May ’26

So, ap­par­ently we are at the cusp of the en­tire world’s white col­lar work­force (and, by ex­ten­sion, much of the US work­force) un­der­go­ing a rev­o­lu­tion in pro­duc­tiv­ity. AI is the tech­nol­ogy that is go­ing to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way we work, the way we in­ter­act with the world, the way we learn, the way we so­cial­ize, and all of this. This sounds great. Really, it does. Everything get­ting faster and eas­ier would be an ex­tra­or­di­nary boon to all of our lives.

Can we have a day off then?

If AI is go­ing to 10x our pro­duc­tiv­ity across the board, that means that I should be able to pro­duce the same amount of out­put by mid­day on Monday that, in the be­fore times, would have taken all week.

So can I just take Friday off? From here on out, I’ll work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then take Friday off. We can even de­clare Friday to be some­thing like an “AI work­ers’ day;” on Thursday I promise I’ll work my ass off writ­ing great prompts and then the agents can churn on them all day on Friday. In that case, you’d hardly even lose Friday, right?

And like, this would ap­ply across the board, of course. So you, the board of di­rec­tors, and the C-suite, you guys could take Friday off to go to play an en­tire 18 holes at the golf course. It’ll be beau­ti­ful, can you imag­ine? You don’t have to be in the of­fice, be­cause I’m not go­ing to be in the of­fice. You don’t have to be at the of­fice, be­cause the AI agents are there. And nei­ther do I!

Just one ex­tra day. Seems rea­son­able and quite a small change re­ally, in light of the to­tal world rev­o­lu­tion across every swathe of hu­man pro­duc­tiv­ity.

(Yo, Elon: I’m try­ing to in­crease the fer­til­ity rate. Childcare for 3 small chil­dren is six thou­sand dol­lars a month here in California. Do I have to go into the of­fice all five days this week? Why not four?)

May 27, 2026

[[read-time]] minute read

We’ve heard con­sis­tently from our com­mu­nity that they value trans­parency when it comes to gen­er­a­tive AI con­tent. That’s why since 2024, we’ve been la­bel­ing con­tent when cre­ators dis­close they’ve used AI tools.

We’ve learned in that time about what peo­ple find use­ful when it comes to AI dis­clo­sures, and to­day we’re mak­ing two up­dates that we think will make this process much sim­pler and more in­tu­itive for cre­ators and view­ers on YouTube.

More vis­i­ble, sim­pli­fied la­bels

We’re mov­ing the dis­clo­sure la­bel for pho­to­re­al­is­tic and mean­ing­fully AI al­tered or gen­er­ated con­tent to a more promi­nent po­si­tion.

For Long-form Videos: The la­bel will now ap­pear di­rectly be­low the video player, above the de­scrip­tion.

For Shorts: The la­bel will ap­pear as an over­lay on the video it­self.

By mov­ing these la­bels on to the main stage, view­ers get the con­text they need at a glance. This is now the sin­gle la­bel for­mat for all pho­to­re­al­is­tic and mean­ing­fully AI al­tered or gen­er­ated con­tent on YouTube.

For con­tent that is un­re­al­is­tic, an­i­mated, or slightly al­tered, view­ers can find this dis­clo­sure in the ex­panded de­scrip­tion.

AI us­age dis­clo­sure at video up­load time.

Introducing au­to­matic AI de­tec­tion

While we still re­quire cre­ators to man­u­ally dis­close when they use re­al­is­tic AI, we want to make the process more seam­less and re­li­able. Starting in May 2026, we’re rolling out new in­ter­nal sig­nals to help iden­tify AI-generated con­tent.

If a cre­ator does­n’t spec­ify whether or not they used AI, but our sys­tems de­tect sig­nif­i­cant pho­to­re­al­is­tic AI use, we will now au­to­mat­i­cally ap­ply a la­bel.

