AI

There’s a phrase that should keep every publisher up at night: “We’re essentially an input company.” That’s Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp — the Murdoch empire behind The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Times of London — casually redefining his company’s identity at a Morgan Stanley conference. He said it like it was obvious. And maybe that’s the scariest part. The Deal That Sparked It News Corp just signed a deal with Meta worth up to $50 million per year over at least three years. That’s roughly $150 million for the right to scrape WSJ, the Post, and other News Corp brands to train Meta’s AI models and power Meta AI chatbot responses. ...

The highest court in the country just said what everyone already knew — machines aren’t authors. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, the eight-year legal crusade to get copyright protection for art made entirely by AI. By refusing the case, the Court left lower court rulings intact: no human author, no copyright. Period. It’s not a surprise. But the consequences are enormous. The Guy Who Tried to Copyright a Robot’s Painting Stephen Thaler, a Missouri computer scientist, has been fighting this battle since 2018. He filed a copyright application for an image called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” — a surreal piece his AI system DABUS generated without human creative input. ...

The New York Times dropped a headline this week that should make every tech worker in Bangalore pause: “India Built the World’s Back Office. A.I. Is Starting to Shrink It.” Dramatic? Sure. Until you look at the numbers — and then it sounds like an understatement. For 25 years, India has been the world’s outsourcing engine. Six million workers. Nearly $300 billion in revenue. Over 7% of GDP. Now AI threatens to do to India what India’s outsourcing model did to Western workers: replace them with something cheaper and faster. ...

Tomorrow evening, Nvidia drops the most consequential earnings report of 2026. And it’s not just about one chipmaker’s quarterly numbers — it’s the entire AI investment thesis going on trial. Nvidia isn’t a semiconductor company anymore. It’s the barometer for the AI economy. The single stock that tells you whether hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending are paying off or spiraling into speculative excess. With NVDA sitting at $191, a $4.62 trillion market cap, and an AI market rattled by Anthropic-triggered selloffs, the pressure is immense. ...

It’s not every day that a single product launch wipes out tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization across an entire sector. But that’s exactly what happened last week when Anthropic unleashed Claude Code Security on the world. IBM tanked 13.2% on Monday — its worst single-day drop in 25 years. CrowdStrike shed over 11%. Cloudflare fell 8%. Okta cratered 9.2%. JFrog lost nearly a quarter of its value. Nassim Taleb is warning of bankruptcies. Analysts are furiously rewriting their models. And the phrase “the Anthropic Effect” has entered the financial lexicon as shorthand for what happens when AI doesn’t just compete with an industry — it threatens to make it irrelevant. ...

Remember your first real job? The one where you learned what “per my last email” actually means, made terrible PowerPoints, and slowly figured out how organizations work? AI is coming for that job. And the consequences run deeper than anyone’s admitting. The Data Is Brutal A Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study found that workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations saw a 16% relative employment decline compared to peers in less exposed fields like nursing or construction. The hardest-hit roles: software engineering, customer service, financial analysis, content creation — the exact white-collar starter jobs an entire generation was told to pursue. ...

The AI industry has a people problem. Not a technology problem, not a funding problem — a people problem. The kind where actual humans organize marches, stall $98 billion in projects, and make advertisers scrub the letters “AI” from their campaigns like it’s a slur. This week delivered the receipts. TIME Magazine’s cover screamed “The People vs. AI.” Sam Altman compared training AI to raising a child and got dragged across the internet. And Super Bowl advertisers discovered that slapping “AI-powered” on your product is now a net negative. Something has shifted, and the industry hasn’t caught up. ...

There’s a concept in economics called diffusion — the moment a technology stops being a novelty and starts propagating through the entire economy. Steam had its moment. Electricity had its moment. The internet had its moment. February 2026 is that moment for AI. And the evidence is no longer debatable. Spotify’s Engineers Stopped Writing Code Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström dropped a bombshell in early February: the company’s top developers “have not written a single line of code” in 2026. Not because they’re slacking. Because they’re supervising AI instead. ...

Five days in New Delhi. $260 billion in pledges. A new US-India tech alliance with China squarely in the crosshairs. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 wasn’t another safety-focused talkfest — it was a power grab, and India just pulled it off. The Numbers Are Staggering Reliance Industries led with $109.8 billion over seven years for AI and data infrastructure across India. The Adani Group followed with $100 billion by 2035 for renewable energy-powered AI data centers. Microsoft confirmed $50 billion by 2030 for the Global South, with India as the flagship market. Yotta Data Services announced $2 billion-plus for one of Asia’s largest AI computing hubs running NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra chips. ...

Every electric vehicle on the road hides a dirty secret inside its motor. The magnets that make it spin depend on rare earth elements — and China controls nearly 90% of the global supply. One research team just used AI to crack that problem wide open. The Supply Chain Everyone Ignores Here’s the uncomfortable math: over 86% of EV motors sold in 2024 used rare earth permanent magnets. Each vehicle packs roughly 1.5 kilograms of neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) — the strongest permanent magnets money can buy. They’re in your phone, your MRI machine, your wind turbine, and increasingly, your car. ...