 Funny numbers I started my career in the dotcom bubble, and the dotcom bubble had a lot of funny numbers. There were metrics that people didn’t really understand or didn’t mean much, like ‘hits’, bandwidth or the number of hosts on the internet. There were also carefully created new ‘adjusted’ metrics that avoided all the stuff you didn’t want to talk about. My personal favourite was the new entrant mobile operator that started talking to investors about EBITDA before customer acquisition: the main costs for the business were capex and customer acquisition, so ‘EBITDA before CAC’ was effectively ‘revenue’. There were a bunch of jokes at the time about how the next metric would be ‘earnings before costs’.We’re seeing a lot of the same stuff this time around. We don’t really know what metrics would be best, we don’t have the metrics that we would like anyway, and the metrics we do have are… funny.You’re getting the Free edition.News Late last month, Axios and other media outlets reported that OpenAI’s annualised monthly revenue had passed $70bn. This week, it emerged that this was a mistake and the actual number was ‘close to $50bn’. The confusion seems to be that in general OpenAI has been reporting revenue net of payments to companies that resell its models (Microsoft, AWS) where Anthropic has been reporting gross, and both OpenAI and investors were also trying to gross-up the numbers to make them comparable, without making it clear which numbers they were using when leaking to the media. See this week’s column. Agent incentivesAgents remain super hot, even if Muse and especially Instinct look an awful lot like the fever-brain excitement around Clubhouse in the pandemic. But if they are going to work, lots of other things need to be plugged together, most obviously how they actually talk to other websites and each other. Meta has launched a new standard (‘Personal Agent Protocol’) with the bunch of logos on the slide. Standards, of course, are one of the key strategic weapons when tech ecosystems try to go to war, and it’s always notable who isn’t on the list, and important to remember that getting the partnership person to sign a partnership deal is not the same as getting the company to use the partnership. Meanwhile, Amazon and a bunch of other retailers are blocking agents entirely. This is partly short-term concern around fraud chargebacks and liability, and it’s not irrational for them to press pause until they worked out how to manage this more generally. There’s a 20-year-old and 150-year-old question of customer ownership versus distribution. If you’re big and already have traffic, you want to own the experience and talk to the customer directly, and if you’re small, you’re willing to take distribution instead. The additional wrinkle, of course, is that Amazon did $75 billion of ad revenue in the last 12 months, and the agent doesn’t see the ads. Open outside China Since Meta abandoned Llama, most of the credible open source models have come from China, which skews the debate about open a fair bit, but now American startup Reflection has launched a pretty credible open model and Mistral, which everyone had forgotten about, has come back from France with a credible model of its own. The FT reports that Nvidia is looking at buying Reflection, as part of the Bank of Jensen strategy to accelerate AI adoption while fragmenting the customer base. IPO overhang I think there were two fundamental changes in AI this year: agentic coding achieved explosive product-market fit, and AI infrastructure capex outgrew the cash flows of the hyperscalers and had to go to the financial markets. There’s been an enormous amount of capital raising of every kind this year, and markets are starting to get uncomfortable: in the last quarter a whole bunch of IPOs were pulled, partly also due to the imminent Anthropic IPO crowding everything out. The week in AIAnthropic quietly updated its terms and conditions to say you’re not allowed to be “cruel” to its models. This is more of the anthropomorphism that seems like sensible speculation at a minimum to some AI researchers and insane to a lot of other people, as I wrote in my column last week. Meanwhile, it creates circularity problems – if you tell a model it has X characteristic, it will try to look like that. OpenAI followed Anthropic in building a text watermarking system to comply with EU requirements. Unlike Anthropic, this is only applied in the EU, and OpenAI is also a lot clearer that they don’t think this is really a good idea: the tech is not reliable enough and too easy to work-around. Google launched Playground, an experimental space to use AI to generate your own games. AI is clearly going to transform both the economics of creating games (especially the hugely-expensive content creation of AAA games) and the mechanics of how games work (the NPCs can actually be intelligent now), as well as letting people spin-up improvised games like this. Compare mobile and app stores, and 3D. Google launched a native Mac app that can connect to all of your software and take notes on what you’re working on, all running locally on-device. I don’t think it’s clear yet whether things like this are a feature or product, but meanwhile it is both predictable and hilarious that this looks nothing like a native Mac app, the download link doesn’t work in Safari, and the app is called “Google AI Edge Foresight”, which is exactly how Microsoft names products. SpaceX Mobile Following its earlier comments, SpaceX bought a portfolio of low-frequency cellular spectrum in the USA that would be needed to build an actual terrestrial network. US mobile operator stocks fell sharply. As I’ve I pointed out before, while SpaceX technology is extremely cool, satellite is either impractical or useless for the vast majority of real cellular use, and so if SpaceX actually wants to build a US mobile service, it will have to build what everyone else has built, spend more or less what anybody else would spend, charge more or less the same prices, and provide probably a mostly inferior service (the best sites are already taken). The most cynical interpretations remain that this is really leverage to get a good MVNO deal. Apple as shadow ads regulator Last month Apple briefly blocked one of the big ad network domains on iOS, and now there’s a wave of speculation that it’s working on a blacklist of a huge number of third-party targeting services, all of which allow advertisers to do terrible evil anti-democratic things to violate your human rights, like show you products you might be interested in and make money for independent publishers. Apple here is an interesting example of what’s sometimes called a shadow regulator: it’s doing things that are really public policy rather than engineering or product decisions, but doing them without any due process, accountability or debate on devices used by well over half of Americans. AboutWhat matters in tech? What’s going on, what might it mean, and what will happen next?I’ve spent 25 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. I’m now an independent analyst, and I speak and consult on strategy and technology for companies around the world. Ideas A reminder to people who want to argue about whether LLMs could ever be conscious: our understanding of what consciousness really is remains so limited that we don’t even know if infants are conscious. An interesting piece by cryptographer Matthew Green on the history of law enforcement access to messages and encryption and how the coming wave of AI bug fixing might mean that law enforcement will no longer be able to hack your iPhone to get your messages and their visibility on criminal and terrorist comms will go dark. Satya Nadella wrote on his personal blog about liability Early next year, Bonham’s will be selling a selection of items from Stanley Kubrick’s estate. In the preview, they show a prop axe from The Shining – the axe that Jack Nicholson used on Scatman Crothers – and also the Grady twins’ dresses. DataGallup has an update on global sentiment towards AI – as ever, it is inversely proportionate to national income. PC shipments are down 20% year on year as the AI semiconductor crunch drives up pricing. LINKUpgrade to PremiumYou’re getting the Free edition. Subscribers to the Premium edition got this two days ago on Sunday evening, together with an exclusive column, complete access to the archive of over 600 issues, and more.SUBSCRIBE OR UPGRADETHIS WAS SENT TO metropulseinc@gmail.com ON 13 October, 2026, BECAUSE YOU SUBSCRIBED AT BEN-EVANS.COM. You can UNSUBSCRIBE, OR READ THE PRIVACY POLICY. OUR MAILING ADDRESS IS Benedict Evans, 2 Golden Square, London, W1, United Kingdom. COPYRIGHT © 2013-2026 Benedict Evans, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. |
Cybersecurity news 10/11/2026
https://this.weekinsecurity.com/this-week-in-security-october-11-2026-edition