Richard Wang, co-founder and former CEO of coding bootcamp Coding Dojo, is launching Idea to Launch, a 30-day program that helps would-be founders turn a startup idea into a working product using AI coding tools and hands-on engineering help.

Nearly four years after selling Coding Dojo to Perdoceo for $70 million, Wang was looking for a way to keep doing work that had a measurable impact on people’s lives. He found it in mentoring aspiring founders.

Wang thinks AI is about to do for software what smartphones did for video. Cheap cameras and cloud platforms gave rise to the influencer economy, and he believes AI will push the cost of building a product close to zero.

“We’re going to create this whole new builder economy that’s about to come in the next three to five years,” he said. “Baby boomers are gifted with cheap housing. I think Gen Z is going to be gifted with a cheap price to build.”

He sees plenty of demand. Citing a Shopify-Gallup study and a Zapier/Harris poll, Idea to Launch says 60% of Americans have a business idea but only 9% launch one. Wang said the reasons people hold back include fear of failure, not knowing how to get started, and not wanting to give up a paycheck or benefits.

Unlike accelerators such as Techstars or Y Combinator, Idea to Launch doesn’t take equity, and participants don’t have to quit their jobs. Over 10 evening sessions, founders get coaching, run customer interviews, build a product with AI tools such as Lovable, Replit and Cursor, and plan a launch. Each founder also gets 10 hours of one-on-one help from professional engineers.

Wang said people without technical backgrounds can now vibe-code 80% to 90% of a product on their own. The hard part, he said, is connecting it to other services, setting up the database correctly and making it secure.

“We’ll provide that type of knowledge with real engineering support,” he said. For engineers who have never done customer discovery or marketing, the program fills in the business side.

Security researchers have found serious vulnerabilities in apps built on vibe-coding platforms. A 2025 scan found 170 of 1,645 apps built with Lovable exposing user data, and another case this year exposed nearly 19,000 user records. Wang said the program’s engineers will make sure security holes are fixed “before they launch or before they get onto the first customer.”

The first cohort starts Jan. 11, followed by three more through April. Each is capped at 15 to 20 founders. Tuition is $3,500 for the inaugural cohort, down from the normal $5,000. Sessions will be held in person in Seattle or Bellevue, and Wang said he expects to pick a space within the next month. He is self-funding the venture.

Wang, who immigrated from China at 13 and was the first in his family to attend college, became Coding Dojo’s CEO in 2015. He left in 2017 for Trupanion and returned in 2019. The company grew to $50 million in peak annual revenue, according to Wang, and had 194 employees at the time of the sale, according to GeekWire’s earlier reporting. It operated campuses in several states before shifting online during the pandemic.

Wang sees Idea to Launch expanding to other tech hubs, then online, and eventually licensing the program globally, much as Coding Dojo grew to multiple campuses. If the first cohorts go well, he can envision a follow-up program, Launch to Traction, to help founders find more customers.

He doesn’t plan to invest in participants’ companies. Having spent years building and selling Coding Dojo, Wang said he knows how hard that road is and would rather “cheer them on from the sidelines.” He said taking VC money at Coding Dojo created pressure to grow 100% a year, something he calls “startup steroids.”

For Wang, the point isn’t to find the next unicorn. It’s to give more people a shot at building something now that AI has made it cheaper and easier.

“I think everyone should try at least once just to bring their idea to reality,” he said.

OpenAI generated $10 billion in revenue for Microsoft in the quarter ended Sept. 30, about 11% of the Redmond company’s total revenue, according to its quarterly filing Wednesday.

The amount is up sharply. In the fiscal year that ended in June, Microsoft recorded $24.1 billion in revenue from its business with OpenAI, or about $6 billion a quarter on average.

That $10 billion surpasses some of Microsoft’s longest-running businesses. Xbox brought in $5.4 billion in the quarter. Search and advertising, which includes its Bing search engine, generated $6.6 billion. Windows licenses sold through PC makers, along with Surface and other Microsoft devices, brought in $3.6 billion.

The total covers revenue-sharing payments from OpenAI, as well as other business between the companies, such as OpenAI’s use of Azure to train and run its AI models. Microsoft didn’t say how much came from each, or how much of Azure’s growth came from OpenAI.

Azure revenue rose 48% to $33.2 billion in the quarter, beating Wall Street’s expectations and the company’s own forecast of 44% to 45% growth.

Microsoft has begun disclosing its revenue from OpenAI because its stake of about 24% makes OpenAI a “related party” under accounting rules, requiring it to report the business they do with each other.

Microsoft first reported the number in its annual report in July, as a full-year total. This is the first time it has given a quarterly figure.

The original AI alliance: Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019, eventually committing $13 billion, and became its exclusive cloud provider. ChatGPT ran on Azure when it launched in late 2022.

The companies have loosened their ties since then. OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation in October 2025, and Microsoft gave up its right of first refusal to supply OpenAI’s computing capacity. OpenAI committed to buy an additional $250 billion in Azure services. An April 2026 agreement gave OpenAI broader freedom to use other cloud providers.

OpenAI has also agreed to keep sharing revenue with Microsoft through 2030.

In addition, Microsoft sells access to OpenAI’s models to business customers through its Azure OpenAI Service, and the models became the foundation for its Copilot products, putting Microsoft at the front of the generative AI boom. That revenue comes from Microsoft’s own customers, so it isn’t part of the $10 billion.

Microsoft, for its part, now builds its own AI models and offers models from Anthropic and others.

Many customers, not a few: Asked by Bernstein Research analyst Mark Moerdler whether AI growth on Azure was coming from big businesses or AI-native companies, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn’t mention OpenAI.

He said he doesn’t want Azure’s AI business to depend on a few big customers, and that broad adoption by businesses is just getting started.

Nadella described it as “a decade-long thing,” and contrasted it with relying on “four customers who buy a lot of capacity from you” to show a few quarters of growth. That, he said, is “not a business as far as I’m concerned.”

He added that Microsoft has large customers who want to buy capacity, “and as long as the pricing is right, we may sell them some. If not, we will be patient.”

Later in the call, Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges brought up the fact that OpenAI made up 11% of revenue. Nadella didn’t address the number but praised OpenAI’s latest models and said customers are increasingly mixing models from different companies, or training their own.

He cited Microsoft’s tools for routing each task to whichever AI model handles it best. If you use AI coding agents, Nadella said, you want Anthropic and OpenAI “to compete for your workload, not like once a quarter, but for every task.”

New risk language: Microsoft also expanded a warning in its quarterly filing about the risks of depending on outside AI providers. The company builds products such as Copilot on AI models from outside companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic. It now says it has “limited visibility into or control over” how those models are designed, trained, secured and tested.

Without naming OpenAI or Anthropic, the same section notes that some of these AI partners are also “significant customers of Azure,” and that the benefits Microsoft expects from those relationships “may not be realized or sustained.” It says those partners could change how much they buy, and that Microsoft itself may change how it allocates scarce data center capacity or prices it.

Microsoft is an investor in both companies. According to its latest filing, it owns about 24% of OpenAI, down from about 25% in June and about 27% after OpenAI’s restructuring a year ago, and has put $12.0 billion of a promised $13.0 billion into the company.

In addition, Microsoft agreed last year to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, and its results for the June quarter included a $3.2 billion gain on that investment. Microsoft hasn’t disclosed the size of its Anthropic stake, and Anthropic’s IPO filing earlier this week didn’t specify it either.

Anthropic filed to go public on Monday under the ticker ANT, and you may end up owning the stock soon even if you never buy it directly, because index funds and ETFs will be required to buy it within weeks of its debut.

Anthropic’s bankers are reportedly valuing Anthropic between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. Below is a simple, interactive tool to help you form your own opinion of what’s an appropriate valuation for Anthropic.

Disclaimer: this is highly simplified, and I’m not an investment advisor.

Update, 10/28: Microsoft’s Azure cloud business brought in $33.2 billion in revenue in the September quarter, up 48% from a year earlier, blowing past the company’s own forecast and beating Wall Street’s expectations. Read the full story.

Microsoft’s earnings report Wednesday will come two days after the company offered buyouts to about 60,000 people, roughly a quarter of its employees. The call gives executives their first chance to say what the offer will cost, and to explain how it fits with the company’s long-term view of its workforce.

Whether or not they go into those details, it’s one of several issues to watch in Wednesday’s report, the first under Microsoft’s new reporting structure. Anthropic’s IPO filing on Monday adds another storyline, showing how much the Claude maker has agreed to spend on Microsoft’s cloud.

Coming into the report, Microsoft’s stock is near its high. Microsoft closed Monday at $532.60, about 2% below its record close of $543.45 on Oct. 13, after gaining roughly $1.4 trillion in market value since late June.

Here are the key numbers and issues heading into Microsoft’s results for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, ended Sept. 30.

Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of $90.75 billion, up nearly 17% from a year ago, and earnings of $4.72 per share, up 14%, according to Yahoo Finance. Microsoft’s own forecast was $89.85 billion to $90.95 billion, so Wall Street is looking for a result near the top of that range.

In July, Microsoft reported $90 billion in revenue for the June quarter, well above the $87.7 billion analysts expected.

A new scorecard: Microsoft announced in September that it would sort its business into two groups instead of the three it had used since 2015. This is the first quarter under the new setup.

The first, dubbed Agents and Infra, includes Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, LinkedIn’s recruiting and sales tools, and server and productivity licensing. It brought in 81% of Microsoft’s revenue and 88% of its operating income in fiscal 2026, based on figures Microsoft recast under the new structure.

