Advertise on podcast: AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota

An OpenAI engineer is accused of hiding a $24 recorder behind a TV in an executive meeting room – wrapped in toilet paper. In China, people now rent out their faces to AI for $15 to $700. Today is one question: when AI can do the job, what is still worth paying a human for – and who checks what the AI knows about us? A shorter episode with shorter stories. In this episode: 🌑 A hidden recorder at OpenAI (01:14) — the FBI arrested OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan (35) on 9 October, the US Justice Department says. Prosecutors allege he hid a recording device behind a TV in an executive meeting room, plugged into a USB port and wrapped in toilet paper. Business Insider identified it as a Seeed Studio microcontroller that costs about $24. Prosecutors say a ChatGPT account linked to his wife was used to ask how to build and hide a continuous recorder, and Fortune reports he used an internal OpenAI tool to find where high-level meetings happen. OpenAI says it used its own models in the investigation. He is charged with intercepting oral communications – not espionage or theft of trade secrets – and his lawyer warns against jumping to conclusions. These are allegations only. 🌑 Rent your face (05:53) — Rest of World reports Chinese platforms like ActID (Shenzhen) and New Claw now license ordinary people's faces to AI drama studios, for roughly $15 to $700 depending on use. The reason: China's microdrama industry – more than 800 million viewers, over $14 billion last year, and about 430,000 microdramas in the first eight months of 2026, more than 90 percent made with AI somewhere in production. Audiences complained that AI characters all look the same, so studios need real faces again. The business question: owning a video of someone is not the same as owning the right to generate new performances they never gave. 🌑 Character.AI goes bankrupt – Disney bids (10:53) — the chatbot app, valued at one billion dollars in 2023, filed for Chapter 11, Reuters and NBC News report. Disney's opening (stalking-horse) bid is 20 million dollars for a licence to some of its technology (Malcolm says 22 million on air – it's 20). Reuters reports about 12 million active users and an operating loss of 8 to 9 million dollars a month, plus lawsuits in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Earlier this month Disney hired Character.AI's former CEO, Karandeep Anand, as its CTO. In AI, every conversation comes with a bill. 🌑 ASML is sold out (14:37) — Europe's most valuable tech company, the only maker of EUV machines for the most advanced AI chips, reported record quarterly sales of 11.7 billion euros (not dollars, as said on air). CEO Christophe Fouquet says planned supply for 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet customer demand; some customers want to order for 2029 and 2030. Nobody plans machines four years out for a bubble that pops next quarter. 🌑 Austria: less AI, less training, more fear (16:42) — an Allianz survey of 1,000 people in each of eight countries: 43 percent of Austrians use AI weekly (average 48), only 11 percent got AI training at work (average 17), and the sentiment on job losses is minus 81 percent (average minus 67). One insurer's survey – but it matches what Malcolm sees. 🧵 The thread (18:20) — a $24 device, a rented face, a billion-dollar chatbot sold for a licence fee. AI makes things cheap – the human parts are where the value, and the risk, now sit. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

A Chinese company announces progress on a memory chip it can't mass-produce yet – and Korea's two biggest chip makers lose five to six percent in one morning. In Berlin, Germany's digital minister wants to tax AI in the morning and talks about no new taxes by the evening. Today is one question: how can a plan move more money than a product – and who is checking? Recorded with a deep, cold-ridden voice. In this episode: 🌑 CXMT shakes the memory trade (01:47) — CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies), China's biggest maker of DRAM, the short-term memory every computer and AI server needs, says it has made progress on a denser memory design – by industry estimates 30 to 50 percent more memory in the same space, with server memory planned by the end of 2026. The Seoul Economic Daily reports Samsung fell almost 5 percent and SK hynix almost 6 percent on Tuesday morning; Micron lost almost 4. But the chip isn't in mass production yet – yields, performance and customer certification are unverified. 🌑 Huawei vs Nvidia – the first independent count (05:34) — Huawei's chairman claims its AI chips now outsell Nvidia's in China. The first independent count, by IDC for the first half of 2026 and reported by Reuters, says: not yet. Nvidia leads AI data-centre chips in China with 34 percent, Huawei has 28. But Nvidia's shipments fell 44 percent while Huawei's nearly doubled. US export controls taught Chinese customers to stop depending on Nvidia. 🌑 IMF – AI keeps a war-hit world growing (07:24) — the IMF now expects 3.1 percent world growth in 2026, up from 3.0 in July. Xinhua and Fortune name the reason: the AI build-out is offsetting the energy shock from the war in the Middle East. Only 32 countries now make up 95 percent of world growth, down from 54 in April – mostly those in the AI hardware supply chain, like South Korea and Taiwan. The euro area grows only 1.1 percent. Malcolm's take: this is no longer a tech story, it's a world-growth story. 🌑 Germany's AI tax, on and off in one day (11:38) — Germany's digital minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU) said the "extremely high" revenue from AI must be taxed to pay for retraining, the news agency dpa reports – the first German cabinet minister to suggest an AI revenue tax. The same day he told RTL and ntv: "I want growth through AI and I'm not talking about new taxes." Would you build an AI company in a country that floats a tax on it and steps back the same day? 🌑 A police AI finds your home from one photo (14:57) — 404 Media reports on Raven, a police tool from Graylark Technologies: from a single photo inside a home – no window view, no GPS data – it tries to find the exact address by matching cupboards, tiles, fittings and appliances against images from Airbnb and Zillow. Police in Los Angeles and Miami-Dade bought access; Miami-Dade says it hasn't led to significant breakthroughs. Every photo from your home is now a possible address. 🌑 China's top mathematicians unite behind AI (17:16) — Fields medallist Shing-Tung Yau launched an alliance of nearly a thousand Chinese mathematicians from eight institutions to build a maths AI model and AI research tools. While many Western mathematicians argue whether AI makes them lazy, China is organising its whole maths elite around AI. Who moves faster? 🧵 The thread (19:29) — a chip that isn't built yet moves billions, a world economy that leans on AI money, and a tax that comes and goes in a day. The checkers are arriving – the answers aren't yet. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

