Anthropic went from a distant #2 in the AI startup race to winning news cycles, sharing the stage with the pope, eclipsing OpenAI's valuation and barreling towards an historic IPO, all in a matter of months. How did Anthropic pull it off? By doubling down on its key export: AI ethics slop.

NEW: Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.

Anthropic is succeeding “by building a popular product, partly by correctly recognizing which way the winds of public sentiment were blowing, partly out of luck, and also by being unabashedly full of shit.” Brilliant stuff, as usual, from @bcmerchant.bsky.social

The great con: "It sent a billionaire co-founder to the Vatican to solemnly intone about the specter of mass job loss and the importance of caring for the poor...[3] days later issues a press release about its massive new funding round & resultant sub-$1 trillion valuation" @bcmerchant.bsky.social:

🫡

Last week, IT employees at the University of California system across the state formed the largest tech worker union in the United States. This is how they now plan to confront tech industry layoffs, rein in AI, and push for tech for the common good:

Alright I’ve got a sick 10 year old, what’s a good family movie we haven’t seen one million times — comps: Wall-e, Mitchells vs machines, Ghostbusters, the Martian, flight of the navigator

It’s a whole trend.

My kingdom for a good, entirely AI-free web browser

This is the stuff.

Counterpoint: No I will not

as we grieve the slop-ification of Google, I want to know everyone's favorite fun niche sites from Back When The Internet Was Good. what did you visit every day on your coffee break at work? we were a big Homestar Runner household, and I also loved Cake Wrecks and Animals Talking In All Caps

Wow - DHS circulated a “Be on the Lookout” alert to national law enforcement for Ben Palmer, the comedian who made that fake ICE tip line. Great work by @aurabogado.bsky.social: www.injusticewatch.org/civil-courts...

CHOOSE. ENOCH.

Counterpoint: Yes they are, and that is good

No better time than the present to get off Google and the rest of those shitty US tech companies.

It really does, for the last two years, it's like they've been daring me

Meanwhile I am transforming my daily browsing practice into never using Google again

The worst news I've gotten in a while

I've wanted to read a deep dive into this very question for a hot minute, will very much look forward to digging into this

“liz you can just use AI as a research tool, don’t be such a Luddite” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/b...

Putting aside the underlying issue here I'd be kind of concerned if my lawyer was tweeting about how much of a moron I am

The metaphors really keep piling up here. A university used AI to try to save some time automating a task that did not need to be automated, or to give the appearance that it was future-forward, and wound up leaving hundreds of students out of graduation.

This is great. I'm gen x but the kids are on to something

Sir, another graduation ceremony in which the students booed AI has dropped. "College graduates were pissed after their school used AI to announce graduates’ names and missed hundreds of names" (via @/FearedBuck on Twitter)

“That’s why the students are booing, I think. They’re experiencing AI in realtime as a forecloser of futures; as the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism, as the prime agent moving a world that’s become a deck stacked against them.” — @bcmerchant.bsky.social really nails it, as usual

Elon Musk suffered the worst defeat possible in his legal battle against OpenAI as a federal jury and a judge ruled he waited too long to bring his claims against the AI startup and its top executives, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

Today I learned that the great Wendy Liu aka @dellsystem.bsky.social has a regular column about AI industry billboards in SF in the @bayareacurrent.bsky.social. It's such a great way to examine these companies and AI culture in the valley and the Bay. I'll be reading them all now:

This is a good read. Take the time to actually *read* it, because this I think actually accurately capture what I think is going on with LLMs (they're not AI, no matter how much proponents whine it is).

Wrote about the college kids booing AI, and how, in a moment rife with economic precarity, affordability crises, and collapsing job prospects, AI has become a new avatar of American capitalism

AI companies are writing their own constitutions. Meanwhile, a shared vocabulary for contesting algorithmic power has been traveling across red and blue states, from legislatures to civil society. New from me in @science.org: "A Civic Grammar for AI Rights" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵

“It’s abundantly clear that the opinions on generative AI grow more positive and less anchored in labor reality the higher up someone is in the management level, so if that’s all legislators and policymakers are talking to, then they’ll be writing some seriously deficient bills.”

Here’s my own anecdote. I recently went to a antique/ craft fair that had a few artist’s booths. The booths had a few people checking out the art. It also had a booth that was selling prints of obvious AI art. The booth was crammed with people thumbing through the cheap prints- you could not get

We as musicians/composers particularly should stand in solidarity with artists and refuse to use genAI art, just like we want others to refuse to use AI music.

"the opinions on generative AI grow more positive and less anchored in labor reality the higher up someone is in the management level ... It’s going to be quite clear that AI policy is labor policy”

“Tools shouldn’t be able to use your own data to replace you"

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

I am going through this as we speak. Thanks to the rise of AI-generated subtitles, human translators and subtitlers are becoming redundant and 'too expensive' to keep around so me (and frankly all of my coworkers) were fired to cut costs.

Damn for a company whose product is intended to “benefit all of humanity” there seems to be a rather small segment doing the benefiting

"According to the survey, 99% of artists “disliked” AI; for 92%, the dislike was “strong.” And that distaste translates into action, too. Per the survey, 85% of artists completely abstain from using AI at all. And 88% percent refusal use AI to generate images." Empowering

What so many have experienced personally has been confirmed by a new study: AI has been a disaster for working artists.

Idea: Luddite University.

I very much enjoyed this discussion about the growing AI resistance and the destruction of surveillance infrastructure with my good friend Jason

Happy International Worker's Day everyone. Let's all smash the machinery hurtful to commonality together.