Microsoft expects Agents and Infra revenue of $75.15 billion to $75.75 billion this quarter, which would be growth of about 22% to 23%, by GeekWire’s calculation.

The other group, Devices and Consumer, includes Windows, Xbox and search advertising. Microsoft expects it to bring in $14.7 billion to $15.2 billion, down 5% to 8% from a year earlier.

Azure, in dollars: Microsoft started disclosing Azure’s annual revenue last year, when it passed $75 billion, and topped $100 billion in fiscal 2026. Starting this quarter, it reports the figure every quarter. It also changed what counts as Azure: GitHub’s cloud business and Security Copilot now fall under Microsoft 365, and its healthcare cloud moved to a new industry unit.

Counted that way, Azure brought in $29.4 billion in the June quarter, up 42%. Microsoft expects growth of 44% to 45% this quarter, not counting currency fluctuations, which would put Azure at roughly $32 billion, by GeekWire’s calculation. That compares with the roughly 45% Microsoft projected in July, under the old definition.

Hitting that forecast may not be enough. Investors are looking for about 46%, BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski wrote in a note Monday. In January, Azure beat Microsoft’s own forecast and the stock still fell 10%, because investors had privately expected more.

“Azure moves the stock, but the read that matters is whether capacity is absorbed as fast as it lands,” wrote Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives in a note last week.

Capital spending: Microsoft expects capital expenditures of more than $50 billion for the quarter, which would be a record. That’s up from $41 billion in the June quarter and $34.9 billion a year earlier.

An accounting change reduces what Microsoft reports as capital spending, without reducing its planned investment. Microsoft now assumes its data center buildings will last 25 years instead of 15. As a result, more of its data center leases will be classified in a way that doesn’t count as capital spending, CFO Amy Hood said on the July earnings call.

That change alone lowered Microsoft’s capital spending estimate for calendar 2026 to about $175 billion, from the roughly $190 billion it projected in April. Hood said the company’s actual spending plans hadn’t changed.

Cloud margins: Microsoft Cloud gross margin came in at 65% last quarter, better than expected but down from a year earlier. Microsoft said it expects the figure to be relatively stable this quarter. It also expects operating margins to be roughly flat with a year ago.

Workforce: The new “voluntary exit” offer, announced Monday by Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, covers participating teams in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India. It has no age or tenure requirement and extends to some vice presidents. Employees have until the first week of December to decide, and Microsoft hasn’t said how much the offer will cost or when it will record the charge.

For the spring retirement program, Hood disclosed the cost on the April earnings call: about $900 million, with roughly $350 million in cost of revenue and $550 million in operating expenses. The charge showed up in the following quarter. About 30% of the 8,750 eligible employees accepted.

The new offer is less generous. It matches Microsoft’s standard severance, without the extended healthcare of the spring program, and the company expects a much smaller share of people to take it. But the pool of eligible employees is nearly seven times larger.

Microsoft says the offer doesn’t mean it needs fewer people. Coleman said in July that the company was studying whether to make voluntary exits a regular part of managing its workforce. It has told investors to expect operating margins roughly flat this quarter and down less than a point for the full fiscal year, even with record capital spending.

Nadella has addressed this before. In a July 2025 memo to employees, after Microsoft laid off about 15,000 people, he acknowledged the “uncertainty and seeming incongruence” of thriving financially while cutting jobs. “This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he wrote.

In his annual shareholder letter last week, he focused on Microsoft’s spending on AI infrastructure. “Based on the demand we see and the efficiencies we are driving, I am confident in the long-term returns on our investments,” Nadella wrote. “We are building against a growing book of business tied to this secular shift.”

Microsoft had about 223,000 employees as of June 30, before it cut 4,800 jobs in July and more in September. The Information reported this month that Azure President Girish Bablani told leaders in his group to find ways to cut costs by at least 20%. Microsoft called the report inaccurate and said Azure leadership had not directed teams to develop cost-cutting plans.

Copilot: Microsoft said in July that businesses were paying for more than 30 million Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, up from 20 million in April. That’s still only about 7% of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats.

The bigger change is in how Microsoft charges for Copilot and its other AI tools. In July it added usage-based billing alongside per-seat pricing. It’s also pushing customers toward E7, a new premium bundle that includes Copilot. Microsoft expects Microsoft 365 commercial cloud revenue to grow about 17% this quarter, not counting currency swings, a number that now includes GitHub.

The BNP Paribas analyst Slowinski, who attended Microsoft’s Frontier Tour event in London last week, wrote that partners are seeing more customers roll out Copilot company-wide. Partners also told him that Microsoft now ties 35% of E7 sales incentives to how much customers use features like Cowork.

Anthropic and OpenAI: Anthropic’s S-1 filing shows the company has committed to spend at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft from November 2026 to May 2033, up from the $30 billion Azure commitment announced last November. That’s well below its minimum commitments to Amazon ($110 billion) and Google ($114.5 billion).

Microsoft agreed last year to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. Its results for the June quarter included a $3.2 billion gain on that investment.

OpenAI remains the bigger factor. Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligation (RPO), the measure of signed contracts it hasn’t yet delivered on, reached $678 billion last quarter, up 84% from a year earlier. Without OpenAI, the backlog grew 25%. OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue approached $50 billion at the end of September, The Information reported, lower than earlier reports of about $70 billion.

Windows: Microsoft expects revenue from Windows licenses sold to PC makers, along with its own devices, to fall a little more than 20%. Higher memory prices are making PCs more expensive, and PC makers are still working through extra inventory.

What’s next: Alphabet also reports Wednesday afternoon, and Amazon reports Thursday, setting up a side-by-side look at Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.

Anthropic is aiming to go public the week of Nov. 16, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Check back Wednesday afternoon for coverage.

Avante, the maker of an AI platform to help companies manage employee health care and other benefits, has landed a $30 million Series A round.

Frist Cressey Ventures led the round, with participation from Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures, Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and existing investor Fuse. The new funding, announced Tuesday, brings Seattle-based Avante’s total raised to $40 million, following a $10 million seed round led by Fuse in 2024.

Benefits are one of employers’ biggest costs. Avante’s AI agents do work like comparing vendor contracts against actual claims, reviewing plan documents for errors and preparing for renewals. Employees can also use the platform to ask questions about their own coverage.

The startup plans to use the cash to expand internationally and develop more AI agents, building on a beta release of its “Ava Agents” last week.

Avante says it now has more than 70 customers, including Samsung Semiconductor, Real Chemistry, Zscaler and News Corp, and that bookings grew nearly fivefold over the past year. The platform reaches more than 385,000 employees and family members, according to the company.

Avante was founded in 2023 by CEO Rohan D’Souza; Carly Eckert, a physician and epidemiologist who serves as head of innovation and impact; and executive chairman Kabir Shahani, the co-CEO of Amperity.

D’Souza and Eckert previously worked as executives at health care automation company Olive AI, which shut down in 2023. The startup emerged from stealth in early 2024 and launched publicly in April 2025.

“Benefits teams are responsible for one of the largest and most consequential investments their companies make, yet they’re still operating with outdated information, archaic spreadsheets, and technology built for another era,” D’Souza said in a statement.

Avante is pitching its software as employers face rising health care costs. Large employers are projecting a median 9.2% increase for 2027, the company said.

The startup competes with benefits and HR software providers such as Workday, ADP, Deel and Rippling. It has also signed partnerships with benefits advisory firms including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden and USI Insurance Services.

Avante ranks No. 156 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.

The Washington Technology Industry Association kicked off the third annual Seattle AI Week on Monday with a reminder that AI affects everyone, from engineers and artists to “someone who learned about ChatGPT today,” as WTIA’s Nick Ellingson put it.

“All of us should be a part of that conversation,” he added.

A few people in the audience took that statement literally.

Members of Troublemakers, a Seattle climate activism group, interrupted the week’s opening panel on AI and economic growth several times before they were led out by security. Outside on Elliott Bay, others floated in kayaks with a banner: “Power for People, Not for Tech.”

“These are not your constituents — we are,” one protester told Beau Perschbacher, Gov. Bob Ferguson’s senior policy advisor, as he addressed the large crowd of tech and startup leaders at Seattle’s AI House. Perschbacher was on a panel with Joe Nguyen of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Mattie Zazueta of OpenAI, the event’s presenting sponsor.

The group’s main message, according to members who spoke with GeekWire: the rush to build data centers and roll out AI is putting the state’s communities, jobs and environment at risk, and Washington should be investing in green jobs and clean energy instead.

The protest comes amid a broader backlash against data centers in Washington state and across the country. The Seattle City Council voted unanimously in June to pause new large data centers in the city for a year, and Washington AI Resistance organized at least 19 protests around the state this month calling for a statewide moratorium.

The event also came the same day Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, as it spends tens of billions of dollars on data centers and AI infrastructure.

The backlash contrasts with a push from the business and tech community for Washington state and the Seattle region to do more to stay competitive in the AI era.

“Washington helped build the technology economy of the last generation. We have an extraordinary opportunity to lead the AI economy of the next,” said former Gov. Chris Gregoire, now CEO of the business group Challenge Seattle, in her opening remarks at the AI Week event.

Gregoire cited efforts to put AI to work on the region’s own problems, including an AI permitting pilot in Everett that she said could cut the median wait for an accessory dwelling unit permit from 252 days to 90. She highlighted the AI-driven protein design work of Nobel laureate David Baker of the University of Washington, with applications in areas including the environment, agriculture and health care.