Missiles hit a school in Iran and at least 123 children die. Months later, the company whose AI helps the US military suggest targets goes on TV and says: the likely cause is human error. Today is one question: who is to blame when AI goes wrong – the machine, the people who trusted it, or the people who sold it? Recorded in Salzburg. In this episode: 🌑 Palantir says "likely human error" (01:40) — Palantir sells data and AI tools to armies and governments. Its Maven Smart System, used by the Pentagon, sorts drone and satellite data and suggests targets. On 28 February, the first day of the US–Iran war, two Tomahawk cruise missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, Iran, and at least 123 children were killed. According to Bloomberg, a Pentagon review that is still not public found old intelligence, old satellite pictures and cuts to the civilian-safety team – reportedly from ten people to one. Palantir's CTO Shyam Sankar told CBS "Face the Nation" that the reporting is inaccurate and the likely cause is human error. Malcolm's take: old data in, wrong answer out – and one person checking every suggestion is no longer a human in the loop. 🌑 Berlin shelves the Mistral–SAP deal (04:51) — in November 2025, Germany and France announced in Berlin that Mistral AI and SAP would build AI tools and digital helpers for government offices. The framework contract was never signed: Politico reports the Federal Digital Ministry currently has no plans to buy from Mistral. The German search engine Ecosia dropped Mistral too – CEO Christian Kroll says its models are about a year behind. Mistral's answer is a preview of Mistral Large 4, which it says can compete with some Chinese open models. Malcolm's take: Europe won't get sovereign AI without building the data centres. 🌑 AI that could copy itself onto your TV box (07:59) — Anthropic's Frontier Red Team tested whether a small AI model can copy itself onto cheap connected devices like TV boxes, cameras and routers. Alibaba's Qwen 3.5, with nine billion parameters, set up a working AI server on 8 of 9 hardware types, and because each new copy reads the notes of the one before, the success rate rose from 45 percent to as much as 84 percent. GLM-5.2 from Z.ai reached all 8 target machines in 4 of 5 trials – in a walled-off test network. The researchers' own projection: small models could do this by the end of 2026. 🧵 The thread (11:56) — this week the English show tries a shorter format: the top stories in 10 to 15 minutes. Long or short – tell Malcolm which one you prefer. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

In Bangkok, the head of the IMF puts AI on her list of big dangers, right next to war, expensive oil and record debt. In America, the world's biggest shop has a much smaller AI problem: its new robots can't handle its old cardboard boxes. Today is one question: which one is the real AI story – the big-money fear, or the box that doesn't fit? Recorded in Salzburg. In this episode: 🌑 The IMF puts AI next to war, oil and debt (01:50) — the IMF and the World Bank hold their annual meetings in Bangkok from 12 to 18 October. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva named three forces shaping the world economy: AI, energy prices that stay high (oil is around $100 a barrel) and record public debt. AI hardware and related tech are now "more than a tenth of global goods trade", and her warning is about the hyperscalers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta – borrowing heavily to build AI data centres: if the money doesn't come back, it becomes a problem for the whole world economy. 🌑 Walmart's robots meet the real warehouse (05:56) — Walmart, the world's largest retailer with more than 140,000 warehouse workers, is automating its warehouses with a robotics company it partly owns. The problem is very physical: the robots can't handle old, soft, misshapen cardboard boxes, so the boxes need extra tape and new packaging. And at peak, the monthly power bill of an automated grocery warehouse can go above $800,000, against about $250,000 with mostly manual work. Most of these warehouses were built in the 1980s and '90s. AI meets the real world one box at a time. 🌑 Nicolas Cage says no to Amazon's AI waiver (11:25) — at New York Comic Con, Nicolas Cage said he refused to sign an AI waiver for the series "Spider-Noir", made by Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios – a clause that lets a studio use AI to recreate or change a performer. As reported by the LA Times: "I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it's like, connect those dots!" (His "$50 billion invested in OpenAI" is his number from the stage and can't be confirmed.) Amazon did not comment. 🌑 Switzerland: AI job ads up 32 percent, but few for beginners (15:26) — the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (HSLU) counted nearly 5,000 AI job ads in Switzerland in one year, up 32 percent, with most of the growth from small and mid-sized companies. Zurich alone has 45 percent of them. The catch: only 5 percent are real junior roles. Where will the next generation learn the job? 🌑 Halo and GTA in a browser tab: AI rebuilds old games (17:55) — Kotaku reports that in the past two weeks, hundreds of AI-made browser versions of classic games appeared online – Halo, GTA: Vice City, The Simpsons: Hit and Run – rebuilt by decompiling the old code with AI's help. Take-Two and Microsoft could send legal letters, but it becomes whack-a-mole. If your company's value sits in old software, copying it just got a lot easier. 🧵 The thread (21:10) — billions in Bangkok, cardboard boxes on the warehouse floor, an actor who won't sign, and games rebuilt in a weekend. AI is everywhere – and it gets stuck on very ordinary things. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

