Tag: ai

Spain instructs state-backed companies to avoid new Palantir contracts

Spain just told Palantir to pack its bags. Or at least, to stop unpacking new ones.

On July 1, the Spanish government issued a directive through SEPI, the state holding company that oversees the country’s publicly owned enterprises, instructing its portfolio companies to avoid entering new contracts with Palantir Technologies. The reason: concerns over classified national security information and what officials see as risks to national sovereignty.

The directive targets firms operating in defense, communications, and infrastructure. We’re talking about heavyweights like Telefónica, defense contractor Indra, and naval shipbuilder Navantia.

What’s actually happening

Here’s the thing: this isn’t technically a ban. It’s not legislation. It’s not even a formal regulation.

It’s more like a strongly worded internal memo with teeth. SEPI is directing the companies it controls to exercise “vigilance” regarding sensitive data, which in practice means no new Palantir contracts.

That distinction matters. Existing contracts remain intact, at least for now. Palantir’s most notable Spanish deal, a contract worth approximately €16.5 million with CIFAS (the Centro de Inteligencia de las Fuerzas Armadas, Spain’s military intelligence center), runs through November 2026. So the company isn’t getting kicked out mid-project. It’s just not being invited back.

The company, co-founded by Peter Thiel and led by CEO Alex Karp, has long positioned itself as the Western world’s answer to authoritarian surveillance tech.

Keep reading

The Biggest Problem With AI Today

What’s the biggest problem in AI today? Is it cost, with token budgets being blown out of the water by agentic AI? Is it sustainability, with AI consuming electricity and fresh water? Is it ethics, with tech companies cramming AI into everything?

I think it’s deeper than that. Those are all symptoms of a much deeper-rooted problem: nobody’s making decisions.

Or more correctly, we’ve abdicated far too much of our executive function to AI. We’ve surrendered our thinking. 

Let’s dig in.

Part 1: Where This Issue Came From

On Friday afternoon, I was mulling over what I wanted to cover in this week’s issue. It’s a holiday weekend here in the USA, so not as many folks will be reading, and that’s okay. (I appreciate that YOU are) And I’ve covered a ton recently:

So on a whim, I set up a NotebookLM with the last 180 days of conversations from over 40 different subreddits, like r/marketing, r/chatgpt, etc. – everything around marketing, business, and AI. I connected it to Claude Code with the NotebookLM command line tool (the most token—efficient way for Claude to talk to NotebookLM), and then put all of my 2026 newsletters year to date into an input folder.

I asked Claude to compare what I’ve written about thus far this year with what folks are finding their hardest problems are with AI. Claude spit out a list of 10 major things derived from over 800,000 words of foaming at the mouth on Reddit that it thought might be good newsletter topics:

  • AI Visibility challenges
  • Agentic oversight is degrading
  • AI deployment is broken
  • 40-60% of company budget is wasted on the wrong models
  • AI is a rental
  • AI sycophancy is screwing up synthetic focus groups
  • AI detectors don’t work
  • AI is hollowing out corporations and no one’s hiring junior staff
  • People measure AI by tokenmaxxing
  • Marketers are basically unpaid labor for AI companies training data

Claude was REALLY pushing for me to write about how measurement is broken in marketing and AI today, and I might do that at some point, but that’s not what I see when I look at this laundry list. Yes, there are measurement issues in many of them, data issues in many of them, but… measurement being broken is the symptom of what I said earlier – we’ve abdicated executive function.

For those who aren’t analytics nerds, you know that measurement is a trailing indicator. It’s not a leading indicator.

Part 2: Executive Function Recap

As a reminder, I bucket executive function into four categories that I call PODS:

  • Plan: you think about achieving something in the future and make a plan to get there from here
  • Organize: you take what you have and try to make sense of it
  • Decide: you take what you have and make decisions about it
  • Solve: you solve the problems you have

Yes, there is more nuance to executive function than this, but this handy, short list is an easy way to see what our brains are doing. That’s critical thinking, one of the worst-named practices we have.

Why? Because critical thinking isn’t about being critical, per se. It’s about metacognition – the definition of which is thinking about thinking. When you’re thinking about how you think, you open the door to improvements, to growth.

Thinking about thinking means asking questions and reflecting – is this the best way to do something? How could I do this better? How could I derive more enjoyment from this thing I’m doing? It’s not criticizing yourself as much as it is recognizing what you’re doing and whether it’s working or not.