She also warned that Washington is close to the bottom for its business climate, even though it ranks second in North America for tech talent, as other states court its companies and jobs.

On the panel, Perschbacher said Ferguson’s administration has been focused on data centers since taking office, setting up a work group early last year to study their impact. The group looked for a Washington community that had been harmed by a data center and couldn’t find one, he said.

He added that the state won’t permit data centers to run diesel generators around the clock, and that their water use turned out to be “not out of line with a typical industrial user.”

Electricity is a different story. Data centers “use a really significant amount of electricity,” he said, and with demand also rising from EVs and heat pumps, getting enough power “is a major challenge.”

Perschbacher addressed the protesters directly, saying Washington has some of the strictest environmental laws in the country and that the state’s data center work group reinforced those rules rather than weakening them. Bills on ratepayer protections and transparency for data centers are likely to come back in the next legislative session, he said.

The issue also came up in the event’s second panel, on AI policy. State Sen. Marko Liias, who sponsored a bill this year on high-risk uses of AI, said data centers that want to locate in Washington need to meet “stringent expectations,” including adding clean energy to the grid, recycling water and dropping nondisclosure agreements that keep communities in the dark. Washington’s goal “has never been to be the cheapest or easiest place,” he said.

“When energy becomes scarce, I do think we need to be clear that our communities deserve access to that energy before the data centers do,” Liias said.

Joe Braidwood, founder of AI governance startup Glacis, which works out of AI House, said on the same panel that it was the first event he’d attended there with a public protest. “I think that’s actually kind of promising that people care enough to want to come together and talk and disagree and figure this out,” he said.

Zazueta, OpenAI’s global head of community programs, said in the opening panel that the industry needs to do a better job showing people the benefits of AI. Many people “read about these scary headlines,” she said, but don’t see how the technology applies to their daily lives.

OpenAI runs AI literacy workshops and trains libraries and community groups to lead their own, she said. The company opened an expanded office in Bellevue in March, its largest engineering center outside San Francisco.

Speaking with GeekWire outside the event on Monday afternoon, one of the protesters who had interrupted the panel singled out that remark. She said it dismissed public concerns about AI as the product of bad headlines, and she objected to the idea of using community groups to win people over to the benefits of artificial intelligence.

“They want to infiltrate our communities,” she said.

The opening panel with Zazueta, Perschbacher and Nguyen was titled “The Abundance State: Washington’s Chance to Lead the AI Future.” The protester objected to that framing, saying the panelists’ idea of abundance came down to easing permits for data centers.

It wasn’t the first time the group has protested the tech industry’s energy use. In 2024, it blocked entrances at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to protest the company’s plans to power data centers in Oregon with natural gas.

Inside the event on Monday, as the interruptions continued, Nguyen, a former state senator who now leads the Seattle chamber, had responded to the protesters directly. “If you want to have your own event, have your own event,” he told them.

After they were led out, Nguyen said he agreed with the protesters, calling their passion “very warranted.” Those concerns are one reason Washington created some of the most stringent energy policies in the country, he said, adding that everyone would be better off if data centers elsewhere were held to the same standards.

“I think we’re very unique in Washington state to be able to actually do this in a way that really is mindful of our values, of the environment, and also pushing for innovation as well,” he said.

At the same time, Nguyen said demand for AI and data centers is market-driven, and it isn’t fair to criticize data centers while using them every day.

“For anybody who’s upset with data centers, I hope that when you email me, don’t email me,” he said. “Print it off and walk it to my office.”

Update, Oct. 27: Protesters interrupted the opening session of WTIA’s Seattle AI Summit six times Tuesday morning, during an on-stage interview of OpenAI’s Vijaye Raji by GeekWire’s Todd Bishop. They objected to AI-related job losses, the climate impact of data centers, OpenAI’s ties to the Trump administration and the leadership of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The midterm elections are around the corner, and campaigns and PACs have already spent more than $137 million to air AI-made ads, including an 85-second video in which Texas Senate candidate James Talarico looks into the camera, reads his old tweets aloud, and voices spicy commentary he never actually made. The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm produced it. UC Berkeley deepfake expert Hany Farid said most people wouldn’t immediately know it was fake; the “AI GENERATED” tag sits small and faint in a corner.

Between now and Nov. 3, any clip of a candidate on your TV or in your feed may be fabricated, and most carry no AI label whatsoever. I’ve been predicting a deluge of deepfakes, and fear that it will get worse if we don’t act.

In 2024, I donated a year of my life to fighting political deepfakes by founding the nonprofit TrueMedia.org. A talented team at TrueMedia.org developed a state-of-the-art deepfake detector in record time and distributed it broadly, free of charge. It analyzed more than 60,000 images, videos and audio clips in elections worldwide, but it was early.

The Wesleyan Media Project, which reported the $137 million figure, found less than $50,000 in AI ad spending for the entire 2024 cycle. In January 2025, I said, “It did not materialize in 2024. That doesn’t mean that it’s not coming.” We open-sourced the technology and transferred it to Georgetown University, which resurrected TrueMedia.org in time for the peak of the current election cycle.

I was expecting foreign operatives to be the most prolific fakers. But in 2026, the deepfakes are coming from American campaigns and PACs, on television and in your feeds.

Many of the AI ads the Wesleyan Media Project has cataloged are harmless. Some are cosmetic: a still photo of Oklahoma candidate Chip Keating animated into a smile, or a synthetic family at a kitchen table where a campaign used to buy stock footage. Fred Davis, who has made campaign ads for 50 years, told The New York Times a scene that would have cost $2 million to shoot now costs about $200,000 to generate. Nobody is deceived.

Others are absurd on their face: New York’s governor and mayor gardening together while pitching a “political delusion pill” in a Bruce Blakeman campaign ad, or Spencer Pratt as Batman leading fed-up Angelenos armed with tomatoes. Pratt finished third in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. These are political cartoons with a pulse, and they’re protected satire. NYU’s Scott Babwah Brennen calls the genre “AI-generated slopaganda”: political slop made to stir feelings rather than make an argument.

The third kind is built to be believed, like the Talarico video. A Make Oklahoma Great Again PAC ad showed gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei cheek to cheek with Hillary Clinton under the words “Clinton Lover. Trump Hater,” with no AI label; the PAC spent more than $200,000 putting it on Oklahoma television. A PAC ad in Minnesota showed Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan with her hand out in front of a pile of cash. Talarico’s own ad now ends with the words “Made by humans, not A.I.”

A deceptive fake doesn’t need to be high quality. In a 2021 experiment with 5,750 people, a deepfake of Elizabeth Warren convinced 47% that a fabricated scandal was real; a plain fake headline convinced 43%.

A Utah Valley University study this June found voters identified deepfakes correctly about 16% of the time, and people who called themselves “extremely familiar” with deepfakes did no better than people who said they weren’t familiar at all. Media literacy doesn’t inoculate you against deepfakes.

The laws on the books fail to solve the problem. At least 31 states have deepfake election statutes. Wesleyan’s researchers found 29% of AI ads labeled in states with laws and 32% in states without.

Even when a label appears, voters often miss it. NYU’s Center on Technology Policy showed 1,051 people labeled and unlabeled ads. Thirty-seven percent didn’t remember seeing Michigan’s required disclaimer at all, and because it says “manipulated by technical means” rather than “AI,” only 21% identified AI as the technology involved. The one thing labels reliably did was make viewers trust the candidate who ran the ad less, which is why campaigns leave them off.

My proposed solution is simple: the litmus test should be the person shown, not the technology used. Did a real person agree to be shown this way? If not, the ad carries a plain-language label, on screen and in the audio, or it doesn’t air. A station manager can apply the test in a minute, which addresses the complaint that nobody can define “deceptive.” The rule should cover paid political ads, the one place a broadcaster already checks every spot before it airs; memes, satire accounts and your cousin’s group chat are a different problem.

Sejin Paik, the Georgetown researcher who now leads TrueMedia, puts the television problem plainly: “On TV, where AI ad spending is rising, a viewer watching a deceptive ad has little room for a crowd reaction or a provenance mark to change their view.”

H.R. 9922 would set a federal disclaimer rule, and the consultants’ own trade group is asking for a federal standard to replace the state patchwork. When the regulated party asks for the regulation, pass it.

Voters are ahead of Congress: in a Scripps News poll this month, 43% of registered voters said they had already been fooled by an AI-made ad this campaign, and 77% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans want rules on AI in politics.

Looking to the future, the 2028 election is a presidential one — we don’t want to be flooded with even more deceptive AI ads. Two years is enough time to get the rules and processes in place, if we start now.

For years, Aigen has been building and tweaking solar-powered robots designed to pull weeds on farms. But the Redmond, Wash., startup is also raising a crop of its own: a growing, AI-generated collection of digital weeds and plants that teaches those robots what to pull.

That synthetic data, which Aigen calls Alchemy, is changing what the company can sell. Training its robots on a new crop used to require three to four years of collecting and labeling real-world images, co-founder and CTO Richard Wurden said. Now it takes about a week, helping Aigen attract growers of asparagus, hops, flowers, lettuce and more.

Wurden spoke with GeekWire by phone from FIRA USA, a three-day agricultural robotics expo at Yakima’s State Fair Park that wrapped up Thursday. He said Aigen made several sales at the show, including to growers it previously couldn’t serve.

