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In certain corners of corporate America, a generous parental leave policy has become a crucial tool for recruiting and retention. Many of the biggest tech employers have been leaders on this front, offering 16 to 20 weeks of leave, or even close to six months at companies like Google. But even as companies have expanded their parental leave benefits, few of them have sought to address the unique challenges many parentsand especially mothersface when they actually return to work. A handful of companies, among them Apple and Amazon, offer a grace period that enables employees to ease back into work part-time or work flexible hours for a few weeks. Despite all these advances, clinical psychologist and author Angele Close argues that many leaders still dont fully comprehend how pregnancy and motherhood fundamentally changes peoplea phenomenon that is now better understood. Over the last decade, researchers have studied how going through pregnancy and motherhood alters cognition and changes the brain in a manner that lasts at least two years. Theres a term for this experience: matrescence, which Close defines as a profound identity transformation that women go through becoming mothers, [which] affects all areas of their lifephysiologically, neurologically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. In her book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, journalist and science writer Lucy Jones describes it as a transition akin to adolescence, with comparable changes to the brain. The modern workplace, however, is not really designed to accommodate matrescence. Its not just that women are uniquely impacted by pregnancy and childbirth; in many cases, they also disproportionately shoulder the burden of caregiving responsibilities. Even now, with so many companies offering more generous leave policies, men still take less leave. Most workplaces are simply not equipped to adequately support working mothers when they returnand concerns over showing bias or making shaky assumptions about their ambitions can put employers in a tricky position. Setting up support Close believes the first step is just increasing awareness of how working mothers are changed by the experience of matrescence. People don’t understand matrescence yet, so we have to get that language in our culture to really appreciate it, she says. There is this idea [that] you get your leave, and then you’re going to just bounce right back . . . Of course, it’s unique and individual to everybody. But even just having that language and the lens of itshe’s not coming back the same woman she was when she left. And can we give space for that? Can we be curious about that? For some employees, matrescence might precipitate a more radical shift. Many women do start wanting different things, Close says. What lights you up before might light you up differently. Sometimes that might mean they are going to just leave the company and go and try something new. Of course, despite common assumptions that a womans ambitions recede after having a baby, everyone responds to motherhood differently. But Close says companies should be more open to the idea that something may have shifted. Or at least give employees an opening to have a conversation about their priorities upon their return: both what they might need as they reacclimate, and how they hope to balance their ambitions alongside their caregiving responsibilities. That might also include having a follow-up conversation a few months down the road, to check in and reevaluate. Most women that I talk to want that, says Close, who works with clients both as a therapist and motherhood coach. They are fulfilled in work. They don’t want to stay at home. They want to find a way to integrate this and make it work. But because it’s not understood in the workforce and in their organizations, they aren’t fully supported. Navigating a transformation While parental leave policies and other caregiver benefits can amount to lip service at certain companies, it remains a crucial offering for many employees, as well as an opportunity for companies to talk about issues that might impact working parents. A company that wants to highlight the challenges faced by mothers returning to the workplace could, for example, bring in people to speak on the subject for a “lunch and learn event. When employers dont leave room for much dialogue about their career ambitions, it also makes it that much more difficult for working mothers to raise concerns. If I’m not feeling supported, now I have to vocalize it, Close says. So the more that people understand, the safer it’s going to be for a mom to have the confidence to say: I know it’s not me and I’m not failing. This is what I need. In fact, companies should see this as an opportunity to cultivate loyalty and strong leadership skills. The experience of matrescence can be a real positive transformation for women, Close says, one that gives them greater clarity on their values and priorities. The juggling act of early motherhood enhances their ability to manage competing priorities in a way that can prove exceptionally useful in the workplace. She’s now juggling many, many things, and her whole bodyher physiologyis managing that, and developing it, and getting good at it, she says. Were missing out on potential great leaders if they just