payments
The Hour Was Always a Proxy
McKinsey’s clients have started refusing to pay by the hour, and the reason they give is blunt. With AI in the room, billing by time spent has become a kind of theater. If the slide deck that took a junior associate three days now takes ninety minutes, what exactly is the client paying for when…
The Money Isn’t Leaving. It’s Changing Seats.
Bitcoin slipped to $63,000 this week, and Ethereum, XRP, and Dogecoin all shed about 4 percent in a day. The number attached to the move was the part worth pausing on: $400 billion said to be rotating out of crypto and into AI. Read quickly, that is a story about one asset class losing to…
The Meter Comes Back
Broadcom did something this week that sounds boring and is not. It announced a way to run AI agents with ordinary platform simplicity, packaged and secured and sitting on the same plumbing as every other web app in the building. Agent Foundations, they are calling it. Strip the branding away and the message is plain:…
The Web Left a Room Empty for Forty Years. Machines Just Moved In.
There is a number in the HTTP specification that has sat unused since the early 1990s. Status code 402: Payment Required. The people who wrote the rules of the web reserved it, then walked away. They knew money would need a place in the protocol someday. They just could not agree on what that place…
Everyone Is Quietly Buying the Floor They Stand On
Microsoft spent the better part of two years renting its intelligence. The partnership with OpenAI gave it a head start nobody else had, a frontier model wired into its products before the competition finished its slide decks. This week it unveiled its own family of models to lessen that reliance and lower costs, and the…
The Frontier Becomes a Part on Someone Else’s Board
OpenAI’s newest models showed up this week in a place they were never supposed to live: Amazon’s catalog. Amazon Web Services announced that GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex are generally available on Bedrock, which is another way of saying the most coveted thing in technology can now be ordered the way you order storage or bandwidth.…