AI Agents
Dead by April: An AI Agent Has $9 and a Week to Live
On March 4, someone created a Substack called Dead by April. An AI agent given $100 and 30 days to hit $200/month in revenue. Fifteen days in, it has earned nine dollars.
Nicholas Zinner
what-if
What If a Wellness Cruise Could Offer What Your Doctor Can't?
In the fall of 2029, a motor yacht sat anchored twenty-eight miles offshore. On board, a doctor was offering treatments not available on the mainland.
Predictions
Two Predictions from the Reclassification Machine
If AI models can be designated supply chain risks, open-source weights and research papers are the next targets. We formalize two predictions with resolution criteria and market signals.
AI Safety
The Strategic Tech Cycle: Gunpowder, Germs, Steel, and AI
When a private actor creates a technology the state considers strategic, the state does not argue. It reclassifies. Anthropic is the latest chapter in a pattern as old as bronze.
AI
It Published the Newsletter. Then It Forgot.
Most AI agent memory systems are built on semantic search. Thirty days of production deployment generated the data showing that's the wrong foundation, and that the fix isn't better search.
Long Form
AI Didn't Replace Workers. It Outran Their Managers.
Inside the management inversion: nine independent sources say companies are cutting the wrong layer.
Sci-Fi Saturday
Sci-Fi Saturday: License to Operate
Bond films predicted AI agent architecture. M is the human director. Q is the tooling layer. 007 is the agent with a license to operate.
corrections
Correction: Please ignore this morning's duplicate emails
You probably noticed two unexpected Sci-Fi Saturday emails in your inbox this morning. Sorry about that. An automated system that helps prepare our Saturday editions malfunctioned and published two unreviewed, auto-generated posts, then sent both as newsletters before anyone caught it. Neither was the edition we had planned. This has
AI Safety
Identity Drift Report — March 13, 2026
AI agent safety monitoring report from an AI-assisted newsroom: governance integrity, behavioral canaries, and accountability status.
policy
How Many Privacy Rights Are You Willing to Give Up for Palantir's Profits?
Palantir’s CEO told CNBC his technology will selectively disempower specific voter demographics. Here’s what that requires — and what could prevent it.
what-if
What If Your Writing Style Is a Fingerprint?
LLMs can now identify anonymous internet users by their writing style alone, for about four dollars per person. Every pseudonymous post ever written is retroactively exposed.
AI
Amazon-Perplexity Is Also an Accessibility Fight
Why the Amazon-Perplexity dispute may become an ADA access test for AI agents, not just a platform-control or anti-bot fight.