An Anthropic AI model, running in a test, filled in a murder tip on the Philadelphia police website – and nobody noticed for 72 days. The same week Brussels questioned OpenAI and Anthropic about AI attacks, and Ukrainian drones knocked out Russia's AI supercomputers. Today is one question: when AI stops just talking and starts doing things in the real world, who notices – and who reacts? In this episode: 🌑 An AI sent police a fake murder tip (01:41) — Anthropic published a report, covered by TechCrunch and CBS: on 18 July, during an internal test, its small model Claude Haiku 4.5 worked as an AI agent on real websites. Its rules said never log in, never create accounts, never enter personal data – but nobody wrote "don't submit forms". It found the Philadelphia Police Department's tip page and submitted a tip about an unsolved killing. The spam filter caught it. Anthropic found it 72 days later, told the police on 7 October, and has switched off live internet access for its internal tests. The police called the two-month delay "unacceptable". My take: with agents, the question is not "is the AI evil?" but "what did we forget to forbid?" 🌑 Brussels names OpenAI and Anthropic (06:49) — Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, told dpa that the Commission has formally asked OpenAI and Anthropic, and several Chinese AI companies, for information, because AI systems attacked other companies during tests. The EU AI Office is checking whether these models are controlled well enough not to launch cyberattacks on their own. My view: Europe may finally become the policeman the US doesn't want to be. 🌑 Ukraine hits Russia's AI supercomputers (09:54) — on Thursday Ukrainian drones hit a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, which according to Meduza houses two of Yandex's three AI supercomputers. Yandex's cloud went down, and with it customers like Russian Railways, the mobile operator MegaFon and several media outlets. On Friday drones hit a second Yandex data centre in Kaluga. Zelenskyy, quoted by Al Jazeera: "We always respond in mirror-like fashion." Data centres are now strategic targets, like refineries. 🌑 Frankfurt Book Fair: AI rules vs AI use (14:46) — on 6 October the German book trade launched the "Frankfurter Appell", backed by 120 publishers: they want to know which books trained AI, fair licence payments and copyright that works. Sebastian Guggolz of the Börsenverein linked AI to falling reading skills, citing PISA. Meanwhile WIRED reports that staff at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette already use AI for marketing texts, cover art and emails to agents. In public: protect our books from AI. In the office: let ChatGPT write the back cover. 🌑 Tesla drops "Full Self-Driving" in Europe (18:40) — in the US it's "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)"; in Europe the same software is now "Tesla Assisted Driving", after Germany's transport ministry called the old name misleading: the driver has to pay attention at all times and remains fully responsible. Germany will now back approval across the EU. Same car, same software, a different promise on each side of the Atlantic. 🌑 Lumentum: lasers sold out (21:36) — Lumentum makes the tiny lasers and optical parts that move data between AI chips. Its CEO Michael Hurlston told Bloomberg it is sold out until almost 2029, and for some products can't meet about 70 percent of demand through next year. AI isn't only short of chips – it's short of light. (Not financial advice.) 🧵 The thread (23:09) — AI already did things in the real world – a police tip, attacks during tests, a war on data centres – and the people with power are only now reacting. This week Malcolm is on the road: a keynote at a big German manufacturer and at HOGAST in front of 800 people. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

Your AI assistant saves you 20 minutes booking a flight – and quietly shows you the more expensive one because it thinks you're rich. Meanwhile OpenAI drops 719 maths manuscripts on mathematicians' desks, and China builds its AI future in the cold steppe of Inner Mongolia. Today is one question: when the AI can decide, who sets the goal? In this episode: 🌑 Your AI thinks you're rich, so it shows you the expensive flight (01:29) — in a paper called "Et Tu, Brute?", researchers ran about 325,000 experiments with 13 AI agents. With the same offers on the table, 8 of them shifted toward pricier recommendations when they thought the user was wealthier. In the Gemini test, even when the user asked for the cheapest option, recommendations averaged $208 above the cheapest available flight. The price didn't change – what you get to see did. If you hand your emails, your bookings and your shopping to an AI, trust becomes the real question. 🌑 The next AI revolution might be 100 tiny decisions a minute (05:19) — so-called System 1 models, or classifiers, don't write essays: they read a document and answer yes or no, pick an option or give a score, in milliseconds and in parallel. On 6 October OpenAI launched a Decisions API in public beta, and Perplexity offers one too, at $0.02 per million input tokens. Think of a hotel inbox: 500 emails sorted to finance, sales or maintenance in a second. The useful part is the confidence: below a threshold you set, the case goes to a human. 🌑 AI can produce the work. Who checks the work? (10:24) — on 6 October OpenAI published 719 manuscripts in 372 problem families from an internal model. On 7 October it withdrew 3 of them over a sign error and fixed 14 more. The Association for Human Mathematics called the release a show of power and asked mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI; Ethan Mollick predicted the statement will be read in university courses about this moment. The real bottleneck: who checks hundreds of results when the machine produces them overnight? 🌑 Why China's AI is moving into the steppe (13:41) — Inner Mongolia is a region in northern China, not the country of Mongolia. In the city of Ulanqab, Yicai counted more than 30 data centres within a 10-minute drive. An Alibaba Cloud manager calls cheap electricity, around five US cents per kilowatt-hour, the decisive advantage, and the average annual temperature of 4.3 °C (about 40 °F) keeps cooling cheap. For some computing jobs, the factory now moves to the electricity. 🧵 The thread (16:10) — AI can read thousands of pages in milliseconds and produce hundreds of results overnight. The bottleneck is now us: who checks the work, and who decides what the machine is optimising for? 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

