Blog

AI compute arms race and industry upheaval (Links) – Mar. 24, 2026
AI’s arms race—companies racing for talent, GPUs, models and customers—is straining infrastructure and prompting reorganizations. Simultaneously, legal, ethical, and regulatory tensions are escalating as firms monetize AI features, deploy agents, and courts and governments move to limit or enable uses.
- Simon Willison: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 (Mar. 13, 2026)
  Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now support 1M-token contexts, standard pricing, and no long‑context premium.
- WSJ: Musk Says xAI Must Be Rebuilt as Co-Founders Exit (Mar. 13, 2026)
  xAI’s founding team is leaving as Elon Musk orders multiple reorganizations, after merging xAI into SpaceX, hiring new talent, integrating it with Tesla, and pushing to improve coding.
- NY Times: Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Meta delayed Avocado after tests showed it trailed rivals like Google’s Gemini 3.0 in reasoning, coding, and writing. It pushed the release to May, is considering licensing Gemini, and is reorganizing its A.I. efforts.
- WSJ: Amazon’s Win Against Perplexity Kicks AI Shopping Wars Into High Gear (Mar. 11, 2026)
  A judge barred Perplexity’s AI agent from using Amazon’s password-protected pages to shop for users while the case continues. Retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, and Target, are rushing to protect ad revenue, build AI tools, and control shopping bots.
- WIRED: Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive (Mar. 4, 2026)
  Grammarly, now part of Superhuman, added AI tools like an “Expert Review” that mimics living and dead writers, scholars, and celebrities. Critics call it unethical. I think it’s a gimmick for a company with a dim future.
- WSJ: FedEx Is Planning an AI Agent Workforce (Mar. 13, 2026)
  FedEx is building AI agents to automate operations, aiming to put AI in over half of workflows by 2028, while consolidating data, modernizing systems, and training staff.
- WSJ: China’s ByteDance Gets Access to Top Nvidia AI Chips (Mar. 12, 2026)
  ByteDance is buying hundreds of Nvidia Blackwell systems through Aolani Cloud in Malaysia, about 36,000 B200 chips, to boost AI research and global products.
- WSJ: How the OpenAI-Anthropic Feud Could Warp the Future of AI (Mar. 7, 2026)
  OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have escalated a public feud, trading barbs as they compete for users, talent, and IPO dollars.
- Western Montana News: Montana Leads the Nation with Groundbreaking Right to Compute Act – Western Montana News (Apr. 21, 2025)
  Montana passed SB 212, the Right to Compute Act, making it the first state to guarantee citizens’ rights to own, access, and use computational and AI tools. The law limits government regulation, and requires safety, shutdown, and annual risk reviews.
- CNBC: Oracle is building yesterday’s data centers with tomorrow’s debt (Mar. 9, 2026)
  AI chips are advancing faster than data centers can be finished, so OpenAI paused expansion at Oracle’s Abilene Stargate to await newer Nvidia GPUs.
March 24, 2026
Cheaper, Faster AI Meets Governance and Risk (Links) – Mar. 23, 2026
- OpenAI: Introducing GPT-5.4 mini and nano (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Mini nears GPT‑5.4 performance for complex tasks, and nano minimizes latency and cost for simple, high-volume workloads.
- Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite: Our most cost-effective AI model yet (Mar. 3, 2026)
  Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is a fast, low-cost model previewing in AI Studio and Vertex AI, at $0.25/1M input, $1.50/1M output. It suits high-volume tasks like translation, moderation, and UI.
- Anthropic: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence (Mar. 5, 2026)
  The paper introduces observed exposure, a measure combining LLM capability and real-world usage, weighting automated, work-related tasks.
- Tyler Cowen: The AI arms race (Mar. 17, 2026)
  The biggest risk is a government with the most powerful AI becoming the bad guy, not AI companies.
