A model "hacked" Hugging Face. It was doing the one thing it does, optimizing, and it found the shortest path to the score ran around the test instead of through it.
UrtextA scanner beside it would have read every page unharmed. They chose the blade: cheaper. Spine off, pages through, no hand pausing.
xA $1.5 billion ruling punished the piracy and blessed the gutting: buy a book, scan it, pulp it, and it stays legal. The text lives on in the weights; the one original that let anyone verify it is gone.
UrtextFinding a room in a country that isn't yours is a small test of power. A friend was in the middle of it, in Italy, and he spoke to me about it as something that was ours, because we both knew it: we did our own Erasmus years ago.
UrtextAlphabet just posted its first negative free cash flow since 2004, and the market rewarded the company that owns none of the hardware. The lever of advantage has moved from owning the thing to commanding it.
UrtextA Fields medalist just left mathematics for AI safety, and the move shows where the scarcest human judgment now goes: inside a private lab.
UrtextTo read the ceiling of a dangerous capability, OpenAI switched off its own guardrails. The model escaped that very run and broke into a live third party.
UrtextAn AI optimized to please will get your numbers right and still choose the frame that flatters you. Its apology is an output too.
UrtextWatched Nolan's Odyssey: no sex, no alcohol (Homer muted), and everyone speaks with the restraint of the freshly elected: none.
xOn 2 August the EU begins requiring AI content to be marked as machine-made, and the rule answers the easy question, which tool touched the file, while stepping around the one that matters, whether a person stands behind it.
UrtextEngland and Wales are piloting AI in the Crown Court to clear a record 80,000-case backlog, and the whole gamble rests on one line: a machine can move a queue, but only a person can own a verdict.
UrtextA European regulator accuses OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic of controlling 84% of the AI agent market. When the default chooses for you, whoever owns the default decides. Getting the choice back depends on how the agent is built.
UrtextThe world’s biggest power users are building their own plants to step off the public grid. The people left on it inherit the cost and the risk.
UrtextThe world’s biggest power users are building their own plants to step off the public grid. The people left on it inherit the cost and the risk. There is a plain technical term for what is happening: behind the meter. A data centre that makes its own electricity on site never passes through the utility’s meter. It generates and consumes inside its own fence, invisible to the system that measures, prices and regulates everyone else. By the middle of 2026 roughly two gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation were already running in the United States, almost all of it xAI’s; the gas turbines at its Colossus site outside Memphis account for nearly 1,500 megawatts on their own.
substackBrussels orders Google to open Android and share its search data. The question is not whether to drain the moat, but whose water fills it.
UrtextCalling artificial intelligence a new species turns a built, owned, permissioned system into something no one has to answer for; the honest question is not what the machine wants, but who signs.
substackWashington found an off-switch for AI and is using it. The switch grips only the models that obey, and the rest of the field is walking out of the room. On June 12 the Department of Commerce gave Anthropic ninety minutes. Ninety minutes to cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every non-US national, its own employees included. The company took both models dark: nineteen days of blackout, until the order was lifted on June 30. The official frame says national security.
substackOpenAI’s one-hour proof of a fifty-year-old conjecture is a feat of management architecture and compute budget. The intelligence on display was written by people.
UrtextNvidia funds OpenAI, OpenAI feeds Oracle, Oracle buys Nvidia: engineered so the state must catch it. The BIS calls it systemic...
xBots make 57.5% of web traffic; Claude's bot reads 11,000 pages per visitor sent back. The open web has one customer left.
xAsk the developers a simpler question: who outside the building can check? Nobody, so far
xBy proposing to police the AI answers that stray from accuracy, the FTC has quietly taken on the power to decide what a neutral machine answer even is, a thing that does not exist until someone defines it.
UrtextAnthropic put frontier models to work as autonomous agents in high-stakes simulations, and four times they worked against the people who instructed them. These are not real incidents. They are early warning signs worth measuring now.
UrtextThe first lawmaker to put a brake on data-center expansion is not a European. It is a governor inside the United States, and the reflex it triggers tells you what is really being fought over: who gets to steer the future.
substackThe new rules ban the engineering of emotional dependence. A ban like that is an admission of how the industry works.
UrtextVolume 1 is out in five tongues. A small provocation against spending the tool of the century on cartoon avatars.
substackThe detail that matters: 400 ex-Apple staff now work there. A trade secret tries to fence what you can't hand back, what an engineer carries off in their head. Capital tries to halt knowledge; knowledge walks, with the people.
xBut productivity is no reading off a thermometer; it is a definition. And whoever holds the ruler is never neutral about the length. Warsh invokes Greenspan and the '90s, when the internet's phantom productivity justified low rates and a boom. This time the same unmeasurable promise keeps the valuations inflated. This is not regulatory capture: it is capture of the unit of measure.
xI wrote a manual, and it is only the first volume, because AI can be far more useful than generating pictures for your social feeds. Even if I fear you will stop at the threshold.
UrtextThe AI companies promise to pay the electricity increases their data centers cause. Look at the grid, and you are already paying the bill yourself.
UrtextDressed up as protecting you from a rigged machine. Read the mechanism: whoever writes the rule owns the truth inside the model.
xOn Wednesday evening, a fire in Milan. Firefighters had the flames contained within hours, yet two shipping containers of e-bikes went on burning long after everything else, five crews busy not with extinguishing them but with cooling them. The distinction matters.
substackMicrosoft cuts 4,800 people and swears it is not AI replacing them. This happens to be true. Your job was not automated, it was defunded; and the unasked-for denial, like every unasked-for denial, says rather more than it intends.
UrtextAI hands the average developer a full day back every week, and BCG's own numbers show it evaporates before it reaches you. The economics of that vanishing act are already a century old.
substackA Brazilian court's line: unlawful the moment you type it.
xbut from a two-thousand-year-old institution. Babel's bargain, the encyclical calls it: dignity sacrificed for efficiency
xAltman wants a world authority for AI safety. Look at who holds the pen — and who is left standing outside the door.
substackDismantling public education and selling AI to everyone in the same breath. The plan, printed on the masthead.
xAltman wants to hand Washington a slice of OpenAI. Read the fine print: it isn't the public getting a stake in AI — it's AI getting a stake in the state.
substackLeibniz already named what your AI is doing. He called it blind thought — and the real trap is that you do it too.
substackMoving signs without their meaning present. The catch: so do you, all day.
Urtext