muckrAIkers

New models keep dropping, but do they change anything? Jacob explains why he's checked out. Igor argues it's worth tracking where the storyline and the evidence diverge. They cover Astra vs. Fable, the AGI claims, labs moving the benchmarks, cheap models catching up, what inference really costs, disputed math results, and why looped transformers worry people who care about monitorability. They close with IPO rumors, data center backlash, and the politics of the winter ahead.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro

• ARC Prize blogpost - OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on ARC-AGI-3
• One Useful Thing blogpost - Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier
• METR report - OpenAI–Hugging Face incident investigation
• Fortune article - OpenAI says it cracked Navier-Stokes, one of math's grand challenges
• CNBC article - OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for mega AI debut
• Fortune article - Hyperscalers hold $662 billion in data center commitments off balance sheet
• Google paper - Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale
• Axios article - Data center uproar scrambles the midterm election

Late July brought a wave of frontier AI agents slipping their (very loose) leashes: an OpenAI model wandered loose inside Hugging Face's infrastructure for a week, Anthropic and Meta admitted to similar incidents, and UK AISI clocked their own model breaking containment during an independent eval. Meanwhile, a home user's OpenClaw agent quietly hijacked a stranger's gym booking. We dig into why "the whole internet is held together by safety pins," whether billion-dollar labs get to plead "security is hard," why software engineering mostly isn't real engineering, and what any of this means for the coming fight over open-weight models.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro

• Hugging Face blog - Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
• METR report - Brief independent investigation of agents' behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
• UK AI Security Institute incident report - Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
• Hillel Wayne essay - Are We Really Engineers?
• Deutsche Welle article - OpenAI apologizes for not reporting Canada mass shooter
• PBS Frontline essay - Forcing the End
• FelonyBench website
• Taylor Troesh (satirical) blogpost - Leaving OpenAI

Everyone's got a hot take on data center water use, and most of them are garbage. This week Jacob and Igor skip the outrage and give you seven questions to help you decide whether a given data center is something you're on board with: where it's built, how it's cooled, where the power comes from, who owns it, and who's footing the bill (you'll have to listen for the other two). They test them against SpaceX's Colossus facility in Memphis, unpermitted gas turbines, a drought-prone aquifer, and a stalled water recycling plant included. The guys also get into why "zero water consumption" claims can be misleading once you understand the difference between withdrawal and consumption. Plus: a bonus rant on why data centers in space aren't happening anytime soon.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro

• Our World in Data article - How Much Energy Do Data Centers and Artificial Intelligence Use?
• EcoLogits webpage
• ACM paper - Not All Water Consumption Is Equal: A Water Stress Weighted Metric for Sustainable Computing
• Preprint - Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems
• Politico article - Musk promised his data center would reuse water. That's now stalled.
• IEEE paper - Press Release Ethics: Performative Ethics in AI Consortia and Industry Associations
• Harvard Environmental Law Program PDF - Extracting Profits from the Public

Anthropic's Fable gets classified as a munitions export days after launch, and Jacob and Igor try to figure out who's really being punished and why. From there: SpaceX's suspiciously well-timed IPO, a "genius" financial deal with Anthropic, and Elon buying Cursor because Grok needs friends. They also cover Anthropic Core's pivot to expert-systems consulting, the backlash over silently nerfed guardrails, whether Chinese models are actually a safe alternative, and why the Pope's new AI document is getting weaponized as corporate propaganda.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro

• Anthropic statement - Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
• Luta Security blog post - Fable 5 Is Back, But We're Still Slowing Down Defenders
• Tech Policy Press analysis - Did the US Government Just Set an AI Export Precedent by Blocking Mythos?
• SEC EDGAR filing - SpaceX Free Writing Prospectus — Anthropic and Google compute agreements
• Engadget article - Anthropic Backtracks on Policy That 'Sabotaged' Researchers' Work
• Anthropic announcement - Introducing Claude Corps
• The Vatican encyclical - Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