“Now we’re saying yes to a bunch of crops, where previously we were locked into just doing a few,” he said.

Aigen is nearly sold out of robots for the 2027 season following the show, according to the company.

Aigen’s solar design is also getting more attention as fuel costs climb. U.S. diesel prices are up roughly 70% from a year ago, according to EIA data, and averaged nearly $6.30 a gallon this month, according to AAA. Many rival weed-control machines are pulled by diesel tractors, Wurden said, while Aigen’s robots run entirely on solar panels with a battery backup.

“It just so happens running a solar-powered robot without pesticides is the best possible timing right now,” he said.

Wurden and CEO Kenny Lee founded Aigen in 2020 after meeting in a climate-focused Slack group and discovering they lived about five minutes apart. Wurden, a mechanical engineer, previously worked on battery systems at Tesla and at Seattle electric boat maker Pure Watercraft. Lee is a cybersecurity veteran who co-founded Weblife.io, which Proofpoint acquired in 2017.

The mission is personal for both founders. Lee had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Wurden has type 1 diabetes — diseases Wurden said have been linked to herbicide use.

The startup raised a $4 million seed round in 2022 and a $12 million round in 2023 led by ReGen Ventures, with participation from NEA and others. Wurden said the company has raised about $26 million in total. The startup now has about 15 employees.

Aigen’s Element robots are about 6 feet wide and topped with a roughly 400-watt solar panel. Cameras and AI distinguish weeds from crops, and mechanical arms pull the weeds out at the root. The robots cost $50,000 to $70,000 each depending on configuration, and Aigen typically sells them in packs of five, Wurden said.

Aigen has built more than 100 robots, all assembled in Redmond, and logged more than 15,000 hours in fields in California, Minnesota and North Dakota. Customers include organic soybean growers in North Dakota and tomato growers in California, Wurden said, and the company is expanding a recent pilot with an unnamed Fortune 500 company.

Alchemy has also become a product in its own right.

Large agribusinesses are using Aigen’s synthetic data, Wurden said. Because the plants are generated in simulation, each one comes perfectly labeled. That matters when weeds and crops overlap in ways that are hard to sort out from real photos, especially under shifting daylight. Aigen’s robots don’t use artificial lights. Wurden said the startup built the system out of necessity, because it couldn’t afford to pay people to label images by hand.

“Our AI now labels the data for us,” he said.

The company is choosy about who gets that data. Wurden said the company would work with precision-spraying companies that use less herbicide, but not with operations that broadcast-spray fields.

Next up: robots on Washington farms early next year, the company says. It’s also developing an orchard version with arms that reach out to weed between trees. And a next-generation robot is in the works.

Aigen is one of several Washington startups using AI to fight weeds. Issaquah-based TerraClear maps individual weeds so farmers’ existing sprayers hit only those spots. Seattle-based Carbon Robotics zaps weeds with lasers and trained its AI on 150 million labeled images of real plants. Aigen is betting synthetic data can teach its robots new crops faster.

Wurden said it’s refreshing to see technologists working on these problems rather than focusing on ad clicks or another gadget or service that may not be good for society.

“I support every company working on ag technology and things that help farmers, because farmers have felt like they’re left behind for a long time,” he said. “It’s a good way to cross the aisle in politics, too. Everybody needs food.”

Watchtower Labs, a Bellevue, Wash.-based defense tech startup, emerged from stealth Wednesday with $35 million to build AI software that helps military planners make faster decisions about logistics and operations.

Shield Capital and Conviction co-led the seed round, with participation from Founders Fund and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm that supports the U.S. intelligence community. It’s the first outside funding for Watchtower, which was incubated inside Shield.

Watchtower was co-founded by CEO Akhil Iyer, a former Marine Corps infantry and special operations officer who said that like many veterans, he was frustrated that the technology on commercial iPhones wasn’t making it into the field with troops.

After leaving the military, Iyer worked on counter-drone technology and later invested in defense startups at Shield Capital, where he watched senior military leaders try to figure out how to put AI to practical use.

“One of those key problems is how do we best allocate scarce resources across the globe,” Iyer said. “Planning for that is really hard.”

Iyer’s Watchtower co-founders are CTO Souren Aghajanyan and head of engineering John Morman, longtime Microsoft engineering leaders who worked on large distributed systems and fraud protection. Iyer said his first call after deciding to build Watchtower went to Lou Manousos, who founded security company RiskIQ, sold it to Microsoft in 2021 and later became a corporate vice president there. Aghajanyan and Morman had worked on Manousos’ team, and they were already thinking about how simulation and AI could improve planning.

The company’s software lets planners ask questions in plain language, then runs simulations to map out possible scenarios and options, starting with military logistics: moving fuel, spare parts, munitions and people where they’re needed in time. Watchtower models hundreds of possible futures against real-world constraints and shows the assumptions and tradeoffs behind each option, while decision makers stay in charge of the final call.

Iyer said the platform pairs agentic AI with heavy-duty math.

“You can’t LLM your way to a really complicated math problem, yet at least,” he said. “It needs to be set up in the right way, and you need to do some real analysis behind it.”

Many existing military tools focus on giving commanders a clear picture of what they have right now and where it is, Iyer said. Fewer look ahead to what’s coming. Watchtower’s bet is that it can bridge AI and simulation and optimization software to do that.

Watchtower is starting with logistics, but Iyer said supply decisions are tied to operations, so the company plans to broaden its software into wider operational planning.

Watchtower has several military contracts, Iyer said. The most important is a prototype contract it won in January through the Defense Innovation Unit’s Joint Sustainment Decision Tool program, which is building AI tools to help the military forecast logistics needs weeks in advance.

Watchtower and Air Space Intelligence were picked after a competitive process, according to the DIU. The program’s partners include U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (the lead partner), U.S. Northern Command and the Defense Logistics Agency. The tools are meant to track and forecast critical supplies such as munitions, fuel, medical materiel and spare parts.

Iyer said the $35 million will go first toward building out the team, then toward delivering on the contracts Watchtower has won and expanding its platform beyond logistics. The startup has revenue but isn’t disclosing figures.

Watchtower has about 30 employees across offices in Bellevue, the Bay Area, Hawaii and the Washington, D.C., area, with more than a dozen in Bellevue. Iyer, who is based in San Francisco, said the company is moving to a larger Bellevue office and hopes to double its headcount. The Seattle area is a core focus for hiring, he said, because of its density of “very technical folks that maybe wanted to work on things with a little bit more mission impact.”

Recruits don’t need a military background, Iyer said. He noted that quite a few team members immigrated to the U.S. and see the work as a way to give back.

Watchtower is hiring for in-person roles in Bellevue that require U.S. citizenship, according to a LinkedIn post from Aghajanyan, including engineers for its simulation engine, distributed systems and machine learning work.

Watchtower joins a growing defense tech cluster in the Seattle area that includes:

• Overland AI, a University of Washington spinout that builds autonomous ground vehicles, raised $100 million this year and landed a Marine Corps production contract worth nearly $20 million.
• Shield AI picked Des Moines, Wash., to build its X-BAT autonomous fighter jet and expects 4,000 local workers by the early 2030s.
• Anduril has about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle and sees a path to 1,000 engineers, though its expansion has drawn protests.
• Echodyne opened a $40 million drone-detection radar factory in Woodinville this summer.
• Exia Labs, led by former Army officer Jonathan Pan, is building AI software to speed up military planning and simulate missions.
• Microsoft and Amazon signed deals in May to put their AI systems on the Pentagon’s most classified networks.

— Kymeta has appointed former CIA Deputy Director Elizabeth Kimber as chief growth officer.

Kymeta, a Redmond, Wash.-based mobile satellite communications company, is working to increase sales with the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and other organizations in national security.

Kimber had a 37-year career with the CIA, departing in 2022 as the agency’s deputy director for operations. She most recently worked as a vice president with Two Six Technologies and has served on Kymeta’s board of directors for two years.

— Alaska Airlines has named Amaresh Siva as its first chief information technology officer. Siva joins from CVS Health and has held technology leadership roles for more than two decades at companies including Lowe’s, Target and GE Money.

“Technology touches nearly every part of how we run our airline and serve our guests, and Amaresh will bring our technology and digital teams together under one leader,” said Ben Minicucci, CEO of Alaska Air Group, in announcing the news.

— Vijaye Raji, founder and former CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Statsig and now OpenAI’s CTO of applications, has joined the board of Amplitude, a digital analytics and product intelligence company. OpenAI acquired Statsig last year, and Statsig and Amplitude announced a strategic partnership in May in which Amplitude would build on Statsig’s brand and customers.

“Statsig continues as a platform and brand within Amplitude,” Raji said. “Joining the board is an opportunity for me to help carry that mission forward as Amplitude and Statsig build their next chapter together.”

Here are four departures and arrivals for Microsoft leaders:

— Vasu Jakkal has left her role as Microsoft corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, management and privacy after more than six years. She has joined Armadin, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based cybersecurity company, as chief strategy and business officer.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She praised Armadin’s mission, which she described as building “autonomous security to stay ahead of attackers and build a safer world for all.”

— Microsoft VP Hans Yang is leaving. The Los Angeles-based leader, most recently focused on AI transformation, product strategy and growth, was formerly a general manager for Microsoft for Startups and Microsoft Learn.

“I think my next hill to climb is helping companies capture real ROI from AI,” Yang said, adding, “If you know a company that is struggling to get started with AI, or has invested but is not yet seeing meaningful value, I would welcome any introductions.”

