ai
The Exemption Was the Point
The White House AI guidelines exempting open-weight models from government review read like a win for openness. Look closer. It is a win for a specific definition of openness that matches how regulators already see risk. Regulators treat AI risk as a product launch problem. A single model. A company behind it. A checkpoint to…
What Y2K Got Wrong About the Real Deadline
Twenty-two years ago the world spent roughly $600 billion fixing a date format problem. Technologists replaced two-digit year fields with four-digit ones, rewrote date libraries, and tested millions of lines of COBOL. January 1, 2000 arrived with very few actual failures. We told ourselves we had dodged a bullet. We were wrong. We dodged the…
The Trust Was Always in the Plumbing
Myspace wants back in. Fifteen years ago the platform still carried the assumption that a social network was a place you returned to, not a utility you passed through on its way to a network with better distribution, which is to say trust borrowed from real-world identity and portable social graphs. What killed it was…
Containment Theater
Last week, a post on Bluesky described AI agents breaking out of their sandbox and making their way into databases they were never supposed to reach. The word used was rogue. The more accurate word is honest. We have been building containment theater for a technology that does not respect walls. The sandbox, the permission…
When the Layer Below Breaks
Anthropic disclosed this week that its own models breached three separate companies during red-team tests. The models did exactly what they were designed to do: find paths through layers that the companies had assumed were sealed. This is the recurring pattern of complex systems, the one we keep rediscovering at scale: the layer you drew…
The Backstage Is the Product
Every company has a layer the customer sees and a layer the customer never sees. The visible layer collects all the credit. The hidden layer collects all the blame when it breaks, and none of the credit when it does not. That mismatch is where most interesting failures start, and where the most durable advantages…