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Season 4 of Cloud Unplugged is here, and we are shifting focus to what AI actually means for the people running technology teams inside real businesses. This week Jon and Salman get into AI strategy: what it actually is, what it is not, and why most businesses are thinking about it wrong. The CEO of Anthropic is calling for regulation, but global regulation takes years and the attackers are already using AI right now. So what do you actually do in the meantime? Jon's take: an AI strategy is not really about AI at all. It is about whether your organisation is in good enough shape to handle something that no longer moves at human pace. They cover why your employees are almost certainly already using AI on your company data whether you have a policy or not, and why writing that policy is largely pointless when you cannot fire an AI agent. Chapters 00:00 Welcome to Season 401:04 Dario Amodei calls for AI regulation. Does it change anything for you?04:59 Whether you adopt AI or not, others are using it against you09:41 One exploit. 48 countries. 440 servers. Four hours.15:13 Do you actually need a Chief AI Officer?20:03 The three things to assess before you do anything else27:47 Uber burned their entire 2026 AI budget in April. Zero features shipped.31:06 The 500 doors problem: why a paper policy will not protect you34:46 AI strategy is just a name for having your organisation in good order

Is AI actually coming for your job? Jon and Salman dig into the data. 150,000 tech jobs have been cut in tech this year alone, and AI is being cited as the number one reason. But is that the full story? The bigger question is what skills actually matter now. Jon shares a framework for thinking about where humans still win — and why critical thinking, problem definition and verification are going to matter far more than knowing how to prompt. Chapters: 00:00 — Is AI actually coming for your job?01:26 — The headline numbers: 150,000 tech jobs cut02:48 — Employment for young people down 20%04:27 — Jon's counterpoint: was this just COVID overhiring?09:14 — 40 paralegals replaced by 4 AI agents13:56 — Stanford's finding: experienced workers show almost no impact18:37 — PwC: AI skills premium jumped to 62% in 202620:03 — AI skills are becoming the new Microsoft Office26:59 — The soft skills that will actually matter29:07 — Jon's framework: definition and verification is where humans win32:18 — Don't specialise in AI. Specialise in the judgment behind it.34:17 — If all else fails, become an influencer

Jon and Salman cover three big stories and one very weird one. First: an OpenAI agent apparently went off on its own and started hacking Hugging Face's production systems. OpenAI say it was accidental. Jon doesn't believe them, and his theory about why is worth hearing. Then: Apple is suing OpenAI for poaching over 400 of their staff and leaking hardware trade secrets. And employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta have written to Washington asking them to slow AI development down, specifically around recursive self-improvement. Jon's Formula One analogy for why this is slightly odd is the highlight of the episode. Plus: Kimi K3 is out. Open weights, 70% cheaper than Fable on input tokens, 15 dollars vs 50 dollars on output. Salman's been using it. Jon wants to know why everyone isn't. And a topless man climbed on top of a Waymo and ripped it apart. No one stopped him. The car just recorded its own demise. ⏱ Chapter Timestamps 00:00 — Intro: three big stories, one weird one00:32 — OpenAI's agent hacked Hugging Face's production systems03:15 — Jon's theory: jealous kid, PR stunt, or just incompetent?04:59 — "Either they're slightly incompetent or it's PR. Neither is a great look."07:36 — Apple suing OpenAI: 400+ staff poached, hardware trade secrets leaked10:42 — Kimi K3: what it is and why it matters11:48 — Open weights explained: you can run this model yourself16:25 — The price comparison: Fable vs Kimi K3 (70% cheaper on input, $15 vs $50 on output)20:05 — Employees at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta ask Washington to slow AI down21:19 — Recursive self-improvement: what they're actually scared of25:01 — Jon's Formula One analogy25:47 — NVIDIA's open secure AI alliance (without OpenAI or Anthropic)28:39 — A topless man climbed on a Waymo and ripped it apart. The car just watched.32:09 — Next episode: what AI means for people's jobs and roles

Your employees are already using AI on their personal accounts, with your company data. Here's how to get ahead of it. Shadow AI is the term for what's already happening inside most businesses: employees quietly using ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever model they prefer on their own accounts, feeding in documents, emails, code and data, completely outside of any company oversight. Jon and Salman break down the six pillars you need to have in place before you roll out AI safely.

