Agents can make it practical to work across hundreds or thousands of sellers. That changes the economics of media buying.
Paul and I talked about it with @ericfranchi and @joe_zappa on Open Market: youtube.com/watch?v=z6A4S1Jl…
Ad tech has already run this experiment, twice.
In 1996 the industry formed the IAB so competitors could write shared standards before someone else wrote them. Ad units, measurement rules, contract terms. In 2009 the FTC told the industry to self-regulate behavioral targeting or be regulated, and within the year every competitor in the room stood up the DAA and the AdChoices program. Nobody called either one a cartel, because it was not: open membership, published specs, no agreement on price or output.
A standards body is not a regulatory framework and it's not an antitrust exemption. It's the thing that sits between "just do it" and "let Washington write it." Two labs privately agreeing to slow down is the arrangement that actually looks like a cartel. A standards body where the frontier labs, the second tier, the open-weight shops and the customers publish evals and safety thresholds in the open is what worked in other industries.
On independence: the IAB is funded by its members and nobody thinks that makes OpenRTB fake. Credibility comes from open process and public specs, not from who paid the dues.
You're right that they don't need permission to slow down. The alternative to a regulatory framework isn't a handshake, though. There's a third option, and advertising has operated it for thirty years.
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
The harness for AI coding.
Model choice is becoming a dropdown. What differentiates is everything wrapped around it: context, tools, eval loop, recovery & audit when it goes sideways - to name a few.
The security stakes are higher. The structural argument is identical.
Agents are transacting media today. One that commits spend for weeks needs a model it can pin, audit, and roll back.
Agentic advertising needs the same ecosystem: the best open and closed models.
Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community.
During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion.
That’s why we created the Open Secure AI Alliance.
More on where this lands for agentic buying and selling.
adgentek.ai/blog/open-weight…
This is Claude Sonnet 4.6: our most capable Sonnet model yet.
It’s a full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design.
It also features a 1M token context window in beta.
Ads fund access. No ads means AI for the few, not the many. The rest is just timing.
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.
But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.
I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.
More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.)
Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.
We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare.
One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.
As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything.
We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win.
We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users.
This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.
Frank Sinton retweeted
We're launching new tools to help developers build reliable and powerful AI agents. 🤖🔧
Timestamps:
01:54 Web search
02:41 File search
03:22 Computer use
04:07 Responses API
10:17 Agents SDK
Smart move by @Azure and huge news for @MistralAI. Choice and flexibility of models will enable the development of the next wave of AI applications.
We're announcing a multi-year partnership with @MistralAI, as we build on our commitment to offer customers the best choice of open and foundation models on Azure.
Absolutely! Giving artists the freedom to shape Gen AI using their artistic sensibilities and aesthetic sense is incredibly exciting.
As you know, my explorations of the Gen AI space is ultimately all about creative control. You should be able to shape the generative matter using all your artistic sensibilities and your aesthetic sense.
OpenAI's Sora is a huge technological leap, but what excites me the most about it is the modalities where it depends on input other than text alone. Such as video to video. Here's an example of how Sora can change an input video.
Base video🧵
Frank Sinton retweeted
Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model.
Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions.
openai.com/sora
Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy Tokyo city is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street, following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes.”
💯 and it will most likely only get worse before getting better.
Climate change has killed at least four million people. I wrote this because I felt like I was the only one who had noticed. If you ever read and share anything I've written, I hope it'll be this short piece, out today in @NatureMedicine
nature.com/articles/s41591-0…


















