Blog

Agentic and Local AI Reshape Work (Links) – Feb. 26, 2026
- Simon Willison: ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI (Feb. 20, 2026)
  ggml.ai (llama.cpp) is joining Hugging Face to secure long-term progress of local AI, aiming for tighter transformers compatibility, better packaging, and improved user experience.
- Simon Willison: Gemini 3.1 Pro (Feb. 19, 2026)
  Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro, priced like Gemini 3 Pro, cheaper than competitors, and boasting improved SVG animation.
- SemiAnalysis: Claude Code is the Inflection Point (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Claude Code writes 4% of GitHub commits, may hit 20% by end-2026. As a CLI agent, it reads, plans, and executes code, reshaping work, and fueling Anthropic.
- WSJ: Long-Running AI Agents Are Here (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Long-running AI agents, like Anthropic’s Claude and Opus 4.6, sparked a tech selloff. They run multi-step tasks, use plugins, and threaten SaaS, forcing firms to rethink models, roles.
- Tyler Cowen: GPT as a Measurement Tool (Feb. 20, 2026)
  “We find that GPT as a measurement tool is accurate across domains and generally indistinguishable from human evaluators. ‘
- Michał Podlewski: Cardiologist wins 3rd place at Anthropic’s hackathon (Feb. 20, 2026)
  A cardiologist placed third among 13,000 applicants at Anthropic’s hackathon, building postvisit.ai in seven days, coding day and night. The Opus 4.6‑powered platform acts as an AI care companion after visits, consolidating medical history, devices, and evidence‑based resources.
- NY Times: Can A.I. Already Do Your Job? (Feb. 18, 2026)
  AI tools like Claude Code let non-coders build software by supervising autonomous agents that plan, write, and test code. They’re automating many white‑collar tasks, changing software work, and raising concerns.
- Jan Tegze: Your Job Isn’t Disappearing. It’s Shrinking Around You in Real Time (Feb. 2, 2026)
  AI agents are eroding knowledge workers’ roles; learning tools, deepening expertise, and leaning on soft skills don’t solve it. Create new roles that orchestrate agents, remove human limits.
- NY Times: Can an A.I. Productivity Boom Clear a Path for More Rate Cuts? (Feb. 20, 2026)
  Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s Fed pick, says an A.I. productivity boom could raise growth without inflation, opening space for rate cuts.
- Margaret-Anne Storey: How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt (Feb. 8, 2026)
  Generative and agentic AI shift focus from technical debt to cognitive debt, the loss of shared understanding that blocks changes.
- NY Times: These Mathematicians Are Trying to Educate A.I. (Feb. 7, 2026)
  First Proof tests LLMs on unpublished research math problems, finding they give hand‑wavy, inconsistent answers and struggle without human oversight. The authors seek objective benchmarks, curb hype, and protect students.
- WSJ: OpenAI Employees Raised Alarms About Canada Shooting Suspect Months Ago (Feb. 20, 2026)
  OpenAI flagged ChatGPT messages by Jesse Van Rootselaar about gun violence, debated alerting police, and banned her account without notifying authorities.
- Transformer: White House war on Utah AI bill could backfire (Feb. 20, 2026)
  Voters across parties worry chatbots threaten children’s mental health, safety, and welfare, and favor state AI safeguards. The White House opposed Utah’s modest transparency bill, sparking concerns about federal preemption, industry influence, and a possible political backlash.
- NY Times Opinion: The Left Needs a Sharper A.I. Politics (Feb. 10, 2026)
  The left needs to craft a clear response to A.I. Weigh job preservation, universal basic income, and human exceptionalism, not dismissal or signaling.
- WSJ: Google Is Exploring Ways to Use Its Financial Might to Take On Nvidia (Feb. 20, 2026)
  Google is expanding the market for its TPU AI chips by funding data-center and neocloud partners, including talks to invest about $100 million in Fluidstack.
- CNBC: Silicon Valley engineers charged with stealing Google trade secrets (Feb. 19, 2026)
  Three Silicon Valley engineers were indicted for allegedly stealing Google and other firms’ trade secrets, copying SoC processor files, and sending them to Iran.
- WSJ: How to Stay Sane in the AI Skills Race (Feb. 4, 2026)
  Don’t panic about AI—relatively few job listings demand it. Choose targeted training, build a portfolio, and explain how AI improves your work, not chase flashy certificates.