As this tech­nol­ogy con­tin­ues to im­prove, cre­ators re­main in con­trol. If a cre­ator thinks their con­tent was in­cor­rectly iden­ti­fied as AI-generated, they can up­date the dis­clo­sure sta­tus in YouTube Studio. However, dis­clo­sures will re­main per­ma­nent in a hand­ful of cases, in­clud­ing:

Content cre­ated us­ing YouTube’s own AI tools, like Veo or Dream Screen.

Content con­tain­ing C2PA meta­data in­di­cat­ing they were fully gen­er­a­tive AI.

Our com­mit­ment to re­spon­si­bil­ity

These changes are de­signed to bal­ance trans­parency with cre­ator con­trol. It’s im­por­tant to note that a dis­clo­sure la­bel alone does not change how a video is rec­om­mended or whether it’s el­i­gi­ble to earn money. In a world where AI is chang­ing what’s pos­si­ble, our goal is sim­ple: make it as easy as pos­si­ble for cre­ators and view­ers to have the right in­for­ma­tion.

Is that YouTube video clip you’re watch­ing real or was it made with AI?

YouTube wants to make it eas­ier for view­ers to know when con­tent on its plat­form is AI-generated. In 2024, it started la­bel­ing con­tent when cre­ators dis­closed they have used AI tools. Now YouTube is mak­ing AI-generated con­tent la­bels more promi­nent for view­ers — and it’s go­ing to start au­to­mat­i­cally ap­ply­ing the la­bels if it de­tects that a video in­cludes “significant pho­to­re­al­is­tic AI use.”

“We’ve heard con­sis­tently from our com­mu­nity that they value trans­parency when it comes to gen­er­a­tive AI con­tent,” YouTube said in a blog post Wednesday an­nounc­ing the up­dates. “These changes are de­signed to bal­ance trans­parency with cre­ator con­trol.”

Under YouTube’s guide­lines, cre­ators will still be re­quired to man­u­ally dis­close when they use re­al­is­tic AI. But start­ing this week, it also will roll out a new in­ter­nal sys­tem to help iden­tify AI-generated con­tent. “If a cre­ator does­n’t spec­ify whether or not they used AI, but our sys­tems de­tect sig­nif­i­cant pho­to­re­al­is­tic AI use, we will now au­to­mat­i­cally ap­ply a la­bel,” YouTube said.

YouTube cre­ators who be­lieve their con­tent was in­cor­rectly flagged as AI-generated can mod­ify the dis­clo­sure sta­tus us­ing the YouTube Studio tool. However, ac­cord­ing to YouTube, the AI la­bels will “remain per­ma­nent” in some cases, in­clud­ing for con­tent cre­ated us­ing YouTube’s own AI tools (such as Veo or Dream Screen) and for con­tent that con­tains C2PA meta­data (based on stan­dards from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) that in­di­cates it was fully AI-generated.

In ad­di­tion, YouTube is mov­ing the dis­clo­sure la­bel for pho­to­re­al­is­tic and mean­ing­fully AI-altered or AI-generated con­tent to a more promi­nent po­si­tion. Until now, YouTube la­beled AI con­tent in a video’s ex­panded de­scrip­tion. Going for­ward, for long-form videos, the AI la­bel will now ap­pear di­rectly be­low the video player and above the de­scrip­tion. For YouTube Shorts, the la­bel will ap­pear as an over­lay on the video it­self.

YouTube re­leased im­ages show­ing where the new la­bels will ap­pear:

“The goal here is con­text at a glance. If it looks real but was made with AI, view­ers will know im­me­di­ately,” Rene Ritchie, YouTube head of ed­i­to­r­ial and cre­ator li­ai­son, says in a video about the changes. He added that the AI la­bels alone “do not af­fect how our videos are rec­om­mended or whether they can earn money. This is purely about giv­ing view­ers the right in­for­ma­tion at the right time.”

Meanwhile, for con­tent that YouTube de­ter­mines is “unrealistic, an­i­mated or slightly al­tered” (but not fully AI-generated), dis­clo­sures will con­tinue to ap­pear in the ex­panded de­scrip­tion sec­tion.

