Hard Fork

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × Dr. Dana Suskind

Washington’s reversal of Anthropic’s Fable 5 restrictions and reported limits on GPT 5.6 shift frontier AI from default release to politically granted access, creating availability risk for businesses built on critical model APIs.Chinese open models may gain from being downloadable and controllable, while parents face a parallel product-screening challenge: Suskind’s DETECT framework favors AI that enhances human connection and rejects companions until safety is established.

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × Sebastian Mallaby

Google’s AI Mode replaces ten blue links with synthesized answers as it defends a search business that generated $54 billion last quarter, putting the link economy and publishers’ traffic at risk.TollBit found AI interfaces delivered 91% less click-through traffic than conventional search, while Chegg’s collapse shows the exposure; crypto’s expanding ties to ordinary savings and vibe coding’s maintenance debt add further risks to monitor.

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × PJ Vogt

AI’s investable signal is agency: systems that pursue goals and act in the world may require regulation beyond media-style infrastructure.Potential gains include faster scientific iteration, but alignment, job automation, and the speed of government oversight remain unresolved risks.

Data centers became 2025’s defining technology as AI infrastructure reached economy-scale spending, tying chips, electricity, cooling, rare earths, and environmental politics into one concentrated build-out.Claude Code and Granola show clearer monetization where AI removes concrete work, while DeepSeek, Sora, TrumpCoin, and age-verification laws leave competitive, governance, and regulatory risks to monitor.

David Yaffe-Bellany

Social platforms have made borderline outrage a scalable growth mechanism, with X recording more first-time US downloads than on any previous day after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, even as most Americans showed no nationwide surge toward violence.A $2 billion UAE crypto transaction involving World Liberty Financial coincided with a tentative opening for advanced Nvidia-chip exports; the overlapping interests and timing raise conflict risks without proving a quid pro quo.

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × David Yaffe-Bellany

Google is putting AI Mode inside Search, a $54 billion last-quarter franchise, replacing 10 blue links with bespoke answers and risking core-business cannibalization.ChatGPT may reach 1% of search by year-end, while defaults could accelerate displacement and Chegg shows the publisher-supplier downside.Trump’s narrower Bitcoin reserve preserves seized holdings, while stablecoin rules, CFTC authority and possible XRP or Solana ETFs could integrate crypto into conventional finance.