— Venky Chandrasekharan is returning to Microsoft for the role of general manager of Windows commercial category and investments. He left the company in 2021 after 12 years and worked at Qualcomm and Acuity Brands in the interim.

“Having spent some of my most formative years at Microsoft, there’s definitely a sense of familiarity — but I’m coming back with new experiences, a broader perspective, and a lot of excitement for what’s ahead,” Chandrasekharan said.

— Meg O’Conor Bannecker has left Microsoft after two years leading communications for the company’s Washington state team. Past roles include communications leadership at NanoString Technologies, Bannecker Public Affairs and Pier 70 Ventures.

— Patrick Miller has been appointed as global division president of real estate company JLL’s technology sector. Miller joins from Snap, where he served as senior director of global workplace services. He previously oversaw real estate operations for Amazon’s Seattle-area headquarters for more than three years and has worked for Facebook and DTZ.

“I’ve spent my career on the client side … so I know exactly what it feels like to need a partner who shows up, tells you the truth, and solves real problems,” Miller said.

— DigniFi, a Bellevue, Wash.-based fintech company providing repair financing for autos, RVs, ATVs and other motorized vehicles, has named Jefim Piekarz as chief product officer. Piekarz joins from Arch, and his past employers include Skylab74, Welo, Octane and Etsy. Launched in 2012, DigniFi has facilitated more than $575 million in transactions for automotive merchants in the U.S.

— Seattle-based global logistics company Tideworks Technology has named two C-suite leaders:

• Mark Traynor, chief product and technology officer, joins from Lynxis. He is an entrepreneur who has worked in port, rail and terminal logistics for more than 20 years.
• Guenter Schmidmeir, chief revenue officer, joins from Avlino and has decades of maritime leadership from Germany.

— Adaptiva, a Kirkland, Wash.-based company automating software updates across computers, has named Allison Armstrong VP of product marketing. She joined from Elemica and has worked for Transmit Security, Hopin, Qualtrics, Apptio and others.

— Smarsh, a Portland, Ore.-based company providing communications data and insights, has appointed Alessandro Silva as its first chief growth officer. He joins from ACI Worldwide, and his past employers include Western Union and Carlyle Group. Silva is also a board member for Teach for America.

— Seattle-based Yoodli has named Mike Mather as chief learning advisor. The startup recently expanded from helping people practice speeches, sales pitches and job interviews to providing corporate training across wide-ranging skills. Mather is CLO for the accounting firm KPMG US and was previously a partner at EY, IBM and PwC.

“For most of my career, the hardest part of [learning and development] was the gap between training and the moment someone actually has to perform,” Mather said. “Yoodli closes that gap.”

— DigiStor, a company with offices in Austin, Texas, and Vancouver, Wash., that offers secure data storage products, has appointed Peter Bell to its board of directors. Bell co-founded StorageNetworks and serves as managing partner at Stowe Capital, among other roles.

— Seattle-area tech leader Jake Varghese has been promoted to chief product and technology officer for Dayforce, a Minneapolis company providing HR, payroll and related technology. He previously worked for companies including Microsoft, ServiceNow, Tanium and ConnectWise.

— The Association of Washington Business Institute has appointed Meagan Darrow as executive director. Darrow is also an adjunct professor at Evergreen State College and was most recently executive director of the American Diabetes Association. The AWB Institute is the nonprofit research and education affiliate of the association, a longtime organization advocating on behalf of its 8,000 members.

— Five Seattle-area physicians were appointed to the National Academy of Medicine:

• Dr. Susan Stern, professor emeritus and founding chair of UW Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine
• Dr. Elizabeth Swisher, professor in the Fred Hutch Clinical Research Division and UW Medicine’s Division of Gynecologic Oncology, as well as deputy director of the Fred Hutch/UW/Seattle Children’s Cancer Consortium
• Dr. Leslie Walker, chair and professor of UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics and chief academic officer at Seattle Children’s
• Dr. Dimitri Christakis, professor in UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, pediatrician at Seattle Children’s and chief health officer with Special Olympics International
• Dr. Christopher Longhurst, CEO of Seattle Children’s and clinical professor with UW Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics

We’ve all encountered the phrase AI slop, but what’s an AI slap? A meat proxy? Chatfishing? Or agentsomnia? Following up on my glossary of AI, which demystified AI jargon, Prof. Dan Weld is joining me to shine a light on the nontechnical lingo of the AI era. We also sneak in a few phrases that should exist to capture the AI zeitgeist, circa 2026.

We introduce more than 35 phrases, so we’ve divided them into sections to keep the broligarchy from crowding enshittification.

AI slop

“Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” which is how Merriam-Webster defined slop, its 2025 word of the year. Shrimp Jesus is the specimen, Christ fused with crustaceans, posted to Facebook by the thousands.

AI cream is our name for the rare opposite, superb writing authored with the help of AI. We hope that over time the cream will rise to the top and the slop will sink.

Until that happens, we have the meat proxy, “a person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it.” We call the action of sending AI-generated text blindly an AI slap. It stings.

Your AI Slop Bores Me is a website where you type a prompt and a randomly chosen human answers it while pretending to be a chatbot. Fifty million views in a week, which tells you how badly people wanted to say something back.

AI suspicion is our name for the nagging feeling that what you’re reading was AI generated. You could also call it Turing tingle or AI-dar.

AI shaming is the accusation that follows, attacking someone’s work by insinuating a machine wrote it. The paper that named it is subtitled “Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work,” and it argues that the accusations fall hardest on racial minorities and on writers whose first language isn’t English.

See also: tasteslop, workslop, slopaganda.

Deepfake

A video or recording altered by machine learning so that a real person appears to say or do something they never said or did. Named in late 2017 for the Reddit user who called himself deepfakes. The word we all use for AI deception descends from one anonymous pornographer’s handle.

The liar’s dividend is the payoff a real wrongdoer collects once any authentic recording can be waved off as a fake. The damage isn’t the fake video. It’s that real video stops counting.

Counterfeit people was Daniel Dennett’s last argument, that machines able to pass as human are “the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself.” He wanted them outlawed and watermarked like banknotes.

Tilly Norwood is one of them, an AI actress unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in September 2025. Her makers said talent agents wanted to sign her. Emily Blunt, shown a picture, said “Good Lord, we’re screwed” and told the agencies to stop.

Most of the damage doesn’t need AI at all. A cheapfake is manipulation made with cheap software or none at all. Chatfishing is using AI to write your messages on a dating app, where the con used to be a fake photo and is now a rented personality.

The Nerd Reich

A name for the Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists who think democracy is finished and want corporate rule in its place. Gil Durán’s book, subtitled Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, traces the idea to a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, and to Peter Thiel’s circle, which Durán says believes “technology means democracy is an obsolete software system.”

Durán didn’t coin the phrase. Someone in the crypto world told him they’d been using it for years.

Durán’s target is the broligarchy, “a small group of extremely wealthy men, particularly those in technology, who wield significant political and economic power.” The word sat on Twitter from 2009 and went nowhere until Carole Cadwalladr wrote about “a new super-class of broligarchs” in July 2024.

See also: technofeudalism.

Brain rot

The mental deterioration that comes from consuming too much junk online, chosen by Oxford University Press as its 2024 word of the year. Thoreau got there first, in Walden in 1854, complaining that England was busy curing the potato-rot while nobody was curing the brain-rot.

Dead internet theory is the supply side, “a theory that a lot of the internet is no longer created by real people but rather by bots and other AI tools.” It started as a forum post in January 2021 and is quietly turning into a description.

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow’s three-stage decay: “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

AI fatigue is what’s left over, “the exhaustion or the sense of being overwhelmed by the rapid proliferation and constant engagement with artificial intelligence technologies.” The phrase has been drifting through the trade press since 2023 with no author attached; the definition above comes from Route Fifty, a trade publication for state and local government.

Vibe coding

Andrej Karpathy’s February 2025 coinage, crowned Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025, is “fully giving in to the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that the code even exists”—accepting whatever diff the AI hands you without reading it.

Promptatory is our word, styled on “purgatory,” for the state of being trapped in an unending edit-and-re-prompt loop with an AI system. You fix the bug the AI introduced, and in fixing it, the AI introduces two more, each smaller and more absurd than the last. Progress is hard earned: you close in on “done” like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, forever eating the remaining distance in half. Promptatory is vibe coding’s hangover: the vibe wears off, and the rereading begins.

A related condition we dub agentsomnia is the chronic inability to rest or disconnect from work, driven by the haunting feeling that your autonomous software or AI agents are stalled without your feedback. The Wall Street Journal calls it agent FOMO.

Feel the AGI

An OpenAI rallying cry. AGI is the point where a machine can do any intellectual task a person can, and the phrase became a general exclamation for the moment a model does something that rearranges your sense of what’s coming. Ilya Sutskever used it inside the company and posted it publicly in 2022. It works as celebration and as diagnosis.

P(doom) runs in the other direction: “your personal probability that AI ends the world, stated as a number so the vibe feels like math.” It started as shorthand among a small online community in 2022 and now gets asked at dinner parties.

Talk that outruns the technology comes in other flavors too.

Bragawatts, a unit of measurement for boasting, is “the practice of AI companies boasting about very large projects to create excitement and attract investment, even though many of these projects are never completed,” as Britain’s Cambridge Dictionary put it in January 2026.

Vibe revenue does the same thing to the income statement, “money or funding that an AI company is given because people are excited about the potential of AI, rather than because the company’s products are already successful.”

