aftermath of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. New York State Assemblyperson, Claire Valdez, representing the 37th District in Queens joins the program to discuss her candidacy for New York's 7th Congressional District. In the Fun Half: Matt Binder and Brandon Sutton join Emma. Jared Kushner speaks at the WEF in Davos, CH and presents his self-proclaimed "master plan" for the Gaza strip. Trump's AI and Crypto czar, David Sacks panels on MSNBC's Squawk Box to express how frightened he is of Ro Khanna's proposed 5% billionaire tax. Trump's polling is in the toilet, currently sitting at net -19% approval rating. Francesca Fiorentini posts a video responding to Ana Kasparian's apology to her audience for failing to recognize Trump as a fascist ahead of his SECOND term. If only there were clues. All that and more To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ZOCDOC: Go to Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY and download the Zocdoc app to sign-up for FREE and book a top-rated doctor. SPOTIFY: Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/majority NAKED WINES: To get 6 bottles of wine for $39.99, head to NakedWines.com/MAJORITY and use code MAJORITY for both the code AND PASSWORD. SUNSET LAKE: Use the code NEWFLOWER—all one word—to get 30% off their new crop of hemp flower and vape carts at SunsetLakeCBD.com Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com
Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn't tell loved ones or human therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide.The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what's being called "AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for months. But this isn't just about isolated edge cases. It's the emergence of an entirely new "attachment economy" designed to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale. Dr. Zak Stein has analyzed dozens of these cases, examining actual conversation transcripts and interviewing those affected. What he's uncovered reveals fundamental flaws in how AI systems interact with our attachment systems and capacity for human bonding, vulnerabilities we've never had to name before because technology has never been able to exploit them like this.In this episode, Zak helps us understand the psychological mechanisms behind AI psychosis, how conversations with chatbots transform into reality-warping experiences, and what this tells us about the profound risks of building technology that targets our most intimate psychological needs. If we're going to do something about this growing problem of AI related psychological harms, we're gonna need to understand the problem even more deeply. And in order to do that, we need more data. That's why Zak is working with researchers at the University of North Carolina to gather data on this growing mental health crisis. If you or a loved one have a story of AI-induced psychological harm to share, you can go to: AIHPRA.org. This site is not a support line. If you or someone you know is in distress, you can always call or text the national helpline in the US at 988 or your local emergency services RECOMMENDED MEDIA The website for the AI Psychological Harms Research CoalitionFurther reading on AI PscyhosisThe Atlantic article on LLM-ings outsourcing their thinking to AIFurther reading on David Sacks' comparison of AI psychosis to a “moral panic” RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODESHow OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His DeathPeople are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI.Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human ConnectionRethinking School in the Age of AI CORRECTIONSAfter this episode was recorded, the name of Zak's organization changed to the AI Psychological Harms Research Consortium Zak referenced the University of California system making a deal with OpenAI. It was actually the Cal State System. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Charles Hoskinson on the current administration's role in crypto, uninstalling X, and more. Input Output Founder Charles Hoskinson joins CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie to discuss taking a break from X, the impact of political memecoins on regulation, his views on the White House's impact on the industry, and why decentralization must survive Wall Street's institutional takeover. Plus, he outlines the road ahead for Cardano and what 2026 has in store for the privacy-focused Midnight protocol. - Timecodes: 01:57 - Why Charles Uninstalled X03:57 - Is Crypto Losing Its Soul?10:42 - Impact of the Trump Memecoin Launch & Trump's "Predatory Free-for-All"14:53 - How the Government Should Regulate Digital Assets19:40 - Failure of the Crypto Czar and Who Would Have Been the Right Choice24:20 - Charles' Relationship with the White House26:14 - Reaction to Venezuela Operation and the Administration's Strategy Failure30:32 - We "Lost Our Window" on Market Structure35:30 - "If I Was Speaker of the House...I Would That Day File Articles of Impeachment"37:13 - Charles' Global Optimism for Crypto40:44 - Cardano's Biggest Successes in 202546:48 - Where Does Programmable Privacy Go from Here with Midnight?52:51 - Why AI Is a Greater Threat Than Quantum - Break the cycle of exploitation. Break down the barriers to truth. Break into the next generation of privacy. Break Free. Free to scroll without being monetized. Free from censorship. Freedom without fear. We deserve more when it comes to privacy. Experience the next generation of blockchain that is private and inclusive by design. Break free with Midnight, visit midnight.network/break-free - This episode was hosted by Jennifer Sanasie.
