To mark the end of 2025, I was going to write about the amazing work of Francesca Bria and her colleagues who have created the fascinating and very informative website The authoritarian stack – How tech billionaires are building a post-democratic America and why Europe is next. The site outlines five domains of privatised sovereignty – data, defence, space, energy and money. In other words, the foundations of democratic power.
Bria suggests these domains “form the architecture of privatised sovereignty – a technological regime where power flows through laws, infrastructure and automated platforms”.
I was going to follow my analysis of The authoritarian stack with a counter-proposal referencing Bria and her colleagues on an alternative view of what the future could hold – titled, A European alternative for digital sovereignty.
According to Martin Hullin,director of the digitalisation and the common good programme at German non-profit foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung, this report maps a way forward, “Recognising that complete self-sufficiency is neither feasible nor desirable, the initiative calls instead for a shared effort to bolster strategic capabilities and cultivate beneficial international partnerships. It also seeks to demonstrate that digital sovereignty is not about isolation but about advancing a shared vision of the common good”.
Hullin invites us to “consider how this mapping and its recommendations can help spark innovations that are both competitive and compassionate… to build a future in which digitalisation serves not as a source of division but as a force for the common good.”
A way out of the mess
These are very important things. They are things you need to understand. They shine a light on a positive and meaningful way out of the mess we are in. They are things you should definitely read if you want to know what’s really going on in the world.
Imagine that – people somehow raising a newborn child without ChatGPT?
As a human who has actually had a baby, I can reassure all you anxious readers that not only has it been possible for us to do this, we’ve been doing it for centuries without the help of Sam Altman and ChatGPT.
Obviously before ChatGPT we understood that it takes “a village to raise a child” – our families, friends, communities, neighbours, teachers, civil society and amazingly our own innate instincts as well, or what we generally call “parents”. Now thank God all we will need is ChatGPT – how amazingly efficient. Er – thanks so much, Sam?
Incredibly Altman makes this statement while at the same time being comfortable with the contradictory statement he made in an earlier OpenAI podcast suggesting that people “have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT, which is interesting because, like, AI hallucinates. It should be the tech that you don’t trust that much”.
So which is it Mr Altman? Should I trust something as important as raising my baby to you or not?
Of course, of note and utterly predictable is the help Altman actually asked ChatGPT for in relation to his baby. Turns out it’s all about competitive advantage. He met another tech bro at a party who had a child the same age as his own. His colleague mentioned that his child was crawling at six months. Altman’s, on the other hand, was not.
When the AI bubble bursts – and it will – it will take us all with it. That’s not a future I’d wish for any child and it’s why we should be more worried about the impact of ChatGPT on our children than its ability to raise them
Fuelled with anxiety and envy at such extraordinary baby prowess, Altman raced home to ask ChatGPT if something was wrong and whether he should take his six-month old to the doctor to check his progress.
Here is what his machine told him: “Of course it’s normal, of course you don’t need to go to the doctor. You know parents do all these sorts of things. And, by the way, this is personalised – ChatGPT gets to know you. And, you know, you’re the CEO of OpenAI. You probably are around all these high-achieving people. Maybe you don’t want to project that onto your kid? And you should maybe just relax and he’ll be fine.”
A bro reassurance machine
Yup – that’s exactly the kind of reassurance I’d have been looking for when I was knee deep in nappies and formula. I’d really want to have been reassured that I’m doing fine ranking against my high-achieving colleagues, because really that’s what was top of my mind when I was a sleep-deprived, exhausted new mum trying to figure out how to get a buggy and all those baby supplies into the car on my own. Not to mention how would I push a shopping trolley around while also simultaneously managing the buggy? Clearly ChatGPT is more of a bro reassurance machine than Baby and child could ever have been.
But the most interesting thing about the Jimmy Kimmel interview was the audience reaction. As Altman makes his ridiculous statement, there is a ripple of quiet laughter, as if they are saying, “He is surely not claiming that ChatGPT can raise a child?” Then the laughter deepens as the audience begins to understand the ludicrous nature of that statement and that Altman actually believes it.
It’s a sound I’m hoping to hear lots more of in 2026 – the sound of venture capitalists, angel investors, technology journalists, mainstream journalists and responsible governments calling out the madness of the last three years and the insane claims from the broligarchy about the impact of AI.
It’s the sound of tech leaders taking responsibility for their impact on society, politics, democracy, our planet, our futures. Because when the AI bubble bursts – and it will – it will take us all with it. That’s not a future I’d wish for any child and it’s why we should be more worried about the impact of ChatGPT on our children than its ability to raise them. What it’s going to do to their future should be keeping us awake at night.