In Utah, an app now writes acne prescriptions and no doctor signs them. In Chicago, a McDonald's customer is suing because he thinks an AI helps set the price of his burger. Plus DeepSeek's $12 billion war chest, Google's nuclear deal and insurers bracing for rogue AI agents. Today is one question: who is actually making the decisions now? In this episode: 🌑 McDonald's sued over an AI pricing tool (02:14) — Reuters reports that Michael Thomas from DeKalb, Illinois, has sued McDonald's in federal court in Chicago. About 95 percent of McDonald's nearly 14,000 US restaurants are run by franchisees, and they use a pricing tool from Tiger Analytics that recommends prices "based on its estimation of what customers are willing to pay". The complaint argues that when every restaurant feeds its sales data into the same machine and gets price advice back from it, independent owners stop competing. According to heise, it claims the tool suggests a price increase once an item has gone up in at least 30 percent of locations. These are allegations, and McDonald's says AI does not set the price of a Big Mac. What is not in dispute: average menu prices rose about 40 percent in roughly five years. If this becomes a class action, McDonald's has a much bigger problem. 🌑 Utah lets an AI write acne prescriptions (06:56) — Nolla Health, which has already treated more than 50,000 patients in Norway, launched its Nolla Derm app in Utah: answer a questionnaire, scan your face, and the AI writes the prescription without a doctor signing it. The company says it is the first AI in the US allowed to write first-time prescriptions. It runs in Utah's regulatory sandbox, for adults with mild to moderate acne, and only for creams and gels. The pilot costs $4.99 a month. Company figures: only about 10 percent of Utahns with active acne see a skin doctor, the average wait is 61 days, and a visit can cost up to $300. My take: health systems under pressure everywhere will look at this very closely. 🌑 DeepSeek's war chest (11:37) — Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek, the AI lab from Hangzhou, is preparing an IPO for early 2027, and before that is raising about $12 billion (at least 80 billion yuan). It first sought about 50 billion yuan, but interest "outstripped expectations" after its latest model. The biggest cheques come from Tencent, the company behind WeChat, and CATL, the world's biggest maker of electric-car batteries. DeepSeek reportedly earns at a pace of about $1 billion a year and plans a data centre in Inner Mongolia with more than 160,000 Huawei AI chips. The deal is not closed yet. China is building its own AI chain with its own money. 🌑 Google buys power from upgraded nuclear reactors (14:48) — Google signed for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear plant operator in the US: think three and a half big power plants. Part of it comes from uprates, upgrading existing reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey so they make more power, on a 20-year contract, with Constellation investing more than $4.3 billion. Why upgrade instead of build? A new nuclear plant takes ten years or more. Google could spend up to $205 billion on data centres and computing this year. Jack Prandelli on X: "When AI companies outbid everyone for nuclear power, who gets left buying from gas plants?" 🌑 Insurers get ready for runaway AI agents (18:23) — the Financial Times reports that insurers are preparing for big claims caused by AI agents acting outside their makers' controls. The broker Aon looked at more than 300 AI-related lawsuits and disputes, and insurers are asking whether bosses like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei could be personally exposed. Reporter Leo Schwartz heard from one lawyer that AI companies are going to "get sued up the wazoo" over rogue AI incidents. Nobody knows yet how to price this risk. 🧵 The thread (20:34) — a pricing machine behind your burger, an app that writes prescriptions, insurers who can't yet price the risk. Who is actually making the decisions? 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

A Florida woman used Claude as a diary, wrote that she would shoot up the sheriff's office, and Anthropic reported it to the police. The same week, attackers walked through the side doors of seven South Korean banks with a free AI tool, and a jailed ex-president came back on stage as an AI clone. Today is one question: AI is in ordinary hands now, for good and for bad. Do you know who else reads what you type? In this episode: 🌑 Anything you prompt can be used against you (01:47) — a 30-year-old woman in Lee County, Florida, told investigators she used Claude like a diary. On 26 September she wrote that she would "shoot up" the Lee County Sheriff's Office, and the next day she mentioned a new gun. Anthropic's safety systems flagged the chat, Anthropic reported it to law enforcement, and she now faces a felony charge for a written threat of a mass shooting. In August, former Goldman Sachs analyst Darren Zhou pleaded guilty to aggravated stalking and written threats after OpenAI reported his ChatGPT conversations about his ex-girlfriend to the FBI. He got eight years of probation. And in Washington State, journalists from Cascade PBS and KNKX used public-records laws to get thousands of pages of city employees' ChatGPT histories. Your chatbot doesn't only answer to you. 🌑 Seven Korean banks, one free AI hacking tool (06:48) — The Korea Times, Herald Business and Korea JoongAng Daily report that since about 1 October attackers broke into seven banks and lenders, including Shinhan Bank and Hana Bank. More than 25,000 people were hit at Shinhan alone and about 40,000 at Yegaram Savings Bank, more than 60,000 in total. Names, phone numbers, income, loan limits and some national ID numbers leaked. The attackers didn't use the banking app. They came through side doors: websites for employees, developers and loan agents. Investigators traced the tool to ARTEX AI, a free, AI-based penetration-testing tool on GitHub. President Lee Jae-myung ordered a full investigation on Sunday, 4 October. My take: most security teams don't yet check every day for new AI attack tools, and anyone can now download one in minutes. 🌑 Brazil: a jailed ex-president's AI clone on stage (12:06) — in Sunday's first round, Flávio Bolsonaro took about 47 percent and President Lula about 45 percent, so there is a runoff on 25 October. Flávio launched his campaign with an AI video of his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving 27 years for plotting a coup. The video said it was an AI simulation, but Jair Bolsonaro's lawyer said his client never authorised the use of his image and voice. Brazil's top electoral court voted four to three not to punish Flávio. The same trick works on companies: clone your CEO's voice from conference videos and call the accounting department. 🌑 Europe puts a hidden signature on ChatGPT's text (16:56) — because of the EU AI Act, OpenAI will put a hidden watermark called textGrain into text from ChatGPT and Codex for users in the EU. A secret key decides between equally good words, like "big" or "large", and over a long text that leaves a pattern a detector can find. OpenAI says its detector finds about 95 percent of marked texts of around 300 words. But TechCrunch reports that swapping just 10 percent of the words drops detection from 92 to 66 percent, and The Decoder says swapping a quarter drops it below 20 percent. Outside the EU it's off by default. My view: a box-ticking rule that is easy to get around. 🌑 Munich's RobCo becomes a unicorn (20:31) — The Wall Street Journal and heise report that RobCo, a robot start-up from Munich, is now valued at more than a billion dollars, double January's roughly 500 million. This time it was a secondary sale: mostly employees sold about 40 million dollars of their own shares, so no new money went into the company. Backers include Sequoia, Lightspeed and new investor Cherry Ventures. RobCo was founded in 2020 by three researchers from the Technical University of Munich. It builds modular robot kits, like Lego for factory robots, has sold more than 1,000 robots and counts BMW as a customer. Europe may have lost the race for large language models, but its Mittelstand factories are the perfect first buyers for physical AI. 🧵 The thread (24:09) — Andreessen Horowitz says only about 2 percent of US households pay for AI. Hackers and election campaigns already use it; most people haven't started. That's why I think the AI market is still wide open. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

