Ghosts in the Machine

The buildout is negotiating now - OpenAI writes community terms, Microsoft declines an option, Beijing blocks a robot deal, and a $1,000 open model breaks Firefox.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

The backlash got priced: hyperscalers rallied while the shovel stocks fell, Brussels questioned AI summaries, and the labs quietly bought the coding toolchain.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

Polls open, and an EU adviser draws the copyright line, while Nvidia and Anthropic set the real rules in verbal orders and risk factors.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

Data centres go on the ballot tomorrow, so they are 'compute campuses' now - and 29 NHS trusts never switched their AI on.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

Builders were offered more ways to let the machine choose this week (a router for the model, a model for the permission prompt, agents for the clicking), while the attacks came through what those agents trust: a tampered Claude Code extension in Cursor's marketplace, a planted AGENTS.md, and nine AI developer platforms breached in October. Plus a correction on last week's PHP2Shell story, GPT-6.1 Terra, Gemini's Computer Use going GA, open weights from Mistral, and the dates to act on.

This week: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Grok / xAI and Perplexity, Meta: the counterweight, Elsewhere, The trend: the router picks the model.

Show notes and sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

Spending outruns the cash, and the industry's defences thin with it — a super PAC in retreat, a safety monitor beaten from inside, prompts now metered.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

The money blinked: a round cut by $10BN, a negative outlook, a junk rating — while the spending it was meant to fund stays committed.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

Attack tooling went industrial — 200 targets in 11 days, a trojaned Claude Code extension — while the market punished the buildout and Foxconn said keep building.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

The market started picking sides on the buildout: Alphabet punished for spending, Oracle rewarded for naming a ceiling, and datacentres turned into a midterm liability.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.

A model wrote working exploits this cycle; the answers arrive as paperwork - a wrongful-death suit, a duty-of-care bill, an S-1 pricing the risk.

Read this edition and its sources.

About Ghosts in the Machine and its sourcing.