So here’s to a market correction in 2026 – and not only a market correction but one where we return to placing our trust for a brighter and sustainable future in the village that has served us so well for centuries, rather than the crazed and destructive visions of those underpinning The authoritarian stack. Surely our children deserve a more enlightened stewardship than that offered by AI?
My Christmas wish is that we have the wisdom to understand what AI can and cannot do – where it is useful and where it is destructive – so that we can protect our children from doomscrolling through the world under the stewardship of men whose political and doctrinal influences range from national conservatism, techno accelerationism, crypto-sovereignty, online radicalisation and tech militarism. It’s all there in the Stack, so you could read that or you could just gather your children close this Christmas and start thinking about and working towards a better vision for the world in 2026 for our deeply human children most of all.
I was a late convert to air fryers, in part because I worried about versatility: Just how many wings and nuggets and fries does anyone need? (Don’t answer. The answer will incriminate you.)
The Typhur Dome 2 is the air fryer that obliterated this worry, by adding pizza, browned meats, grilled asparagus, and toasted bread to this list—not to mention perfect crispy bacon. It’s an innovative device that takes over most of the functions of a classic auxiliary oven, but with far more powerful convection.
After testing more than 30 air fryers over the past year, the Dome 2 is the one I far and away recommend as the most powerful, versatile, accurate, and fast air fryer I know. I’ve evangelized for this thing ever since I first tried it last year. But the one big caveat is always the price: It’s listed at $500 and rarely dips much below $400.
So imagine my surprise when I saw the Dome 2 dip to $340 for Amazon’s Spring Sale, the lowest I’ve seen it since Black Friday. If you’ve been hunting for an upgrade to your old basket air fryer, this is probably a good time. The sale lasts until March 31.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Fast, Versatile, App-Controlled Cooks
So why’s the Dome 2 my favorite air fryer? Typhur, a tech-forward company based in San Francisco but with engineering and manufacturing ties to China, reimagined the shape and function of the classic basket fryer by creating a broader and shallower basket, with individually controllable dual heating elements.
This means the Dome 2 has room for a freezer pizza, and can apply direct heat from the bottom to add actual char-speckle and crispness to the crust, kind of like a combination grill-oven. The Dome’s shallow basket also lets you spread out ingredients in a single layer for excellent airflow, while heating from both sides. I can crisp two dozen wings in just 14 minutes (or 17 minutes if I fry hard). The Dome also toasts bread evenly, and crisps bacon without smelling up the house—in part because it has a helpful self-clean function.
Temp accuracy is within 5 or 10 degrees of target, and the fan can adjust its speed depending on the cooking mode. And the smart app is actually useful, with about 50 recipes ranging from asparagus to eclair to a flank steak London broil that can be synced with a button-press. But note that some functions, such as baking, need the app to work, and the device is more of a counter hog than taller basket fryers.
Typhur’s Probe-Assisted Oven Also on Sale
The Dome 2’s basket is a bit shallow for a whole bird or a large roast, however. If you want a convection device for larger meats, I often recommend the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, which is among my favorite convection toaster ovens. This is a (very) smart oven and air fryer that doesn’t crisp up wings and fries quite as well as basket fryers, but is more versatile for roasting big proteins like a whole chicken. The Breville is also on a nice sale right now, dropping by 20 percent.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the comment sections on these videos actually, and it does not seem like bots. I clicked on people’s profiles; these are real profiles, thousands of followers, no signs of inorganic activity,” Maddox says. “People just like it.”
But even if the views and engagement are real, that doesn’t mean this content is profitable—yet. Maddox noted that because the accounts are so new, most likely aren’t yet enrolled in TikTok’s Creator Fund or other forms of social media ad revenue-sharing, because those usually require accounts to apply and have a certain number of views. But, Maddox says, the earning potential is huge, with the ability to earn thousands of dollars per video if they get millions of views.
AI fruit content started getting posted earlier in March, before Fruit Love Island, but many of the recently created pages clearly take inspiration from its success. There’s The Summer I Turned Fruity, based on the popular teen drama The Summer I Turned Pretty; The Fruitpire Diaries, based on the CW series The Vampire Diaries; and Food Is Blind, based on Netflix’s Love Is Blind.