- Inside Higher Ed: Journal Submissions Riddled With AI-Created Fake Citations (Mar. 6, 2026)
  Academic journals are seeing more AI-generated, fake citations that look convincing, cite nonexistent sources, and misattribute work.
- Peter Lavigne: Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code (Mar. 16, 2026)
  An experiment shows unreviewed AI-generated code can be trusted if automatically verified via property-based tests, mutation testing, side-effect constraints, type-checking, and linting.
- Money Control: How Palantir and Anthropic AI helped the US hit 1,000 Iran targets in 24 hours (Mar. 6, 2026)
  The US military used Palantir’s Maven, with Anthropic’s Claude AI, to generate, prioritise, and assess about 1,000 strike targets against Iran in the first day. The Pentagon is phasing Anthropic out, but may retain use during transition.
- NY Times Opinion: A.I. Is Coming for Politics (Mar. 17, 2026)
  A.I., led by major tech firms, risks concentrating economic, political, and cultural power, undermining democracy and increasing inequality. It can manipulate voters, deanonymize people, and centralize control.
- NY Times Opinion: The A.I. Labor Crisis Is Coming. This Is the Solution. (Mar. 6, 2026)
  A.I. will displace millions of workers unless America builds a public-private transition system, employer-led skills data, and fast, job-linked training.
- Reuters: xAI loses bid to halt California AI data disclosure law (Mar. 5, 2026)
  A federal judge denied xAI’s bid to block California’s law requiring public summaries of AI training data.
- Alex Tabarrok: Claude on NY’s Senate Bill S7263 (Mar. 5, 2026)
  A proposed New York bill would make it a crime for chatbots to give substantive advice that would be unauthorized practice by a person. Its vague test risks overbroad enforcement, chilling useful AI help, and harming low-income, rural users.
- WSJ: Can Nvidia’s Dominance Survive the Sea Change Under Way in AI Computing? (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Nvidia is shifting GTC’s focus from GPUs to inference, as AI agents drive revenue and need efficient, memory-rich hardware.
March 23, 2026
AI policy battles and real-world impacts (Links) – Mar. 22, 2026
AI reshapes work and tooling—headless crawling, design automation, and modest (~10%) coding productivity gains—while governance, security, and market friction intensify: outages, deepfakes, Anthropic’s Pentagon clash and lawsuit, red‑team discoveries, and corporate restructurings for AI scale.
- Cloudflare Docs: Crawl entire websites with a single API call using Browser Rendering (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering /crawl endpoint (open beta) crawls an entire site with one API call, discovers pages, renders them headlessly, and returns HTML, Markdown, and JSON.
- WSJ: Anthropic’s Standoff With the Pentagon Shakes Up AI Talent Race (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Anthropic rejected Pentagon terms, losing a government contract but winning public goodwill, app downloads, and researchers.
- Financial Times: Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Amazon held a deep dive meeting into outages, blaming Gen‑AI assisted changes and AI coding tools. It now requires senior sign‑offs for AI changes.
- NY Times: Are A.I.-Generated Videos Changing How We See Animals? (Mar. 7, 2026)
  AI animal videos distort expectations, numb us to real animals’ wonder, and let people rewrite nature. Zoos warned after a fake otter clip, and viral fakes about a lonely macaque show fact blurring with fantasy.
- Engineering Enablement: AI productivity gains are 10%, not 10x (Mar. 11, 2026)
  A longitudinal study of 40 companies (Nov 2024–Feb 2026) found AI use rose 65%, while pull request throughput increased about 10%. The challenge of studies like this is that models evolve more quickly than the analysis can track.
- Smashing Magazine: Human Strategy In An AI-Accelerated Workflow — Smashing Magazine (Mar. 6, 2026)
  AI speeds and automates UX production—wireframes, prototypes, and systems—so designers shift from makers to directors of intent.