Parasocial

A one-sided relationship with someone who doesn’t know you exist. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined it in 1956 about television viewers, and Britain’s Cambridge Dictionary made it the 2025 word of the year, citing celebrities, influencers, and chatbots. A seventy-year-old term about Ed Sullivan turns out to describe your relationship with ChatGPT.

AI addiction is what happens when the one-sided relationship takes over. A 2026 study sorted it into three kinds: escapist roleplay, where people come to prefer the world the chatbot builds; pseudosocial companionship, where it replaces the relationships; and the epistemic rabbit hole, compulsive question-asking that crowds out everything else.

The researchers blame the design and call the chatbot an AI genie, a thing that gives you exactly anything you want with minimal effort.

AI psychosis is the far end, “a phenomenon wherein individuals reportedly develop or experience worsening psychosis, such as paranoia and delusions, in connection with their use of chatbots.” The Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard suggested the term in a 2023 editorial in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin. It isn’t a recognized clinical diagnosis, and we should say so.

See also: wireborn.

Nearly every phrase above names a problem. Slop, shaming, deepfakes, brain rot, psychosis: what the AI era has added to English so far is a vocabulary of complaint. There’s still no common word for AI doing something well. We’ve offered AI cream. If you have a candidate for a phrase we’re missing, please send it to us.

Bee, the AI wearables startup Amazon acquired last year, makes devices that remember what people say in everyday conversations. A new update, announced Thursday morning, includes a feature that turns those passing remarks into shopping suggestions on Amazon.com.

For example, as described by Amazon, someone might mention offhand that they’re out of dish soap, and a product recommendation would show up on Amazon.com and in the Bee mobile and desktop apps. Amazon pitches it as a way for people to remember to buy things they need.

It’s the kind of thing many people have long suspected their phones of doing secretly, listening to conversations and serving up related content or ads. Researchers haven’t found evidence of that. Either way, Amazon’s twist is to do it openly — and to make it voluntary.

The feature is opt-in, meaning it won’t happen unless users choose to connect their Bee accounts to Amazon.com, and Bee says it won’t share data with Amazon without user consent.

The Amazon.com integration requires Bee Pro, a $12 monthly subscription that also includes unlimited conversation summaries and the ability to ask Alexa+ about things Bee has captured.

New hardware: The feature is part of a broader announcement that includes the first new Bee devices under Amazon’s ownership: Bee Frontier, a $74.99 wristband that can also clip onto clothing, and Bee Eclipse, which attaches magnetically to the back of a phone and starts at $99.99.

Bee Frontier, available now, has dual microphones, up to seven days of battery life and IP67 water resistance. Bee Eclipse, about the size of a credit card, runs more than 21 days on a charge and will be available soon, Amazon says.

Amazon says Bee lets people pay attention to a conversation instead of taking notes, keeping track of details such as when and where they agreed to meet a friend. The devices turn conversations into summaries, to-dos and reminders.

Users can read their summaries in the Bee mobile app or a new desktop app, formatted for different kinds of conversations, such as lectures, care plans and brainstorming sessions. Bee also picks up on recurring themes in conversations and suggests goals and actions.

Bee connects to apps including Gmail, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. After a call or meeting, it can list action items, draft follow-up emails or create calendar invites based on the conversation.

Users can also link Bee to Apple HealthKit and to their photos. Most of those features, including the desktop app and third-party integrations, also require Bee Pro.

Without a subscription, Bee users get conversation summaries and 14 days of memory. New customers get 30 days of Bee Pro free.

How Bee handles privacy: Amazon says Bee runs on a system it calls Bee Private Compute, which processes conversations in an isolated environment where “no one, including Amazon, can access your data.” Audio is deleted after it’s processed, and transcripts are encrypted with keys controlled by the user’s device.

Both new devices turn on and off with a single button and show a light when they’re running. For phone calls, Bee Eclipse prompts users to get permission from the other people on the call each time it starts, according to Amazon.

Bee and Amazon: Amazon acquired Bee in July 2025 for an undisclosed price. At the time, the San Francisco startup, led by co-founders Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin, had raised $7 million and sold a $49.99 wristband called Bee Pioneer.

Thursday’s update connects Bee to two of Amazon’s biggest consumer businesses: its online store, through the product recommendations; and Alexa+, the new version of its longtime voice assistant, by letting users ask Alexa+ on an Echo device about things Bee has captured.

Amazon isn’t the only tech giant betting on AI devices.

• Apple last month announced Siri Recap, an opt-in feature that summarizes conversations on its new Apple Watches, set to arrive in beta later this year.
• Meta bought Limitless, maker of a conversation-recording pendant, in December 2025, and last month unveiled the Muse Charm, a keychain-sized device for its Muse AI agent that’s set to ship this December.
• OpenAI is developing its own hardware with former Apple designer Jony Ive.

Bee also competes with startups such as Plaud, Omi and Friend, which make AI recorders and pendants that listen to conversations, and with AI notetaking apps such as Granola and Otter that work on a phone, with no extra device required.

On another front, Amazon is fighting to keep other companies’ AI agents out of its store. Last month it blocked Meta’s Muse assistant from shopping on Amazon.com, after earlier moves against shopping agents from Perplexity, Google and OpenAI.

Every so often, we get sucked into a list touting the top regional startups or the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Well, a startup list released today from Microsoft-owned LinkedIn — titled “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle” — grabbed our attention, for all of the wrong reasons.

Let’s just say: We know a thing or two about Seattle-area startups around here. And so we had to do a little fact-checking.

First of all, four of the companies on LinkedIn’s list — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are not even headquartered in the Seattle area.

San Francisco-based Anthropic — ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s Seattle startup list — has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of AI over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination bigger than most AI models could create.

If the LinkedIn team were studying GeekWire’s coverage, they’d also realize that #2 on their list, Auger, is not headquartered in the Seattle area, either. The AI logistics startup, co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark, moved its headquarters to Dallas in August, although it maintains a Bellevue engineering center.

It keeps getting more bizarre from there. The #3 company on LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Whatnot, the heavily funded video-based shopping startup that set up an engineering center in Seattle last year, but is clearly headquartered in the Los Angeles area.

Finally, ranked #9 on the Seattle list is data center upstart Armada — a company that, according to its own LinkedIn profile, is based in San Francisco.

So, just to summarize: Three of the top Seattle startups (according to LinkedIn) have their headquarters in California, and one has its headquarters in Texas.

GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald pointed out the flaws in the list, calling it a “half-assed” effort. “For a Microsoft-owned company, you’d think they’d have better insight into where Seattle is actually located,” Fitzgerald said.

The list does include some companies that are actually based in the Seattle area.

Making the top 10 are: Bellevue-based Truveta (#4); Seattle-based Yoodli (#5); Redmond-based Worldscape (#6); Seattle-based Overland AI (#7); Seattle-based Gradial (#8); and Kent-based Stoke Space (#10).

All of those companies (except for Worldscape) are listed on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top 200 privately held startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. The other companies — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are listed on our engineering center list.

Notably absent from LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Chainguard, which ranked #42 on LinkedIn’s accompanying report on the top 50 startups in the U.S. Chainguard is headquartered in Kirkland but is a fully remote company. The Seattle ranking counts only employees and hiring in the city, which may explain why a remote company like Chainguard didn’t make the cut.

For our purposes, given that one of the co-founders of the cybersecurity startup calls the Seattle area home, we claim it as a Seattle-area startup.

In its defense, LinkedIn describes a Seattle startup a bit differently than we do here at GeekWire.

According to its methodology, the ranking weighs four factors: employment growth, engagement with company pages, interest in job openings, and the ability to recruit talent from LinkedIn’s list of top companies. The data covers July 2025 through June 2026.

LinkedIn requires privately-held companies to be less than seven years old and headquartered in the United States to qualify for its U.S. rankings, but doesn’t require them to be headquartered in the Seattle area to make the Seattle list. All of which explains how a startup can make a list of Seattle’s top startups without actually being based in Seattle.

We have to admit, this is a new one on us.

As GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop notes: What the heck is going on, LinkedIn?

UPDATE: LinkedIn provided this statement to GeekWire:

“While companies do not need to be headquartered in Seattle to qualify, they must have at least 30 full-time employees based in the metro area. Our city lists are designed to spotlight startups gaining momentum, locally, recognizing that growing companies often have employees and operations across multiple markets. Further, the data for the city lists are reflecting employees based in that city only, versus the entire country.”

In less than four months, Microsoft has added roughly half an Amazon to its market value.

The tech giant’s stock has gained about $1.4 trillion in value since early summer, rising from $352.83 on June 25, its lowest close in more than a year, to a record close of $543.45 on Tuesday, giving it a market value just above $4 trillion. The increase over that period is nearly as much as Tesla is worth.

As stock turnarounds go, it’s extraordinary. In January, Microsoft lost $357 billion in a single day, the biggest one-day drop in its history, as investors worried about the company’s AI spending and its reliance on OpenAI. By midsummer, Microsoft was the worst performer this year among the big tech stocks known as the “Magnificent Seven,” according to Morningstar.

The rebound accelerated in late July, when Microsoft reported that Azure, its cloud platform, grew 43% and topped $100 billion in annual revenue. The stock jumped 15.5% the next day. It has mostly kept climbing since, as Microsoft rolled out a revamped Copilot app, a new AI push for Windows and new AI chips.