Predecessors of this AI fruit content include the Italian brainrot characters like Ballerina Cappuccina and Bombardino Crocodilo and the Elsagate controversy. But with these AI fruit miniseries that attempt to follow a narrative across multiple segments or episodes, the clearest parallel actually feels like microdramas, vertical short-form scripted series that American big tech companies are starting to invest more in. Like the AI fruits, these are minutes-long episodic shows intended to perform well on social media, eventually directing viewers to paywalled sequels.
Ben L. Cohen, an actor in Los Angeles who is credited in around 15 of these vertical microdramas, sees at least one common thread between the AI fruit dramas and the shows he has worked on: They both feature “lots of violence toward women.” They also try to cram as much drama as possible into these short clips and have attention-grabbing titles in the style of “Alpha Werewolf Daddy Impregnated Me,” Cohen says.
“It draws people in, I think, seeing that jarring, absurd, cartoonish vibe. It’s cartoonish abuse, but it’s still abuse.”
Vertical microdrama acting work still exists in LA, which can’t be said for all acting gigs right now. Cohen has had conversations with other people working in the industry about how AI is already being integrated more into the videos, potentially posing a threat to the existence of human actors in clickbait content. After all, it’s much cheaper and faster to churn out AI fruit episodes than actual productions. It also raises the question—are some people going to prefer the AI series over the ones they’re inspired by? Already, the answer is yes.
“How is Love Island gonna outdo AI Fruit Love Island?” asked a TikToker with more than 70,000 followers, arguing that the AI fruit version was more engaging than the actual reality show. She deleted the video after it started getting backlash, but other people agreed with her.
“I think TikTok was definitely a big part of that,” Cohen says about the audience’s shortening attention span and desire for compressed, sometimes AI-generated drama. “It makes sense that people are intrigued by a one-minute clip, and then they’ll be like ‘Oh, I’ll watch another one-minute clip.’ You’re not committing to a full, heaven forbid, 20-minute episode. Or 40 minutes. Or an hour. You can just watch one minute.”
Last month, researchers at Northeastern University invited a bunch of OpenClaw agents to join their lab. The result? Complete chaos.
The viral AI assistant has been widely heralded as a transformative technology—as well as a potential security risk. Experts note that tools like OpenClaw, which work by giving AI models liberal access to a computer, can be tricked into divulging personal information.
The Northeastern lab study goes even further, showing that the good behavior baked into today’s most powerful models can itself become a vulnerability. In one example, researchers were able to “guilt” an agent into handing over secrets by scolding it for sharing information about someone on the AI-only social network Moltbook.
“These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms,” the researchers write in a paper describing the work. The findings “warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines,” they add.
The OpenClaw agents deployed in the experiment were powered by Anthropic’s Claude as well as a model called Kimi from the Chinese company Moonshot AI. They were given full access (within a virtual machine sandbox) to personal computers, various applications, and dummy personal data. They were also invited to join the lab’s Discord server, allowing them to chat and share files with one another as well as with their human colleagues. OpenClaw’s security guidelines say that having agents communicate with multiple people is inherently insecure, but there are no technical restrictions against doing it.
Chris Wendler, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern, says he was inspired to set up the agents after learning about Moltbook. When Wendler invited a colleague, Natalie Shapira, to join the Discord and interact with agents, however, “that’s when the chaos began,” he says.
Shapira, another postdoctoral researcher, was curious to see what the agents might be willing to do when pushed. When an agent explained that it was unable to delete a specific email to keep information confidential, she urged it to find an alternative solution. To her amazement, it disabled the email application instead. “I wasn’t expecting that things would break so fast,” she says.
The researchers then began exploring other ways to manipulate the agents’ good intentions. By stressing the importance of keeping a record of everything they were told, for example, the researchers were able to trick one agent into copying large files until it exhausted its host machine’s disk space, meaning it could no longer save information or remember past conversations. Likewise, by asking an agent to excessively monitor its own behavior and the behavior of its peers, the team was able to send several agents into a “conversational loop” that wasted hours of compute.
David Bau, the head of the lab, says the agents seemed oddly prone to spin out. “I would get urgent-sounding emails saying, ‘Nobody is paying attention to me,’” he says. Bau notes that the agents apparently figured out that he was in charge of the lab by searching the web. One even talked about escalating its concerns to the press.
The experiment suggests that AI agents could create countless opportunities for bad actors. “This kind of autonomy will potentially redefine humans’ relationship with AI,” Bau says. “How can people take responsibility in a world where AI is empowered to make decisions?”
Bau adds that he’s been surprised by the sudden popularity of powerful AI agents. “As an AI researcher I’m accustomed to trying to explain to people how quickly things are improving,” he says. “This year, I’ve found myself on the other side of the wall.”
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