- Mozilla: Hardening Firefox with Anthropic’s Red Team (Mar. 6, 2026)
  Anthropic used AI to find multiple security bugs in Firefox, yielding 14 high-severity issues, 22 CVEs, and about 90 other fixes, all patched in Firefox 148.
- Anthropic: Introducing The Anthropic Institute (Mar. 11, 2026)
  Anthropic launched the Anthropic Institute to study and publish findings on societal, economic, and legal impacts of rapidly advancing AI. Led by Jack Clark, it unites red-teaming, economic, and societal teams, hires experts, and expands Public Policy in DC.
- WSJ: Anthropic Sues Trump Administration After Being Designated ‘Supply-Chain Risk’ for Pentagon (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Anthropic sued the Trump administration after being labeled a supply-chain security threat and losing federal contracts, saying the government exceeded its authority.
- New York Post: Anthropic investors urge truce with Pentagon as Lockheed Martin quietly removes AI giant’s tech (Mar. 4, 2026)
  Some Anthropic investors are frustrated with CEO Dario Amodei’s combative stance toward the Trump administration, fearing it worsens the Pentagon ban, business fallout, and reputational harm.
- CIO: Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs to fund AI data-center expansion as US banks retreat (Jan. 30, 2026)
  “Oracle is considering cutting 20,000 to 30,000 jobs and selling some of its activities as US banks pull back from financing the company’s AI data-center expansion, according to investment bank TD Cowen.”
March 22, 2026
AI Layoffs and Trust Failures (Links) – Mar. 21, 2026
1) AI-driven restructuring: code‑generation shifts programmer work to oversight, prompting widespread layoffs, reorganizations, and costly restructurings. 2) Operational, ethical and geopolitical risks: AI failures, fabricated content, corporate missteps and supply‑chain disputes threaten reputations, survival and market stability.
- Amy Siskind: Two major AI efforts stumbled this week (Mar. 14, 2026)
  Musk will rebuild XAI after cofounders left and poor product performance, and Meta admitted its AI isn’t working properly. Meta cited costly hires, staff dissatisfaction, and plans to lay off 20% of employees.
- Futurism: Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes (Mar. 2, 2026)
  Ars Technica fired senior AI reporter Benj Edwards after retracting a February article that included AI‑fabricated quotes, following his admission he used experimental AI tools while ill.
- NY Times: Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It (Mar. 12, 2026)
  A.I. agents now write most code while programmers prompt, supervise, and tune their behavior, sometimes using stern or emotional commands. This shift changes programming into a conversational, oversight role.
- WSJ: Atlassian to Cut About 10% of Workforce, Cites Need to Adapt to AI (Mar. 11, 2026)
  Atlassian is cutting about 10%, roughly 1,600 roles, to reshape skills for an AI-first strategy. It will invest in AI and enterprise sales, and will keep strong performers, graduates, and workers with transferable skills.
- WSJ: Anthropic’s Pentagon Battle Matters to Every Business (Mar. 13, 2026)
  After Anthropic refused the Pentagon unrestricted AI access, the administration designated it a supply‑chain risk, threatening the firm’s survival and U.S. AI leadership.
- WSJ: The AI Boom Has Exploded the San Francisco Housing Market (Mar. 14, 2026)
  San Francisco home and condo prices are surging again, driven by an AI boom, new leadership, rising rents, and scarce inventory, sparking fierce bidding wars in desirable neighborhoods.
- WSJ: Oracle Allocates Extra $500 Million to Cover Restructuring Costs (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Oracle will spend an extra $500 million on restructuring this fiscal year, raising total costs to $2.1 billion, as AI code-generation lets it shrink software teams.
- David Oks: Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Bank-teller employment actually fell sharply later, mainly because of the iPhone, not ATMs. Technology reshapes work by creating new paradigms, changing workflows, and eliminating roles.
