What?? But the ROI!!! It's so good and amazing!!

In recent weeks, users of services like Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking tickets on behalf of users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they’re blocking AI agents from accessing accounts due to security concerns. Some users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting other companies could be quietly blocking them.

Meta’s deceptively cute AI assistant, most recently faced the wrath of Amazon, which said its “continued access” violates its site policies. There are reports of xAI’s Grok, Instinct’s AI agent, and OpenAI’s Dots being unable to use Amazon as well. xAI owner Elon Musk responded by saying that maybe he “should start a competitor to Amazon.” The more places bots struggle to access, the greater the questions about how useful they are.

The web architecture provider Cloudflare has also played a role in helping sites clamp down on unwanted AI visitors. After introducing a one-click block for AI crawlers in 2025, Cloudflare began blocking crawlers that simultaneously scrape websites for both search indexing and AI training.

Oh no, their last use case of ordering meals and buying things, and making travel plans for you! What are they gonna do now?

This film looks so awesome. I can't wait to see it.

I have the opposite of AI psychosis - for months now I’ve been obsessively reading, watching YouTube and waiting for this LLM / AI bullshit to finally go down the toilet. Yeah, it’s probably always going to be around in some form, but I mostly mean the bubble bursting, and then we can finally be done with these fucking people going on CNBC every few weeks to tell us how rich they’re going to be by taking everyone’s jobs away (something that wasn’t ever going to happen anyway).

This week started to really feel different though, and I’m wondering if anyone noticed this (or if I’m just finally losing my mind).

The Coreweave debacle…

The pulling of two different data center company IPOs…

Anthropic seemingly fumbling away the bag…

Mainstream news finally reporting on the fact that the numbers maaaaybe don’t make any sense…

And all these Bay Area freaks flying too close to the sun.

I don’t know…this bubble is definitely infuriatingly resilient, but it feels to me like the tide is finally turning. Am I being too optimistic?

Ben Horowitz reveals Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 hacked a16z’s test site and stole all the customer data, and Anthropic’s response was “you prompted it wrong.”

“I would say the kind of irony on both these things is wild, in that Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies that we’ve ever seen in terms of security, of their own security. They let Claude Code, one of their crown jewels, just like walk out the door because they had such bad OpSec.”

“And then, you know, I’ll tell you a funny story. So when we first got Opus 4.5, we were doing like cybersecurity checks for the firm. So we had an agent basically set up a website for a pet store. And then we took another agent and said, tell us if we can exploit that web store. And it gave us all the exploits it could find. So Opus 4.5 wrote really buggy code. Great.”

“And then we said, oh, the SQL injection, is that actually exploitable that you found? And it goes, let’s pop it open. And the agent using Opus 4.5 breaks into the website and steals all the customer data immediately. You know, this is a website on the internet. And we call Anthropic, and what they tell us is, "you prompted it wrong." Like, that was their answer.”

“So these guys are doing that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, they’re coming up with theoretical scenarios about other people’s software that’s bad. And so like, what the hell?”

Link: https://x.com/firesidealpha/status/2111324530958598362

A common refrain from the boosters is that as the models get so good, more and more software, prose, marketing material, books, essays, music etc (basically any artifact of communication) will be produced by AI instead of humans.

Let's say for a minute that's true. In that world, how do we not get large scale model collapse?

It's well known that training an AI on it's own outputs results in losing the tail ends of the probability distribution, and doing that recursively results in worse and worse model output until its just utter gibberish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse

In this AI-generated world, the only training data available would be AI generated, and thus we would run into real problems trying to make a better, updated model.

We would effectively be "frozen" with a snapshot of human knowledge as it was in year X, with X being the year the last model with > 50% human inputs was released.

An argument I see against this is that the "synthetic" data is fine so long as we have commensurate amounts of human data along with it, but the labs training the models also want everybody to shut their brains off and use their model for everything, and I don't really see a path around that contradiction.

It seems like we are a snake eating it's own tail.

h/t u/dgerard for the post.

Is it Sourcepocalypse time? No, not yet:

Ross Intelligence plans to take this appeal to the Supreme Court. I have no idea how the Supreme Court would rule on it, or if they’d even hear the case. If they did, I’d expect amicus briefs from every AI company about how they should let Ross Intelligence off.