When you’re planning, organizing, deciding, and solving, you’re inherently thinking about thinking. Every time you plan, every time you bring order to chaos, you have to check in with your own brain to see if what you’re doing is moving you closer to the goal posts.

Executive function is one of the things that defines our sentience as living creatures. Every sentient creature from a mouse to us does these tasks. You’ve read or heard stories about crows fashioning tools from wire to solve problems, you’ve watched dogs and cats make decisions and plan. I’ve watched my own cat measure optically whether or not she can make a particular jump.

Properly prompted, today’s AI tools are superb at executive functions as well. Given the right frameworks, harnesses, and data, they can plan, organize, decide, and solve better than we can at most language-based tasks.

And therein lies the actual problem.

Keep reading

China-Linked Socialist NGO Derailed $23.6 Billion In Data Center Buildouts: Report

Our note on Thursday titled “World’s Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out” detailed Blackstone dialing back its presence from Northern Virginia’s data-center alley, raising questions about whether the AI infrastructure buildout, colliding with local resistance movements, has begun to hit hard limits.

Just days after agreeing to sell stakes in three Virginia data centers to Digital Realty Trust for $3.5 billion, Blackstone’s QTS Realty Trust is reportedly abandoning plans for its portion of the massive Prince William Digital Gateway project. The 2,100-acre campus was expected to include as many as 37 data-center buildings and require city-scale power supplies.

“For community organizers and residents that spent the last five years opposing the Digital Gateway, QTS’s pullout will now validate a playbook that involved pressure campaigns on local politicians and legal attacks. It will also unleash even more powerful blowback nationwide against these unwanted developments,” we noted.

That brings us to the composition of the local resistance. Multiple reports suggest data center opposition is not entirely organic.

In fact, one familiar player appears to be involved, a name our readers know well, and the U.S. government certainly recognizes because a China-based billionaire funds the socialist NGO network.

Y Combinator founder Garry Tan, also founder of Garry’s List, a civic engagement organization, cited the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s recent report on how a “coordinated foreign influence campaign against American AI — running through CCP state media, a Shanghai-based Marxist’s nonprofit network, and foreign billionaire dark money that has funneled $2B+ into US advocacy infrastructure.”

Garry’s List noted, “AI doomerism isn’t as organic as it looks.“

That China-based Marxist’s nonprofit network spreading across the US is supported by Neville Roy Singham, who has reportedly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, media operations, and activist networks that seek to sow chaos and spread communism inside the US.

Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, was authorized to examine whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.

Given that federal investigators are circling the socialists in the Singham NGO network, Garry’s List noted that Singham’s Party for Socialism and Liberation has “run 21 campaigns across 14 states that delayed, scaled back, or blocked $23.6 billion in AI infrastructure investment.”

Keep reading

Anthropic Moves To Shut Loopholes Letting Chinese Tech Firms Access Claude

Days after the Commerce Department lifted three-week-old export controls on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos AI models over national security concerns, a new report says the company is moving to close loopholes that have allowed Chinese firms to access its most advanced models.

The Financial Times cites people familiar with the matter who say Chinese companies, such as Ant Financial, used overseas subsidiaries, cloud providers, and internal corporate networks to access AI chatbots such as Claude Code.  

To note, Alibaba owns about one-third of Ant Financial. Alibaba was recently blacklisted by the US Government over concerns that it was effectively an arm of the Chinese military.

Ant reportedly provided employees with corporate Claude accounts routed through its Singapore-linked intranet, while ByteDance employees have used VPNs and expense reimbursements for personal Claude subscriptions.

The workarounds do not appear to violate US or Chinese law, but they breach Anthropic’s terms of service, which ban Chinese companies and Beijing-controlled foreign entities from using its models.

Anthropic said it prohibits access from unsupported regions, including China, and continuously updates enforcement systems to detect evasion.

FT provided more details on its crackdown:

As part of its efforts to crack down on unauthorised access, Anthropic has targeted “transfer station” services, which relay requests from users in mainland China through Claude accounts registered overseas before returning the responses.

However, larger Chinese AI groups generally avoid transfer stations because the services’ operators are widely suspected of storing or reselling prompts. Executives worry rivals could analyse those requests to understand how they are using advanced models to improve their own systems.

What’s ironic is that a company behind one of the world’s most advanced coding models apparently failed to build the proper guardrails needed to keep Chinese firms from accessing it, even as it works to close those loopholes.

