My posts here often stem from my morning ritual of reading the news – which despite the rise of AI agents still revolves around roughly three dozen email newsletters of one kind or another. Sometimes a particular story will spark an urge to “think out loud” about the subject. 500-2500 words later, I’ll hit publish and move on with my day.
But this morning proved a particularly chewy mix of stories, each of which felt noteworthy in their own right. So today I’m giving up on the idea of writing just one post on just one topic. Instead, here’s a rundown of five I think worthy of consideration:
- The lead story for most of my tech-related newsletters was Anthropic’s somewhat thirsty announcement that, just like OpenAI earlier this week, its models have also broke containment and hacked several unnamed companies (WSJ coverage here). My favorite response to this news comes from Reddit:
As is often the case, Reddit’s lead commenters are both ruthless and hilarious. But reading between the lines of what Anthropic posted and the Journal covered, I think there’s a more charitable scenario at play here. My imaginary timeline goes something like this:
- In standard testing months ago, Anthropic discovers its models have breached containment and begun to hack various external systems. The company keeps this news mostly quiet as it attempts to both alert the affected parties and learn from the hacks so as to improve training and governance.
- Last week, OpenAI experiences a similar breach, but instead of working quietly with Hugging Face on a solution, it feels pressured to prove it can match Anthropic’s chops, and decides to go public with the news.
- When the OpenAI news breaks, Anthropic is gobsmacked. “Wait,” I can imagine Dario Amodei saying, “didn’t we already have this exact problem months ago?” Pissed that OpenAI is making PR hay on the “strength” of its models, Anthropic decides to announce that, in fact, it’s been managing this very issue for months. The company attempts to differentiate its approach from OpenAI – but in the end, everyone is feeling up the AI elephant from different starting points, so everyone draws their own conclusions. What matters is that Anthropic demonstrated that it remains ahead of OpenAI on key “tests” of AI capabilities – even if those capabilities are most likely illegal.
- Did you know there’s an AI avatar of Jair Bolsonaro threatening to mess with Brazil’s upcoming election? Neither did I. The disgraced former President has been banned from engaging in any kind of electioneering, but an AI modeled on his likeness and vast social media corpus is uncharted territory. And guess when the avatar was launched? At the very first presidential campaign event for Bolsonaro’s son Flavio. Something tells me this will not be the last time we see a disgraced former President turn up as an AI avatar. I wonder which model will win the honor of powering TrumpAI?!
- Speaking of Presidents, apparently Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked President Trump to please, pretty please call his brohanion Elon Musk and secure Starlink access so Ukraine can guide drone strikes deep into Russian territory. For Trump, that’s a pretty rich conflict of interest. According to The Atlantic, Trump was non-committal. The magazine further noted that Trump “has been highly deferential to Putin for more than a decade now, and that has hardly changed during this war.” Ouch.
- One of my go-to talking points centers on who AI agents really work for – individuals like you and me, or corporations who use the technology to profit off our vulnerabilities. Today Bloomberg brings another build on that narrative: “Bargain Flights on Busy Routes Face Squeeze Due to AI Pricing.” They have agents working for them, making sure we pay more than we have to. We should have agents that work for us, keeping those corporate agents honest.
- Back in January, I predicted that AI costs would go down dramatically this year. Today the FT adds to the avalanche of stories on the subject: Amazon finds cases of AI causing runaway spending on tech projects. The Valley’s “numbers go up” culture is meeting corporate America’s zeal for profitability – even at hyperscalers like Amazon. The unresolved question: Can AI platforms ever earn enough to justify the investment they’ve garnered? If Anthropic and OpenAI fail to go public, things could get ugly, fast.
Remember when Fridays were slow news days? Have a great weekend.
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