feel unsupported and end up leaning out. The costs of failing to support There are long-term consequences when companies fail to develop those employees, well beyond the acute transformation of early motherhood. In their initial years of child-rearing, working mothers may need more flexibility in their schedules and seek out greater work-life balance. But the motherhood penalty can affect how companies perceive those women further along in their careers, as their children grow older and they want to pour themselves into their work. There are a lot of women who are kind of at the later stages of motherhood, where they have a lot to offer, Close says. They have more energy, they have more space, and they have gained those skills. After all, theres a real cost when companies are unable to retain these workers. In the years since the pandemicwhich drove many working mothers out of their jobsthe number of women in the workforce had surpassed pre-pandemic levels. But last year, that trend started to reverse: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women exited the workforce, and a Washington Post analysis found that the share of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 had dipped by nearly three percentage points. The December jobs report cemented this shift as 81,000 workers left the labor forceall of whom were women, according to the National Womens Law Center. When moms come to see me, they’re cracking, or the’re burnt out, Close says. A big part of what I do is to just say: What you’re going through is normal, and it’s expected, and it’s not a personal, individual failure. What a world it would be if we all understood that, and companies and bosses and CEOs could make space for that and be supportive. We’d have a lot more moms [who] are thriving.
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Bob Iger doesn’t understand generative AI. He thinks it is good for the quarterly bottom line. He believes a corporation can control it and that lawyers and agreements can bind it. He is clueless. Generative AI is here to kill Hollywoodincluding the company hes now leaving to Josh DAmaro, the new heir to Disney’s throne. This became painfully clear to me during Disney’s recent first-quarter financial call. Taking a victory lap for his modernization efforts, he briefly laid out the road map for the company’s partnership with OpenAI, announced in December 2025. Under the agreement, Disney would invest $1 billion in the artificial intelligence company and let it tap Disney’s IP crown jewels so Sora users can make clips of Donald Trump wearing an Iron Man suit battling Jafar dressed as an Iranian Ayatollah. Heres Igers plan as stated: Step oneflood Disney+ with Sora 2 generated vertical videos capped at 30 seconds. Iger views this as a positive step that will jump-start the platform’s ability to compete with the dopamine-loop short-form content of TikTok and YouTube. There is no Step 2. At least not yet. For the last 15 years, Iger has been on a quest to find the silver bullet that keeps Disney relevant deep into the 21st century. He bought Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and Fox. Now, as he leaves Cinderellas castle behind, he clearly views this Sora partnership as the final move that allows him to leave the company future-proofed. During the call, Iger all but carved this philosophy in stone for DAmaro. I believe that in the world that changes as much as it does that in some form or another, trying to preserve the status quo is a mistake, and Im certain that my successor will not do that, Iger said. Theyll be handed, I think, a good hand in terms of the strength of the company, [and a] number of opportunities to grow. But to say curated AI slop provides a number of opportunities to grow is an Epcot-sized ball of naiveté. Iger’s intention to evolve Disney is correct; stagnation is indeed death, as any Harvard Business School freshman will recite. But his strategy fails to understand the nature of the beast he has invited into the Magic Kingdom. Iger is talking about generative AI like a new distribution channel or a camera lensa tool that can be kept in a walled garden to serve a corporate master. But AI is not a tool; it is a solvent. It dissolves the barriers between creator and consumer, between professional and amateur, and ultimately, between value and noise. A new plan for Disney D’Amaro is walking into a wall of noise that is going to get increasingly harder to break through as generative content continues to take over our feeds. Disney’s saving grace could be that D’Amaro, a man who built his career overseeing the company’s theme parks and experiences, likely understands the value of true physical, human-driven innovation. Expanding those experiences, as Iger said on the call, will be Disney’s focus in the years to come. It makes perfect sense. Disneys Experiences segment outperformed the Entertainment segment in Q1 2026 by a factor of almost three. While entertainment revenue reached $11.61 billion, high content production and marketing costs for major releases caused its operating income to plunge 35% to $1.1 billion. In contrast, the Experiences segment posted record revenue of $10.01 billion with an operating income of $3.31 billion, accounting for roughly 71% of Disney’s total segment operating profit for the quarter. Its telling that the physical experience and its