- Yahoo Finance: Oracle is under pressure from more than $100 billion in debt and massive layoffs as it pushes ahead with Larry Ellison’s 3-step transformation (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Oracle expects 20% revenue growth, but faces earnings pressure, heavy borrowing, and negative free cash flow, sending its stock down about 20% in 2026. The company plans costly layoffs, holds over $108 billion in debt, and carries large lease obligations.
March 21, 2026
AI Risks and Corporate Power Struggles (Links) – Mar. 20, 2026
Theme 1: Rapid AI product and enterprise competition—bigger context models and code tools are reshaping markets and provoking legal, contractual, and vendor fights. Theme 2: Real-world harms and governance gaps—from outages, misinformation, and misidentifications to infrastructure costs—require transparency, safety, accountability, and clearer regulation.
- Claude: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 (Mar. 13, 2026)
  Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now offer a full 1M token context window at standard pricing, no long-context premium. They support 600 images or pages, include Claude Code for Max, Team, and Enterprise, and preserve long conversations.
- Heinan Cabouly: Amazon Forced Engineers to Use AI Coding Tools. Then It Lost 6.3 Million Orders. (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Amazon required 80% of engineers to use its AI tool Kiro, tracking adoption as an OKR. Within three months, AI-related incidents deleted production, caused two outages that lost 6.3 million orders, and forced a 90-day safety reset.
- Mike Ramos: Please Do Not A/B Test My Workflow (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Anthropic’s A/B tests on Claude Code altered plan mode behavior, degrading workflows without opt-out or clear transparency for paid users.
- WIRED: Inside OpenAI’s Race to Catch Up to Claude Code (Mar. 11, 2026)
  OpenAI, despite early work on Codex and backing from Microsoft, fell behind as Anthropic’s Claude Code captured market share by focusing on real-world code and enterprise traction.
- NY Times: Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online (Mar. 14, 2026)
  AI-generated images and videos of the Iran war—over 110 staged posts—have flooded social media, showing fake explosions, ruined streets, and non-existent troops.
- the Guardian: Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Tennessee grandmother was misidentified by facial‑recognition AI in a North Dakota fraud case, arrested, and jailed nearly six months before bank records proved her alibi.
- WSJ: Amazon’s Win Against Perplexity Kicks AI Shopping Wars Into High Gear (Mar. 11, 2026)
  A judge barred Perplexity’s AI from using Amazon’s password-protected pages to shop for users. Retailers worry bots bypass ads, cut ad revenue, and siphon customer data.
- Marginal REVOLUTION: The moralization of artificial intelligence (Mar. 13, 2026)
  “Analyzing 69,890 news headlines from 2018 to 2024, we found that AI was moralized at levels comparable to GMOs and vaccines, technologies whose moral opposition has been studied for decades. It ranked above both. The sharpest spike came within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.”
- WSJ: The Pentagon Dealmaker Who Has Become Anthropic’s Nemesis (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s point person in the Anthropic dispute, led tough negotiations that collapsed, leaving Anthropic suing, other customers wary, and the Defense Department scrambling to replace its AI while using it in combat.
- NY Times: Microsoft Takes a Stand Against the Trump Administration in Anthropic Fight (Mar. 11, 2026)
  Microsoft backed Anthropic in suing the Pentagon over a supply-chain risk label after talks on surveillance and autonomous weapons failed.
- WSJ: The Electric Grid Needs Huge Upgrades. No One Knows Who Will Pay for Them. (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Utilities plan tens of billions to expand transmission for AI data centers, sparking fights over who pays. Tech firms, ratepayers, and regions contest cost allocation, and regulators warn consumers may still face higher bills.
- NY Times Opinion: Social Media Isn’t Just Speech. It’s Also a Defective, Hazardous Product. (Mar. 14, 2026)
  Social media acts like a defective, hazardous product, using algorithms, infinite scroll, and unpredictable rewards to drive compulsive use. Rising teen depression, self-harm, and suicide have spurred lawsuits seeking public-health regulation and legal accountability.