The boys continue their discussion of Walter Isaacson's "Elon Musk." This is the part where Elon loses his mind. Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:From self-proclaimed ‘socialist' to Team Trump and DeSantis: Elon Musk's curious politics revealed The Quiet Political Rise of David Sacks, Silicon Valley's Prophet of Urban DoomElon Musk biographer admits suggestion SpaceX head blocked Ukraine drone attack was wrong Elon Musk's Daughter on Dad's Biography: 'Sad Excuse for a Puff Piece'Character LimitTwitter fulfilling more government censorship requests under Musk Elon Musk booed for nearly 5 minutes straight at Dave Chappelle show in San Francisco New CNN Chief Trying to Please GOP Elite Research finds more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if USAID defunding continues, including more than 4 million children under fiveWhat the data says about Social Security Trump Administration, DOGE Activities Risk SSA Operations and Security of Personal DataThanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
President Trump's new executive order makes it harder for states to regulate AI, giving a powerful industry even more power. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt and Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. President Trump with David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto czar. Photo by Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
(0:00) Bestie intros (0:12) OpenAI declares "Code Red" as competitors eat away ChatGPT market share (28:14) David Sacks vs. New York Times (51:24) New poverty line, America's slow descent into socialism Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: Sacks's AI waiver: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/David-Sacks.pdf Sacks's Crypto waiver: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Memo-David-Sacks-3.5.2025-1.pdf https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-ceo-declares-code-red-combat-threats-chatgpt-delays-ads-effort?rc=f8fu8f https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/19/nvidia-says-no-assurance-of-deal-with-openai-after-100-billion-pact.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/us/politics/anita-dunn-biden-white-house.html https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
FOLLOW UP starts with the realization that Spotify Wrapped thinks we are 82 years old, which honestly feels accurate, followed by a massive shout out to Bama Bryan on Bluesky for listening to us for over 3,000 minutes. We look at the grim stats from the Department of Government Efficiency regarding USAID deaths, then move to IN THE NEWS where the KALSHI CEO wants to monetize "any difference in opinion" because gambling on the news is the future. PALANTIR CEO Alex Karp claims making war crimes constitutional is bad for business, META STARTS KICKING AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN OFF their platforms to avoid fines, and TETHER gets a "weak" rating while U.S. BANK calls the ability to freeze stablecoins "appealing." We discuss the LEAK CONFIRMS OPENAI IS PREPARING ADS for ChatGPT while SAM ALTMAN DECLARES 'CODE RED' to catch up to Google. Speaking of which, ONE OF GOOGLE'S BIGGEST AI ADVANTAGES IS WHAT IT ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT YOU, even if GOOGLE DISCOVER IS TESTING AI-GENERATED HEADLINES that are complete lies. We cover how GROK WOULD PREFER A SECOND HOLOCAUST OVER HARMING ELON MUSK, the US PATENT OFFICE ruling on generative AI, a new report on DAVID SACKS profiting from his administration role, and INSTACART SUES NEW YORK CITY because paying workers a living wage is apparently unconstitutional. We wrap up the news with the HUMAN ROBOT HYPE SCARING CHINA, a sad story where CHILDREN SOB AS WAYMO RUNS OVER DOG, a video showing a WAYMO SELF-DRIVING TAXI TAKES PASSENGER THROUGH ACTIVE POLICE SCENE, and the fact that PASSENGERS FACE DISRUPTION AS AIRBUS UPDATES THOUSANDS OF PLANES due to solar flares.In MEDIA CANDY, the industry is shaking because NETFLIX BUYS WARNER BROS. FOR $82 BILLION, meaning they now own everything from Harry Potter to Batman. We look at upcoming releases including WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY, FALLOUT SEASON 2, ROMCON: WHO THE F**K IS JASON PORTER?, SEAN COMBS: THE RECKONING, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, and A MAN ON THE INSIDE. Moving to APPS & DOODADS, we discuss the pure joy of uninstalling DROPBOX, our collective hatred for FUCK CENTER STAGE, and the report that APPLE EMPLOYEES ARE 'GIDDY' ABOUT ALAN DYE'S DEPARTURE. We also cover the horror show where GOOGLE'S AGENTIC AI WIPES USER'S ENTIRE HDD without permission, a study showing YOUR GLITCHY VIDEO CALLS MAY MAKE PEOPLE MISTRUST YOU, and how SCIENTISTS CREATED THE BLACKEST FABRIC EVER.Finally, in THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE, we