I’ve defended Micron against its rivals often enough that I don’t reach for the company’s press office as a source of good faith. Legacy chipmakers cry protectionism every time a customer finds a cheaper part, and most of the time the complaint is about margin, not national security. Every instinct I have says discount this warning too. I can’t. Not this time. Apple’s pitch to the Trump administration — sourcing Chinese memory for products sold outside the United States — has been framed as a carve-out, a geographic footnote that leaves the domestic industry untouched.

I used to think the labs with the best models would win the consumer layer eventually, on the theory that a better assistant is a better assistant regardless of which app it lives inside. Distribution felt like a problem money could solve whenever a lab got serious about it. Money doesn’t solve it fast enough anymore, apparently. Cognition acquired Poke, the messaging-based AI assistant, in a deal reportedly valuing Poke’s parent in the low nine figures.

I expected the Delhi High Court’s ruling on ANI versus OpenAI to go the other way. News agencies have made real headway in other jurisdictions arguing that training on their reporting is itself the infringement, and I assumed an Indian court would lean toward the plaintiff on a fact pattern this sympathetic. It didn’t, and the reasoning it used is the more interesting story than the outcome. The Delhi High Court ruled that OpenAI’s use of ANI content to train ChatGPT wasn’t copyright infringement, because ANI didn’t show that ChatGPT actually reproduced its reports.

I’ve been dismissive of “proof of human” as a category for a while. It sounded like a solution chasing a problem that mostly affected crypto airdrops and dating app catfish, not something a platform with three billion users needed to solve. I was wrong about the addressable market, if not about the mechanism. Meta launched Facebook Verified, a free program that checks a facial recognition selfie and assigns a badge confirming you’re a real person.

I generally treat “confidential IPO filing” stories as noise — every ambitious Chinese tech company floats a Hong Kong listing rumor at some point, and most of them either stall or get quietly repriced down before they ever ring a bell. I don’t think MetaX’s filing is noise, and the reason has nothing to do with MetaX’s chips. The Shanghai-based GPU maker confidentially filed for a Hong Kong listing targeting a year-end IPO, part of what reporting describes as a surge of fundraising from rivals in the same window China’s vice premier reportedly warned domestic AI companies that resisting local chips made them traitors to the state.

I like open-weight models. I think Jensen Huang’s argument — that open weights let more eyes find more flaws faster — is broadly correct as a security philosophy, and I’ve made versions of that argument in print before this week. I still believe it. I just don’t think this week is the evidence for it that the industry’s letter wants it to be. Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and others signed a letter defending open-weight models against “premature restrictions,” timed to Huang’s first-ever post on X making the eyes-on-the-code case.

I want to like the “AI is deflationary” story. It’s clean, it’s optimistic, and every model launch this year has come with a chart showing cost per token falling off a cliff. I’ve written versions of that chart myself. The chart is real. It’s just not the whole curve. Qualcomm telling customers it’s raising prices by double digits, after exhausting its ability to absorb supplier costs, landed in the same news cycle as Anthropic pricing Opus 5 at roughly half of what Fable 5 costs for comparable capability.

I don’t have much sympathy for prosecutors who treat a phone’s security feature as evidence of criminal intent. That instinct made this story easy to write off as one more overreach the moment I read the headline. It’s not that simple, and pretending it is would waste the more interesting story sitting right next to it. The DOJ is prosecuting a Cop City protester for allegedly giving CBP a duress passcode — the GrapheneOS feature that wipes a phone’s contents when entered under compulsion — treating the wipe itself as obstruction.

I think Big Tech gets away with treating “user safety” as a compliance checkbox more often than it should, and I’ve said so in this space before. If a $1 billion fine landed on Google for something a European regulator plausibly called a child-safety failure, my first instinct is to side with the regulator. My first instinct is wrong here, and not for the reason Google’s lobbyists would give you.

I’ve defended the platform-partnership model for autonomy longer than most people in this space. Waymo riding on Uber’s demand, Mobileye supplying ADAS to a dozen automakers instead of building its own car — division of labor sounded like the mature, capital-efficient way to scale a technology this expensive. I don’t think that’s the endgame anymore. Waymo is reportedly exploring an exit from its Uber partnership, with the relationship souring amid a lobbying fight over robotaxi regulation.