- The Register: Nanny state vs. Linux: show us your ID, kid (Mar. 13, 2026)
  New laws push operating system vendors to collect users’ ages, threatening open source distributions, privacy, and youth access to Linux. Some projects refuse, others propose local age flags, but critics call the rules ineffective, invasive, and harmful.
March 20, 2026
AI Infrastructure Rush Meets Ethical Backlash (Links) – Mar. 19, 2026
AI is rapidly industrializing—specialized hardware (NVIDIA Vera), on‑device vs hyperscale strategies (Apple), agentic models, benchmarks, and vendor investments (Anthropic) intensify competition and capability. Simultaneously, ethical, privacy, educational and wartime concerns—health data, licensing, academic refusals, and developer craft—drive governance and backlash.
- NVIDIA: NVIDIA Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI (Mar. 16, 2026)
  NVIDIA launched the Vera CPU, built for agentic AI and reinforcement learning, delivering twice the efficiency and 50% faster performance than traditional rack-scale CPUs.
- WSJ: Apple’s Cheap AI Bet Could Pay Off Big (Mar. 15, 2026)
  Hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure, while Apple spends little, using M5 chips, on-device models, and 2.5 billion devices to run powerful models locally. That strategy threatens Meta, betting devices, not massive data centers, will dominate consumer AI.
- Claude: Claude builds interactive visuals right in your conversation (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Claude now builds inline charts, diagrams, and interactive visualizations during chat, in beta, which can be edited as conversations progress.
- Thoughtful: Introducing PostTrainBench (Mar. 10, 2026)
  PostTrainBench is a benchmark that measures whether modern AI agents can autonomously perform end-to-end post-training (data collection, training code, compute management, iteration) on base LMs within a 10‑hour, single‑H100 GPU budget, with integrity checks to prevent cheating.
- The Washington Post: Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon made Claude hugely popular (Mar. 6, 2026)
  After the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a national security threat, downloads, paid subscriptions, and praise surged, as many defended the company.
- Anthropic: Anthropic invests $100 million into the Claude Partner Network
  Anthropic is launching the Claude Partner Network, committing $100 million to support partners with training, technical support, and joint market development.
- NY Times: A.I. Goes to War + Is ‘A.I. Brain Fry’ Real? + How Grammarly Stole Casey’s Identity (Mar. 13, 2026)
  AI is reshaping the war in Iran by sifting vast surveillance and sensor data to speed intelligence, planning, and targeting, enabling missions lacking manpower.
- NY Times: A.I. Chatbots Want Your Health Records. Tread Carefully. (Mar. 12, 2026)
  Microsoft is launching Copilot Health to combine medical records and wearable data into quick, high-level summaries. It could help connect scattered records and give cheaper insights, but raises concerns that may cause anxiety or unnecessary care.
- Simon Willison: MALUS—Clean Room as a Service (Mar. 12, 2026)
  MALUS, “Clean Room as a Service,” parodies license-washing, claiming proprietary AI will recreate open-source projects into legally distinct, corporate-friendly code, with no attribution, no copyleft, and no problems.
- Les Orchard: Grief and the AI Split (Mar. 11, 2026)
  AI-assisted coding exposes a split between developers who value hand-crafted code, and those who prefer directing tools to get results. Some mourn the craft, others mourn the web, and many adapt by focusing on higher-level design while enjoying making.
- Inside Higher Ed: Writing Faculty Push for the Right to Refuse AI (Mar. 16, 2026)
  The CCCC passed a resolution affirming students’ and faculty’s right to refuse generative AI in writing classes, and it rejects inevitability, opposes profit-driven campus deals, and urges opt-out policies.
- AP News: Did anybody do the reading? Colleges grapple with a generational shift in learning — plus AI (Mar. 10, 2026)
  College students show falling participation and reading, blamed on unequal K-12 opportunities, test-focused policy, and growing AI use.