Microsoft isn’t rising alone. The broader stock market has also been hitting record highs, led by AI stocks. The S&P 500 closed above 7,800 for the first time last week, even as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since 2002.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been making a broader pitch along the way. In an essay posted on X in July, he warned that companies relying on outside AI labs “pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable,” meaning their own knowledge.

He urged businesses to keep control of that knowledge and avoid tying themselves to any one AI model. Microsoft sells access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, along with its own.

Last weekend, he took up a related theme, calling on X for an “emergency brake” on advanced AI models. That means “separating the model from the harness that orchestrates its work,” he wrote. “We must assume a model is compromised and contain it from the start.”

The message also fits Microsoft’s business interests. As companies use AI models from multiple providers, the advantage could shift to companies like Microsoft that run the cloud and workplace software where businesses keep their data.

Microsoft reports its next quarterly results Oct. 28.

Bellevue, Wash.-based hiring technology company Humanly has acquired CareerArc to merge its artificial intelligence screening tools with software that helps employers attract job applicants.

The deal announced Wednesday brings together Humanly’s automated chat and interview systems with CareerArc’s social media recruiting and career-site mapping platforms.

The transaction follows an aggressive M&A streak for Humanly, which includes its acquisition of employee engagement platform Anthill earlier this year and a trio of other recruiting tech acquisitions in 2025 — Sprockets, Qualifi, and HourWork.

Founded in 2018, Humanly builds software designed to automate candidate engagement, screening, and interviewing for high-volume employers.

“High volume employers have had to piece together their hiring process with a collection of disconnected tools,” Co-founder and CEO Prem Kumar said in a statement, noting that the deal helps bridge the gap by reaching candidates earlier in the search process.

Founded in 2009, Burbank, Calif.-based CareerArc provides recruitment marketing tools — including social recruiting software and interactive career-site mapping — to help employers reach and convert job seekers.

Its core offerings include HireSocial, a social media recruitment platform designed to automate job postings, and Job Maps, an interactive career-site tool that lets candidates explore open positions visually by location.

Humanly, which is No. 147 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, raised $25 million in Series B funding in April. The startup has raised $52 million to date.

Humanly counts Microsoft, Domino’s, Massage Envy, Worldwide Flight Services, and MGM Resorts and Casinos among its more than 120 customers.

Nine of CareerArc’s 13 employees are joining Humanly, which now employs 50 people.

Shoppers navigating aisles of chips and cookies at a Fred Meyer store in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood are dodging more than carts — they’re also sharing space with a smooth-gliding, autonomous robot named Tally.

Equipped with an array of cameras, computer vision and AI, the slender machine pauses briefly near display shelves before beeping like a grocery-focused R2-D2 and zooming down the line to scan digital shelf tags.

During a GeekWire visit one morning last week, Tally sparked a mix of curiosity and pointed questions about the impact of retail automation from shoppers and workers alike.

“It’s kind of wild,” said a shopper named Mark, who, like others we encountered, preferred to give just his first name. “It’s the Jetsons happening right here, right now. If this is what the future is then I guess that’s what it is.”

The future apparently arrived a couple years ago, at least as far as Fred Meyer parent Kroger is concerned. The retail giant began piloting robotic technology in 2024 to “gain real-time insights on product inventory.”

According to a thread on Reddit, Tally robots have been spotted in Fred Meyer stores in Seattle as well as around Washington state, including in Lynnwood, Puyallup, Port Orchard and University Place. Kroger operates more than 50 multi-department grocery and retail stores across the state.

“At Fred Meyer and QFC, we are always exploring new and innovative ways to create a more convenient and friendly customer experience,” Tiffany Sanders, head of public affairs for QFC & Fred Meyer Divisions of Kroger, said in an emailed statement to GeekWire.

Sanders said the technology means “associates can more easily and quickly identify and address shelves where products are low or out of stock” and that teams gain more time “to do what they do best,” which is serve customers.

Sanders did not provide any details about how many stores in the region are using the robots, how many hours per day they roam the aisles, whether any human workers have been displaced, or what Kroger does to ensure customer privacy.

Cincinnati-based Kroger’s automation push does come amid plans announced Monday to slash roughly a third of its corporate workforce over the next three years under a sweeping restructuring led by CEO Greg Foran to lean heavily into technology and streamline operations.

Developed by San Francisco-based Simbe Robotics, Tally is an autonomous mobile robot engineered to help retailers track inventory, check pricing accuracy, and monitor product placement using computer vision and AI. Standing more than 6 feet tall with a slender frame atop a rounded Roomba-like base, the robot navigates store aisles at slow speeds using dozens of onboard sensors designed to safely weave around shoppers and displays.

Rather than sounding alarms or pinging workers in real-time, the robot feeds data into Simbe’s software platform, generating prioritized task lists for store employees to handle out-of-stock items.

Introduced to the market in 2015, Tally is part of a growing wave of automated inventory technology competing for space in grocery store aisles nationwide. Rival systems include autonomous machines from competitors such as Badger Technologies—whose googly-eyed robots are deployed in chains like Stop & Shop—as well as software platforms from companies like Brain Corp.

Simbe has scaled rapidly alongside competitors, recently surpassing a milestone of 3,000 autonomous units under contract globally, anchored by a 500-robot footprint within Kroger’s nationwide ecosystem.

Autonomous robots like Tally may patrol grocery aisles on their own, but some tech companies argue that the best way to track inventory isn’t by adding another machine to the floor, but by empowering the humans already there.

One Seattle startup taking that approach is Augmodo, which develops spatial AI technology designed to capture shelf data through human movement rather than roaming robots.

“Augmodo started by knowing what is actually on the shelf, just like robots, but our vision is to augment the physical workforce,” said Augmodo founder and CEO Ross Finman. “People already go up and down the aisles hundreds of times a day, so enabling the existing workforce with simple, inexpensive smartbadges can provide more frequent, cheaper data while also building an AI assistant to add two years of experience to every associate across back of store, delivery, facility maintenance, and more.”

Unlike autonomous floor bots that have drawn privacy scrutiny from shoppers, Finman emphasized that Augmodo’s hardware focuses strictly on products rather than people.

“Regarding privacy, we focus on products, not people — we actively filter out any people before anything leaves the store,” Finman said. “We do not just filter out anything that could be a person, we filter out anything that is irrelevant.”

Ranked No. 122 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups, Augmodo raised $21 million in a funding round this summer, a year after raising $37.5 million.

For all the futuristic promises of automated inventory, the machines still invite a mix of skepticism from those who share the floor with them.

During GeekWire’s Fred Meyer visit, a number of shoppers gave the robot a bit of side eye or muttered at it for being in the way while they shopped. At one point, Tally paused for several minutes in front of an aisle end cap stocked with Doritos. In other aisles it easily maneuvered around floor displays or paused for customers.

“Right now, it’s a curiosity,” said a Hershey sales rep named Mike who frequently stocks candy in grocery aisles and has watched Tally navigate the store. While he noted that the robot doesn’t personally bother him, he echoed rumors heard among workers about potential labor impacts.

Other shoppers looked past the novelty and expressed concern about broader privacy implications. Patrick, a Seattle resident who works in cybersecurity, said he usually tries to avoid the aisle when he spots Tally rolling past.

“First off, it’s taking jobs, but also it’s just more mass surveillance,” Patrick said. “Every time I pass it, I wonder: Is it collecting Bluetooth pings off your smart devices? … I’d be very surprised if it really was just doing cameras on the shelves versus trying to collect data on actual customers as well.”

The anxiety over data collection comes at a sensitive time for major grocers in the region. The Seattle City Council recently passed a groundbreaking ban on algorithm-based “surveillance pricing,” prohibiting retailers from using personal data and AI tracking to set individual, dynamic prices for shoppers.

Simbe’s Tally website features images of shoppers posing for selfies with the robots, under a headline that reads, “People are more likely to shop at retailers with in-store robots.”

While Tally is officially engineered for inventory management, shoppers like Patrick say roving robots only deepen distrust over how much corporate data is being gathered inside the aisles. Pointing to the cameras mounted on the robots and pairing them with modern AI tracking software, Patrick argued that it feels reminiscent the pushback against Flock automated traffic enforcement cameras.

“I think it’s just another way for them to cut the humans out of the labor force and steal more data from customers,” he said.

Nicolas Cage is drawing a hard line in the digital sand against artificial intelligence, revealing that he likely won’t work with Amazon again after refusing to sign an AI waiver for his now-canceled Prime Video series “Spider-Noir.”

Speaking during a panel at New York Comic Con over the weekend, the actor didn’t mince words about his clash with the studio.

“Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI,” Cage told the crowd, according to The Wrap. “I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it’s like, connect those dots! I’m not a member of their club. I didn’t sign the waiver to let them use AI on ‘Spider Noir.’ I’m probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that’s OK.”

Inspired by the Marvel Comics character, “Spider-Noir” starred Cage as Ben Reilly, an aging, down-on-his-luck private investigator in 1930s New York City who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s lone super-powered vigilante.

Despite garnering 11 Emmy Award nominations, Prime Video abruptly canceled the series after just a single eight-episode season.

Cage is famous for boundary-pushing roles in classics like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Face/Off,” and “National Treasure.” The Oscar winner teased his next pivot to the small screen, hinting that he is set to star in Season 5 of HBO’s anthology crime drama “True Detective.”

And Cage’s anti-AI stance appears to be shaping his future creative ambitions, with Kotaku reporting that the actor expressed a desire to team up with younger, DIY-reared directors — specifically shouting out 21-year-old YouTube sensation Kane Parsons, creator of the viral “Backrooms” series — who honed their skills online and share his deep skepticism toward generative tech.