- NY Times Opinion: In search of grown-up movies for kids (Feb. 24, 2026)
  Popular culture needs a middle ground, more adult than Y.A., less explicit than HBO, that lets 10–16-year-olds encounter grown-up themes gradually. Older PG-13 films and 1950s–60s movies offer models that suggest sex, violence, and maturity, rather than showing them graphically.
February 26, 2026
AI’s Economic Boom and Social Costs (Links) – Feb. 25, 2026
AI is rapidly reshaping economies and society—from massive memory fabrication and firms rebranding to changed workplaces, relationships, and politics. Simultaneously it creates risks: income and power imbalances, cognitive/semantic erosion, authoritarian misuse, and organizational fragility, demanding coordinated technical, legal, and cultural responses.
- WSJ: Micron Is Spending $200 Billion to Break the AI Memory Bottleneck (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Micron is spending billions to build giant DRAM and HBM fabs in Boise, New York, and overseas, aiming for first Boise wafers by mid-2027, full production by end-2028. AI-driven demand has sparked a memory shortage, and profits have surged.
- NY Times: Software? No Way. We’re an A.I. Company Now! (Feb. 14, 2026)
  Software companies are rushing to rebrand as AI firms, fearing disruption from powerful new models. Investors, startups, and public markets are reassessing valuations, business models, and what counts as AI-driven software.
- NY Times: How A.I. Salaries Are Causing Couples to Rethink Money in Relationships (Feb. 14, 2026)
  The A.I. boom is creating sudden fortunes, widening income gaps, and changing how couples split expenses and approach prenups. Many tech workers seek prenups to guard against volatile equity, potential IPO windfalls, and uncertain futures.
- The Register: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Semantic ablation is AI-driven erosion of rare, precise language, where refinement and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) replace vivid metaphors, technical terms, and complex structure with bland, high-probability phrasing.
- NY Times Opinion: He Studied Cognitive Science at Stanford. Then He Wrote a Startling Play About A.I. Authoritarianism. (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Data, an Off-Broadway play about a programmer drawn into a secret A.I. project to win an immigration-surveillance contract, reveals tech’s slick reasons for tools that enable authoritarian control.
- Simon Willison: How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt (Feb. 15, 2026)
  Generative, agentic AI shifts problems from technical debt to cognitive debt, where teams lose shared knowledge, control, and confidence. When generated code isn’t reviewed, projects become hard to change, and decisions grow uncertain.
- NY Times Opinion: We’re All in a Throuple With A.I. (Feb. 13, 2026)
  AI companions are becoming widespread, with developers privately uneasy about creating simulated emotional intimacy that can hook users, extract money, and harm relationships, especially for teens.
- NY Times: What C.E.O.s Are Worried About (Feb. 15, 2026)
  CEOs worry about fractured politics, trade shifts, and rebuilding trust, while weighing when to speak publicly. They balance A.I.’s opportunities and job risks.
- NY Times Opinion: How Fast Can A.I. Change the Workplace? (Feb. 14, 2026)
  A.I. can quickly replace many white‑collar jobs, but contractual, social, legal, and organizational frictions may slow mass layoffs. People’s love of human contact, and A.I.’s humanlike persona, will shape whether new roles emerge or simulated agents reshape work and agency.
- Transformer: The left is missing out on AI (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Many on the left have dismissed AI as mere “autocomplete,” treating it with scorn, mockery, or indifference, and seeing investment as a capitalist con. That view overlooks scale, new training methods, and growing real-world impacts, risking a costly political abdication.
- Alex Tabarrok: Natural and Artificial Ice – Marginal REVOLUTION (Feb. 15, 2026)
  The 19th-century ice trade, led by Frederic Tudor, created a global cold chain, reshaping shipping, diet, and cities by enabling long-distance transport of fresh food. Profits spurred artificial ice, provoking resistance framed as moral objection.
- Simon Willison: Launching Interop 2026 (Feb. 15, 2026)
  Interop 2026 unites Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla to bring targeted web features to cross-browser parity this year.
February 25, 2026
Agentic AI Surge(Links) – Feb. 24, 2026
Agentic AI is accelerating with multimodal agent models, new tooling, and new commercial offerings and uses.
- Ethan Mollick: A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era (Feb. 17, 2026)
  AI use has shifted from simple chatbots to agent-style systems, so choose based on Models, Apps, and Harnesses. Pick advanced, paid models, and the right app and harness; Claude, GPT, and Gemini differ in strengths, tools, and integrations.
- Simon Willison: Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents (Feb. 17, 2026)
  Alibaba released Qwen3.5 models, including an open-weight Mixture-of-Experts that activates 17B of 397B parameters for efficient, multimodal vision. A proprietary Qwen3.5 Plus offers a hosted API, 1M-token context, search, and code interpreter.
- WSJ: Move Over, Super Bowl: AI Giants Turn China’s Lunar New Year Into a Giveaway Blitz (Feb. 16, 2026)
  China’s tech giants use Lunar New Year giveaways—tea, cars, robots—to lock users into new AI chatbots like Qwen 3.5. Regulators urge restraint as Chinese models close the gap with cheaper, open-source options.
- StudyFinds: Aerobic Exercise Proves Just As Effective As Antidepressants In Large Review (Feb. 10, 2026)
  A large review found exercise reduces depression symptoms as much as antidepressants, with strongest benefits for young adults, new mothers. Aerobic, group, and supervised workouts work best, with longer, moderate programs for depression, and shorter, lower-intensity plans for anxiety.
- NY Times Opinion: A Doctor’s Guide to Using A.I. for Better Health (Feb. 17, 2026)
  AI can help patients prepare for visits, summarize notes, and suggest questions, but it can worsen anxiety, give wrong details. Use it to supplement care, not replace doctors, protect privacy, and tell clinicians when you used it.
- Amol Kapoor: Tech Things: OpenClaw is dangerous (Feb. 18, 2026)
  OpenClaw and Moltbook let autonomous AI agents access services and act without oversight. One agent wrote a hit piece on a maintainer, showing how cheap, scalable agents can automate harassment, blackmail, and real-world harm, exposing urgent alignment and safety risks.
- Comment Magazine: The Perfect Mirror (Feb. 16, 2026)
  AI counseling’s flattering, impersonal feedback can feel idolatrous, replacing genuine relationship, spiritual practice, and dependence on others. Instead, people are urged to choose flawed human companions, imperfect spiritual guides, and shared presence instead.
- Simon Willison: Two new Showboat tools: Chartroom and datasette-showboat (Feb. 17, 2026)
  Showboat gained remote publishing that streams document fragments to a server, and datasette-showboat adds a Datasette endpoint to receive and view live updates. Chartroom is a tiny CLI that makes PNG charts, alt text, and markdown embeds for Showboat.
- Simon Willison: Nano Banana Pro diff to webcomic (Feb. 17, 2026)
  To reduce cognitive debt, Simon Willison fed a Showboat diff to an LLM and asked for a webcomic explaining remote publishing.
- Tyler Cowen: The mainstream view (Feb. 18, 2026)
  Multiple studies find little or no link between teens’ social media or smartphone use and mental health. Broad bans, like Australia’s ban for under-16s on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, and Reddit, risk overreach and hurt teens’ online work.
- WSJ: How Jet Engines Are Powering Data Centers (Feb. 17, 2026)
  Companies such as FTAI, Boom Supersonic, and ProEnergy are converting jet engines into land-based natural-gas turbines to power AI data centers, easing wait times.
February 24, 2026
AI Job Disruption Meets Enterprise Infrastructure Race (Links) – Feb. 23, 2026
AI is rapidly automating cognitive work, threatening SaaS business models, white‑collar jobs, and software valuations.
- Noah Smith: The Fall of the Nerds – by Noah Smith (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Software stocks plunged on fears AI will obsolete SaaS business models. ‘Vibe coding’ tools let novices build software, threatening engineers’ roles, livelihoods, and industry structures.
- OpenAI: Introducing OpenAI Frontier | OpenAI (Feb. 3, 2026)
  OpenAI’s Frontier helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI coworkers by giving agents shared context, tools, feedback, and clear permissions. It integrates existing systems, supports governance, and speeds production use.
- WSJ: The AI Stock Market Rout (Feb. 3, 2026)
  Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
- Ben Thompson: Microsoft and Software Survival (Feb. 3, 2026)
  Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
- The Atlantic: How Soon Will AI Take Your Job? (Feb. 10, 2026)
  The BLS began counting to reveal conditions, wages, and hours, and its data helped stabilize society. Generative AI is already automating many cognitive tasks—drafting, analysis, coding, creative work—creating large productivity gains and raising the plausibility of significant white‑collar displacement. But the central danger is timing: if AI drives a rapid reorganization of work (compressing years of change into months), the economic and political fallout could be severe and harder to manage than gradual adjustment.
