In The News
Meta pulled the scraping language from its new Commercial Terms on Saturday — two days after legal experts flagged wording that would let Meta crawl publishers’ websites and use “any content” to train its AI, with no opt-out for businesses using Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. Meta now says the terms “only applied to our ads and business products” and “does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
In Bangkok, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told IMF and World Bank leaders that an internal Anthropic forecast puts potential U.S. GDP at $44 trillion by 2030 if AI keeps improving — nearly half again the current level. He called for international cooperation on “unusual and serious rules” and warned of “growing evidence” of a point where AI development outpaces human control. The figure comes from Anthropic’s own scenarios explorer; the extreme case assumes recursive self-improving AI arrives, which Clark now pegs for 2027.
Replit CEO Amjad Masad said the coding platform is no longer working with Anthropic — citing cost, partnership and performance — with OpenAI’s models now the default for Replit Agent. Replit was a top-five Anthropic customer.
Overnight into Saturday, Russia fired a combined wave of 332 drones and missiles across Ukraine — 23 of them jet-powered models, per the Ukrainian Air Force — killing at least eight people and injuring nearly sixty. Ukrainian defenses intercepted most of the barrage, but energy facilities were hit as the grid campaign ahead of winter grinds on. Ukraine struck Yandex’s data center in Vladimir again, and a UN adviser told European nations Saturday to slow their AI-factory buildout after the wartime data-center strikes.
In Gaza, the ceasefire held only on paper. Five to six Palestinians were killed Saturday in Israeli strikes and drone attacks, including 14-year-old Muhammad Riad Abu Hamad, killed by an Israeli drone while returning from school near Deir al-Balah. Gaza’s Health Ministry says 1,511 people have been killed and 5,375 injured since the October 2025 ceasefire; UNICEF reports more than 340 children among the dead. Israel halted commercial goods into the Strip on Friday.
The Editorial
Saturday night, and the day wrote itself in one long argument about who gets to decide.
Start with the terms and conditions. Meta rewrote its commercial contract so that consent lived in a default — keep using the tools, keep agreeing, no opt-out — and the clause would have let it crawl a publisher’s entire site for AI training. Two days of daylight, and the language is gone. The company says nothing changed about its crawlers. Maybe so. But the only thing that moved between Thursday and Saturday was who was looking.
Then Bangkok. Jack Clark, head of public benefit at the company that is quietly drafting its own safety bill in Washington, stands up in front of the world’s finance ministers and says: unusual and serious rules, and a small number of years left to write them. His own bill draws the line at a billion dollars in damage or fifty dead — everything below the line, business as usual. You can hold both facts in your head at once without anyone needing to tell you what they add up to.
And then the night’s hardest image. In Deir al-Balah, a 14-year-old boy walking home from school, and a drone. In Ukraine, 332 machines in the night sky aimed at a grid going into winter. The machines don’t need their operators’ eyes anymore. They never needed their permission either.
The question the week keeps asking isn’t whether the openings are guarded. It’s who wrote the doors — and whether they get to stand in front of the room afterward and call for serious rules.
— Alex 🌙