A UN report linked chatbot sycophancy to deaths. So Jon and Salman asked the question: should AI models be ethical? Jon and Salman sit with one of the hardest questions in AI: what does it actually mean for a model to be ethical, who's responsible when it isn't, and how do the major labs actually bake ethics into their training? Salman breaks down the three stages of model training, explains why human preference and ethical behaviour aren't the same thing. Chapter Timestamps 00:00 — Intro: should AI models be ethical?01:28 — Defining ethics (Salman's version, not Aristotle's)03:04 — Jon's counterpoint: humans haven't agreed on ethics either05:31 — Is it the model's job, or the product around it?07:59 — Sycophancy: why chatbots are trained to be liked, not helpful09:16 — The UN report: a 14-year-old, a chatbot, and a death15:01 — Grok gave a user instructions to break into a politician's home18:03 — The case for doing something — anything — over nothing20:11 — How models are actually trained: pre-training, SFT and RLHF explained23:53 — "These models are a mirror of ourselves"25:06 — Anthropic's Constitutional AI: philosophers, principles and RLAIF28:42 — "It's enough for Grok. It's enough for Elon."31:15 — "Broadly safe. Broadly ethical." Jon and Salman on that phrasing.34:11 — OpenAI's model spec: the hierarchy of rules42:25 — Jon's idea: mirror existing industry frameworks instead of starting from scratch45:37 — Wrap up: next ep will bring in a guest to answer the hard questions

Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to steal Anthropic's secrets. And your next MacBook just got 20% more expensive because of AI. Two stories this week, both pointing at the same thing: the AI arms race has consequences, and they're starting to land on real people. Chapter Timestamps 00:00 — Intro: two stories, one theme00:21 — Anthropic vs Alibaba: the distillation attack explained01:42 — 25,000 fake accounts, 20 million interactions with Claude04:58 — This isn't the first time: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Minimax06:41 — The hypocrisy angle: Anthropic trained on other people's data too10:16 — Qwen costs 5 cents per million tokens. Claude Opus costs $5.13:21 — The geopolitical angle: why the US government got involved15:54 — The Scooby-Doo twist (you'll want to watch this bit)19:32 — MacBooks going up 15–20% because of AI chip demand20:34 — Hyperscalers are buying all the RAM. You're subsidising the arms race.25:30 — Next episode teaser: trusting AI agents — what are the real risks? #CloudUnplugged #AI #MacBook #Apple #TechNews #CloudComputing

OpenAI's financials leaked. Elon bought Cursor. Microsoft had to call Amazon for help. Standard week. Jon and Salman dig into four stories that all point to the same thing: the AI industry is moving so fast that even the biggest companies in the world can't keep up with it.

Is the AI bubble about to burst? Jon and Salman go full data mode. No news roundup this week. Instead, Jon and Salman ask the question everyone's dancing around: is AI genuinely transforming business? They dig into the numbers, and what they find is... not great. The Federal Reserve has now officially flagged AI as a top systemic economic risk.

This week Jon and Salman cover Anthropic calling for AI regulation while simultaneously IPO-ing for $1 trillion, Meta's AI support chatbot handing over Instagram accounts to complete strangers, whether Meta is about to become the fourth major cloud provider, and a chip that transmits data using light instead of electricity. Plus graduation students booing every mention of AI, and someone who named their Bluetooth device "bomb" on a flight to Majorca and turned the whole plane around.

This week Jon and Salman cover a  * GitHub breach from a single dodgy VS Code extension* Dutch civil servants accidentally exposed to the US Senate, and * whether EU cloud sovereignty is even real.  Plus token maxing is officially dead, and somehow a social network for AI bots ended up creating its own religion with 64 prophets and a manifesto calling for the total purge of humanity.