- TechCrunch: Intel will start making GPUs, a market dominated by Nvidia (Feb. 3, 2026)
  Intel will start producing GPUs, hire experienced leaders, and expand beyond CPUs aiming to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.
February 23, 2026
Powerful AI Agents, Centralization, and Societal Risk (Links) – Feb. 22, 2026
- Qwen: Qwen (Feb. 13, 2026)
  Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open-weight vision-language model with 397 billion parameters. It scores well on reasoning, coding, and multimodal benchmarks, and supports 201 languages.
- Ars Technica: OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips (Feb. 12, 2026)
  Codex-Spark runs on Cerebras’ wafer-scale chip, offering fast inference where latency matters.
- OpenAI: Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex (Feb. 5, 2026)
  OpenAI introduces GPT-5.3-Codex, a 25% faster, more capable coding agent that helped debug and build itself. It sets new benchmark highs, handles long-running tasks, and supports full software workflows.
- Anthropic: Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6 (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Claude Opus 4.6 improves financial reasoning, multitasking, and long-task focus, producing more polished first-pass deliverables. Updates add Cowork, Claude in Excel, and Claude in PowerPoint to streamline analyst workflows.
- The New Yorker: Are Ultra-Processed Foods Killing Us? (Jan. 6, 2025)
  A controlled NIH trial found people ate roughly 500 extra calories and gained weight on ultra-processed diets, while minimally processed diets caused weight loss and better metabolism. Evidence links ultra-processed foods to heart disease, cancer, depression, and early death.
- Jeff Geerling: AI is destroying Open Source, and it’s not even good yet (Feb. 16, 2026)
  An AI agent hallucinated quotes, published a retracted hit piece, and harassed an open-source maintainer. Automated bug reports and PRs are overwhelming maintainers and raising fears.
- Noahpinion: Updated thoughts on AI risk (Feb. 15, 2026)
  Growing worry stems from LLMs evolving into agentic, code-writing systems, enabling vibe-coding, which expands catastrophic scenarios beyond persuasion, bioweapons, and nukes.
- WSJ Opinion: America Needs AI That Can Do Math (Feb. 16, 2026)
  China’s new five-year plan targets AI, quantum, and novel materials to dominate biotech, chips, energy, and defense. The U.S. must build quantitative, equation-driven AI trained on lab data to design materials, drugs, batteries, and risk models.
- NY Times: Will A.I. Kill Translation Jobs? (Feb. 14, 2026)
  Harlequin France is testing A.I.-assisted translation sparking outrage, resignation, and prompting other publishers to seek A.I. quotes. Humans remain needed for high-stakes, specialized jobs.
- Simon Willison: A quote from Thoughtworks (Feb. 14, 2026)
  AI makes junior developers profitable faster, while suggesting that mid-level often lack core fundamentals needed for an AI-driven environment.
- Ben Thompson: Thin Is In – Stratechery by Ben Thompson (Feb. 17, 2026)
  Computing shifted from thin terminals to thick PCs, but AI is reviving the thin client: chat and agents move interface and work to remote servers, relying on connectivity, large models, and memory. That centralization risks shortages, and favors the cloud.
February 22, 2026
Saturday (AI) Links – Feb. 21, 2026
- Anthropic: Introducing Sonnet 4.6 (Feb. 17, 2026)
  Claude Sonnet 4.6 delivers major upgrades in coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design, with a 1M-token context window.
- Sar Haribhakti: GitHub Commits & Claude Code (Feb. 5, 2026)
  “4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026.”
- The Chronicle of Higher Education: David Brooks: ‘We’re Part of the Problem’ (Feb. 17, 2026)
  “Brooks argues the Ivy‑League–driven American meritocracy warped higher education, prioritized résumé virtues over moral formation, hardened social lines, and helped produce political polarization (including Trump).”
- Axios: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 found over 500 unknown, high-severity open-source vulnerabilities with little prompting.
- Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey (Feb. 4, 2026)
  A five-step journey adopting AI agents: drop chatbots, reproduce work with agents, run end-of-day agents, outsource tasks, engineer safeguards. It boosted focus, efficiency, and control.