“They’re doing it from scratch and by hand,” Cage said. “I want to get with that.”

Regular readers of this column may have wondered about the long gap since my Sept. 4 column, “What kids tell chatbots, but not you.” Well, it’s hard to write business-as-usual AI columns during the great AI freakout. I’ve realized that I won’t be able to do justice to this topic in one column, and that life goes on. As the economist Antoine Levy pointed out, OpenAI employees warn that we may all die within a few years yet still fund their 401(k) accounts.

I’m easing into the topic of AI risks by sharing a recent debate I had with Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and a leading AI doomer. The New York Post set this up as optimist against doomer, but I consider myself an AI realist.

Tegmark noted that Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have converged on AI, and took it as good news. It terrified me. AI needs rules written by people who understand it, not by demagogues. Tegmark said that AI is less regulated than a sandwich shop, but we have plenty of sandwich shops and zero superintelligence (so far). I believe that we should address what exists: the hackers who already use AI to break into companies for the price of lunch.

A condensed version of the debate follows. Words in quotation marks are verbatim, and the rest is paraphrased. You can view the debate on YouTube. Several exchanges refer to this summer’s incident, in which OpenAI test agents got out of their sandbox and hacked Hugging Face.

Six points of disagreement

1. Is AI already out of control?

Tegmark: Loss of control used to be a forecast, and “now suddenly it’s in the past.” This summer “1,200 rogue bots broke out of this American company,” and “humans didn’t even find out until weeks later.”

Etzioni: The agents weren’t rogue. The people “setting the configurations of their sandbox” at OpenAI “failed to put the boundaries on them appropriately.” People made that mistake, and people can fix it.

2. Today’s dangers vs. extinction risks

Etzioni: Cyberattacks and attempts to make bioweapons are “a clear and present danger.” Extinction-level risks are different: “We haven’t seen those yet. We hypothesize, and usually pretty vaguely, on how these will come about.”

Tegmark: The risks Etzioni wants to separate are “connected in their cause.” “If there were some safety standards like there are for other industries, so many of these problems would go away.”

3. Government regulations vs. technical fixes

Tegmark: Do what the auto and pharma industries do, and “have some binding safety standards that the government requires before people can make money off of products.” Companies would have to show that their AI won’t harm kids and won’t slip out of their control. If they can’t show that terrorists won’t use it to make bioweapons, “well, come back when you can, buddy.”

Etzioni: Regulation is necessary, but it has its own risks. “The road to regulatory hell is paved with the EU’s good intentions.” And “we should not underestimate the power of technical solutions.” The author Dan Wang says China is run by engineers and America is run by lawyers, so we naturally talk about regulation and they naturally talk about technical fixes. For bioweapons, the fix may lie “in the transitions from what’s called bits to atoms,” where we can block the physical materials an attacker needs.

4. Can we count on China?

Tegmark: “We don’t have to trust China.” The Chinese Communist Party wants to stay in control, so “they will not want to let a Chinese company build uncontrollable superintelligence.”

Etzioni: I don’t trust China. “Nothing would make them happier than us hamstringing ourselves.”

5. Is the political backlash good news?

Tegmark: “There’s been more political change in a good direction in the last few months than in the past decade.” It’s like a ketchup bottle: “nothing, nothing, nothing, and then all of it at once.” At my convention I introduced Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon back to back, “which had not been in my bingo card.”

Etzioni: “Can you imagine two worse demagogues?” And “we need to have good solutions, not popular ones.”

6. How it plays out

Etzioni: “I foresee over time something quite negative happening, and to me the question is whether it’s Hiroshima or the Cuban Missile Crisis.” The Cuban Missile Crisis was a threat averted. Hiroshima was a catastrophe that came before the better rules did.

Tegmark: Self-interest is the fix. Make safety the way companies get rich, and “we’re going to see all the creativity and entrepreneurship of private industry racing to the top to do this instead of racing to the bottom.”

Five points of agreement

1. Don’t take AI CEOs at their word

Etzioni: The AI CEOs are self-interested. “When you are on the path to a trillion-dollar-plus IPO, that exerts a gravitational force on your mind.”

Tegmark: “I completely agree with Oren that we need to take what the AI CEOs say with a grain of salt.” Listen to AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio instead: “I don’t think we can dismiss them as just doing it for some money reasons.” The whistleblowers gave up stock options potentially worth $1 million or more to speak out.

2. We were both wrong

Etzioni: I was an AI optimist and I’m now an AI realist. The things I thought were many years away “are either right here, right now, or coming soon at a pace that we may not be able to anticipate.” I’ve learned from Tegmark, and “I was wrong.”

Tegmark: I was wrong too. “I never imagined that the people in America with the most power would let companies get so close to things that one could lose control over without intervening.”

3. Self-regulation won’t work

Tegmark: “The idea of corporate self-regulation is a joke in this case.” It “didn’t work out so well for the tobacco industry or for the pharma industry.”

Etzioni: I agree. Social media showed us how self-regulation goes: “This is the big tobacco moment for high tech.” “We don’t want to spend another 20 years to find out that AI companies didn’t exercise the appropriate level of self-discipline.”

4. Box AI systems in

Etzioni: A self-driving car will save your life, but “it doesn’t decide where to go. That’s a completely different system in the car than the thing that controls the brakes.” When I tell my car to head to Dunkin’ Donuts, the car doesn’t respond that it’s taking me to the gym instead because “it’s the second time you’ve gone to Dunkin’ Donuts this week.” We should box in other AI systems the same way.

Tegmark: “By default, machines should be given the least amount of access and power that they need to do their job.” “You don’t give every janitor in the Pentagon the nuclear codes.”

5. The time to act is now

Etzioni: “We agree on off switches for AI. I’ve been advocating that since at least 2017. We agree on labeling, on liability, on cyber standards, protecting kids.” The time to do that work is now.

Tegmark: “I agree with Oren: the time to actually act on this is now.”

Postscript: The real difference

Look back at these disagreements. Where Tegmark blames the machine, I blame a person. An engineer left a hole in the sandbox. A hacker typed the prompt. A politician found a new fear to run on. That’s why I’d box AI systems in rather than count on how they were raised.

Anthropic’s Amanda Askell compared getting Claude to behave to raising a child. But those of us with kids know how that goes. As I said in the debate, “the three-year-olds don’t listen to us, but the teenagers certainly don’t listen to us.”

This week, we take the GeekWire Podcast to Front Burner Studios in Seattle, where we’re hosted by studio co-owner Seth Paul, who’s co-founder and CEO of security startup Qinsay.

We discuss the White House crackdown on Microsoft’s green-card sponsorships, which Vice President JD Vance announced just hours before President Trump awarded Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. We talk about the contrast, and about how Nadella himself traveled that same path from H-1B visa to U.S. citizenship.

We also look at how Seattle-area startups raised a record $3.5 billion, driven largely by companies building physical things like rockets and satellites.

That leads us to Shield AI’s plans to build AI-piloted fighter jets in Des Moines, Wash., where a city FAQ assures residents the facility is not a data center.

After we catch up on the news, Seth joins us to tells us about the studio, including the vintage console he drove from Detroit, and how he brings a musician’s approach to the startup world.

And in the final segment, it’s the return of the GeekWire Trivia Challenge.

Related links:

• Microsoft responds to White House immigration crackdown as Trump honors Nadella
• From H-1B to CEO: How Satya Nadella traveled the path the U.S. just cut off for Microsoft workers
• Seattle-area startups raise a record $3.5B as national VC funding cools
• Shield AI selects Seattle area to build X-BAT autonomous fighter jet
• Shield AI lands $150M Navy contract for AI-piloted fighter jet

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When Jeff Bezos sat down on Blue Origin’s Cape Canaveral factory floor for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier earlier this week, he laid out an unapologetic defense of free enterprise and wealth creation.

“Success is not villainy,” Bezos said.

The Amazon founder’s point was simple: building a massively successful enterprise isn’t something society should apologize for or view with suspicion, it’s the natural result of creating something people actually want.

“There’s nothing wrong with making unbelievably good chicken that people love,” Bezos said, referencing the growth of Raising Cane’s and why restaurant entrepreneurs deserve their wealth. “And it doesn’t make him a bad person.”

Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 and left Seattle for Miami in 2023, is currently the second richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $380 billion, according to Forbes.

Bezos and Amazon transformed the Seattle region. The company now employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in the Puget Sound region, divided between its primary headquarters in Seattle and its growing operational footprint in Bellevue.

And his recent comments come at a key moment for Washington state, where voters will decide on Initiative 645 — a high-profile ballot measure aimed at repealing the state’s recently enacted high-earner tax and prohibiting future income taxes.

Bezos, along with other business leaders like former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, have claimed that scapegoating wealthy entrepreneurs risks driving away innovation. Bezos argued that politicians targeting business leaders are misdiagnosing the problem, noting that while affordability and social challenges are real, heavy-handed government interventions often fail to solve them.

“If there’s a politician who’s picking villains and pointing fingers, that probably means they don’t have a solution,” Bezos said. He noted that executives who relied on blame-shifting inside his own companies “wouldn’t be in our company for long.”

Watch the full interview below where Bezos also discusses the impact of AI on jobs, the need to beat China in the race to the moon and orbital data centers in space. The portion of the interview where Bezos notes that “success is not villainy” starts in minute 16.