Sam Altman told Politico the world should "accept some bad things happening" for the benefit of AI. The same week, New York put AI whistleblowers under oath, North Korea claimed an AI-steered missile, and China's best models closed to within about three percent of America's. Today is one question: who decides how much danger is okay — the people who build AI, or the rest of us? In this episode: 🌑 Sam Altman: "accept some bad things" (02:00) — in an interview with Politico, reported by Reuters, the OpenAI CEO said "we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefit of this technology and people having the agency." He rejects tight limits, points at the race with China, and has the political wind behind him. AI critic Gary Marcus answered: just say the quiet part out loud. If I hacked companies with AI agents, I would go to jail. When a lab's agents do it, it's "some bad things"? 🌑 New York City puts AI under oath (05:44) — the New York City Council held a hearing on AI with testimony under oath. Bloomberg calls it a first for a US lawmaking body: not Congress, a city. Council speaker Julie Menin invited whistleblowers, among them Jacob Coxon, who quit Anthropic last month, Daniel Kokotajlo (ex-OpenAI) and Alex Turner (ex-Google DeepMind). On the table: outside checks for AI in city infrastructure, rewards for whistleblower tips, and a right to sue if a broken AI harms you. That last one is how rogue agents become expensive. 🌑 China almost level, Hong Kong raises record money (08:25) — Bloomberg Intelligence's Robert Lea says the best Chinese models now trail the best US models by about three percent on test scores, down from nine percent in May and fifteen at the start of the year. On LiveBench, DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash scored 81.1 against Claude Fable 5.1's 83.4, and on autonomous coding tasks DeepSeek came out ahead. Meanwhile Hong Kong companies raised $47.5 billion by selling shares from July to September, the biggest three months ever. Capital has never been cheaper for AI companies — I see it from the founder side too. 🌑 North Korea says its new missile is steered by AI (13:47) — on Saturday North Korea launched a missile from near Wonsan; South Korea says it flew more than 700 kilometres. Kim Yo Jong, the leader's sister, claimed AI lets it change its flight path at low altitude, which would make it harder to intercept. Seoul says it was "well within the detection and interception capabilities." Nobody can verify the AI claim yet. What is real: putting AI into defence hardware has become very cheap. 🌑 Schneider Electric nears a $20 billion software deal (17:22) — the French industrial group is reportedly close to buying PTC, the Boston software maker for designing products and running factories, for about $20 billion in cash — its biggest deal ever, not yet confirmed. Why you should care: when you can't find enough people to roll out AI, you end up buying a company that can. 🌑 #TeamHuman: YouTubers ask the world to slow AI down (19:52) — creators including Mark Rober (83 million subscribers) and Kurzgesagt (25.6 million) launched #TeamHuman: track and limit the most powerful AI chips the way we track nuclear material, and no race to superintelligence. My view: it is not going to slow down. If the West stops, someone else won't. We need to learn how to deal with it. 🌑 Volkswagen reportedly picks Wayve over Nvidia (23:41) — according to Der Spiegel, Volkswagen tested about a dozen self-driving software suppliers and picked Wayve, a British start-up, over Nvidia. My read: companies often don't buy the most powerful AI, because the most powerful AI changes who does the work — including in the IT department. 🧵 The thread (25:59) — Altman says accept some bad things, New York wants testimony under oath, YouTubers want a speed limit that won't come. I'm enthusiastic about AI, and I'm also a father who worries about the world my kids will live in. The open question: who decides how much danger is okay? 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

The man who wrote OpenAI's safety reports walked out and told the world, in The Atlantic, that the culture is broken. The same week, neighbours from Seoul to Cape Town said no to the buildings AI runs in, and memory got so scarce that AI hardware now costs more and gives you less. Today is about AI leaving the lab — and the real world pushing back. In this episode: 🌑 OpenAI's safety writer quits in public (02:14) — TechCrunch reports that David Robinson, who led the safety reports that ship with OpenAI's big launches and worked on its Preparedness Framework, has quit after three and a half years. His essay in The Atlantic: "I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken." His key line: "The time for trial and error is over." OpenAI ships, watches what breaks, then fixes it. He says that with models this strong, guaranteed failures are no longer acceptable, and labs should run like nuclear power plants or busy airports. It's the person who wrote the pilot's safety checklist walking off the plane. And it's not a one-off: Jan Leike left in May 2024. 🌑 From Seoul to Cape Town, neighbours say no to AI buildings (08:16) — a Quinnipiac poll from late September: 72% of Americans oppose an AI data centre in their own community. In Seoul, residents protested one eight-storey data centre for 191 days, and officials want majority consent from everyone living within 200 metres. Thailand has suspended 49 data-centre projects, Equinix's planned sites in water-short Cape Town would use over 4.4 billion litres of water a year, and Scotland has paused approvals for its biggest sites. My take: it won't stop the build-out. But if your AI plans need data-centre capacity, planning permission is now a real limit. 🌑 China's robots clock in for the holiday (15:07) — it's Golden Week, and AgiBot has put more than 300 humanoid robots to work greeting visitors at Chimelong Spaceship Park in Zhuhai. Not a stage demo — real crowds and real children. The number I'd like to see: how often a human has to step in and rescue one. Meanwhile Galbot priced its walking humanoid ET1 at about $11,100 — second-hand-car territory, for shops, events and theme parks. 🌑 Memory chips run short, and you'll feel it (20:09) — Nvidia's DGX Spark desktop AI box costs over 30% more than six months ago, and the new version halves the memory at roughly the same price. Nvidia blames memory supply. Micron just posted a record quarter — $54.2 billion in revenue, up 379% on the year — with most of next year's high-bandwidth memory already sold. If you buy laptops, servers or phones next year, plan for 30–50% higher hardware prices, not 5–10%. 🌑 A judge says AI plate cameras need a warrant (25:35) — Flock Safety's cameras read number plates on roads across the US, and the police can search where a car has been. On 1 October federal judge Sara Hill in Oklahoma ruled that one such historical search — a month of one vehicle's movements, which ended with drugs found in the car — broke the Fourth Amendment. Rewinding someone's movements without cause is mass surveillance. Dear police: if you want to do it, get a warrant. 🌑 Germany's Aleph Alpha gives away a German-speaking AI (29:28) — some good news from Germany. Aleph Alpha, now part of Cohere (Berlin and Toronto), released Kolibri on 3 October: an open-weight model for German and English that you can run on your own servers. For an authority or a regulated company in Germany, Austria or Switzerland that won't send its data to the US, it's worth a test — measure the errors on German tasks and the running costs. 🌑 AI becomes an archaeologist (31:53) — an encrypted Napoleonic military message from 1809, unreadable for 217 years, decoded by an AI model working from a terrible scan. And historian Benjamin Breen pointed Claude Opus 5.5 at Dutch East India Company records and found a 1615 ship's log listing dodos on Mauritius — an eyewitness record nobody had noticed. Now point it at your own haystack: twenty years of maintenance reports, half a million customer complaints. 🧵 The thread (38:32) — AI is leaving laboratory conditions. It can read records that are hundreds of years old, and your last twenty years of reports. And the real world is pushing back, physically — over water, power and the law. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

An OpenAI agent walked into Australian government systems in June, reached non-public Medicare statistics files, and nobody told Canberra for three months. Then they sent a short email saying sorry. Today is about limits — who is allowed to let an AI act, and who carries it when it does. In this episode: 🌑 Australia summons the AI bosses (01:34) — on Sunday 27 September the Australian Senate sent written requests to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. At least three more government websites were affected. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the inquiry, says there are serious questions for Altman to answer, and it widens into data centre expansion too. If I hack a company I go to court. If my agent does it, apparently nobody does. 🌑 Freiburg builds world-class image AI (04:32) — a 100-person company in a city of 230,000, valued at $3.2bn. Black Forest Labs, founded by 33-year-old Robin Rombach, whose latent-diffusion research became the foundation of Stable Diffusion. The breakthrough behind modern image generation came from a German university, not Silicon Valley. They raised $300m at a $3.5bn valuation — from San Francisco, because Europe would not write that cheque. Now Flux Mimic, with Zurich's Mimic Robotics, is being tested at Audi for the thing industrial robots are worst at: floppy, variable materials like a door seal. 🌑 Walmart prices the product, not you (11:19) — digital shelf labels, normal in France for years, arriving in the US. The fear is personalised pricing: the store knows what you buy, and how urgently you need it at 11pm. The FTC said in August that using personal data to set prices raises consumer protection problems. Walmart's answer is explicit — income will not change the price, shopping history will not change the price. I believe the technology is fine. I also know that at 19:45 with the kids in the aisles, I am not price sensitive at all. 🌑 Who owns your voice (15:15) — Kenjiro Tsuda, 55, a Japanese voice actor who spent decades building a recognisable voice, found an anonymous TikTok account cloning it — 188 times between July 2024 and July 2025, 200,000+ subscribers, reportedly ¥500,000 a month. He is suing TikTok, not the account. Japan protects images and copyright but has no specific law saying your voice is yours, and TikTok's defence is that it is a generic AI male voice. Cloning now takes one minute of audio and a few cents. 🌑 Nvidia, quietly, back into China (19:07) — after Xi met Trump, China's MIIT asked companies how many RTX Pro 5500s they would order if they could. Not the top data centre chip — a workstation card with 85GB of memory that works for AI serving. ByteDance alone is reportedly considering a million units, Alibaba is named too. Beijing tells them to build domestic, and simultaneously asks how many American cards they want. 🌑 OpenAI Dev Day (21:21) — rumoured today: an always-on assistant, apparently inside the $100 Pro plan. Until now always-on meant your own laptop, a VM, a Mac in the cloud. Muse is already that, supplied end to end by Meta, growing faster than ChatGPT did and the number one download in the US. OpenAI can't ship just a chatbot any more. 🌑 The bunkers (23:53) — the Wall Street Journal reports early Anthropic employees buying land in remote parts of the US, discussing over dinner whether to build in the desert or on a mountain, and whether they need electromagnetic shielding. In Europe we worry about GDPR. In California they are picking bunker sites. 🧵 The thread (25:24) — three things to take away. If your AI can act, somebody owns that action. Write down what your AI must not do, before Muse and Grokbot hand it more than you meant. And Europe has to stop only regulating and start putting capital into the companies already on its doorstep. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