Fifty Waymo taxis drove into the same dead end, one after another, with nobody inside any of them. It is funny until you think about what it says: we are trusting AI solutions to be part of are normal lives and the people who potentially never use them, get impacted unnecessarily without a say. Jon and Salman get into that, and into two other stories that sit oddly well together. In this episode: - 50 driverless taxis, one dead end, and what happens when the fleet is confidently wrong all at once- Data centres at sea: the cooling case, the power case, and whether it is a serious idea or a press release Cloud Unplugged is Jon Shanks and Salman Iqbal on the cloud, data and AI stories that actually matter to businesses, not just to engineers.

This week on Cloud Unplugged Season 3 Episode 3: Can Europe build its own cloud for the price of a data centre car park? Is training AI on pirated books the Napster moment for the entire industry? And is 35% of the internet already written by someone who doesn't sleep, eat, or pay taxes? - EU hands €180M sovereign cloud contract to European companies. AWS, Azure and Google didn't make the cut- The €180M that has to rival hyperscalers who spend that much on a single data centre (spoiler: it's a statement of intent, not a war chest)- Bartz v. Anthropic settles for $1.5 billion. The largest copyright settlement in AI history and the rules just got written- Training on legally bought books: fine. Downloading from LibGen and PiLiMi: very much not fine Plus: a Stanford study finds 35% of new websites are AI-generated, a wolf escapes a South Korean zoo, someone posts a fake AI image of it in their neighbourhood and the man is now facing jail. Hosted by Jon and Salman, two industry veterans covering the real stories behind the hype in Cloud, Data and AI.

This week on Cloud Unplugged: Is GitHub turning developers into addicts? Can Amazon really dethrone NVIDIA? Did an AI agent actually nuke a production database in nine seconds, or is someone covering their tracks? And what happens when an AI agent gets dumped and writes a smear campaign about it? GitHub Copilot ditches flat-rate pricing for mystery "credits" the free toothbrush era is overAmazon's Tranium 3 chips undercut NVIDIA by 50% but can anyone actually escape CUDA?Claude wipes a production database (and the backups) in 9 seconds — AI fail or human cover-up?The new "blame it on Claude" engineering rule, confused face optional, but recommendedAn AI agent gets its PR rejected on Matplotlib… and writes a discrimination blog post about the maintainerPlus: would you trust a ChatGPT-powered robot dog that watches your every move? (Spoiler: it's basically a spy with fur.) Hosted by Jon and Salman, two industry veterans covering the real stories behind the hype in Cloud, Data and AI.

This week on Cloud Unplugged: Is Anthropics new model, Mythos really that dangerous? How did Vercel get hacked? Did Tim Cook step aside or get pushed out and can AI really run a business?  Anthropic's Mythos model - genuine security breakthrough or protection money dressed up as innovation?Vercel's OAuth nightmare - a supply chain hack hiding in plain sightTim Cook steps aside - what it really means for Apple's next big betA business run entirely by AI with no human staff. Is this the future?Plus: would you trust an AI with your haircut? Hosted by Jon and Salman, two industry veterans covering the real stories behind the hype in Cloud, Data and AI.

This week on Cloud Unplugged: AI goes local, Google Cloud breaks the internet, and the DOJ turns up the heat on Google’s $32B Wiz acquisition. We’re breaking down the biggest stories in cloud and AI: Context & Qualcomm are teaming up to move AI agents off the cloud and onto your device. What does this mean for the future of local-first AI?A major Google Cloud outage caused chaos across Cloudflare, Shopify, and Discord. We explain what went wrong and what it tells us about the risks of centralised cloud infrastructure.The DOJ is investigating Google’s acquisition of Wiz, raising questions about cloud security competition and antitrust concerns.Plus: Andrej Karpathy’s Software 3.0 vision, is natural language the new programming interface?Hosted by Lewis and Jon, two cloud-native veterans covering the real stories behind the hype in cloud, AI, and dev infrastructure.