But before getting to the full news round-up, I want to focus on something odd I saw over the past week. A bunch of different elites started making more aggressive claims that artificial intelligence is now some sort of super-intelligent singularity. It’s weird, and I would normally discount these arguments as not worth paying attention to, except that they seem to be capturing the minds of major financiers and even lefty Senators like Bernie Sanders. And I think there’s something problematic going on here.

The dispute over Seedance is the whole fight in a nutshell. If AI changes everything, as Amodei claims, then old questions, like who owns what, don’t matter. But if AI is just another important technology, then how it gets deployed and for whose benefit does matter.

There are similar elements when it comes to Anthropic, which is building out market power by focusing on working within regulated spaces. And a host of Chinese AI models are now trying to capture the agent space, since their AI models are generally more efficient than America’s bloated approaches because Chinese firms don’t make money selling cloud computing services. Regardless of who is providing the agent, a regulatory model forcing agents to be on the side of the citizen is very different than one which isn’t. And that’s especially true if Google becomes the full provider of all commercial context and data, or if the Chinese come to dominate in key spheres.

A world where you are manipulated by the company providing you with a window into the world is very different than one where you are just paying for honest services. And that’s what the cultish weirdos are bullying us to avoid thinking about.