The up­dates come af­ter YouTube ear­lier this month ex­panded its like­ness-de­tec­tion pro­gram to all cre­ators (18 and older). That’s de­signed to help users “detect and man­age how AI is used to de­pict you on YouTube.” For cre­ators who en­roll in the pro­gram, YouTube’s sys­tems will iden­tify videos that may be al­tered or syn­thetic uses of their fa­cial like­ness; they can then re­quest re­moval of “unauthorized con­tent that uses your like­ness di­rectly in YouTube Studio.”

27th May 2026

Anthropic are strongly ru­mored to be about to have their first prof­itable quar­ter. Stories are cir­cu­lat­ing of com­pa­nies sur­prised at how ex­pen­sive their LLM bills are be­com­ing from us­age by their staff. I think this is be­cause OpenAI and Anthropic have both found prod­uct-mar­ket fit.

Enterprise cus­tomers are now pay­ing API prices

I think they’ve found prod­uct-mar­ket fit

And they’re ramp­ing up

The AI-failure sto­ries around this are pretty thin

We also know the labs are spend­ing a lot

API rev­enue is be­com­ing less im­por­tant

April is a new in­flec­tion point

Enterprise cus­tomers are now pay­ing API prices

I cur­rently sub­scribe to the $100/month Max plan from Anthropic and the $100/month Pro plan from OpenAI. If you are a heavy user of cod­ing agents these plans are a fan­tas­tic deal. I just ran the ccusage tool on my lap­top to get an es­ti­mate of how much I would have spent if I were to pay for API to­kens in the past 30 days and got:

$1,199.79 for Anthropic Claude Code

$980.37 for OpenAI Codex

That’s $2,180.16 worth of to­kens for $200—not bad at all! I’m a mod­er­ately heavy user of these tools, but I’m cer­tainly not run­ning agents every hour of the day and night.

I had as­sumed that com­pa­nies mak­ing ex­ten­sive use of agents were get­ting sim­i­lar dis­counts. It turns out I could not have been more wrong about that.

I haven’t been able to track down the ex­act date, but at some point in the last six months Anthropic switched their Enterprise plan (originally “Claude seats in­clude enough us­age for a typ­i­cal work­day” back in August 2025) to $20/seat/month plus API pric­ing for us­age. This story about the change from The Information is dated Apr 14, 2026, but cites an Anthropic spokesper­son claim­ing that the pric­ing change oc­curred in November 2025. Existing cus­tomers are find­ing out about the change as they re­new their con­tracts.

OpenAI made a sim­i­lar pric­ing change in April. The Codex rate card (Internet Archive copy) cur­rently says:

Note: On April 2, 2026, we up­dated Codex pric­ing to align with API to­ken us­age, in­stead of per-mes­sage pric­ing. This change was ap­plic­a­ble to new and ex­ist­ing Plus, Pro, ChatGPT Business and new ChatGPT Enterprise plans. On April 23, 2026, we made this up­date for all ex­ist­ing ChatGPT Enterprise plans as well, in­clu­sive of Edu, Health, Gov, and ChatGPT for Teachers.

Note: On April 2, 2026, we up­dated Codex pric­ing to align with API to­ken us­age, in­stead of per-mes­sage pric­ing. This change was ap­plic­a­ble to new and ex­ist­ing Plus, Pro, ChatGPT Business and new ChatGPT Enterprise plans.

On April 23, 2026, we made this up­date for all ex­ist­ing ChatGPT Enterprise plans as well, in­clu­sive of Edu, Health, Gov, and ChatGPT for Teachers.

It’s a lit­tle harder to de­code as they quote prices in “credits”, but as far as I can tell those credit costs are an ex­act match for the API to­ken costs listed for those mod­els.

All of which is to say that as of April 2026 the “Enterprise” cost for both OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code/Cowork is the same as the listed API price.

GPT-5.5 (released April 23rd) is 2x the API price of GPT-5.4. Opus 4.7 (April 16th) is around 1.4x the price of Opus 4.6 when you take their new to­k­enizer into ac­count.

