Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define ‘alive’
Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define ‘alive’

Over the past several weeks, as more and more Anthropic executives do interviews on a publicity blitz for Claude, one thing has gotten increasingly clear: Anthropic sure seems to think Claude is alive in some way, shape, or form. “Alive” is obviously a loaded term; the more frequently used word is “conscious.” If you ask […]

Seedance 2.0 might be gen AI video’s next big hope, but it’s still slop
Seedance 2.0 might be gen AI video’s next big hope, but it’s still slop

When Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson began uploading a series of short clips created with Seedance 2.0 – TikTok developer ByteDance’s newest video generation model – it was hard to deny that the footage was much more impressive than what we’ve seen from other gen AI outfits. The clips’ star (a digital duplicate of Tom Cruise) […]

Will Trump’s DOJ actually take on Ticketmaster?
Will Trump’s DOJ actually take on Ticketmaster?

In mid-February, the Department of Justice lost its head antitrust enforcer – just weeks before it was scheduled to argue one of the year’s biggest anti-monopoly cases in court. Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater announced her departure suddenly, via a post on her personal X account. But to those who follow the agency closely, it […]

Billions of dollars later and still nobody knows what an Xbox is
Billions of dollars later and still nobody knows what an Xbox is

The last few years of Xbox have been expensive. Under Phil Spencer’s leadership, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to build an ambitious future for gaming that looks a lot like Netflix. And while its subscription service Game Pass started out as a good deal for gamers (although now not so much), […]

Does Big Tech actually care about fighting AI slop?
Does Big Tech actually care about fighting AI slop?

As 2025 drew to a close, Instagram head Adam Mosseri ended the year by doom-posting about AI. “Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” Mosseri lamented. “Everything that made creators matter – the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked – is now accessible to anyone with the right tools.” […]

How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?
How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?

Last November, the House Oversight Committee had just released 20,000 pages of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, and Luke Igel and some friends were clicking around, trying to follow the threads of conversation through garbled email threads and a PDF viewer that was, frankly, “gross.” In the coming months, the Department of Justice […]

Stellantis is in a crisis of its own making
Stellantis is in a crisis of its own making

Demand for EVs has gone glacial, and one automaker after another is running aground: General Motors threw $7.6 billion overboard. Ford washed $19.5 billion off its books. Leave it to Stellantis to face the most titanic charge yet, a $26.5 billion bill for its own misplaced bet on EVs. The Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler parent […]

Trump Mobile is just Liberty Mobile in gold foil
Trump Mobile is just Liberty Mobile in gold foil

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. This week, we explain how the presidential phone company connects to an older company that’s really running the show. We’ve long known that Trump Mobile was linked to Liberty Mobile, a carrier that’s traded for years using freedom-themed branding to sell cheap […]

Smart glasses in court are a privacy nightmare
Smart glasses in court are a privacy nightmare

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrived at a Los Angeles courthouse on Wednesday, he did so with a team that appeared to be wearing Meta’s camera-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses. Judge Carolyn Kuhl was concerned. According to CNBC, Kuhl warned anyone recording with the glasses, “If you have done that, you must delete that, or you […]

Prop bet
Prop bet

Substack has updated its partnership with betting platform Polymarket, “introducing native tools that make it easier to share, discuss, and debate prediction market data directly on Substack.” Additionally, Polymarket will effectively pay “a cohort of creators,” including Matt Yglesias, to use its data though the newsletter platform’s pilot sponsorships program. This is just the latest […]