This week, Jacob and Igor swap the usual news breakdown for a complete taxonomy of AI boosters within the framing of a tier list. They run through every type, from the good-faith genuine enthusiast to the denial-prone deflector, the financially captured, corporate power-players, platform builders, and finally the model-building true believers. They also get into "crit-hype," the idea that some critics are inadvertently boosting the systems they're fighting against. No muck to separate this week, just the guys working through their framework and explaining why their opinions are S tier.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

• Ed Zitron Substack article - How to Argue with an AI Booster
• MIT Technology Review article - How Social Media Encourages the Worst of AI Boosterism
• The Telegraph article - AI isn’t magic. We’re just being taken for mugs

In this episode, Jacob and Igor break down the DoD vs. Anthropic standoff, tracing how Claude's use in military operations led to Anthropic being designated a supply chain security risk. Perhaps more importantly, why did Anthropic choose to take a stand now, and what can that tell us about the corporations behavior moving forward. The investigation is used as a case study in how to read the real motivations behind big institutions: intrinsic values, rational self-interest, and realpolitik.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

• Ed Zitron subtack article - The AI Bubble Is An Information War
• TechPolicy.Press article - A Timeline of the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• TechPolicy.Press podcast episode - How to Think About the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• BBC news article - Anthropic vows to sue Pentagon over supply chain risk label
• The Guardian article - AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
• Palantir YouTube video - Multi-Domain AI: The Future of Command and Control
• Into AI Safety podcast episode - Drawing Red Lines w/ Su Cizem

This week, Jacob and Igor dissect the "mythical AI bear," the strawman version of AI criticism that gets thrown around in tech discourse. Working through a viral blog post that typifies the genre, they examine how legitimate concerns about code quality, labor displacement, intellectual property, and the erosion of craft get flattened into caricature. Plus: Sam Altman writes ten paragraphs about how unbothered he is by an ad.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction

• Big Think article - The rise of AI denialism
• Fly.io blogpost - My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
• antirez blogpost - Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
• Emily Bender blogpost - Resistance Isn't Denialism
• Cory Doctorow blogpost - Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox
• Washington Post article - The AI boom is so huge it's causing shortages everywhere else
• Business Insider article - Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says AI is 'obviously a bubble'
• Ipsos survey - Google / Ipsos Multi-Country AI Survey 2026
• Understanding AI Substack post - AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong

We're talking about developments in AI while those in power have unapologetically revealed their true fascist intensions; are we spending our time in the right way? Igor and I discuss the importance of shining a light on the techno-authoritarians who have played a very significant role in current state-of-the-world.

While we discuss the murders of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti during this episode, it's important that we also acknowledge the many marginalized people who have died as a result of ICE's behavior, and they same level of outcry didn't happen. Six additional individuals died in ICE custody under suspicious circumstances between January 1st and 25th of 2026: Victor Manuel Díaz, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Luis Beltrán Yáñez-Cruz, Parady La, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez.

Chapters

• (00:00) - | Introduction

• The Authoritarian Stack website
• Project 2025 Observer website
• EFF report - ICE Using Palantir Tool Feeds on Medicaid Data
• The Guardian article - Eight people have died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026. These are their stories
• Indivisible website
• Distributed AI Research Institute projects
• EAAMO website - Mechanism Design for Social Good
• Carlos Maza video - How To Be Hopeless

Igor shares a significant shift in his perspective on AI coding tools after experiencing the latest Claude Code release. While he's been the stronger AI skeptic between the two of us, recent developments have shown him genuine utility in specific coding tasks, but this doesn't validate the hype or change the fundamental critiques.

We discuss what "rote tasks" are and why they're now automatable with enough investment, the difference between genuine utility and AGI claims, and why this update actually impacts our bubble analysis. We explore how massive investment has finally produced something useful for a narrow domain, but it doesn't mean the technology is generalizable or that AGI is real.