So April saw both lead­ing model com­pa­nies re­lease new fron­tier mod­els with a higher API price, and both com­pa­nies now have mea­sures to lock their en­ter­prise cus­tomers (who tend to sign year-long deals) at those API prices, not the pre­vi­ous ex­treme dis­counts.

I think they’ve found prod­uct-mar­ket fit

Why these sud­den ag­gres­sive moves on pric­ing? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are plan­ning to IPO, but I sus­pect there’s a more im­por­tant fac­tor here: I think they’ve fi­nally found prod­uct-mar­ket fit, with the cod­ing/​gen­eral-pur­pose agent prod­ucts em­bod­ied by Claude Code/Cowork and Codex.

Tools like ChatGPT are wildly pop­u­lar, but that wild pop­u­lar­ity has been dif­fi­cult to turn into rev­enue. In February OpenAI boasted more than 900 mil­lion weekly ac­tive users for ChatGPT, but only 50 mil­lion—5.6% of that—were pay­ing con­sumer sub­scribers.

Charging $10-$20/month per user is an OK busi­ness, but you’d need 1 – 2 bil­lion sub­scribers stick­ing around for four years to cover $1 tril­lion in in­fra­struc­ture.

Companies spend­ing $200+/month/user will get you there a whole lot faster—and as noted above, as a power-user I’m at ~$1,000/month in API costs per ven­dor al­ready.

Coding agents re­ally did change every­thing. These are tools which burn vastly more to­kens, but are also quickly be­com­ing daily dri­vers for the work car­ried out by ex­tremely well-com­pen­sated pro­fes­sion­als. Right now that’s still mostly soft­ware en­gi­neers, but a cod­ing agent is a tool that can au­to­mate any­thing you can do by typ­ing com­mands into a com­puter… so they are clearly ap­plic­a­ble to a much wider set of skilled knowl­edge work­ers.

As I’ve dis­cussed on this site at length, the mod­els re­leased in November 2025 el­e­vated agents to be­ing gen­uinely use­ful. We’ve had six months to get used to that idea now—it’s no won­der com­pa­nies are be­gin­ning to spend real money on this tech­nol­ogy.

You could ar­gue that ChatGPT achieved prod­uct-mar­ket fit when it be­came the fastest-grow­ing con­sumer app in his­tory back in February 2023… but it cer­tainly was­n’t mak­ing any ac­tual money back then. Coding agents plus en­ter­prise pric­ing marks the point when these com­pa­nies start mak­ing very real rev­enue. Maybe even enough to start cov­er­ing their costs!

And they’re ramp­ing up

As fur­ther ev­i­dence that en­ter­prise agents rep­re­sent prod­uct-mar­ket fit for these com­pa­nies, con­sider their open job list­ings.

OpenAI have 703 open jobs right now, of which I’d cat­e­go­rize 229 (32.6%) as re­lat­ing to en­ter­prise sales and sup­port—ac­count ex­ec­u­tives, “Go To Market”, “Forward Deployed Engineers” and the like.

Anthropic have 390 open jobs, 105 (26.9%) of which look en­ter­prisey to me.

It’s pleas­ingly ironic that these AI labs have picked a busi­ness model with such a heavy de­mand on hu­man la­bor—en­ter­prise sales con­tracts don’t close them­selves with­out a whole lot of hu­mans in the mix!

(I ran this analy­sis by scrap­ing their job sites with Claude Code, then hav­ing it use Datasette’s JSON API to pipe that data into Datasette Cloud where I used Datasette Agent for the analy­sis, ex­ported here. Dogfood!)

The AI-failure sto­ries around this are pretty thin

I started dig­ging into this in re­sponse to a grow­ing vol­ume of sto­ries claim­ing that large com­pa­nies were sound­ing the alarm be­cause their AI us­age costs had grown so large.

The most widely cited of these sto­ries ap­pear quite overblown to me.

The most dis­cussed has been Uber, based on this re­port where CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga in­di­cated that Uber had “maxed out its full year AI bud­get just a few months into 2026”, mostly thanks to Claude Code.