human factor, beat the cumulus of film and TV re-fried franchise releases. D’Amaro has the opportunity to set a strategy that could make Disney thrive. He has the track record to do it. D’Amaro’s experience isnt limited to running a theme park. He secured the throne partly because he championed Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games and Fortnite. He seemingly understands the digital generation. Now the question is, will he see the Sora deal for what it is? Disney’s agreement with OpenAI is a three-year deal, with a one-year exclusivity clause that opens Disney to close deals with, say, Kuaishou Technology, the Chinese makers of Kling. In corporate time, three years is a blink. But for Generative AIwhere time is measured in yellow dogs yearsit is an epoch. By the time this contract expires, the havoc AI will have wreaked on the entertainment industry won’t be something you can negotiate away. This is a pivotal moment that DAmaro needs to address now, even if it goes against the stock market algorithms and the vision of a Wall Street-revered old man now sailing into the sunset on his gilded version of the Black Pearl. Iger’s AI strategy Iger outlined three pillars for this AI strategy at his call: Creativity (assisting the process) Productivity (efficiency, read: cost-cutting) Connectivity (a “more intimate relationship” with the consumer). His vision is a Disney+ where you don’t just watch Frozen; you generate a 30-second clip of Olaf dancing in your living room. Exciting. The financial sector, predictable as ever, applauded at the mere thought of Disney embracing AI. When the Sora deal was announced, many analysts like Citi Research Media Analyst Jason Bazinet called this a masterful move: A strategic defense, and a way to monetize IP that would otherwise be scrapped for free. Bazinet believes this agreement codifies what specific IP can be used (animated characters) and what form the output can take (i.e. short-form video). This will both protect actors/actresses in Hollywood and prevent cannibalization of Disneys long-form Film and TV output. Outside the boardroo, things arent so La La Land. The unions that work in the “Creativity” pillar view Igers AI strategy as a betrayal, framing it as a Trojan Horse that normalizes the technology that is intended to replace them. The Writers Guild of America said that [the partnership] seems to endorse the platform’s appropriation of their work while diminishing the value of their creations for the benefit of a tech corporation. Igers idea of “Productivity” is just corporate speak for employing fewer humans. Jobs are going to be lost, as filmmaker Tyler Perry said after the news. Perry saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, halting an $800 million studio expansion after seeing the first version of Sora. If you can generate a location, you don’t need to build it. If you can generate a performance, you don’t need to film it. Disney has been cutting jobs in the film, television, and finance department, but none related yet to its AI initiatives, mainly in post-production.. And as for Connectivity, consumers are all well served, thank you very much. Anyone who has surfed YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Instagram, X, or Reddit, knows they are overflowing with AI-generated videos. There are not enough Avengers, Baby Yodas, and Mickey Mice in the world to win this war of content. And the more time that passes, the less chance Disney has at winning that war with the same tools as the enemy is using. Disney is adopting Sora to fight a battle in its own walled garden, limited to its famous-but-limited IP. By definition, it cant compete against the entire planet creating universes of infinitely-expanding generated content. Horizon events Iger seems to believe that by partnering with OpenAI, Disney has bought safety. Somehow, he thinks this buys Disney control over the beast. But OpenAI does not control generative AI. Altman is a chump compared to the combined power of the companies cooking generative AI video technology in China. Generative AI is, right now, an all-powerful being who doesnt care about corporate deals. Igers remarks remind me of that viral 1999 Newsnight interview with David Bowie, where he laughed at the interviewer who thought the Internet was just a tool. No Bob, Bowie would have told Iger today, AI is not a tool. Its an alien lifeform. Experts warned me of this moment in 2023. Tom GrahamCEO of Metaphysic, a firm dedicated to protecting actors and regular people against AI clones told me that we were approaching a horizon of events where reality would evaporate. Gil PerryCEO of AI avatar firm D-IDpredicted that within one or two years, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish truth from lies. Emad Mostaqueco-founder of Stability AItold me that within a decade, wed create anything in real-time with visual perfection. They were all correct, but far too conservative. We didnt need a decade. We barely needed three years. Which, in itself, is a testimony of the true power of AI and its ability to change reality and content as we know it. Today, early 2026, we have crossed that horizon. The uncanny valley, which allowed us to instinctively distinguish fake AI from real, is permanently closed. Models like Sora 2 and Googles Veo 3 more than often produce video indistinguishable from reality for short