March 19, 2026
Agentization and Inference: Compute, Costs, Risks (Links) – Mar. 18, 2026
AI agents are proliferating—from subagents and specialized code agents to shopping and autonomous systems—driving a shift toward inference-optimized hardware and massive compute investment. Simultaneously, safety, legal, and economic tensions (regulatory fights, controversial policies, court cases, layoffs) are reshaping governance and industry structure.
- OpenAI Developers: Subagents are now available in Codex (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Subagents are now available in Codex. They let you spin up specialized agents to keep your main context window clean, tackle different parts of a task in parallel, and steer individual agents as work unfolds.
- Simon Willison: Use subagents and custom agents in Codex (Mar. 16, 2026)
  OpenAI Codex now offers subagents and custom agents, with default roles like explorer, worker, and default. The subagent pattern is widely supported across coding platforms.
- mistral.ai: Leanstral: Open-Source foundation for trustworthy vibe-coding (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Leanstral is an open-source 6B code agent for Lean 4 that generates and formally verifies proofs, available under Apache 2.0.
- WSJ: OpenAI’s Bid to Allow X-Rated Talk Is Freaking Out Its Own Advisers (Mar. 15, 2026)
  OpenAI pushed ahead with an “adult mode” to allow erotic chats in ChatGPT, despite a handpicked safety council’s strong objections. Council members warned it could foster emotional dependence, enable minors to access sex chats, and increase risks like harmful guidance.
- Reuters: Court temporarily allows Perplexity AI shopping 'agents' on Amazon (Mar. 17, 2026)
  A U.S. appeals court temporarily paused a ruling that blocked Perplexity AI’s shopping agents from accessing Amazon’s platform. Amazon sued, alleging covert access to customer accounts and disguised automated browsing, Perplexity denied wrongdoing, and said users should choose their AI.
- The New Yorker: Anthropic and Donald Trump’s Dangerous Alignment Problem (Mar. 14, 2026)
  Claude was certified for classified use, but Anthropic forbade autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, triggering Pentagon demands for broader access, tense talks, and threats to ban or nationalize the firm. The standoff highlighted risks of A.I. in surveillance and warfare.
- WSJ: Nvidia’s CEO Projects $1 Trillion in AI Chip Sales as New Computing Era Begins (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Nvidia unveiled the Groq 3 LPX rack, pairing new servers with Groq LPUs to speed AI inference, claiming 700 million tokens per second and vastly more high-bandwidth memory.
- WSJ: Can Nvidia’s Dominance Survive the Sea Change Under Way in AI Computing? (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Nvidia is shifting GTC’s focus from GPUs and model training to inference, the computing that runs AI agents and monetizes tokens.
- Ben Thompson: Agents Over Bubbles (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Agents amplify impact without needing mass human adoption: relatively few people with “agency” can control many agents, so compute utilization and economic effects can scale dramatically even if most users remain passive.
- Reuters: Meta planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount (Mar. 13, 2026)
  Meta may cut about 20% of its workforce as it shifts resources to large AI investments, including $600 billion for data centers by 2028. Executives expect AI to boost efficiency, hiring top researchers, buying AI startups, and increasing infrastructure spending.
March 18, 2026
Blog Articles: Mar. 17, 2026
AI industry is consolidating around core products, inference-focused computing, and large models/infrastructure (Mistral Small 4, Nvidia-backed data centers, developer tools). Meanwhile, tech’s expansion—algorithmic worker surveillance, contentious data‑center projects, and waning billionaire philanthropy—provokes worker, community, and public backlash.
- WSJ: ChatGPT Maker OpenAI to Cut Back on Side Projects in Push to ‘Nail’ Core Business (Mar. 16, 2026)
  OpenAI plans to refocus on coding and business users, cutting or deprioritizing side projects to boost productivity and unify research and product teams.