Given that Claude Code only got re­ally good in November it’s en­tirely un­sur­pris­ing to me that a bud­get set in 2025 may have failed to pre­dict de­mand for that tool in 2026!

That Uber story was fur­ther fu­eled by com­ments made by Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, on the Rapid Response pod­cast. I tracked down the seg­ment and there re­ally is­n’t much there. Here’s what Andrew said:

But then you some­times go and talk to your se­nior en­gi­neer­ing lead­ers and you’re say­ing, OK, how many pro­jects that were on the cut­ting room floor got moved above the line be­cause of the pro­duc­tiv­ity gains be­cause 25% of our code com­mits were via Claude Code last quar­ter? That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe im­plic­itly there’s more that is get­ting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line be­tween one of those stats and, OK, now we’re ac­tu­ally pro­duc­ing like 25% more use­ful con­sumer fea­tures, right? And that line is hard to draw.

But then you some­times go and talk to your se­nior en­gi­neer­ing lead­ers and you’re say­ing, OK, how many pro­jects that were on the cut­ting room floor got moved above the line be­cause of the pro­duc­tiv­ity gains be­cause 25% of our code com­mits were via Claude Code last quar­ter?

That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe im­plic­itly there’s more that is get­ting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line be­tween one of those stats and, OK, now we’re ac­tu­ally pro­duc­ing like 25% more use­ful con­sumer fea­tures, right? And that line is hard to draw.

Somehow this frag­ment turned into head­lines like Uber’s COO says it’s get­ting harder to jus­tify the money spent on AI to­ken­maxxing, be­cause the mar­ket for sto­ries about AI fail­ures re­mains enor­mous.

The other pop­u­lar story around this is Microsoft starts can­cel­ing Claude Code li­censes, os­ten­si­bly to en­cour­age their en­gi­neers to dog­food their own Copilot CLI agent in­stead—but The Verge re­porter Tom Warren says “sources tell me the de­ci­sion is also a fi­nan­cial one”, trig­gered by the June 30th end of Microsoft’s fi­nan­cial year.

I think both of these sto­ries sup­port my “product-market fit” hy­poth­e­sis. The best ad­vice I ever heard on pric­ing a prod­uct was that your cus­tomer should suck air through their teeth and then say yes. Uber’s bud­get over­run and Microsoft’s seat can­cel­la­tions look like that ef­fect play­ing out in prac­tice.

We also know the labs are spend­ing a lot

The big AI labs spend bil­lions of dol­lars on both train­ing and in­fer­ence. Credible fig­ures are hard to come by, but we did get one huge hint as to the fig­ures in­volved from, oddly enough, the re­cent SpaceX S-1:

[…] in May 2026, we en­tered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI re­search and de­vel­op­ment pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion, with re­spect to ac­cess to com­pute ca­pac­ity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agree­ments, the cus­tomer has agreed to pay us $1.25 bil­lion per month through May 2029 […]

[…] in May 2026, we en­tered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI re­search and de­vel­op­ment pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion, with re­spect to ac­cess to com­pute ca­pac­ity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agree­ments, the cus­tomer has agreed to pay us $1.25 bil­lion per month through May 2029 […]

The Anthropic an­nounce­ment said that this deal meant they could “increase our us­age lim­its for Claude Code and the Claude API”, heav­ily im­ply­ing that Colossus is be­ing used for in­fer­ence, not model train­ing.

Anthropic al­ready have vast amounts of com­pute from other providers. The fact that they’re will­ing to spend $1.25 bil­lion per month for ex­tra ca­pac­ity from just one of their ven­dors hints at how big these in­fer­ence bud­gets have be­come.

API rev­enue is be­com­ing less im­por­tant

Over the past two years my im­pres­sion has been that OpenAI made more of their in­come from sub­scrip­tion rev­enue while Anthropic made more from their API.

Anthropic’s API rev­enue was his­tor­i­cally quite de­pen­dent on a small num­ber of large API cus­tomers—this VentureBeat story from August 2025 quotes “sources fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter” sug­gest­ing that just Cursor and GitHub Copilot were re­spon­si­ble for $1.2 bil­lion of the com­pa­ny’s then-$4 bil­lion rev­enue.