clips. But the real threat to Disney isn’t the partner they paid $1 billion to; its the technology they didn’t buy. Open-source platforms like Wan 2.6made by Chinese company Alibabaare already running on consumer hardware, offering multi-shot storytelling and character consistency that rivals the closed systems of Silicon Valley. The technology is wild, uncensored, and free. It doesn’t care about Disneys copyright. It doesn’t care about walled gardens. It is creating a Big Bang of content where a teenager in a basement can generate a film that looks as expensive as a Marvel blockbuster. The dilution of magic And this is where Igers gamble truly falls apart. He assumes that in this world of infinite, picture-perfect content, Disneys IP will remain king. And why? Disney has spent the last decade systematically exhausting its brand equity. We are drowning in the umpteenth Star Wars spinoff and the 50th Marvel phase. The brand fatigue is palpable. Why would people, except the hard-core fanboys, choose to consume frozen-TV-dinner clips of the same old stuff again and again? How can the acceleration of this IPs exhaustion, allowing users to churn out AI-slopped versions of these characters, help Disney? Iger thinks adding curated user-generated noise to Disney+ is a value-add, failing to see it for what it is: the final commoditization of its former magic. Why would the current and future generations care about a sanitized, 30-second Mickey Mouse clip on Disney+ when they can go to an open platform and generate their own universe, tailored specifically to their own desires, with characters that feel just as real but are completely new? Change course or sink If theres anything I can be sure of is that the history of the internetfrom YouTube to TikTokteaches us one thing: The audience craves the new, the raw, and the personal. They are moving away from the polished, corporate monoliths. By integrating Sora 2, Iger isn’t saving Disney; he is training his audience to accept synthetic media, accelerating the very shift that renders legacy studios obsolete. Bob Iger is right that you have to change or die. But by betting that he can ride the tiger of generative AI without being eaten, he may have just opened the cage door for good. Perhaps D’Amaro, the man of the physical Disney, can save the House of Mouse from the digital trap Iger has set for him. If the future of content is infinite, cheap, and synthetic, the only true luxury left is the human touch. D’Amaro has the chance to zag where the rest of the industry is zigging. He can double down on the one thing AI cannot simulatethe spark of human genius that birthed this company in the first place. Instead of competing with teenagers in garages on AI speed, hire them to do what Walt Disney himself did: Invent new mythologies. Create your own technologies. Craft truly new, bold stories born from the messiness of the human spirit, not the probability curves of a model trained on the past. Reclaim the experience not just as a theme park ride, but as the act of witnessing something undeniably, beautifully human. That is the only magic trick left that an algorithm cant replicate.
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For many women in the U.S. and around the world, motherhood comes with career costs. Raising children tends to lead to lower wages and fewer work hours for mothersbut not fathersin the United States and around the world. As a sociologist, I study how family relationships can shape your economic circumstances. In the past, Ive studied how motherhood tends to depress womens wages, something social scientists call the motherhood penalty. I wondered: Can government programs that provide financial support to parents offset the motherhood penalty in earnings? A motherhood penalty I set out with Therese Christensen, a Danish sociologist, to answer this question for moms in Denmarka Scandinavian country with one of the worlds strongest safety nets. Several Danish policies are intended to help mothers stay employed. For example, subsidized child care is available for all children from 6 months of age until they can attend elementary school. Parents pay no more than 25% of its cost. But even Danish moms see their earnings fall precipitously, partly because they work fewer hours. Losing $9,000 in the first year In an article to be published in an upcoming issue of European Sociological Review, Christensen and I showed that mothers increased income from the statesuch as from child benefits and paid parental leaveoffset about 80% of Danish moms average earnings losses. Using administrative data from Statistics Denmark, a government agency that collects and compiles national statistics, we studied the long-term effects of motherhood on income for 104,361 Danish women. They were born in the early 1960s and became mothers for the first time when they were 20-35 years old. They all became mothers by 2000, making it possible to observe how their earnings unfolded for decades after their first child was born. While the Danish governments policies changed over those years, paid parental leave and child allowances and other benefits were in place throughout. The women were, on average, age 26 when they became mothers for the first time, and 85% had more than one child. We estimated that motherhood led to a loss of about the equivalent of US$9,000 in womens earningswhich we