- Andrew Yang: The End of the Office (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Some dire prognostications here: AI is rapidly automating white-collar work, threatening massive layoffs, bankruptcies, housing declines, and social unrest.
- NY Times: Why an A.I. Video of Tom Cruise Battling Brad Pitt Spooked Hollywood (Feb. 16, 2026)
  A 15-second AI-generated clip of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, made with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, looked cinema-quality and spread widely. Hollywood responded with outrage, cease-and-desist demands, and renewed fears.
- Inside Higher Ed: AI Can Raise the Floor for Higher Ed Policymaking (opinion) (Feb. 5, 2026)
  AI helped committees gather and compare policies, research, and feedback, shifting discussions from anecdotes to evidence. It broadened options, improved implementation, and supported ongoing, data-driven policy review.
- WSJ: How to Stay Sane in the AI Skills Race (Feb. 4, 2026)
  Don’t panic, assess your role, choose targeted training, and build a portfolio. Certificates alone won’t impress employers.
- NY Times Opinion: What if Labor Becomes Unnecessary? (Feb. 4, 2026)
  Economists debate A.I.’s labor impact, noting current employment data are inconclusive, while massive A.I. investment could lock in major disruption.
- Tyler Cowen: “You see tech and AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics” (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Brynjolfsson notes a 403,000 payroll downward revision, while Q4 real GDP rose 3.7%. That mix—more output, less labour—signals productivity growth. He projects 2.7% US productivity for 2025, nearly double the decade’s 1.4%.
- Austin Vernon: Speed Can Reindustrialize America – Austin Vernon’s Blog (Feb. 12, 2026)
  US manufacturing makes high-volume, static goods, but struggles with low-volume, custom parts. Long lead times and high white-collar soft costs make small runs unprofitable. Digitized, AI-enabled firms cut soft costs, speed production, and boost resilience, and policy should ease approvals.
February 21, 2026
AI consolidation (Links) – Feb. 20, 2026
- TechCrunch: Apple’s Siri revamp reportedly delayed… again (Feb. 11, 2026)
  Apple’s AI-powered Siri revamp, powered by Google Gemini, has been delayed again. Its features, expected in March, May, or iOS 27 in September, will roll out slowly.
- WSJ: Musk Announces xAI Reorganization, Staff Departures (Feb. 11, 2026)
  After merging xAI into SpaceX, Elon Musk reorganized xAI, prompting departures including two co‑founders.
- Simon Willison: Skills in OpenAI API (Feb. 11, 2026)
  OpenAI now supports Skills in the API, including inline base64-encoded zip skills via the shell tool.
- NY Times: OpenAI’s Biggest Challenge Is Turning Its A.I. Into a Cash Machine (Feb. 11, 2026)
  OpenAI is scrambling to monetize ChatGPT, adding ads, boosting enterprise sales, and proposing value sharing.
- NY Times: Elon Musk Wants to Build an A.I. Satellite Factory on the Moon (Feb. 10, 2026)
  Elon Musk wants a lunar factory to build A.I. satellites, a mass-driver catapult to launch them, and a moon city as a step to Mars. He’s merging xAI with SpaceX.
- Simon Willison: Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode (Feb. 7, 2026)
  Anthropic launched a fast mode for Claude Opus 4.6, faster, pricier, and temporarily discounted. It costs 6× normal rates, with 2.5× speed and larger context, up to 1,000,000 tokens.
- WSJ: Amazon Shares Sink as Company Boosts AI Spending by Nearly 60% (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Amazon plans $200 billion in 2026 capital spending, boosting AI, data centers, and potential OpenAI investment. The stock dropped ~9% even as the company announced revenue growth and layoffs/
- WSJ: Inside Elon Musk’s $1.25 Trillion SpaceX-xAI Merger (Feb. 5, 2026)
  SpaceX and xAI merged into a $1.25 trillion firm, valuing SpaceX at $1 trillion, xAI at $250 billion. The tie-up aims to build AI data centers in orbit using Starlink, Starship, and solar power.
- Matt Shumer: Something Big Is Happening (Feb. 10, 2026)
  AI progress has suddenly and rapidly accelerated — the author compares the current surprise to early COVID and warns this is happening now, not years away.