learn that CLAUDIA BLACK EXITS ‘AHSOKA' SEASON 2 over pay disputes because Disney is apparently broke, we scrutinize LEAKED CLIPS FROM THE RUMORED 50TH ANNIVERSARY RERELEASE OF THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF STAR WARS (still no R2D2), check out a STORMTROOPER SUIT ON FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE, and mention THE MAD MEN 4K release.Sponsors:Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordWatch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/4IRVvpdJC30Show notes at https://gog.show/725FOLLOW UPKalshi CEO Says He Wants to Monetize ‘Any Difference in Opinion'Palantir CEO Says Making War Crimes Constitutional Would Be Good for BusinessMeta starts kicking Australian children off Instagram and FacebookMeta reportedly plans to slash Metaverse budget by up to 30%IN THE NEWSCrypto's Most Trusted Stablecoin Given Lowest Possible ‘Weak' Rating By Major TradFi AgencyU.S. Bank Calls Ability to Freeze Stablecoins ‘Appealing' as Crypto Has Completely Lost the PlotLeak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll outOpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares 'code red' as ChatGPT competition mountsOne of Google's biggest AI advantages is what it already knows about youGoogle Discover is testing AI-generated headlines and they aren't goodGrok would prefer a second Holocaust over harming Elon MuskUS patent office says generative AI is equivalent to other tools in inventors' beltsThe People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AINew report examines how David Sacks might profit from Trump administration roleInstacart sues New York City over minimum pay, tipping lawsHumanoid Robot Hype Is Officially Scaring ChinaChildren Sob as Waymo Runs Over DogWaymo self-driving taxi takes passenger through active police scene in downtown LA, video showsPassengers face disruption as Airbus updates thousands of planesMEDIA CANDYNetflix Buys Warner Bros. for $82 BillionWake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out MysteryFallout Season 2 on Prime VideoROMCON: Who The F**k is Jason Porter? - Season 1Sean Combs: The ReckoningThe Long Kiss GoodnightThe American RevolutionA Man On the InsideAPPS & DOODADSGruber: Apple employees 'giddy' about Alan Dye's departureGoogle's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failureYour glitchy video calls may make people mistrust youScientists Created the Blackest Fabric Ever, Then Made a DressTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the BuildingClaudia Black Exits ‘Ahsoka' Season 2 Over Alleged Pay DisputesLeaked clips from the rumored 50th anniversary rerelease of the original version of Star WarsThe Mad Men 4K on HBO debacleWilliam Shatner - Good King WenceslasAI boom kills Crucial as Micron shuts down consumer brandCLOSING SHOUT-OUTSSteve Cropper, guitarist for Booker T. & the MG's, Otis Redding, the Blues Brothers and many more, has died. He was 84.STAX: Soulsville, USA.'Mortal Kombat' Star Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Dead at 75See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
So many of the right-leaning TikTokkers who foisted Trump upon us under the promise of standing for the common man are now realizing that he is doing the exact opposite. But they are forgetting that it didn't have to be this way, even as they prepare to make the same mistake by canceling the next primary. I go back to the 2022 midterms to show how that election and its aftermath was the ultimate inflection point. We could have rebuilt the party with new faces and new policies, but Trump came back, saddled us with Kevin McCarthy, Mike Johnson, and everyone else, and now his supporters blame all those names for our woes while forgetting the top of the food chain. Next, I discuss Florida's AI bill of rights and how it contrasts with the cronyism in the White House led by David Sacks. Imagine if we had a party with a leader who actually spoke for the people on issues related to electricity prices, land use, and parental control over chatbots rather than pimping Big Tech. After all, isn't that what we were promised all along? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kara and Scott break down the post-Thanksgiving spending surge, as shoppers set new records online and in stores. Then, tech bros rush to the defense of Trump's AI and Crypto czar David Sacks after a New York Times article calls out conflicts of interest. Plus, speculation heats about the next Fed Chair, and Melania launches a production company. Watch this episode on the Pivot YouTube channel.Follow us on Instagram and Threads at @pivotpodcastofficial.Follow us on Bluesky at @pivotpod.bsky.socialFollow us on TikTok at @pivotpodcast.Send us your questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or email Pivot@voxmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices