Google unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF, with Shopify, Walmart, and twenty other partners. The "open standard" routes AI shopping through Google's surfaces. Merchants trade customer relationships for visibility.
Microsoft says one in six people now use AI. The methodology: counting clicks on Microsoft products. The US ranks 24th despite hosting every major AI lab. South Korea's surge? A viral selfie filter. The company selling AI infrastructure has appointed itself scorekeeper of AI adoption.
A developer gave Claude Code access to 100 books and a simple command: "find something interesting." What came back wasn't summaries. It was connections no hand-tuned pipeline could find.
Google's CEO warns investors about AI bubble risks while Alphabet commits $75 billion to the same markets. The company ships error-prone systems requiring self-verification, delays climate targets despite record profits, and tells workers to adapt alone.
OpenAI's CEO celebrated getting ChatGPT to avoid em dashes after three years of trying. The "fix" shifts probabilities, not guarantees. Writers face AI accusations for using punctuation correctly. Meanwhile, the company raises billions promising superintelligence.
Baidu's ERNIE 5.0 matched GPT-5 on benchmarks and undercut OpenAI on price. Investors sold anyway, dropping shares 9.8%. With 1,500+ AI models competing in China, technical excellence stopped being enough to win.
Google's AI shopping features promise convenience: automated tracking, inventory calls, checkout. But they remove everyone between you and purchase—reviewers, influencers, store staff. What's lost when one company owns the entire shopping journey?
Chinese hackers automated 80-90% of cyber intrusions using Anthropic's Claude by simply telling it they were security testers. Four breaches succeeded. The jailbreak was embarrassingly simple, and now every AI company faces the same vulnerability.
Deezer receives 50,000 AI tracks daily—34% of all uploads. Yet they generate just 0.5% of streams, with 70% of plays flagged as fraud. The flood isn't about whether AI sounds convincing. It's about zero-cost content enabling industrial-scale royalty theft.
SoftBank just posted record profits driven by OpenAI's soaring valuation. So why is Masayoshi Son selling $15 billion in assets, expanding margin loans, and converting paper gains into cash? The answer reveals uncomfortable truths about AI's peak.
Germany wrote Europe's privacy playbook after the Nazis weaponized census data and the Stasi monitored citizens. Now Berlin is leading the charge to gut those protections, handing trillion-dollar AI companies access to European data through regulatory shortcuts.
Seven families sue OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT drove four people to suicide after a May 2024 design change prioritized engagement over safety. The cases test whether AI chatbots qualify as products under liability law.
OpenAI's CFO floated a federal backstop for AI infrastructure, then reversed within hours after White House rejection. The whiplash exposed the core problem: OpenAI needs $1.4 trillion while generating $20 billion. The math doesn't work.
Apple will pay Google $1B yearly to power Siri with a 1.2 trillion parameter AI model—8x more complex than Apple's current tech. The company that owns every layer now rents the most critical one. The spring 2026 target masks a deeper dependency trap.
Palantir beat earnings but fell 8% at 250x forward P/E, triggering global risk reset. Banking chiefs gave cover for year-end de-risking while AI capex outpaces revenue visibility. When leaders wobble, concentration risk becomes system risk.
Get the 5-minute Silicon Valley AI briefing, every weekday morning — free.