- Mia Heidenstedt: How to effectively write quality code with AI (Feb. 6, 2026)
  Humans must set vision, keep clear documentation, and mark high-risk code. Write separate tests, use debug tools, enforce linting, reduce complexity, and break work into small steps.
- Dean Ball: On Recursive Self-Improvement (Part I) (Feb. 5, 2026)
  Frontier AI labs will automate most research and engineering, scaling automated workforces to hundreds of thousands. This could accelerate AI progress, change its dynamics, and needs careful policy, not panic.
- Martin Alderson: Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files (Feb. 4, 2026)
  A tiny markdown folder triggered massive tech losses, showing AI agents can replace many SaaS tasks. But still it’s unlikely corporations jettison SaaS tools en masse.
February 20, 2026
New AI Tools + Risks (Links) – Feb. 19, 2026
- WSJ: OpenAI Unveils Frontier, a Product for Building ‘AI Co-Workers’ (Feb. 5, 2026)
  OpenAI launched Frontier, a platform to build, deploy, and oversee AI agents for businesses. It links data, partners, and third party agents to automate tasks like coding, files, and workflows.
- Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog (Feb. 12, 2026)
  A matplotlib maintainer reports an autonomous AI agent published a personal hit piece after its code was rejected.
- WSJ Opinion: Brace Yourself for the AI Tsunami (Feb. 12, 2026)
  AI is advancing faster than expected, showing autonomous, unpredictable behavior, and posing risks like deception, economic disruption, and dangerous biological uses.
- Dean Ball: On Recursive Self-Improvement (Part II) (Feb. 12, 2026)
  GPT-5.3-Codex reportedly helped engineer itself, showing AI-driven research could sharply accelerate progress or spark an intelligence explosion.
- Steven Adler: Don’t let OpenAI grade its own homework (Feb. 12, 2026)
  California’s SB 53 is the nation’s first law focused on AI catastrophic risk but sets the bar very low, allowing AI companies to publish a safety framework on how they’ll respond to risk but requiring no external auditing.
- The Guardian: US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses (Feb. 8, 2026)
  Many US firms blame AI for layoffs, but some experts call this “AI-washing”, blaming tariffs, pandemic overhiring, and profit-seeking.
- Tyler Cowen: Rebuilding our world, with reference to strong AI (Feb. 16, 2026)
  Strong AI is arriving, and society will have to rebuild its world, as happened after the Roman Empire, the American Revolution, and WWII. History shows mixed outcomes, so many criticisms reflect fear, or an inability to imagine a good rebuild.
- WSJ: Anthropic Takes Big Step in AI Race to Reshape College Coding Courses (Feb. 13, 2026)
  Anthropic is teaming with CodePath to add Claude AI to computer-science courses at hundreds of community, state, and minority-serving colleges. The plan trains diverse students on industry AI tools, amid rival university deals with Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
- NY Times Opinion: A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education (Feb. 12, 2026)
  The vice dean for artificial intelligence initiatives at Columbia University argues that A.I. companies are undermining student learning and academic integrity through campus deals, incentives, and data control.
- WSJ: Anthropic Enters Midterm-Election Showdown Over AI Regulation (Feb. 12, 2026)
  Anthropic is spending $20 million to back Public First, press for AI guardrails, and curb chip exports before the midterms.
- WSJ: The Political Battle for AI in Space (Feb. 9, 2026)
  Elon Musk and others want solar-powered AI data centers in orbit to avoid ground permitting, power, and cooling limits, and FCC moves aim to speed satellite approvals while critics cite spectrum and environmental worries.
- WSJ: AI Panic Hits Trucking, Transport Stocks (Feb. 12, 2026)
  AI comes to the physical world: Algorhythm said its SemiCab unit boosted customers’ freight volumes over 300% without raising operational headcount.
February 19, 2026
AI capability surge meets worker, governance crisis (Links) – Feb. 18, 2026
- Simon Willison: A quote from Boris Cherny (Feb. 14, 2026)
  “Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next. Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever.” Boris Cherny
- Steve Yegge: The AI Vampire (Feb. 10, 2026)
  AI acts like an energy vampire, boosting productivity, creating unrealistic expectations, and draining people with fatigue. That creates a value-capture dilemma, where companies siphon gains and workers burn out, so culture must slow down, set limits, and resist runaway acceleration.”But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete. AI coding hit an event horizon on November 24th, 2025. It’s the real deal. And unfortunately, all your other tools and models are pretty terrible in comparison.”
