When compute became a values judgment. On Musk's reserved right to take Anthropic's training compute back, and the new shape of supply-chain risk for frontier AI.
Mixed Decision in Anthropic AI Case: Authors Guild Responds to Summary Judgment in Bartz v. Anthropic
On June 23, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a summary judgment order in Bartz v. Anthropic—one of the first major lawsuits brought by authors against an AI company for using unlicensed books to train […]
Who Pays for the Commons?
Three and a half years after the emergence of generative AI as a new technology paradigm, there is broad agreement that AI companies have extracted enorm...
After AI Takes Everything | Airing
Prompted by letters from three engineers, the author asks what remains for humans as AI takes over execution, naming judgment, taste, and derivation as irreplaceable, and warns against the erosion of subjecthood.
On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture
How AI has turned what was once a superpower into a liability.
How AI Saved My Company From a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare
After 2+ years and a tremendous waste of energy and money, my firm Calm Company Fund resolved a lawsuit against us on very favorable terms. What started as one of the most challenging periods of my life became an unexpected masterclass in using AI to level the playing field against well-funded opponents. If you’re an... Continue reading →
Up the Stack: How AI’s Escape From the Commodity Trap Risks Enterprise Lock-in
Critics and boosters are both looking in the wrong place
The Pinhole View of AI Value
Focusing only on headcount reduction is like saying the only value of a car is that you don’t have to pay for a horse.
The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: “Alternative Nobel” Winner Timnit Gebru
We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence. “Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”
On Taste, Effort & Curiosity - again
When AI collapses how long it takes to ship, what’s left is judgment, experimentation, and knowing what not to build.
Is AI the next Dumbwaiter? — Douglas Rushkoff
The demand for AI's unbridled growth is reactionary — a way of doubling down on the same old colonizing way of doing things. It doesn't have to be.
Code Was Never the Asset - The Phoenix Architecture
Why AI makes the hidden economics of software unavoidable
Behind the AI ‘Extinction’ Power Bid: Soaring Costs Could Hit 10% of World GDP
AI firms are invoking unproven extinction warnings to justify restrictions on developments by their smaller rivals whilst seeking greater influence over regulation
The economics of agents - Marginal REVOLUTION
From Patrick Collison: Assorted things I’ve been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It’s often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, […]
The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy.
In the age of AI, every maker becomes a manager
Dynamic pricing
Both AI and non-AI
AI 'surveillance pricing' under scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers
Canada Has a Precedent to Regulate Surveillance Pricing
Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill, CR and Groundwork Collaborative Investigation Finds via @ConsumerReports
Kroger Stores Overcharging Shoppers on Sale Items, CR Price Check Finds via @ConsumerReports
Different Prices for the Same Ride: How Uber and Lyft Use AI to Get More Money Out of You via @ConsumerReports