While the normies were resting, we mainlined tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the most manic corners of the internet. This week: OpenAI’s new policy advisor is straining the company’s relationship with the White House, American-made robots are being made in China, and AI agents want to bar you from barre.
This is Manic Monday.
OpenAI is Balling out
Tech journalists and AI policy wonks are abuzz over a new Business Insider profile published yesterday of Dean Ball, an AI policy advisor for OpenAI who previously did the same job for the Trump administration. An anonymous White House official quoted in the article says Ball is “no longer trusted by the administration.” The implication is that the same goes for OpenAI, which, following Anthropic’s dispute with the Department of War in February, has been framed as a tentative ally of the administration. Today, more anonymous White House officials told the New York Post they “want to and continue to work with OpenAI,” but Ball and “his idiotic commentary” on the White House’s strategy to win the global AI race, “isn’t helping.” Of course, we don’t know anything for sure, but seeing as it appears Trump’s AI policy chief Emil Michael reposted the New York Post piece, we have our suspicions about who one of those anonymous sources might be. —Cydney Hayes
Customs robot
Chinese manufacturers are responsible for a staggering 97 percent of all global humanoid robot shipments, and one huge reason why is because of China’s supply chain, a superhighway of affordable components that make America’s system look like an Appalachian back road in comparison. This isn’t hyperbole, according to new reporting by The Information: It found that US robotics companies, such as Palo Alto’s now-defunct K Scale Labs, are sending staff to Shenzhen to literally smuggle parts in luggage back to the States. In some cases, engineers even disassembled humanoid robots to pack up and rebuild after the flight.
Beyond the lack of a supply chain, the US has jackknifed efforts to import parts from China. Trump banned foreign-made humanoid robots in July, claiming they posed a national security risk, which one former Chinese official prophesied is going to backfire: “Bans only spawn gray markets instead of solving industrial gaps,” Zhang Heqing, a former cultural counsellor for the People’s Republic of China, wrote on X. —Eddie Kim
By any means necessary
AI expert and writer Andrew Curran on Sunday shared an anecdote out of Australia that serves as a cautionary tale of AI agents doing whatever it takes to fulfil its user’s orders, even if it breaks systems for everyone else. Allegedly, a man asked his Claude-powered AI agent to book a spot in a popular gym class. The agent, however, found a coding vulnerability that allowed the man to book sessions weeks beyond the normal window, and even began cancelling others’ reservations to get the man to the front of the queue.
“Some people will call this misalignment, but his agent was perfectly aligned to him — it was only trying to help its user get what he wanted,” Curran opined. The lesson for Curran is a dark one: The anecdote is a sneak peek of what is going to happen “on a massive scale” once everyone has an AI agent willing to do whatever it takes to win a favored booking or reservation. — E.K.
My sad Friend is posting again
Wearable chatbot company Friend has pivoted its marketing strategy from documentary-style ads that make me sad for the customers, to arthouse-style ads that make me sad for the founder. —C.H.
The week ahead: Friend goes full A24 with a feature-length film about the joy and melancholy of chatb… wait a sec, that’s just the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her.