Today Anthropic are ru­mored to hit $10.9 bil­lion in the sec­ond quar­ter, po­ten­tially even op­er­at­ing at a profit for the first time.

This pivot-to-En­ter­prise sug­gests that the labs have re­al­ized that the real money lies in cut­ting out the mid­dle­men. Anthropic’s Claude Code di­rectly com­petes with Cursor and Copilot. No won­der Cursor are in­vest­ing in their own mod­els!

April is a new in­flec­tion point

I’ve called November 2025 the November in­flec­tion point be­cause that was when GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, com­bined with their re­spec­tive cod­ing agent har­nesses, got good—good enough that we’ve spent the last six months adapt­ing to agent sys­tems that can re­li­ably get use­ful work done.

I think April 2026 is a new in­flec­tion point where the rev­enue im­pli­ca­tions of this have started to land, to the ben­e­fit of the fron­tier AI labs and with ma­te­r­ial im­pacts on the bud­gets of large com­pa­nies.

We’ll know for sure how real this mo­ment is when the S-1 doc­u­ments for the up­com­ing Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs give us some real, au­dited num­bers to get our teeth into.

These days, a typ­i­cal Google Search feels like an ob­sta­cle course. Type out ‘upcoming PC games 2026’ and your gaze has to swerve around a chunky AI overview which re­cy­cles the work of hu­man writ­ers in a bid to kneecap ef­forts to click away from Google. It’s a bleak state of af­fairs for what was once the pre­mier dis­cov­ery tool for the in­ter­net, and as such many users are look­ing for al­ter­na­tive search en­gines.

DuckDuckGo has been one ma­jor win­ner of this Google Search aban­don­ment. Just for a start, vis­its to its AI-free search page noai.duck­duckgo.com be­tween May 20 to May 25 are said to have in­creased by 22.7% on av­er­age week-on-week, with the fig­ures peak­ing May 24 at 27.7%.

The DuckDuckGo mo­bile app saw in­stalls spike in the US by 18.1% on av­er­age com­pared to the pre­vi­ous week. TechCrunch re­ported this growth was sus­tained over six days, peak­ing at 30.5% on May 25. An even greater num­ber of iOS users hit down­load on the app though, with in­stalls see­ing an av­er­age week-on-week growth of 33% and a peak of 69.9%.

This all fol­lows Google CEO Sundar Pichai claim­ing last week that, “People love [Search’s AI Mode].” DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg crit­i­cised Google’s all-in-on-AI ap­proach to Search, telling Paul Thurrott, “Google is force-feed­ing AI with no way to opt out. As a re­sult, their re­sults are get­ting worse, not bet­ter. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and al­lows them to de­cide how much or how lit­tle AI they want.”

To be clear, Google is­n’t about to lose its Search crown; DuckDuckGo rep­re­sents about 2% of the search en­gine mar­ket in the US—Google still en­joyed about 85% as of last month.

DuckDuckGo also of­fers AI prod­ucts such as duck.ai, which al­lows users to chat pri­vately with a num­ber of ma­jor LLMs such as GPT-5 mini and Claude Haiku 4.5. Given that Google re­ported its rev­enue from search grew by 19% dur­ing Q1 2026—apparently thanks to its “AI ex­pe­ri­ences like AI Mode and AI Overviews”—it would­n’t make much busi­ness sense for any com­pany to com­pletely ex­ile it­self from the AI in­dus­try at this mo­ment in time.

However, DuckDuckGo has en­deav­oured to pri­ori­tise user choice and pri­vacy. Weinberg said ear­lier this week, “Everything you do in DuckDuckGo is pri­vate, we don’t col­lect search his­to­ries or chats, and noth­ing is used for AI train­ing.”

Keep up to date with the most im­por­tant sto­ries and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

According to chief com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cer Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s own AI overviews re­main pop­u­lar—though so does the op­tion to fil­ter out AI-generated im­ages from search re­sults. He said, “People just want a choice.” Amen to that.

