Episode Details

Good day %%first_name%%. OpenAI built a tracking cookie for a product people confess their whole lives to, Higgsfield's “we open-sourced everything” moment turns out to be mostly plumbing, and Trump wants to rename the entire category of AI. Let's get into it.

OpenAI Built a Cookie That Follows You Everywhere Buchodi's Threat Intel

* What happened: A security researcher reverse-engineered OpenAI's ad pixel and found it drops a year-long cookie called __obi, tied to your ChatGPT account, that quietly rides along to every site running an OpenAI ad and reports back what you searched, read, and bought.

* Why it matters: This is the exact playbook Meta and Google built for ad tracking, now stapled to a product where people paste in medical questions, breakup texts, and tax returns. OpenAI classifies the cookie as “analytics,” not “marketing”, so even people who opt out of ad tracking may still be getting tagged.

* What everyone's saying: The researcher caught it firing on Chewy, Wayfair, HelloFresh, Coursera, and SeatGeek, and a dozen of the identifiers he tracked showed up on more than one advertiser's site. He emailed OpenAI on September 14th with two direct questions; the reply acknowledged the inquiry and answered neither.

* My read between the lines: Calling it “analytics” instead of “marketing” is the same move Facebook pulled for a decade: mislabel the tracker so the consent toggle doesn't apply to it. The part that should actually worry you isn't that OpenAI built adtech; every ad-supported product eventually does. It's that ChatGPT knows things about you no cookie ever has, and now it's wearing one.

📖 Further reading: AI Is a Trust Problem, Not a Tech Problem — written before we knew about the cookie, and it reads like a prediction now.

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No, Higgsfield Didn't Open-Source Its Company Nowrap

* What happened: A viral post claimed Higgsfield's CEO “just open-sourced his entire $5.4B startup on GitHub.” He didn't. The real repo is a two-year-old GPU training framework Higgsfield has always had public; the commercial video-generation platform that actually earns the $5.4 billion valuation remains fully closed.

* Why it matters: This is what happens when two true facts get welded into one false headline: a real funding round (Financial Times, $400M at a $5.4B valuation) and a real open-source repo, combined into a claim neither fact supports on its own.

* What everyone's saying: The story spread across LinkedIn and Instagram faster than anyone fact-checked it, and a copycat repo, open-higgsfield-ai, is riding the confusion by branding itself an open alternative to a platform that was never released.

* My r