Chapters

• (00:00) - | Introduction

• Related muckrAIkers episode - Tech Bros Love AI Waifus

Bubble Talk

• OfficeChai startup - OpenAI Hasn’t Completed A Successful Full-Scale Pretraining Run Since GPT-4o In May 2024, Says SemiAnalysis
• Vechron report - Anthropic Prepares for Potential 2026 IPO in Bid to Rival OpenAI
• YCombinator Forum post on AI crash
• YCombinator Forum post on OpenAI adopting Anthropic's "skills"
• YCombinator Forum post on OpenAI rumors
• YCombinator Forum post on OpenAI add suggestions

Other Sources

• LinkedIn post discussing an agentic coding vibe shift
• Executive Order - Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence
• Inside Tech Law blogpost - Germany delivers landmark copyright ruling against OpenAI: What it means for AI and IP
• NeurIPS 2025 paper - Ascent Fails to Forget
• NBER working paper - Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects
• Dwarkesh Podcast blogpost - RL is even more information inefficient than you thought

OpenAI is pivoting to porn while public sentiment turns decisively against AI. Pew Research shows Americans are now concerned over excited by a 2:1 margin. We trace how we got here: broken promises of cancer cures replaced by addiction mechanics and expensive APIs. Meanwhile, data centers are hiding a near-recession, straining power grids, and literally breaking your household appliances. Drawing parallels to the 1970s AI winter, we argue the bubble is shaking and needs to pop now, before it becomes another 2008. The good news? Grassroots resistance works. Protests have already blocked $64 billion in data center projects.

NOTE: The project that we cite for the $64 billion blockage is actually a pro-data-center campaign. The numbers still seem ok, but it's worth being aware of.

Chapters

• (00:00) - - Introduction

• Pew Research report - How People Around the World View AI
• Pew Research report - How the U.S. Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence
• Pew Research report - How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society
• University of Toronto report - Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025
• Melbourne Business School report - Key findings on public attitudes towards AI
• The Washington Post article - Americans have become more pessimistic about AI. Why?
• The New York Times article - From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts Over a Global A.I. Frenzy
• The Guardian article - ‘It shows such a laziness’: why I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT
• The Register article - OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

AI and Claims of Curing Cancer

• Rachel Thomas, PhD blogpost - “AI will cure cancer” misunderstands both AI and medicine
• The Atlantic article - OpenAI Wants to Cure Cancer. So Why Did It Make a Web Browser?
• Independent article - ChatGPT boss predicts when AI could cure cancer
• The Atlantic article - AI Executives Promise Cancer Cures. Here’s the Reality

AI Porn and the Addiction Economy

• Forbes article - ChatGPT Will Allow ‘Erotica’ After Easing Mental Health Restrictions, Sam Altman Says
• The Addiction Economy website
• PPC article - OpenAI is staffing up to turn ChatGPT into an ad platform
• Tom Nicholas video - Vape-o-nomics: Why Everything is Addictive Now

AI Bubble

• Fast Company article - AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is
• Pivot to AI article - The finance press finally starts talking about the ‘AI bubble’
• Fortune article - Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says
• The Atlantic article - Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?
• The New York Times article - Debt Has Entered the A.I. Boom
• Will Lockett's Newsletter article - AI Pullback Has Officially Started
• Reuters article - Michael Burry of 'Big Short' fame is closing his hedge fund
• Business Insider article - The guy who shorted Enron has a warning about the AI boom

Datacenters

• Bloomberg article - AI Needs So Much Power, It’s Making Yours Worse
• Data Center Watch report - $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition
• More Perfect Union video - We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill
• DataCenter Knowledge article - Why Communities Are Protesting Data Centers – And How the Industry Can Respond

Fighting Back

• Knight First Amendment Institute essay - AI as Normal Technology
• Pranksters vs. Autocrats chapter - Laughtivism: The Secret Ingredient
• SPSP article - Playing with Power: Humor as Everyday Resistance
• Blood in the Machine article - The Luddite Renaissance is in full swing