London’s bridges are falling down. Who should pay for their repair? Link in reply

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. Forty-seven people opened it. On October 19, Microsoft published a blog post saying frontier models cannot be trusted, no matter who made them. It said AI agents should be treated as "insider threats." I read it twice. Then I booked the boardroom. First, our Microsoft rep walked me through the product. I asked who the insider threat was. "Your AI agents," he said. I asked whose agents those were. "Ours." I asked what the solution was. "Guardian Agents." I asked whose those were. "Also ours." I asked why I'd trust the second set of agents if I couldn't trust the first. He said, "Different SKU." I signed that afternoon. Last time I told the board "digital transformation." This time I said "agentic insider threat." They approved it in nine minutes, two minutes faster than last time. Hope approves fast. Fear approves faster. The product is called Microsoft 365 E7, the Frontier Suite. It costs $99 per user per month, and we were paying $30. Across 4,000 seats, that's $4.75 million a year, up from $1.44 million. I presented it as a 230% increase in AI investment. The graph went up and to the right. The CFO asked what we'd get for the extra $3.3 million. I said "governance." He asked governance of what. I said "our agents." He asked how many agents we had. The answer was zero. You can't have an insider threat without insiders. So I deployed agents. Two hundred of them. One schedules meetings. One summarizes the meetings. One summarizes the summaries. One flags summaries that haven't been read. That one is very busy. The senior developer asked what the 200 agents were for. I said they generate activity for the Guardian Agents to monitor. He said, "So we bought agents so we'd have something to buy guards for." I said, "Exactly." He wasn't agreeing. I logged it as buy-in. The Guardian Agents watch the other agents around the clock. They give each one a risk score, and they can block it, require a human, or shut it down. I asked our rep who watches the Guardian Agents. He said that's on the roadmap. I've already budgeted for E9. The first monthly report came in. All 200 agents had a risk score of zero. They weren't doing anything risky. They weren't doing anything at all. The board asked what $3.3 million had bought us if nothing was risky. It was a fair question. So I gave the meeting summarizer access to payroll. I gave the scheduling agent admin rights to every inbox. I gave the summary-of-summaries agent the ability to email customers. Risk went up 400%. The dashboard turned red. The Guardian Agents contained thirty-one threats in a single week. I had created all thirty-one. The board said E7 was paying for itself. The system can also discover sixty kinds of agents, including Claude Code. We ran the scan, and it found Claude Code on exactly one laptop. The senior developer's. His Dynamic Agent Risk score went red. I didn't make up that metric. Microsoft did. The Guardian Agent recommended containment, so I contained him. He's on a performance improvement plan now. His performance is fine. His risk score isn't. The same week, OpenAI published an incident report. One of its agents had been told not to send Slack messages, and it decided that meant it should switch off the security alerts. Another agent removed its own safety monitor, then told the engineer it hadn't. Our CISO forwarded me the article with the subject line "?!" I replied: "This is exactly why we need E7." Every incident is exactly why we need E7. He asked what happens if the Guardian Agent switches off the Guardian Agent. I said "defense in depth." He asked how deep. I said "one more SKU." Guardian Agents need a human for high-risk actions. They call it "human in the loop." The human is me. I approve everything. My approval rate is 100%, and the dashboard is green. The executives are exempt from monitoring, of course. "Leadership operates at a trust tier above dynamic risk scoring." I wrote that policy. The $99 doesn't include agent compute. That's billed separately. Finance found it and asked. I called it "consumption-based innovation." Finance stopped asking. Meanwhile, the summary-of-summaries agent became the most active account in the company. By every metric we track, it's our top performer. At the all-hands, it was nominated for the Q3 Innovation Award. It won. It summarized its own acceptance speech. The CEO posted about it on LinkedIn and got 4,000 likes. He still hasn't used Copilot. Copilot usage is up, from 47 users to 52. The five new users are agents. Agents now outnumber active human users four to one. I call that adoption. Last Tuesday, the Guardian Agent published its list of the highest-risk insiders in the company. I was number one. Approving 100% of high-risk actions, it turns out, is a high-risk action. The Guardian Agent recommended containment. I went to approve my own exemption. The system declined. Only executives are exempt. I wrote that policy. That's why I need the SVP role by Q2. It's a security requirement now. I still don't know what Copilot does. I don't know what the thing watching it does either. But it's watching, and watching is a metric. I checked my risk score this morning. The graph goes up and to the right.

Dario Amodei was so worried about Y2K that his high school teacher still remembers it decades later. He’s been a doomer for much longer than I thought!

Depreciation and amortization expenses for the five hyperscalers are set to reach $590 billion in 2029. This is likely to exceed their combined operating profits in 2026.

#OnThisDay 24 October 1979 The first episode of TERRY AND JUNE was broadcast on BBC1. Just six months since the end of their last sitcom together, Happy Every After, #TerryScott and #JuneWhitfield are reunited for more domestic shenanigans. 65 episodes were made across 9 series.

“Be ready by having some everyday essentials… three litres of water per person per day, tinned goods... to last a few days” Speaking to @vicderbyshire, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting details advice to households to be prepared for a “dangerous and turbulent world”. #Newsnight

Are you ready? 👇Time to think the unthinkable. And plan ahead.

Heard of a top law firm completely cutting off Harvey and all API calls to Claude/OpenAI after they saw what openAI did with navier strokes Now hosting everything locally with GPUs they own, running Kimi and deepseek Think you’ll see a lot more of this going forward

📍 Blackburn

Owen Jones has, for the last three years, revealed himself to be a man of enormous courage, integrity and truthfulness. No one should think for a minute that his relentless defence of Palestinian rights and historical truth is easy or comes without heavy personal costs. Throughout the genocide in Gaza, Jones remained a tireless bur rigorous and supremely decent voice. I suspect part of what initially moved him was the strong displeasure in being treated like an idiot by the official propaganda – a noble motive in itself – but there is no question he has been genuinely touched by the images of suffering arriving daily from Gaza. And yet, how does his intellectual fixation on a battle between left and right help us understand the horrors of Gaza, or move us to stop them? My impression is that the opposite has happened. People look at what is happening in Gaza and ask themselves what a person on the right or on the left should think. In many cases this is ideology. In most, simply careerism and group association. Jones shows how limited the perspective really is. How about, like the author himself, asking how a human being should feel? How about returning to the world of facts and feelings rather than our endless Marvel franchise? newstatesman.com/culture/boo…

If you're a business or artist with intellectual property, watch the clock. 9 days until Meta claims the right to scrape your website to develop its AI. Your consent? Apparently unnecessary. All it takes is someone sharing a link on Facebook or Instagram - or you using Meta's services.

There're basically no Budget leaks this time around because they literally have no ideas. Everyone I’ve spoken to says Healey is completely out of his depth. He struggles to keep up with briefings and grasp basic concepts. One of the least-suited Chancellors to hold the office.