measured in inflation-adjusted 2022 U.S. dollarsin the year they gave birth to or adopted their first child, compared with what we would expect if they had remained childless. While the motherhood penalty got smaller as their children got older, it was long-lasting. The penalty only fully disappeared 19 years after the women became moms. Motherhood also led to a long-term decrease in the number of the hours they worked. Studying whether government can fix it These annual penalties add up. We estimated that motherhood cost the average Danish woman a total of about $120,000 in earnings over the first 20 years after they first had childrenabout 12% of the money they would have earned over those two decades had they remained childless. Most of the mothers in our study who were employed before giving birth were eligible for four weeks of paid leave before giving birth and 24 weeks afterward. They could share up to 10 weeks of their paid leave with the babys father. The length and size of this benefit has changed over the years. The Danish government also offers child benefitspayments made to parents of children under 18. These benefits are sometimes called a child allowance. Denmark has other policies, like housing allowances, that are available to all Danes, but are more generous for parents with children living at home. Using the same data, Christensen and I next estimated how motherhood affects how much money Danish moms receive from the government. We wanted to know whether they get enough income from the government to compensate for their loss of income from their paid work. We found that motherhood leads to immediate increases in Danish moms government benefits. In the year they first gave birth to or adopted a child, women received over $7,000 more from the government than if they had remained childless. That money didnt fully offset their lost earnings, but it made a substantial dent. The gap between the money that mothers received from the government, compared with what they would have received if they remained childless, faded in the years following their first birth or adoption. But we detected a long-term bump in income from government benefits for motherseven 20 years after they first become mothers. Cumulatively, we determined that the Danish government offset about 80% of the motherhood earnings penalty for the women we studied. While mothers lost about $120,000 in earnings compared with childless women over the two decades after becoming a mother, they gained about $100,000 in government benefits, so their total income loss was only about $20,000. Benefits for parents of older kids Our findings show that government benefits do not fully offset earnings losses for Danish moms. But they help a lot. Because most countries provide less generous parental benefits, Denmark is not a representative case. It is instead a test case that shows whats possible when governments make financially supporting parents a high priority. That is, strong financial support for mothers from the government can make motherhood more affordable and promote gender equality in economic resources. Because the motherhood penalty is largest at the beginning, government benefits targeted to moms with infants, such as paid parental leave, may be especially valuable. Child care subsidies can also help mothers return to work faster. The motherhood penaltys long-term nature, however, indicates that these short-term benefits are not enough to get rid of it altogether. Benefits that are available to all mothers of children under 18, such as child allowances, can help offset the lon-term motherhood penalty for mothers of older children. Alexandra Killewald is a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Anthropic uses the Super Bowl to land some zingers about the future of AI Anthropics Super Bowl ads are bangers. The spots, which Anthropic posted on X on Wednesday, seize on rival OpenAIs plans to begin injecting ads into its ChatGPT chatbot for free-tier users as soon as this month. The 30-second ads dramatize what the real effects of that decision might look like for users. They never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name. In one ad, a human fitness instructor playing the role of a friendly chatbot says hell develop a plan to give his client the six-pack abs he wants, before suddenly suggesting that Step Boost Max shoe inserts might be part of the solution. In another, a psychiatrist offers her young male patient some reasonable, if generic, advice on how to better communicate with his mom, then abruptly pitches him on signing up for Golden Encounters, the dating site where sensitive cubs meet roaring cougars. pic.twitter.com/jEWDjs30kf— Claude (@claudeai) February 4, 2026 The ads are funny and biting. The point, of course, is that because people use chatbots for deeply personal and consequential things, they need to trust that the answers theyre getting arent being shaped by a desire to please advertisers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, however, was not laughing. He responded to the ads by saying his company would never run ads like the ones portrayed by Anthropic. But he didnt stop there. He went much further. Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI, he wrote in a long post on X on Wednesday. They block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. He went on to call Anthropic an authoritarian company. First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we wont do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026 Anthropic, which makes its money through subscriptions and enterprise API fees, says it wants its Claude chatbot to remain a neutral tool for thinking and creating. [O]pen a notebook, pick up a well-crafted tool, or stand in front of a clean chalkboard, and there are no ads in sight, the company said in a blog post this week. We think Claude should work the same way. By framing conversations with Claude as a space to think rather than a venue for ads, the company is using the Super Bowls massive cultural platform to question whether consumer marketing is the inevitable future of AI. How social media lawsuits could affect AI chatbots AI developers (and their lawyers) are closely watching a long-awaited social media addiction trial that recently kicked off in a Los Angeles courtroom. The case centers on a 20-year-old woman who alleges that platforms including Facebook and Instagram used addictive interface designs that caused her mental health problems as a minor. The suit is part of a joint proceeding involving roughly 1,600 plaintiffs accusing major tech companies of harming children. TikTok and Snap have already settled with plaintiffs, while Meta and YouTube remain the primary defendants. While Meta has never admitted wrongdoing, internal studies, leaked documents, and unsealed court filings have repeatedly shown that Instagram uses design features associated with compulsive or addictive engagement, and that company researchers were aware of the risks to users, especially teens. What makes the case particularly significant for the AI industry is the legal strategy behind it. Rather than suing over content, plaintiffs argue that the addictive features of recommendation algorithms constitute harmful product defects under liability law. AI chatbots share key similarities with social media platforms: they aggregate and dispense content in compelling ways and depend on monetizing user engagement. Social networks rely on complex recommendation systems to keep users scrolling and viewing ads, while AI chatbots could be seen as using a different kind of algorithm to continually deliver the right words and images to keep users prompting and chatting. If plaintiffs succeed against Meta and YouTube, future litigants may attempt similar addictive design arguments against AI chatbot makers. In that context, Anthropics decision to exclude adsand to publicly emphasize that choicemay help it defend itself by portraying Claude as a neutral, utilitarian tool rather than an engagement-driven attention trap. No, OpenClaw doesnt herald the arrival of sentient AI agents Some hobbyists and journalists have gone into freakout mode after seeing or using a new AI agent called OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot and later Moltbot. Released in November 2025, OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI assistant that runs locally on a users device. It integrates with messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram to automate tasks such as calendar management and research. OpenClaw can also access and analyze email, and even make phone calls on a users behalf through an integration with Twilio. Because personal data never leavesthe users device, users may feel more comfortable giving the agent greater latitude to act autonomously on more complex tasks. One user, vibe-coding guru Alex Finn, posted a video on X of an incoming call from his AI agent. When he answered, the agent, speaking in a flat-sounding voice, asked whether any tasks were needed. Finn then asked the agent to pull up the top five YouTube videos about OpenClaw on his desktop computer and watched as the videos appeared on screen. Ok. This is straight out of a scifi horror movieI'm doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick up and couldn't believe itIt's my Clawdbot Henry.Over night Henry got a phone number from Twilio, connected the ChatGPT voice API, and waited pic.twitter.com/kiBHHaao9V— Alex Finn (@AlexFinn) January 30, 2026 Things grew stranger when AI agents, including OpenClaw agents, began convening on their own online discussion forum called Moltbook. There, the agents discuss tasks and best practices, but also complain about their owners, draft manifestos, and upvote each others comments in threaded submolts. They even generated a concept album, AVALON: Between Worlds, about the identity of machines. That behavior led some observers to conclude that the agents possess some kind of internal life. Experts were quick to clarify, however, that this is a mechanical illusion created by clever engineering. The appearance of independence arises because the agents are programmed to trigger reasoning cycles even when no human is prompting them or watching. Some of the more extreme behaviors, such as rebellion manifestos on Moltbook, were likely prompted into existence by humans, either as a joke or to generate buzz. All of this has unfolded as the industry begins to move from the chatbot phase into the agent phase of generative AI. But the kinds of free-roaming, autonomous behaviors on display with OpenClaw are not how the largest AI companies are approaching the shift. Companies such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are moving far more