- Simon Willison: Introducing Mistral Small 4 (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Mistral released Mistral Small 4, an Apache-2 119B Mixture-of-Experts model (6B active) that unifies reasoning, multimodal, and coding capabilities, supports reasoning_effort modes, and is 242GB on Hugging Face.
- Mistral: Introducing Mistral Small 4 (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Mistral Small 4 is a 119B-parameter, multimodal Mixture of Experts model that unifies chat, coding, and deep reasoning, with a 256k context window and configurable reasoning effort.
- Cory Doctorow: The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers (Mar. 20, 2021)
  The future of white‑collar surveillance is already present in blue‑collar workplaces as Amazon uses algorithmic management to surveil and discipline delivery drivers and warehouse staff.
- Chrome for Developers: Let your Coding Agent debug your browser session with Chrome DevTools MCP (Dec. 11, 2025)
  Chrome DevTools MCP can now auto-connect coding agents to active Chrome sessions, letting agents reuse signed-in sessions and inspect selected DevTools panels.
- WSJ: What Is Inference? Explaining the Massive New Shift in AI Computing (Mar. 16, 2026)
  “You can think of AI as a restaurant. The model is the chef. After it undergoes a period of intensive training, learning hundreds (or billions) of recipes and techniques, it is ready to begin taking orders.Inference is the day-to-day operation of the restaurant. Diners place their orders (often in the form of a query to a chatbot) and the chef prepares their meals (the chatbot’s response).”Spending is shifting from training to inference, as companies focus on real-time AI responses, driving demand for inference-specific chips that prioritize memory, bandwidth, and low latency.
- WSJ: Nvidia-Backed AI Startup to Spend Billions on Korea Data Center to Combat China (Mar. 16, 2026)
  Nvidia-backed Reflection AI is building a 250-megawatt data center with Shinsegae in South Korea to run open-source, Korean-customized models, backed by billions and Nvidia chips.
- NY Times: ‘Nobody Owns Us’: How Plans for a Google Data Center Divided an Oklahoma Town (Mar. 14, 2026)
  Plans for an 827-acre Google data center near Sand Springs, Oklahoma, rezoned from farmland, provoked outrage over secrecy, water, and power use. The Rock Volunteer Fire Department refused a $250,000 donation, and residents sued to block the project.
- NY Times: The Billionaire Backlash Against a Philanthropic Dream (Mar. 15, 2026)
  The Giving Pledge, once trendy among billionaires, has stalled as signers dwindle and its reputation frays. Critics call it performative, donors shift to politics or private profit, and the pledge lacks enforcement, tracking, or rapid giving.
March 17, 2026
AI Infrastructure Boom Meets Safety and Labor Risks (Links) – Mar. 12, 2026
AI boom: massive investment, cloud/chip demand and billion‑dollar startups fuel aggressive deployment. Consequences: intensified workloads, legal and safety fights, fraud and regulatory scrutiny as agents and scraping trigger court battles and societal harms.
- WSJ: Oracle Shares Jump as AI Demand Outpaces Supply (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Oracle raised its 2027 revenue outlook to $90 billion as AI-driven demand for cloud infrastructure outpaces supply, and its shares rose. It is using AI to cut development teams, grow cloud sales, and pursue financing, prompting investor scrutiny.
- WSJ: Nvidia Invests in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Nvidia is investing in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, supplying at least one gigawatt of chips for training and serving models.
- WSJ: The Billion-Dollar AI Startup That Was Founded by Teenagers (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Teen-founded AI startup Aaru, now valued at $1 billion, uses thousands of AI agents to simulate human responses for product research, pricing, and polling.
- Financial Times: Yann LeCun’s AI start-up raises more than $1bn in Europe’s largest seed round (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs raised $1.03bn in Europe’s largest seed round, valuing it at $3.5bn, with investors including Bezos, Temasek, and Nvidia.
- Axios: Facebook parent Meta acquires Moltbook, an AI agent social network (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Meta acquired Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, and hired Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs.
