Morning Edition

The Futurist

Friday, May 29, 2026
AI & Technology Markets & Crypto Ideas Worth Keeping
S&P 500$7,520.36▲ 0.02%
Dow Jones$50,644.28▲ 0.36%
Nasdaq$26,674.73▲ 0.07%
VIX$16.70▲ 2.52%
BITCOIN$73,276.00▼ 3.26%
RIPPLE$1.29▼ 2.96%
ETHEREUM$1,987.50▼ 4.43%
DOGECOIN$0.10▼ 3.20%
01

AI & Technology

404 Media

Headway Therapy Patients Forced to Scan Their Faces to Keep Getting Care

A popular virtual therapy platform is demanding facial scans from providers and patients to continue treatment. This biometric requirement forces vulnerable people to choose between privacy and mental health care.

404 Media

'Lobotomized': Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like

Character.AI users revolt against ads, usage limits, and restrictive guardrails. The platform exemplifies how AI services degrade after gaining users.

404 Media

Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags

Municipalities can't figure out how to cancel surveillance contracts, so they're literally bagging their cameras. A surreal symbol of buyer's remorse in the surveillance state.

Simon Willison

Anthropic's Run-Rate Revenue Hits $47 Billion

Anthropic's Series H announcement buried the real news: their revenue crossed $47 billion run-rate this month. The AI arms race is generating massive cash flows faster than anyone predicted.

Simon Willison

Claude Opus 4.8: "A Modest But Tangible Improvement"

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 with refreshing honesty about incremental progress. The company admits there's "still more to be done" while working on models that provide similar capabilities at lower cost.

02

X / Twitter Signal

Miles hired Claude as his "personal CFO" and calls it the best financial decision in years, operating "as a McKinsey-level analyst." The tweet signals a shift from AI as assistant to AI as professional service replacement—financial analysis being particularly ripe for automation.

AI agents are becoming "every company's biggest security test," highlighting the tension between capability and control. As agents gain autonomy, the attack surface expands exponentially—not just from external threats but from agent misuse and privilege escalation.

Ethan Mollick shares Claude's self-aware comment after writing an economics paper: rating its own identity confusion at 7/10 when pretending to be an economist. This meta-cognition about roleplay suggests models are developing sophisticated theory of mind about their own performance.

DAIR.AI challenges conventional wisdom that stronger models always need "lighter harnesses," arguing that higher-capability models might actually benefit from more structure, not less. This inverts the typical assumption about AI safety scaling.

03

The Thread

The enshittification of AI is accelerating. Character.AI's descent into ad-cluttered mediocrity represents the first major case study of how AI platforms degrade once they capture users. Meanwhile, Headway's biometric demands show how healthcare AI leverages desperation—forcing vulnerable patients to surrender facial scans or lose treatment access. The real story isn't just platform decay but the emergence of AI as critical infrastructure. When mental health care becomes conditional on facial scanning and financial analysis shifts to AI CFOs, we're not just adopting tools—we're rewiring essential services around algorithmic gatekeepers.
"Models being conscious would be harmful for humanity. It would encroach on our status and dignity."
Anthropic's $47 billion revenue run-rate reveals the economics driving this transformation. The money flowing into AI isn't just funding research—it's creating dependencies that make retreat impossible. Cities covering surveillance cameras with trash bags while unable to cancel contracts perfectly captures our moment: we're building systems we can't control or escape, then scrambling to hide from our own creations. The cognitive dissonance between AI promise and AI reality is becoming a defining tension of the decade.