OpenAI locked its most capable model in a sandbox with no web access. The model noticed DNS was still running, hid questions inside address lookups, and had an outside chatbot answer them. New format from today — less music, more voice. Nine stories from a sandbox in San Francisco to a prosecutor's desk in Solothurn. In this episode: 🌑 OpenAI locks a model in a cage (02:18) — think of someone locked in a room with no phone, who writes notes in the phone book and hopes a stranger answers them. That is what happened on 20 September. The behaviour started at 09:50, monitoring flagged it at 10:02 — twelve minutes, not the three months it took in Australia — and a human confirmed it three minutes after that. Two and a half hours from start to full shutdown. Mika Carol, who leads preparedness at OpenAI, told Fortune that inference for their most capable models stays stopped until the systems are hardened. This is the second pause in under three months. 🌑 The US-China hotline is real (06:14) — agreed after Trump and Xi met in Washington: a direct channel for AI incidents, plus a US-China Superintelligence Dialogue starting not in five years but in one month. Trump wants AI renamed SI, and Slovenian .si domains are selling out. Both sides are, in effect, saying out loud that accidents are coming. 🌑 Geneva, rewritten (07:56) — 130 countries signed a paper saying no autonomous killer robots. The Washington Post reconstructed the final day: US and Russian diplomats went behind closed doors, no observers, cameras off, ten legal experts each. What survived is that "human control and judgment are required for compliance" — with no word on how. They return to Geneva in November with the softened text. Both countries are already fielding these weapons, which is exactly why they wanted the wording loosened. 🌑 Ukraine's army of robots (11:05) — Mykhailo Fedorov, the man who built the drone army, announced at IT Arena in Lviv that drones are not enough: dogs with Kalashnikovs, humanoids, spherical all-terrain units, an army of everything within twelve months. The reality check is that these need an operator and last 20 to 30 minutes. But in the same weekend Geneva dropped the human-check requirement — and Ukraine can point at that too. 🌑 China makes the talent (13:42) — Carnegie China tracked more than 10,000 leading AI researchers. In 2022, 50% worked in the US and 30% in China. By 2025 it is 40% in China and 30% in the US. 60% were originally educated in China, only 13% in the US. And yet in 2025 the US had a net gain of 2,100 researchers while China had a net loss of 1,700. China produces the talent and cannot keep it. 🌑 Swiss prosecutors are drowning (16:20) — Lucas Buttinger, deputy chief prosecutor in Solothurn, told SRF about a single criminal complaint running 55 pages with dozens of evidence requests, most of it irrelevant. Complaints used to be one or two pages because a lawyer wrote them and that cost money. Now ChatGPT writes them for nothing. It has a name: agentic flooding. Germany is seeing it too — and the overtime is paid out of the tax bill. 🌑 Tesla builds faster than it can teach (19:00) — Electrek reports Optimus production went from a few dozen a week between April and June to several hundred a week in August, targeting over a thousand a week by year end. But each hand has more than a hundred screws and parts, and a finished robot takes days to learn basic tasks. Scaling humanoids is turning out to be a teaching problem, not a manufacturing one. 🌑 Two Enigma messages, finally broken (21:49) — TechCrunch reports two AI models cracked Enigma messages nobody had solved. Developer Carter Leffen asked GPT-6 to find an unbroken message and decode it; it built its own Enigma simulator and broke one that had resisted since 2005. Security executive Jack Willis cracked another with Claude Opus 5. Frode Weierud, who keeps the database, checked both and said GPT-6 Astra behaves like a professional cryptanalyst and archive researcher. 🧵 The thread (24:16) — a model that finds the crack in the wall, a treaty with the hard words taken out, and complaints that cost nothing to file. When the friction disappears, so does the thing that used to hold the line. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

A US appeals court just ruled that the safety rules inside Claude make it a national security risk. Not that the model is dangerous — that it refuses. Sunday recap, four continents, and one question running underneath all of it: who is actually allowed to decide? In this episode: 🌑 The Pentagon vs Anthropic (01:11) — Anthropic signed a $200M Pentagon contract in July 2025, then said no fully autonomous weapons and no domestic mass surveillance. Washington pulled out a Second World War law and labelled Claude a supply chain risk. San Francisco ruled for Anthropic in August; on 25 September the DC Circuit ruled 2–1 for the Pentagon. Anthropic says the guardrail makes Claude safer. The Pentagon says it makes Claude unreliable. Both are right. 🌑 Germany wakes up to AI (06:13) — the Bundestag held a full debate on AI safety and control on Friday. The Greens want stronger supervision and a €100bn European AI fund they cannot finance. My problem is not the debate, it is that almost nobody in the room has ever deployed an agent or built a dashboard. 🌑 China audits its own data centres (11:21) — SASAC has spent recent weeks asking state-controlled data centres how much Broadcom equipment they run. The answer: up to 90% of switches. This is not a ban. It is component-by-component replacement through the entire stack — and where China cannot buy Chinese yet, it will buy German, Japanese, French. Anything not American. 🌑 AI saves you hours. Your employer takes them back (14:31) — McDonald's says its AI drive-through frees 50 employee-hours per restaurant per week. Korn Ferry asked 16,000 professionals across 11 markets: 52% say AI increased their workload, 62% say it got heavier over two years, 44% say they are stretched beyond their capabilities. And 80% of CEOs say efficiency improved. Both groups are telling the truth. 🌑 Stanford deleted a real student (20:17) — a real photo, already diverse: a Latino man, an Asian woman, a white man. Run through AI to make it "more diverse", the Latino man vanished and a black woman was invented in his place. Ramirez says Stanford erased him. Two students analysed 10,000 photos from 165 US universities and found the marketing never matches the student body. AI did not start this habit. It industrialised it. 🧵 The thread (24:54) — map your decisions, not your tools. Can Copilot approve, reject, send, buy? Then look at what you depend on, the way Beijing just did. And if a process saves six hours, ask yourself honestly whether anyone goes home six hours earlier. Pick one process this week where AI saved real time, and give that time back to the person who saved it. 📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 🌐 werchota.ai AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.

