Three things landed in my feed this week and none of them surprised me, but all of them worried me a little. Let's get into it.
Claude Just Got Permission to Hit Send Without Asking First
Anthropic expanded what Claude can do inside Gmail, and in certain setups, it can now send emails on your behalf without stopping to ask you first. Not draft and wait. Send.
I get why this is useful. Nobody wants to sit there approving every "thanks, got it" reply all day long. But an assistant that fires off emails on its own is a different animal than one that drafts and waits for you to hit the button.
Robert's take: I like Claude a whole lot, I use it every single day for this blog. But I am not handing it the keys to my outbox yet. Give me a review step. One typo in an autonomous email to a client and you're cleaning up a mess for a week.
Zuckerberg Wants Everybody to Have Superintelligence, Sort Of
Mark Zuckerberg put out a manifesto this week arguing the most powerful AI systems should be broadly available instead of locked up inside a handful of labs. Meta's whole strategy right now leans on that argument.
Why it matters: this is Meta drawing a line against the closed shops like OpenAI and Anthropic. Open access sounds great on a poster. It also happens to be a convenient pitch when your models aren't winning head to head benchmarks against the closed ones.
Robert's take: I want more open models in the world, I really do. But let's not pretend this manifesto is pure charity. It is also a competitive move dressed up as a principle. Both things can be true at once.
Big Tech's AI Bill Just Crossed $730 Billion and Nobody Even Flinched
Combined AI spending from the big tech companies is on pace to blow past $730 billion this year. That number keeps climbing every quarter and none of the executives on the earnings calls sound worried about it.
Why it matters: this is real money being bet on the idea that AI demand keeps growing faster than the cost of building it. Data centers, chips, power contracts, all of it stacking up. If growth slows even a little, that bill does not shrink, it just looks a lot scarier on a balance sheet.
Robert's take: I've run a small business long enough to know that spending like this only makes sense if the revenue shows up on schedule. Right now it is mostly a bet on faith. I hope it pays off, because a lot of jobs and a lot of retirement accounts are riding on it.
That's what caught my eye today. More tomorrow.