Keep reading

Billionaire Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Warns Woke AI Company Anthropic Could Rig 2028 Election for Democrats

Billionaire technology Peter Thiel warned that AI company Anthropic could use its technological advantage to influence the 2028 presidential election in favor of Democrats.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Thiel suggested that Anthropic, which he described as a “woke liberal company,” was “winning the AI race” and could use its advanced AI models to “rig the elections in 2028.”

Thiel, who co-founded both PayPal and Palantir, argued he company would be able to “completely outwit” any efforts by Elon Musk to counter it through X because of the power of its technology.

Anthropic has declined to comment, referring reporters to a previous blog post on election integrity and political bias.

The company has clashed with the Trump administration, which has even designated it a “supply chain risk” because of the restrictions it wants to place on military programs.

CEO Dario Amodei is known for his left-wing views and has likened President Trump to a “feudal warlord.”

Keep reading

4Chan trolls UK government with another AI hamster as fines hit $800k

4Chan has continued to troll the UK government and Ofcom after they hit the website with fines of over $800,000, and they’re answering with more AI hamsters.

Over the last year, a number of governments have been cracking down on what online content can be accessed by children under the age of 18. That includes the United Kingdom, which is working on a social media ban similar to the one that Australia implemented. 

The UK has implemented age safety verification checks for certain material too and has hit a number of websites with takedowns, as well as fines. 4Chan has been caught up in the latter, being issued with fines that now total over $800,000.

While Ofcom, the UK regulator, is still seeking payment from 4Chan, their lawyer has once again responded with an AI hamster.

4Chan hits back at UK government’s latest fine

“Ofcom wrote. Again. Demanding that 4chan pay its fine. Sent us bank details and everything. Oh no. Super scary. We replied with a hamster. Again,” Preston Byrne, the website’s lawyer, posted on X. 

Byrne also showed off the email response he sent to the regulator. “You want money, huh? Come get it,” he started, with an AI hamster wearing a Thug Life hate being surronded by mountains of dollar bills.

“As 4Chan has no assets in the United Kingdom (given that it has no connection to the United Kingdom), that would require you to show up in a US court as a platiff, waive soreign immunity, and overcome existing U.S. doctrine regarding the non-enforcement of foreign regulatory penalties. 

“We suspect that isn’t going to happen. We suspect you know it isn’t going to happen, too.”

Keep reading

Are Taxpayers Helping to Finance America’s Data Center Boom?

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else” ~ Frédéric Bastiat

A strikingly large number of massive data centers are being built across the United States. It is currently estimated that there are more than 4,000 data centers in the U.S., and more are on the way.

The federal government as well as local and state governments are providing financial incentives for these investments. Such incentives occur in an environment that lacks transparency and proper disclosure. As an extension of this opaqueness, the benefits to justify these subsidies also remain unclear. Many would argue that promises of job creation have been grossly overstated (and the data centers’ potential role in creating a digital control grid kept secret), while energy and resource concerns—as well as the potential costs of site cleanup if and when the facilities close down or fail—have been minimized. This, in addition to the secrecy surrounding the planning and financing of the data center industry, indicates that the negative impact to local residents and the American taxpayers may be substantial.

The following report examines this matter and is organized into two main sections. The first covers the federal layer of financial influence helping to advance the data center boom—the One Big Beautiful Bill. The second section focuses on the generous state and local government tax incentives, which are costing state governments billions in revenue losses. The conclusion elaborates on an opportunity to join the effort in seeking clarity on America’s data center industry, with additional resources provided in the links below.

Keep reading

The Kids Are Not Okay With AI, And They Know It…

Eric Schmidt hadn’t finished the word “artificial” before the booing started.

The former Google CEO stood at the University of Arizona’s commencement last month, ready to deliver the kind of speech he had probably given a dozen times before: AI as the next great transformation, graduates as its rightful authors.

He got as far as telling them the technology would “touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have.” The boos rose before he could finish his own sentence. “I can hear you,” he said gently. The boos continued, as did Schmidt, who was unable to fully conceal the awkward embarrassment.

He wasn’t the only one. A week earlier, at Middle Tennessee State University, Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta told graduates that “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” The boos from graduates started immediately. He responded with tough love: “I know it. Deal with it.” But the boos only grew louder.

A week before that, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield barely got through the phrase “next industrial revolution” at the University of Central Florida before the crowd erupted. “Okay, I struck a chord,” she said, turning around with her hands up in disbelief and clearly caught off guard.

They were all caught off guard. This isn’t how graduations usually go.