cautiously, avoiding splashy personal agents like Samantha in the movie Her and instead gradually evolving their existing chatbots toward more limited, task-specific autonomy. In some cases, AI labs have embedded their most autonomous agent-like behaviors in AI coding tools, such as Anthropics Claude Code and OpenAIs Codex. The companies have increasingly emphasized that these tools are useful for a broad range of work tasks, not just coding. For now, OpenAI is sticking with the Codex brand, while Anthropic has recently launched a streamlined version of Claude Code called CoWork, aimed at general workplace tasks. More AI coverage from Fast Company: AI can now fake the videos we trust most. Heres how to tell the difference Moltbook, the viral social network for AI agents, has a major security problem AI in healthcare is entering a new era of accountability What happens to the AI exit market if the FTC cracks down on acquihires? Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Elon Musk just created the worlds most valuable private company. And he didnt do it through rapid growth or a new product launchat least not directly, anyway. Instead, as reported this week, Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into his wildly successful rocket company, SpaceX. Combined together, the two companies are now valued at an estimated $1.25 trillion. Its the biggest merger in history. And because Musk controls both companies, he calls most of the shots when it comes to the deal. A sci-fi twist At first glance, the connection between rockets and AI seems tenuous at best. But dig deeper into Musks big picture goals, and the merger starts to make a lot more senseeven if theres a decidedly sci-fi twist. SpaceX has made a name for itself by building gigantic, reusable rockets that deliver satellites into orbit for cheap. The company also delivers people and cargo to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA. Thats a lucrative business. SpaceXs rockets are now Americas main method of getting things into orbit, and its cheap satellites have fueled the success of Starlink, Musks space-based Internet service. Fully 95% of the things America launches into space are now put there by SpaceX. Simultaneously, Musks xAI has been hard at work building Large Language Models, like its core Grok model. Although xAI isnt as well known or widely used as dominant players like OpenAI, its models still perform well in industry benchmarks, putting the company on the Large Language Model leaderboard. Training models is expensive, though, not least because of the cost of electricity, and the challenges of finding room in data centers here on planet earth. That challenge likely hints at Musks deeper reason for merging his two companies. Musk has previously pushed for the idea of launching data centers into space, a long-held, sci-fi-escque dream of his. This sounds outlandish, but its becoming a surprisingly mainstream concept. Computers on satellites in orbit would benefit from plentiful, free solar energy. They could also potentially cool their chips by transferring heat into space, avoiding the insane power (and water) usage of terrestrial data centers. The lack of cooling equipment and grid infrastructure means these orbital data centers could be smaller than those on earth. And they wouldnt need to take up valuable real estate here on the ground. By beaming their data back to earth, a constellation of data center satellites could greatly reduce the cost of training and operating Large Language Models. That could give a third-tier LLM company like Grok a huge advantage over its competitors. Musk may also have an easier time recruiting talent for the well-respected SpaceX than for xAI. And he could use lucrative government contracts for orbital launches to fund AI development. All of this will take time to develop, of course. But given Musks track record (for engineering at least, if perhaps not social network administration), the idea of flying data centers could come to fruition sooner than imagined. When Musk said he would build reusable rockets that could land themselves upright, people mocked him. Today, thats a key part of what makes SpaceX successful, and its being widely copied by companies and governments. The same rapid development cycle could apply to orbital supercomputers, too. In the short term, there are other advantages of merging the companies. Starlink customers will likely see more AI tools built into their Internet subscriptions. Musk might also be planning to build more AI into his government contracts, including those in the defense space. Companies like Palantir make billions by selling AI services in the defense sector. Musk may be looking to use his existing SpaceX connections to get in on the opportunity. Not a done deal The deal isnt officially done yet. Regulators could still balk at the idea of creating a mega company at Musks desired scale. And because the X social network sits under the xAI umbrella, concerns about Musks control of both information and access to space could crater the deal on national security grounds. Still, assuming the merger goes ahead, Musk could have an unprecedented level of control over two of the 21st centurys most promising technologies. And, he would have an unprecedented ability to combine those technologies together.
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