Episode Details

Good day %%first_name%%. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are building their own AI safety regulator -- no government required. Grok Bot just got the keys to your bank account. And a Carnegie Mellon professor explains, in exhausting detail, what happens to a class once AI can do all the homework. Let's get into it.

Big AI Is Writing Its Own Safety Rules TheStreet

* What happened: Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are building a self-regulatory body called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA), targeting a late-2026 or early-2027 launch. The three labs originally wanted a public-private partnership with federal oversight, but that stalled after a draft White House executive order was put on hold and the administration told them to reach industry consensus first.

* Why it matters: If SAFA becomes the industry's real rulebook, the companies being tested help write the test: third-party model checks, incident reporting, and what counts as “responsible AI” all get defined by the labs building the thing being judged, before any regulator weighs in.

* What everyone's saying: Backers pitch it as FINRA-for-AI, complete with a bipartisan CEO shortlist (a former Biden science adviser and a current White House AI adviser). Meta, xAI, and Nvidia pushed back publicly at Dreamforce, arguing SAFA is a deal among three labs, not a consensus across the field -- and that the biggest labs auditing themselves against a bar their smaller rivals never helped set is the whole problem, not the solution.

* My read between the lines: SAFA can set standards, but without government registration it almost certainly can't punish anyone for missing them -- which makes it less a regulator than an expensive permission slip the industry writes for itself, then grades with a ruler it also drew. Today's other story about a professor giving up on take-home grading because it can't be trusted anymore is, unintentionally, the perfect footnote.

📖 Further reading: Washington Found the Off Switch for Anthropic -- worth a re-read now that the industry wants to write its own switch instead of waiting for Washington to flip it.

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The Ex-Twitter CEO Betting Ads Die With Agents 20VC

* What happened: Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal told 20VC that online advertising stops working once AI agents, not humans, do most of the web browsing -- there's no eyeball left to sell to. His startup Parallel, already valued at $2 billion after a Sequoia-led raise, is building what he calls “AdSense for agents”: a system that pays content owners per agent visit instead of per human click.

* Why it matters: Nearly every website that survives on ad revenue today is betting that human traffic keeps showing up. If agents really do browse the web “1,000 times more than humans,” as Agrawal claims, the economic floor under the free internet shifts from eyeballs to API calls, and it shifts fa