Older generations had their own frustrations with the people steering their world, but they rarely stood up at their own commencement, in front of their families, and told a stranger they didn’t believe them or what they had to say about their future.

It would be easy to read the response as simple nerves about a tough job market and leave it there. But when you look more closely at how this generation actually lives with technology, their worldview takes a different form.

A recent Gallup survey found that Gen Z’s use of AI has leveled off, but their feelings about it have not. Excitement has fallen 14 points in a year, to just 22 percent. And anger has climbed 9 points, to 31 percent. Even among those who use it every day, enthusiasm dropped by 18 points over 12 months. Eight in ten now believe AI will make learning harder. Forty-two percent believe it will hurt their ability to think carefully. Only a quarter believe it will help. Nearly half say the risks of AI in the workplace now outweigh the benefits, which is a sharp rise from the year before. And when asked whose work they actually trust, 69 percent said human work. Only 3 percent said AI’s work alone.

A separate Gallup study found that 47 percent of college students have seriously considered changing their major because of what AI is doing to the job market. Sixteen percent have already changed. The students who use AI most, such as in technology, business, and engineering, are also the ones most likely to be reconsidering whether they picked the right field at all.

The kids know the use of artificial intelligence is built into every device they touch throughout their day. It is being wired to replace the skills they were once told to seek in every career they had been advised to pursue.

Keep reading

Blackstone Sells Stake In Three Virginia Data Centers Amid Grassroot Outrage

Up until now, when it comes to real estate, Blackstone was best known in recent years for dumping many of its trophy office properties – which in the aftermath of work from home never recovered their projected cash flow potential – at a huge discount. Now, it may be pulling a page from its old, pre-Lehman playbook  by calling the top in yet another commercial real estate segment: data centers. 

According to Bloomberg, Blackstone is selling its stakes in a trio of data centers across Northern Virginia for $3.5 billion, cashing out of part of a bet it made less than three years ago.

Digital Realty Trust will pay $1.2 billion of cash and offer $2.3 billion of its shares to Blackstone funds, the firms said in a statement Monday. In exchange, the data center company will acquire Blackstone’s 80% interest in two 96-megawatt data centers in Manassas, Virginia, and a 50% interest in a 96-megawatt center in nearby Sterling.

The assets involved in this week’s sale were part of a joint venture that Blackstone announced it would set up with Digital Realty in 2023 as it sought to get ahead in the AI arms race that has engulfed Wall Street in recent years. Blackstone and Digital Realty will continue to work together on their remaining data center investments located elsewhere in Northern Virginia as well as in Paris and Frankfurt. 

“We have developed a strong partnership with Blackstone,” Greg Wright, Digital Realty CEO, said in the statement. “This transaction reflects the next phase of that relationship, allowing us to increase our ownership in a portfolio of fully leased, high-quality hyperscale assets.”

It does. The question is why did Blackstone decide to pull the cord now, just as fresh doubts are creeping whether the Mag 7s will continue funding the AI expansion with virtually unlimited capex.

As part of Wall Street’s broader push into data centers, investment has poured into Northern Virginia, which is considered the country’s largest data center market, and is better known as “Data Center Alley“.


Keep reading

Pentagon Launches Investigation into Data Breach at Peter Thiel’s Exclusive Dialog Network

The Pentagon is conducting an operations security review following a significant data exposure at Dialog, a highly secretive private events organization co-founded by tech investor Peter Thiel, that compromised personal information of senior U.S. national security officials and active-duty special operations personnel.

The incident, first reported by WIRED, occurred after a misconfigured website left sensitive registrant files publicly accessible, prompting concerns over potential operational security risks for individuals involved in intelligence and military activities.

According to reports, the exposed database contained records for 222 participants scheduled to attend Dialog’s upcoming retreat outside Dublin, Ireland, in August. Among those affected were current and former high-ranking U.S. and allied military and intelligence officials.

Notable cases include an active-duty U.S. intelligence officer embedded with a Tier 1 special operations unit and a senior National Security Council official who advises President Donald Trump and previously served with the CIA. Both individuals were listed as first-time participants for the event, reported Clash Report.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll (sometimes referred to with slight name variations in early reporting, such as Diane Driscoll) appears in the leaked membership and registration records for Dialog.

The files reportedly included highly personal details such as dates of birth, home addresses, mobile phone numbers, headshot photographs, private authentication tokens, and emergency contact information listing spouses and family members.

Keep reading