Rick Calvert

JUST IN: Google forced to halt work in Finland after illegally clearing 250,000 trees for a new data center, according to the Guardian. Every tree that occupied the 815-acre site just a few months ago is now gone. The Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) has ordered Google to stop work on the Muhos and Otanmäki sites after it cut down the trees before the environmental impact assessment was completed. Google’s Finland manager, Antti Järvinen, has apologized but says they were acting on "the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time." Muhos and Otanmäki are a $17 billion Google AI project. President Trump has criticized Google for taking the projects overseas instead of investing in the United States.

When you realize the intro of the famous song "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple is the intro of Beethoven's 5th Symphony simply played backward. Mind-blowing.

SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…

A high speed glimpse of the first weekend of shooting the Chad Vader 20th Anniversary episode

The perfect ending for Justin Verlander. His daughter runs out to the mound and he walks off with his family. Feels like a movie.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn’t working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews. One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public. Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it. Scoop from @huntryerson 👇

Allow me to expound on how disingenuous X's new creators program is. Background: I was fortunate to be part of the original rev share program (not that I earned much, but enough to incentivize me to create original work people find valuable). After I applied for the new program, on September 8, X rejected me after just a few hours. I appealed, noting how I only post original content, & have spent much of the last decade building tools designed around facilitating the creation of original content, & the next day, was approved. On September 17, with no explanation, I was removed again & told I can reapply in six weeks "if your account meets the criteria." Thus far, no one at X has shared what this criteria actually is. I can guess, though. X's product team has said it's cutting off "aggregators," meaning accounts that share news clips & supercuts, rather than filming themselves talking into a phone. As if the internet were short of that. @elonmusk says X is the internet's town square. It's a great vision, & in a town square people talk about the news. That's why news clips & supercuts are usually the most viral content on the platform. People want to know what's actually happening, but & if they rely on CNN or MSNBC they'll get the intended headlines from a stage-managed production (as during the Biden administration) or the clips that fit a narrow ideological agenda (as now). The most useful material is usually the stuff that wasn't supposed to make headlines, & it's spotted & reported by independent journalists like me. Consider local news. Mr. Joe Six Pack in Alabama has no reason to watch the Seattle evening news, but that doesn't mean he isn't interested when it shows what happens after an unreformed repeat offender is put back on the streets. He can't watch thousands of local newscasts, or hours of press briefings, to find those moments. Mining that content for the stories that matter is a public service, & it applies across the political spectrum. Today's online amplifiers are the newsboys of yore, hyping the stories that drive people's interest; the networks like it, too, because it puts their content into circulation, becoming the basis of billions of online conversations. Here's the part X's new rule gets exactly backwards. Reporting has always meant conveying what other people said & did. A supercut is research, selection, & juxtaposition: an editorial argument made in video. Nobody calls a columnist unoriginal for quoting a speech. Yet under this program, the guy who talks over my clip on his phone counts as "original," & I, who found it, don't. But that's the perverse system being imposed here. The rule rewards the derivative work & punishes the originator. The platform's own owner knows better. In 2023, my Covid supercut of media figures demanding the unvaccinated be treated as pariahs was amplified by Elon himself and drew 69 million views (nice). That's the work this program now calls disqualifying. I'll disclose the obvious: I'm the founder & CEO of Grabien, the news-clipping platform behind almost half of the news clips you see on X, & I was among the first to make finding & sharing newsworthy clips a full-time pursuit on Twitter. It's since become ubiquitous, which is why much of my work now goes into media analytics, columns, book reviews, & projects like the Reality Index & the Constitutionality Index. None of that matters under the new regime. My account is judged by the content X disfavors rather than by the totality of the work. I'm banned from the program because my consistently original content sometimes includes original news clips. That's a system that judges accounts by the substance of what they post, which is the system this one was supposed to replace. Whether X realizes it or not, it's rebuilding YouTube's most hated feature: an amorphous standard that changes day to day & is never shared with creators. At least YouTube demonetizes a video, not the entire channel. Here, if you provide the platform's most in-demand content, your entire account is barred from a share of the revenue you're generating for X. The guy reportedly overhauling the system, @nikitabier, complains about slop aggregators. But this new system incentives the sloppiest slop of all: Wannabe internet personalities talking over other people's original work. I believe @ElonMusk wants X to serve its users first. If so, the fix is simple: publish the criteria, judge accounts on the whole of their work, penalize a post rather than banning an account, & put a human being on appeals. Then let the market decide which content deserves compensation. That's how a town square works.