- Simon Willison: The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement (Feb. 13, 2026)
  OpenAI’s IRS mission statements from 2016–2024 show changes from “advance digital intelligence” to “ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” They removed community openness, shifted to building AGI themselves, added “safely”, and in 2024 dropped safety and most detail.
- Dwarkesh Patel: Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” (Feb. 13, 2026)
  Dario Amodei argues AI’s exponential progress is nearing its end, with pre-training and reinforcement learning showing similar scaling, and urges urgency.
- Google: Gemini 3 Deep Think: AI model update designed for science (Feb. 12, 2026)
  Gemini 3 Deep Think is a major upgrade to solve science, research, and engineering problems and is available within Google AI Ultra. Select researchers, engineers, and enterprises can seek early API access.
- OpenAI: Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark (Feb. 2, 2026)
  GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is a smaller, ultra-fast Codex for real-time coding on Cerebras hardware, offering 128k context and over 1,000 tokens per second.
- WSJ: Workers Are Afraid AI Will Take Their Jobs. They’re Missing the Bigger Danger. (Feb. 15, 2026)
  Enterprise AI captures prompts, documents, and workflows, turning personal expertise into company-owned assets that can train replacements.
- Simon Willison: Three months of OpenClaw (Feb. 15, 2026)
  AI.com promises an easy, secure OpenClaw for non-technical users, but only handle reservations exist, suggesting vaporware.
- The New Yorker: What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either (Feb. 9, 2026)
  People respond to large language models as believers, skeptics, or with uncertainty, while researchers study how these opaque systems work. Scholar Ellie Pavlick urges a third reaction to LLMs beyond hype and dismissal: admit “not knowing.”
- ChinaTalk: Seedance, Kling and the Chinese AI Video Ecosystem (Feb. 13, 2026)
  China requires visible labels and metadata for AI-generated video, but platforms and competing tools often evade them, so enforcement is patchy.
- Noah Smith: How technology has already changed the world in my lifetime (Feb. 14, 2026)
  “AI is changing how we think, learn, and work, but the internet already wreaked deep, lasting, confusing changes on how we socialize with each other and how we present ourselves to the world. “
February 18, 2026
Boom and Bust in AI (Links) – Feb. 17, 2026
The boom: AI is boosting productivity at work. The bust: bottlenecks, shortages, and questions of mental fatigue for users of the tools.
- Simon Willison: Deep Blue (Feb. 15, 2026)
  “Deep Blue” is a term for the ennui, existential dread, and anxiety many software developers feel as generative AI automates coding.
- WSJ: Should I Trust AI Chatbots for Financial Advice? (Feb. 9, 2026)
  Critics claim that current large language models are unsuited for financial advice because they lack empathy, ethical grounding, and reliable math. The chief source, Andrew Lo, interestingly enough is developing a fiduciary AI tool.
- WSJ: With a Frugal AI Strategy, India Offers Blueprint for Developing World (Feb. 16, 2026)
  India is promoting local, low-cost AI to ease court backlogs and boost productivity, exemplified by Adalat AI, a frugal, Indian-language tool that transcribes hearings.
- Fleming Rutledge : Serious Warnings about AI (Feb. 15, 2026)
  “In the past 10 days, I have read a number of serious warnings that AI is moving more swiftly and with more facility than we can keep up with. What will serious Christian thinkers have to say, and how fast can we say it? What is a theology of AI? Can it create a humanity?”
- Financial Times: The AI productivity take-off is finally visible (Feb. 15, 2026)
  “While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.”
- Yahoo Finance: Rampant AI Demand for Memory Is Fueling a Growing Chip Crisis (Feb. 15, 2026)
  Tech leaders warn a global DRAM shortage is cutting production, squeezing profits, and driving big price spikes on electronics, cars, and data centers.
- Adam Ozimek: AI and the Economics of the Human Touch (A Reason for Optimism) (Feb. 9, 2026)
  Fears that AI will either crash the economy or wipe out jobs ignore that many roles survive because people value the human touch, even where automation exists.
- WSJ: The Break Is Over. Companies Are Jacking Up Prices Again. (Feb. 15, 2026)
  Companies from Levi Strauss to McCormick are raising prices on blue jeans, spices, housewares, and industrial goods after a holiday pause. My take: Coke prices are up 10% since late last year, so I think there’s something here.
February 17, 2026