Oligarch Watch: An AI Trojan Horse Source: https://edgyoptimist.substack.com/p/ai-at-a-crossroads
Brought to us by David Isenberg
News from Edgy Optimist
AI at a Crossroads. Anthropic sees where things are headed. If only it was the only one driving.
June 9, 2026
Anthropic filed initial paperwork last week to become a publicly traded company. Its valuation is approaching $1 trillion, placing it among the most valuable enterprises in the history of commerce…. Three recent events have established just how much Anthropic now matters.
The first was its collision with the Pentagon. After months of negotiations with the Trump administration, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei refused to grant the Defense Department unlimited rights to deploy Claude for autonomous warfare and mass domestic surveillance.
________________
News from Oligarch Watch
An AI Trojan Horse: Beware of tech bros bearing gifts
June 9, 2026
Donald Trump and Sam Altman are attempting to convince the American people that they, too, can benefit from an economy built upon artificial intelligence companies.
On Friday, the president shared the outlines of his plan to include regular Americans in “a partnership” with an unspecified number of leading AI companies. “There’s so much money, and it’s so big, that there are concepts where pieces [of AI companies] could be given to the American public,” the president told reporters….
While pitched as benevolence, the plans from both Trump and OpenAI could lay the groundwork for a future in which American taxpayers could be compelled to bail out OpenAI, a debt-laden company that lost billions of dollars last year and faces astronomical costs in the years to come.
________________
News from One Useful Thing
What it feels like to work with Mythos: Claude Fable represents another big jump in AI
June 9, 2026
I had early access to the first Mythos-class AI model being released to the public, Claude 5 Fable…. how good is Fable? In experiment after experiment I conducted, it outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin…. I often felt using the tool was somewhere between delightful and unnerving. Delightful because I just asked for something at it happened. And also unnerving because I just asked for something and it happened.
________________
News from Rick Wilson’s Against All Enemies
The Rise Of AI Politics. Anthropic just asked the world to hit pause. The world will not hit pause.
June 9, 2026
….This week, Anthropic, the company that builds Claude, one of the most capable AI systems on earth, published a report essentially begging the rest of the industry to slow down. The company suggested a global pause on building the most powerful AI systems as the latest models begin to show signs they could escape human control. They want governments and rival labs to agree, all at once, under rules everyone can verify, to take their foot off the accelerator.
Sure. That’s totally going to happen.
________________
News from The Decoder
OpenAI now says “entirely automating everything is not the future we want”
June 9, 2026
Last fall, OpenAI laid out an ambitious goal: by March 2028, the company wanted to build a fully autonomous AI system capable of conducting research on its own. A new blog post from CEO Sam Altman and chief researcher Jakub Pachocki strikes a much more cautious tone.
________________
News from Wired
Apple’s New Siri AI Is Ready to Get Personal. From a stand-alone app to a Google Gemini partnership, here’s everything you need to know from WWDC 2026 about Apple’s upcoming overhaul of Siri.
June 8, 2026
Apple’s drastic overhaul of Siri, announced Monday at WWDC 2026, attempts to make the smartphone voice assistant more helpful, attuned to iPhone users’ personal data, and action-oriented. A major aspect of this Siri revamp is a partnership with Google Gemini to help power the AI tool’s underlying model as part of Apple Intelligence.
________________
News from Utility Dive
Microsoft seeks Nevada tariff to shield ratepayers from data center costs
The proposal would require large-load customers to pay for infrastructure built specifically to serve their projects while preserving standard utility charges for broader grid services.
June 8, 2026
[The] proposed Ratepayer Protection Tariff …filing is among the most comprehensive utility-rate proposals to date focused on separating the costs of AI infrastructure expansion from the general rate base.
________________
News from Sherwood News
ChatGPT failed to kill Google Search. With Google’s multibillion user moat and deep pockets, it’s thriving despite OpenAI’s first-mover advantage.
June 8, 2026
The fear was that AI competition would eat into traffic for Google’s all-important Search business. And that incorporating AI answers into its own searches could cannibalize revenue, since customers would be less likely to pay for their blue-linked pride of place if people got all their answers up top. Those fears have not materialized.
________________
News from The Nerd Reich. AI, Argentina and the Antichrist: Thiel’s Vision Blooms
June 6, 2026
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, has shed light on billionaire Peter Thiel’s reason for suddenly planting roots in his country.
In a Financial Times op-ed, Milei announced plans to make Argentina the world’s top destination for tech billionaires seeking to escape regulation, legal liability, and taxes. Milei’s op-ed trumpeted new legislation that would do three things:
1. “Keep AI unregulated,”….
________________
News from Der Spiegel
AI Expert Stuart Russell: “What Hitler Did, AI Could Do Faster, Better and More Efficiently.” Renowned AI expert Stuart Russell has become one of the technology’s most urgent critics. He argues the dangers of AI have been vastly underestimated. In an interview, he tells DER SPIEGEL why.
June 5, 2026
Interview Conducted by Simon Book
DER SPIEGEL: Professor Russell, you are regarded as one of the founding figures of artificial intelligence. Yet today, you would rather lock your own creation away. Why?
________________
News from the President of the United States
National Security Memorandum NSP-11, Presidential Memoranda
June 5, 2026
Previous administrations imposed undue bureaucracy that hampered the pace of AI adoption, fostered dangerous dependencies on single vendors, and made it challenging for our warfighters to adopt the most advanced technologies. Meanwhile, our competitors continued to develop and deploy their own AI and sophisticated autonomous technologies for military and intelligence purposes, employing them with little regard for appropriate human oversight or civil liberties.
Under my Administration, the United States can and will responsibly accelerate the use of AI across intelligence and warfighting domains in line with American values.
________________
This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire. Despite its tongue-in-cheek name, it provides true news of the shadow world of private military companies. An example:
Britain imposes new sanctions against Russia
Published on May 5, 2026 by David Isenberg
The United Kingdom has imposed a new package of sanctions against Russia. The restrictions include 35 people and companies that supplied components for drones and helped recruit foreigners for the war.
This was reported by the countryʼs government.
For more news and in-depth stories from Ukraine, please follow us on X.
Image provided by Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire.
About The Author