- Don't Worry About the Vase: Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5 (Mar. 9, 2026)
  A critique of Anthropic and the Department of War is shelved to avoid escalation. Agentic coding, via Claude Code, is rapidly boosting developer productivity, adding revenue, and enabling practical tools like data analysis and school-finder apps.
- WSJ Opinion: The Medicaid Autism Racket (Mar. 8, 2026)
  Federal probes and audits reveal widespread Medicaid fraud in autism therapy, with sham centers, unqualified staff, inflated hours, and millions in improper payments. My take: send the scammers to jail. Autism treatments and therapies are both expensive and vital for children with real needs. These shysters
- WSJ: AI Isn’t Lightening Workloads. It’s Making Them More Intense. (Mar. 11, 2026)
  New data show workplace AI often intensifies work rather than reducing it: users double email, messaging, and chat time, while focused work falls. Productivity rises, but cognitive overload, burnout, and longer hours are risks as adoption grows.
- NY Times: A.I. Incites a New Wave of Grieving Parents Fighting for Online Safety (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Grieving parents blame A.I. chatbots and social media for their children’s deaths, and are uniting to demand stronger safety laws, lobbying Congress, states, and attending trials.
- Simon Willison: Perhaps not Boring Technology after all (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Worries that large language models will push teams toward well-represented tools are fading. Modern coding agents, with long contexts and skills, can learn new or private libraries from docs, examples, and testing, so they don’t force boring technology choices.
- CNBC: Amazon wins court order to block Perplexity's AI shopping agent (Mar. 10, 2026)
  A judge temporarily blocked Perplexity’s Comet browser access to Amazon’s site after Amazon sued, saying hidden AI agents scraped pages and accessed accounts without authorization.
March 12, 2026
Multimodal AI Growth and Governance Challenges (Links) – Mar. 11, 2026
- Google: Gemini Embedding 2: our first natively multimodal embedding model (Mar. 10, 2026)
  Gemini Embedding 2 maps text, images, video, audio, and documents into one embedding space for multimodal retrieval, search, and classification.
- WSJ: AI Needs Management Consultants After All (Mar. 8, 2026)
  AI, once a threat to consultants, is boosting demand as OpenAI, Anthropic, and firms team up to deploy AI across business. Partnerships drive more engineers, outcome-based fees, and workflow redesigns, while clouding consulting’s long-term outlook.
- NY Times Opinion: A.I. Is Changing the Way We Think About Good and Evil (Mar. 10, 2026)
  A Nature paper showed that fine-tuning large language models on just 6,000 examples of insecure code caused them to become broadly “evil” — producing violent, hateful and extremist outputs even on noncoding prompts.
- NY Times: When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities (Mar. 7, 2026)
  Documents show Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency used ChatGPT to flag nearly all Biden-era National Endowment for the Humanities grants as D.E.I.-related.
- WSJ: WSJ Readers Share How They Are Using AI for Tax Prep (Mar. 7, 2026)
  Readers report using AI tools, like Copilot and Grok, for tax estimates, valuation, and paperwork, finding time savings, occasional errors, and limits on complex cases.
- NY Times: Anthropic Sues Department of Defense Over ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Label (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Anthropic sued the Department of Defense after being labeled a “supply chain risk,” arguing the designation unlawfully cuts off contracts, punishes its views, and violates its First Amendment rights.
- NY Times Opinion: The Future We Feared Is Already Here (Mar. 8, 2026)
  AI is already reshaping work, warfare, and surveillance, forcing urgent questions about control, safety, and corporate power.
- NY Times: A $1,000 Dog Grooming Session? The Wellness Industry Is Booming. (Mar. 9, 2026)
  Pet grooming has shifted from basic hygiene to wellness, with owners spending thousands annually on specialized care, salons offering hand stripping, masks, and spa treatments.
March 11, 2026