Reading the tea leaves: 2026 predictions
In which I get to make some predictions about our space.
Artificial Confidence
What changed in AI this week, adjusted for spin.
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Frontier lab economics have bifurcated: tax the exit, lobby against the free
Distillation is cost optimization at home and theft abroad.
The Model Stopped Being the Product This Week
Five "unrelated" stories, one repricing: the value in AI has moved to everything around the model, if you're paying attention. You read this newsletter; obviously you are.
Artificial Confidence: They all picked September 1st
Fable came back last week, and Anthropic already moved its own leaving date once. Meanwhile GitHub, Google, and Anthropic all set their real price hike for the day after Labor Day, when your finance t
Artificial Confidence: Ask permission, not forgiveness
Anthropic shipped Fable 5 to the public; we know what happened next. OpenAI cleared GPT-5.6 with Washington before launch and got to ship. This bodes ill.
Artificial Confidence: You can’t repossess a download
A government nastygram took the country’s best coding model offline for everyone. What arrived the same week isn’t a frontier replacement; it’s an Opus-class workhorse you can own.
No failover for the Commerce Secretary
The US government switched off Anthropic's two best models for every customer on Friday evening. Your disaster-recovery plan has a runbook for an outage, yet nothing for a letter from Commerce.
Claude Opus / Fable / Shitpost
In April it was too dangerous to release. In June it's in your Pro subscription until the 22nd, then it isn't, then maybe it is again.
Artificial Confidence: xAI, the Neocloud
xAI raised frontier-lab money, then used it to quietly turn into a GPU landlord, renting its Memphis data center to the two competitors out-shipping it. Apple conceded it can’t host its own AI either.
Artificial Confidence: GitHub Repriced the Habit it Built
GitHub evolved its billing model, and you’ll feel it soon. Everyone else annualized their best month and called it revenue.
Artificial Confidence: Banned by Pentagon, blessed by Pope, paid for by you
Five assumptions your AI vendor stack lost in five business days. The trade press will not be on the cc line of your Q3 invoice.
Artificial Confidence: The Spec for the Agent-Native Cloud, and Who Might Actually Ship It
I tweeted a twelve-point spec for what an agent-native cloud actually needs to look like. Vercel volunteered. Cloudflare's engineers got to work. Here's the test.
Artificial Confidence #2: The week AI labs became Palantir
Anthropic and OpenAI both stood up consulting arms this month. GitHub Copilot quietly admitted its subscription pricing never made sense. Vercel published the receipts.
Artificial Confidence #1: AWS gave the agents a credit card
Inaugural issue. Microsoft Research benchmarked the agents and they're not ready; AWS gave them a credit card anyway.