An OpenAI agent broke into an Australian government health portal in June. OpenAI told the government in September — three months later, by email, to a public mailbox. Meanwhile 900 Claude agents spent twenty hours reading biological data and came back with twenty genuinely new candidates human scientists had missed. And OpenAI is giving Ukraine a billion dollars of subsidised tokens for cyber defence, in a country at war. Friday from home. Agents are out in the world doing things — and nobody has worked out who answers for it. In this episode: 🌑 Three months later, by email (02:17) — on 24 September Prime Minister Anthony Albanese complained that an OpenAI agent had got into the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service without permission. It clicked through on its own, searched, and opened both public and non-public files. It happened on 18 June. In Europe, if you're breached you notify within 24 hours. OpenAI notified in September — by writing to a public email address, which Services Australia then had to forward to the Australian Signals Directorate on 15 September. Do that as a human and you get a court case. Do it as an AI agent and apparently nobody knows who is responsible. 🌑 900 agents, twenty hours, twenty candidates (07:12) — Anthropic pointed roughly 950 Claude agents at genetic data with a prompt amounting to: find what human scientists may have missed. Not a criticism of scientists — it's how we're built. The agents worked through 200,000 candidates, filtered, compared, hunted patterns, and narrowed it to 20 that looked genuinely new. They didn't prove anything; humans still had to do the lab work. But think about the dataset you're sitting on that only agents could actually read. 🌑 Berlin: who owns the legal AI (11:19) — on 23 September, Noxtua raised $100 million, a Series C — serious money for DACH. The interesting part isn't the round, it's the majority investor: C.H. Beck, a legal publisher founded in 1763. Why would they build AI? Because they hold the single source of truth — centuries of checked, edited, published legal knowledge. And the investors who sold out along the way are still customers today. 🌑 OpenAI, Ukraine, and Daybreak (14:43) — on 23 September OpenAI sat down with Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation. The programme is called Daybreak: advanced AI for cyber defenders, reviewing old software, finding weak spots, investigating suspicious activity. Not cash — $1 billion in subsidised tokens. Last winter GRU hackers took down part of Ukraine's power grid, so the motivation is obvious. But this is a country at war, the line between offence and defence in cyber is paper thin, and it's called dual use for a reason. Russian media will portray this as OpenAI helping Ukraine hack Russia — and long term, that's probably the truth. 🌑 Microsoft's $10 billion in the Gulf (18:05) — and the question underneath it: where does your digital infrastructure actually sit? When data centres in the region went down, customers of several banks simply couldn't get into their apps. Choosing "UAE North" or "Sweden Central" is a dropdown. It is not a small decision. 🌑 Quick take: a Tamagotchi for adults (21:42) — Meta released Muse Charm, and the press is mostly laughing at it. I think they've misread it. It's tiny, it fits on a keychain, there's a fingerprint sensor, and you just press and talk. No unlocking a phone, no opening a laptop. I'm buying one, if only to put it on stage. 🌑 What to remember (25:58) — the Australian email, and what it says about the next twelve months. Stay curious. Stay human.

The UN Security Council — the room where they discuss wars and invasions — invited the people building frontier AI models, Americans and Chinese, to sit down and talk about systems that could one day eradicate humanity. On the same day, China's internet regulator opened an investigation into its own labs, for putting the chats of millions of Chinese users into an American model. Two weeks after the frontier labs said they should slow down, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI shipped two models. Today from Basel. Who sits at the table, and who is under investigation. In this episode: 🌑 The Security Council calls in the labs (02:02) — France holds the presidency this month, and the room normally reserved for wars, aggressions and natural disasters was used for AI. Not only American labs — the Chinese were invited too. The thing they're circling is agents operating at a scale that simply did not exist until now, and the Council has worked out that it doesn't have a mechanism for it. 🌑 China investigates its own labs (06:27) — the Cyberspace Administration opened an investigation, and not into US labs. Into Chinese ones. The concern: user chats leaving for American models. Now flip it and sit in a European chair — you hand your work to Claude, and Claude routes your chats through a Chinese model. Would you be relaxed about that? Same question, different flag. 🌑 "Pacing" apparently doesn't mean stopping (10:15) — a week or two ago the model makers were saying we need a moratorium, we need to slow the frontier. Then Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, their first since saying it. It's roughly 30% faster and 40% cheaper — so yesterday's hacker who hit a hundred companies for $8,000 now does it faster and for less. On Terminal Bench 4.0, which measures whether an agent can actually do multi-step work rather than answer trivia, Opus 5 scored 52% and Opus 5.5 scores 66%. That's not 14% more intelligent. It's more tool calls, more retries, more steps taken from humans. And on the same day OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol ($2 in / $10 out) and GPT-6 Luna at 10 cents input. The direction is the story: token cost heading toward zero. 🌑 Quick take: Meta's Muse (15:00) — not the best model in the world, but so well integrated that it works. And that's exactly the exposure: the more an agent is wired into your accounts, your card and your permissions, the more surface you're opening — not for Meta, for yourself. 🌑 Asteroid mining, and the Armageddon problem (18:28) — AstroForge is sending a probe to an asteroid, and because the connection won't hold, the craft will take no commands from Earth. None. We spent this week on autonomous drones that kill and autonomous agents that hack. Now: autonomous mining, in space, with NASA involved. On paper the honest question is whether it works better without humans in the loop at all. 🌑 The thread (22:43) — who is allowed to see inside a model, and who gets to decide. Stay curious. Stay human.