Ghosts in the Machine

Accountability keeps dissolving: officials can't name the cause, a judge can't name the author, a board can't name a successor.

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The chip scandal reaches the cabinet - a subpoena threat, a secretary's job, OpenAI switching sides - while $74BN of new data centres is committed.

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One boardroom's crisis is rewriting policy: Commerce widening the licence net, Chinese labs renting offshore, and institutions quietly deleting what they claimed about AI.

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The controls get routed around: an export list, a safety evaluation, a school's monitor and a grid queue, while the listing price rises.

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The state is arriving: the FBI at Nvidia's founder, a new Australian regulator, Brussels on companion bots - while SoftBank writes off the turbines.

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Control is personal, not institutional: a jail threat instead of a rule, a safety office moved indoors, a $4.5TN firm with no successor.

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This week the agent moved off the laptop, into hosted sessions, cloud sandboxes and a Git store built for thousands of agent pushes, while the week's trouble came from what agents remember for you: passwords saved by Claude Code's "don't ask again", stolen LLM keys running up six-figure days, and model strings that will quietly answer with a different model. Plus GPT-6 Cyber, Perplexity's open-weight embedders, Meta's Conductor shutdown and an MIT rebuild, Revolut bringing inference home, and the dates to act on.

This week: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Grok / xAI, Meta, Perplexity, Elsewhere, Trend: the agent leaves the laptop.

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The machines now generate the work that jams institutions - complaints, attacks, half-finished code - while the money and the voters pull back.

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The constraint on AI has moved from compute to Washington: a spy memo at Nvidia, 16% borrowing costs, and three chairmen who want a briefing.

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The repricing has crossed three continents, and the official writing the buildout's land policy turns out to be invested in it.

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