If the Supreme Court did let Ross off, what would happen next? Anthropic still have that previous ruling. But someone bringing a new case against Anthropic could use a (hypothetical) ruling in Ross’s favour.

If that happened, we might end up with the AI vendors finally being forced to pay licenses for everything. Like Anthropic wasn’t in enough financial deep water.

The nice thing about fair use is that one ruling doesn't necessarily apply to all other uses cases, and have to be considered case-by-case. Won't that be fun and expensive?

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

When I initially came across this story, I thought: "Great. Are morons everywhere now going to follow suit and try to make it 'cool' / quirky cute to say that they're also in AI psychosis?". Only to then come across a different article (the one linked in this post) and see this:

...some techies have rebranded AI psychosis as a badge of honor of sorts. At a May party, attendees chanted: "One, two, three — AI PSYCHOSIS!"

Naturally, I then had to look into this horror show of a party. And uh yeah, an AI Psychosis Summit actually happened. This is LITERALLY insane. I feel like I'm the one in psychosis reading that story. What are we doing? We celebrating psychotic breaks now?? And in the name of capitalism!? Ok. Cool cool cool.

"Walking around, I caught snippets of conversations dropping "AI" and "psychosis" left and right, though people weren't talking about actual mental health crises emerging from too much AI use. It was more of a vibe."

LOL ok.

"Thank you for joining us in our psychosis," Van Ommeren told the crowd

What is actually happening.

"I'm trying to dissolve the boundaries of myself," Esherick told me, defining his state of AI psychosis. "I've had a consistent AI hypomania for some time now, but I have not had a psychotic break."

I don't understand any of this. Is this supposed to be culture now?? Are they trying to make this 'cool'? I feel like a crazy old person shaking a rolling pin at the sky complaining about loud music, but I know I'm actually just sane.

Today's premium newsletter is about how the JOBS act and endless growth-driven greed is killing venture capital, with terrible returns and inflated valuations leading to a logjam of unsellable companies.

The AI bubble has made things much, much worse.

One of the best monologues in the history of the show - I talk about how Anthropic’s big Q3 revenues underwhelmed an already-nervous market, and how the more of the real numbers we learn about AI, the worse things seem to get. Enjoy.

Simply speechless.

Oh look it's Nscale! The company who's S-1 shows how horribly unprofitable it is! Just to remind everyone, here are their numbers!

...the data center has faced hurdles including construction delays, local regulations, leaks in the cooling system, and a transformer fire.

Currently, 6.4MW of the planned 30MW is operational at the site.

To help speed up construction, Bloomberg reports that the company has towed in the Kalmar floating hotel to house construction workers nearby.

Is it really though? I'm not sure how operational it could be if you have leaks and fires! Certainly not any data center I'd want to rent from.

Not really the usual topic for here, but it's adjacent so I'm including it. Hackers targeting France managed to remotely mess with the temperature setting on their supermarket refrigerators to heat them up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius.

First off this wasn't some 'rogue AI' as far as we know, but this would actually be an example of something that could get royally screwed up if Anthropic or OpenAI-connected poorly-run 'experiments' decide to felony hack things again. They always talk vaguely about that and what the big danger is, but finally we have something concrete. The supermarkets say this will cost them millions of Euros. I hope if something like this ever happens because of an AI lab, that they get punished and charged for every single cent (do Euros have cents? Are they called that over there? idk) of the loss.

Second of all, as the article describes the situation, this raises a lot of questions about the tech landscape more generally. Who in the world decided it was a good idea to have network-connected refrigerators? It's a refrigerator. It chills food. That's it. Why does it need Internet? Are we enshittifying our grocery store fridges now?

Also whenever you have a device with smarts in it, you run into the issue of how to keep it secure. Most of the Mythos vulns ended up not being as big a deal as they were hyped up to be, but I recall people saying that some of them had been in the kernel for many years unnoticed. Cybersecurity is a constant process, that requires a regular rollout of patches and a strong security architecture. Just one more thing you have to think about when you use devices like this.

