Antinuclear

Cory Doctorow: AI’s big beasts aren’t really scared of their products. They’re scared of their competition

Once the government stipulates that “superintelligence risk” is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another.

The US giants would love to stop battling each other and be protected from China – and they might have hit on just the narrative to make that possible, writes our tech columnist

Cory Doctorow, Sep 19, 2026, https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-superintelligence-openai-anthropic-google-meta?utm_source=www.thenerve.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=the-trouble-with-steven-pinker-weekend-edition&_bhlid=908300191252e2da6f90f63419219331f1249af1

There’s lots of reasons to believe the “hyperscaler” model of AI can never be profitable. This business model pursued by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and others of spending billions on chips and data centres in the hope of recouping it through subscriptions is delusional because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products).

The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance-sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they’re faking their finances is very strong.

Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you’ll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of “profitable” that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics. 

But let’s give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money furnaces they’ve been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who’ve supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shovelling into their models’ coalboxes for years now.

Basically, they’re saying: “Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running carriages over them and make a profit.” Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.

To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, scores of OpenAI’s best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That’s because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:

Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker: “What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?” and to a one, they said: “No problem, we’ve designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse.”

That means that you can’t just “build the railroad and run the carriages over it”. The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they’ve got a new, adjacent railroad that’s even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.

This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen’s race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a non-aggression pact among themselves promising not to compete any more. But there’s two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another; and, second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese “open weight” models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US “frontier models” by a mere four months.

Freaking out about superintelligence is a canonical example of ‘criti-hype’, where critics repeat boosters’ claims but append ‘(and that’s bad)’ to them

Even if you don’t trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust.

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen’s race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on “superintelligence”.

Once the government stipulates that “superintelligence risk” is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another.

Freaking out about “superintelligence” is a canonical example of “criti-hype”, where critics repeat boosters’ claims but append “(and that’s bad)” to them.

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai colluded to rig the ad market with a secret program called Jedi Blue. Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20bn in exchange for Apple not entering the search market. And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret “no poach” agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another’s top engineers by offering them raises.

The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he’s just talking about Greta Thunberg) is “wasteful competition”.

When an industry that is eating itself alive through hyperscaling demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open-source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its “rogue AI hacking” story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do.

Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it’s because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO is indirectly propped up by X engagement metrics generated by letting the world’s stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs using Grok. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).

That doesn’t mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanours.

This is an edited version of a post from pluralistic.net. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 creative commons licence

Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, is published by Verso

September 20, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Israel is a sick society: ‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’

Signs of the Times, (SOTT), Xan Brooks, The Guardian, Sun, 13 Sep 2026

operators. NAZA‘s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence

On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.

NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.

I meet Szor and Abraham at the Venice film festival, where NAZA is competing for the Golden Lion award. The pair won an Oscar for their previous documentary, 2024’s No Other Land (co-directed with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), which spotlighted Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank. “No Other Land documented horrible crimes,” Abraham says. “But at the same time it gave people … I don’t want to say hope, but some light to latch on to. It’s not a coincidence that this film is all in the dark. We are in a very dark place right now.”

The Gaza health ministry has reported more than 73,000 deaths in three years of Israeli bombardment, the vast majority of which have been civilian casualties. NAZA briefly shows us the rubble, grieving parents, dead children on the ground. Its main backdrop, though, is placid, normal Tel Aviv, just 44 miles to the north, where rush-hour traffic drifts dreamily on the street and the cinematheque is showing a Claude Lanzmann retrospective. Tellingly, the film was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest. Glazer, says Szor, supported the structure and creative approach she and Abraham had adopted, that fostered the sense of a home that sits next door to hell.

NAZA deliberately concerns itself with the system – the policy of mass surveillance, the industrial business of murder – more than the individual psychology of those involved. But presumably its sources must feel guilt and shame, otherwise they’d never have agreed to put their careers and liberty at risk.

Abraham is unconvinced. “Well, it depends which one,” he says. “

There are many motivations for an individual to speak. Some people talk because they feel the opposite of shame. They feel pride in their accomplishment and expertise. Remember that these people serve in sensitive units. They are not often asked what they do. So there is an attraction to [our] curiosity that drives them to speak up.”

The film uncovers a system that is fiendishly efficient.Its series of disconnects appears designed to distance the perpetrators from the crime. Many of these men work remotely from Tel Aviv. AI selects the target and a drone drops the bomb. Even the language feels purposely euphemistic and obfuscatory. NAZA translates as collateral damage, which in turn translates to human beings.

“Sure, it’s easier to kill people when you’re doing it on a screen,” Abraham says.

“There is some truth in that, I guess. But equally it should be said that intelligence officers know the most. They listen to the cellphones. They know the house they are bombing is full of children. They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike.”

What is the status of these men now? Some discuss their work in the past tense. Others don’t, which suggests that they might still be at work, overseeing airstrikes each night. Abraham won’t say; he’s mindful of protecting his sources. “But you can imagine. We are dealing with 24 people, so there is a whole variety of statuses.”

NAZA prompts obvious questions about the creatures of darkness we see on screen. But it prompts intriguing ones, too, about Szor and Abraham, a pair of dissident investigative journalists from the country’s middle class. In the furious, febrile climate of post-7 October Israel, their work is liable to make them pariahs, if not enemies of the state……………………………………………… https://www.sott.net/article/508377-Israel-is-a-sick-society-They-know-the-house-they-are-bombing-is-full-of-children

September 20, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment