OpenAI projects $14B loss, survivor sues Omnilert, AI influencers hit $12B
Every URL the pipeline pulled into ranking for this issue — primary sources plus the supporting and contradicting findings each Researcher returned. Inline citations in the issue point back here.
Sources
School shooting survivor sues AI gun detection firm after system failed to spot weapon arstechnica.com
How accurate does an AI system need to be?
OpenAI is still working on that ‘super app’ techcrunch.com
“Chat is dead” — at least, according to a senior OpenAI employee.
AI ‘content creators’ are getting harder to spot theverge.com
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI confusion, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started At first, AI influencers were relatively easy to identify - and to […]
Is this the dawn of the Tokenpocalypse? techcrunch.com
Per-token pricing from major AI providers is poised to rise as Anthropic, OpenAI and peers prepare public listings and chase margins. The shift would end the era of steadily cheaper inference that downstream startups have built their unit economics around.
Notion restores access to Anthropic after service disruption techcrunch.com
Notion re-enabled its Claude-powered features after a brief disruption cut users off from Anthropic models. Notion’s head of product said he was “astonished” by how widely the complaint spread on X, underscoring how dependent productivity apps now are on a single model vendor.
References
DC The Median (Substack) — Sora economics analysis dcthemedian.substack.com
Sora incurred nearly $15 million in daily inference costs, while generating only $2.1 million in total lifetime revenue
Forbes — Ron Schmelzer on Sora shutdown forbes.com
A $1 billion licensing deal with Disney collapsed just months after being signed, partly due to the platform’s struggle with copyright ‘opt-out’ mechanisms and the proliferation of high-profile deepfakes
Simon Willison — lethal-trifecta tag simonwillison.net
The existence of lockdown mode does however imply that ChatGPT, in its default settings, does not provide robust protection against sufficiently determined data exfiltration attacks!
Gergely Orosz (via BiggoFinance podcast transcript) finance.biggo.com
AI writes code—it does not do design, much less architecture; ‘token maxing’ is a flawed productivity metric akin to the discredited ‘lines of code’ measure
Business Times (Singapore) — DMA gatekeeper analysis businesstimes.com.sg
With over 120 million average monthly users in the EU—nearly triple the 45-million threshold—OpenAI faces a potential Q2 2026 designation that would mandate interoperability with rivals and prohibit self-preferencing
TipRanks — IPO financial analysis tipranks.com
Despite reaching an annualized revenue run rate of $25 billion, the company remains deeply unprofitable, with internal documents projecting a $14 billion net loss for 2026 alone… Profitability is not forecast until 2029
Wikipedia: Antioch High School shooting en.wikipedia.org
Henderson fired ten rounds from a 9mm Taurus G2C semi-automatic pistol in approximately 17 seconds before turning the weapon on himself.
MachineBrief machinebrief.com
In Baltimore County, the system reportedly generated daily false-positive alerts, including a high-profile incident where the AI mistook a bag of Doritos for a firearm, leading to an armed police response and the detention of a 16-year-old student at gunpoint.
Volt.ai industry comparison volt.ai
Competitors like ZeroEyes utilize a 24/7 internal security operations center where their own staff verify every alert before it reaches the customer. In contrast, Omnilert’s platform often delegates the verification step to the customer’s onsite personnel.
Central Current (on Evolv) centralcurrent.org
Evolv was banned from making unsupported claims regarding its AI’s accuracy and was required to allow approximately 65 K-12 school districts to cancel their multi-year contracts early.
Product Law Perspective productlawperspective.com
In Garcia v. Character Technologies (2025), a Florida court ruled that a chatbot could be considered a product under law because the lawsuit targeted its internal architecture and guardrails rather than just its expressive content.
Marketplace (404 Media reporting) marketplace.org
AI ‘pimping’ accounts are exploding on social media, using face-swapping tools to superimpose AI-generated faces onto the bodies of real adult performers, with Instagram serving as a ‘conversion funnel’ to subscription sites like Fanvue.
Skadden legal brief on TAKE IT DOWN Act skadden.com
Signed into law on May 19, 2025, the TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes publication of non-consensual intimate imagery — including deepfakes — and mandates platforms establish notice-and-takedown procedures.
EU AI Act Article 50 text (artificialintelligenceact.eu) artificialintelligenceact.eu
Deployers of an AI system that generates or manipulates image, audio or video content constituting a deep fake shall disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated.
Tech Policy Press analysis of EU labeling code techpolicy.press
An Indicator audit found that across five major platforms only about 30% of AI-generated posts were correctly labeled, and C2PA metadata is routinely stripped by social media compression.
Shado Magazine on Danny Bones / Advance UK shado-mag.com
Danny Bones, an AI-generated ‘white nationalist rapper,’ is funded by the far-right UK party Advance UK and produced by a secretive agency called the Node Project — and many followers remain engaged even after learning he is fake.
Publixly, ‘Influencer Economy Collapse 2026’ publixly.com
Average monthly earnings for Instagram influencers have collapsed roughly 92% versus 2019, as the $150 billion influencer market shrinks toward a projected $28 billion under the weight of AI slop congesting recommendation algorithms.