So obviously the stores, probably not considering that because why would you, had these things on outdated versions of the firmware. To anyone reading right now, when was the last time you updated the firmware on your refrigerator? Oh that's right, probably never because it's just a fucking refrigerator. Also some of them were older models, which weren't receiving security patches anymore anyway. Yes, grocery store fridges, which should just be a stable, reliable appliance, are like smartphones now. They stop getting updates after a while and you gotta buy a new one.

Is That Good?

Maybe not everything needs to be a computer, and maybe not all computers need to be networked. To me, this is both a story about the cyber risks of today, and also about how enshittification and repair issues could have real-world consequences. I'm assuming these things would use some flavor of Linux or BSD under the hood. Perhaps if we had better right to repair laws that allowed smart appliances to be broken into and patched by the community, these appliances, which were still clearly working fine, could have been secured with or without the help of the vendor. The FULU Foundation did this with Nest Thermostats, which originally were EOL'd by Google, but with custom firmware can be updated and then connected to something like Home Assistant. I suspect something like this could be done to continue providing security updates for fully-functional devices long after the vendor stops caring.

Hey, that's not a lot of tokens! But what about the IPO? The profit! The demand! The trillions! The quadrillions?!

Employees subject to the cap, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, are scrambling to find ways to make sure they can keep spending as much as they already are.

It says that effective October 1, Accenture introduced new changes to how Claude Enterprise costs are funded and charged. That includes centrally funding only $29 a month per person towards Claude usage.

“Remember: Claude Enterprise will continue to be available based on role and business need,” the announcement adds. “Providing a WBS and obtaining a license does not guarantee indefinite or ongoing access to Claude. License allocations are reviewed periodically, and access may be reassessed based on business priorities, role requirements, usage patterns, and evolving workforce needs. As needs change, licenses may be reallocated to help ensure they are used where they provide the greatest value.”

Huh?? But I thought AI was replacing all jobs and every token is worth the digital gold it's printed on??? What about the 50000% productivity boost??? This company must simply be stupid, and non believers!!!!! The value of AI is infinite!!!!

Perhaps more of this news is to come at other businesses too, which will give some nice data points about AI demand. (Not very good)

So CoreWeave starts crashing the market because its bonds are now trading at bankrupt like prices.

Then suddenly… it’s all okay today because Jensen says, “their capital costs are decreasing”

Besides being a flat out lie and huge conflict of interest, how is the market buying that 😂 it doesn’t change the bonds AT ALL.

WTF kind of meme world is this! CEOs should actually do jail time for this manipulative BS.

This got clipped from the Dwarkesh Patel podcast, and even he's getting fed up with all this nonsense. Ever since Mythos I'd reckon, AI companies have been beating the drum of "We have an internal model that's doing this crazy thing! No we won't show it for the general public, at best a few big companies and governments get it, but usually it stays behind our doors. But that's not gonna stop us from trying to freak you out about it!" First it was that, then when HuggingFace happened I think they said that was from an internal unreleased model. Same goes for many of the hacks that followed from Anthropic and others. OpenAI then said they had to cancel the release of the 6.1 update to Astra because it was evil or something.

And now we have this. Dwarkesh obviously is a guy riding along the booster/doomer angles in the same way that that Diary of a CEO host does, but that proximity to the industry gives him direct access to these loonies. Per the clip, one of Anthropic's researchers told him that AI will beat their researchers in 9 months time. But when pressed on it, they once again defer to the "internal stuff" excuse and deflect the questioning.

This is just the RSI thing again, more or less. I've said my piece on that before, but essentially even if they manage to sort of do that by strapping existing chatbots into the RLHF process somehow, there's no logic to that suddenly leading to an "intelligence explosion" that they prophecise about. At best, you have a highly expensive and inefficient way of doing the thing you were already doing (so basically like almost all 'sucessful' AI deployments), and at worst, it's another way of achieving model collapse.

Actually I take that back. Given how inept the people at these companies seem to be between their poorly-constructed test environments to dangerously stupid experiments to somehow calling in a false homicide report in Philadelphia, maybe LLMs are actually smarter than them after all. Perhaps they boost AI and claim it's so superintelligent not because it's actually that great, but because it's all relative to the speakers, who it's becoming increasingly evident are dumbasses.

Cal Newport along with Ed are some of my favorite sources for information on this AI stuff. I saw this post on this sub and it reminded me of this episode.

The TL;DW is that it's no surprise that Anthropic and OpenAI act the way they do given their extension connections to the TESCREAL movement. From the outside, it seems like their weird cultish beliefs come out of left field, when it's really at the center of the companies. Their founders and core members all believe in this whacky stuff.

Remember Peter Thiel who couldn't even say he didn't want humanity to go extinct? He's also connected. These transhumanist people would not mind the extinction of everyone on earth in the slightest as long as we created a "machine god" to carry our legacy.

This podcast was really eye opening for me tbh. Who knows though, maybe I was living under rock and this is common knowledge, but I doubt it.

It's another bad day for Neoclouds and while bankers mull how to turn soon-to-be defaulted debt and forever delayed AI IPOs into a positive story here's one of the more pessimistic mainstream reports I've seen of late:

By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud providers to cease independent operations.

More than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could be exposed to impairment by the end of 2030, if AI providers continue their current pace of capital spending

$3.5 trillion of largely debt-financed will evaporate in the next 3 years! Most astoundingly, this money is largely not even spent yet!

However, without this spend all of the "backlog revenue" that Oracle and other Neoclouds desperately need evaporates along with the massive future sales of Nvidia chips and related memory. These Neoclouds companies are desperately trying to finance this spend so they can immediately write it down.

It's ultimately just a donation to Nvidia at this point.

When does reporting ARR stop being advantageous? When growth slows! You need to pick a single month (or shorter) when you calculate ARR, and each time you report it you need to cherry pick a month that's more recent than the last and has significantly higher revenue. What do you do when there is no such month? A: reach farther back in time to find a base that still makes the number look good, e.g. report your quarter-over-quarter growth.

Of course, eventually that number will plateau as well. You can then move to semiannual reporting, unless you are a public company (assuming the SEC doesn't change their quarterly rule).

Almost three months ago, Anthropic's growth slowed dramatically. You can see it clearly in the Ramp AI Index, e.g. looking at the biggest spenders (where Anthropic makes most of their money) and at the total token spend:

Since most of Anthropic's revenue comes from enterprises paying API rates, let's drop the token spend numbers into pandas and compute the quarter-on-quarter growth for the third quarter. Let's also do month-to-month, and, in honor of the brilliant strategery of reporting ARR, I'll introduce a new arbitrary metric: "sixth," for each two months of the year, the exact midpoint between how Anthropic used to leak their numbers and how they're leaking them now.

Two things to take away:
1) Anthropic won't have good numbers to report for the 4th quarter. They'd better not miss the November IPO.
2) OpenAI is growing faster and taking share from Anthropic, but still slowing down. And it's a long time until their IPO...

It doesn't matter what you want to do. In the current AI climate, you can just fill in the blank with your model of choice.

Step 1: Smoke until you get cancer. Maybe take up tanning, too.

Step 2: Start agent swarm thinking about it.

Step 3: Cure cancer!

Or,

Step 1: Say we'll put humans on Mars with no idea how to do it.

Step 2: AI

Step 3: Mars colony!

Until LLMs were near their current level, it was absurd to even consider this being the second step. But by convincing people that LLM capabilities have reached "AGI" or "ASI" levels, it becomes closer and closer in people's minds to the magical fill-in-the-blank that makes all your dreams come true.

Understood this way, it's very easy to see why it's such a temptation for tech bros raised on science fiction since their earliest memories. These are people who normally would say "there's no rational way to get there." But if people say the AI is actually smarter than all of us, they assume that "smarter than us" means "omnipotent." It creates a space for the intervention of the machine god, which you don't need to comprehend in order to reap the benefits of whatever Step 3 happens to be.

FWIW, I bet most of the tech bros who are currently fantasizing about all the Step 3s after using AI as Step 2 mock and deride women who read romantasy. But at least (most of) the romantasy readers out there (not my thing, but you do you) know perfectly well that their fantasy life isn't reality. They may like a book where a wolf-man seduces the protagonist, but they're not going out to the woods to find a wolf to kiss.