Jess has been writ­ing about games for over ten years, spend­ing a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of that time work­ing on print pub­li­ca­tions PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not in­ves­ti­gat­ing all things hard­ware here, she’s ei­ther con­struct­ing a pas­sion­ate de­fence of a 7/10 game, day­dream­ing about her de­but novel, or feel­ing wist­ful about the last time she chased some nerds around a field with an over­sized foam sword.

Today, Last.fm be­gins a new chap­ter as an in­de­pen­dent com­pany. Ownership has changed,

but the prod­uct you use every day has not.

Your ac­count, your lis­ten­ing his­tory, and your data re­main ex­actly where they are. The team

build­ing Last.fm is the same. The ser­vice con­tin­ues as nor­mal.

What stays the same

Your Pro sub­scrip­tion and billing (if you’re a mem­ber)

The peo­ple be­hind the prod­uct

We’ll share more about what comes next in the weeks ahead. For now, every­thing works

ex­actly as it did yes­ter­day.

Same ser­vice. Same team. New chap­ter. Thanks for be­ing part of it.

Last.fm is now op­er­at­ing as an in­de­pen­dent com­pany fol­low­ing a change in own­er­ship.

No. The ser­vice con­tin­ues as nor­mal.

Is Last.fm be­ing ac­quired by an­other com­pany?

No. Last.fm is now op­er­at­ing in­de­pen­dently.

The team build­ing and op­er­at­ing Last.fm re­mains in place.

What does in­de­pen­dence mean for users?

It means we can fo­cus fully on build­ing lis­ten­ing in­sights and com­mu­nity fea­tures for mu­sic fans.

You’ll see con­tin­ued, steady im­prove­ments over time.

Is my ac­count or lis­ten­ing his­tory af­fected?

No. Your ac­count, scrob­bles, and lis­ten­ing his­tory re­main un­changed.

Yes. Your data and pri­vacy set­tings re­main un­changed. There is no change to how your data is

stored or pro­tected as a re­sult of this own­er­ship change.

No. There is no change to our ap­proach to data han­dling or pri­vacy as part of this tran­si­tion.

No. If you’re a Pro mem­ber, your sub­scrip­tion, billing, and ben­e­fits re­main the same.

There are no changes to pric­ing at this time.

I build tools us­ing the Last.fm API — should I be con­cerned?

No. API func­tion­al­ity con­tin­ues as nor­mal. We value the de­vel­oper com­mu­nity and will con­tinue

sup­port­ing the ecosys­tem around Last.fm.

If you’re a Pro mem­ber, thank you — your sub­scrip­tion di­rectly sup­ports the work we do. If

you’re not, you can learn more about Pro here: https://​www.last.fm/​pro

I never thought I’d see this hap­pen. So ex­cit­ing!

Congratulations to the team! Very ex­cit­ing

I wish the team all the best in go­ing for­ward on their own.

Congratulations and best of luck!

Wow, this is ex­cit­ing news! I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

Congrats to the whole team! Can’t wait to see where the plat­form will go!

Are we get­ting the band back to­gether?

wow! that is bril­liant news! con­grats and look­ing for­ward to what’s com­ing!

Super happy to see this ex­cel­lent news! Can’t wait to see what hap­pens next!

Love to see it, con­grat­u­la­tions!

Now let’s undo the re­gion lock for Russian users.

yes!! bring back ra­dio that would be awe­some

And groups!! It would be so nice

There is a cer­tain wild­ness in the tech in­dus­try these days that both mim­ics pre­vi­ous eras of large changes, like cloud com­put­ing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like noth­ing we’ve ever seen be­fore (record rev­enues ac­com­pa­nied by mass lay­offs).

One pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion: Tech ex­ec­u­tives, es­pe­cially CEOs, are col­lec­tively suf­fer­ing from delu­sions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie.

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psy­chosis be­cause they’re suf­fi­ciently dis­tant from the last mile of work that still has to hap­pen to gen­er­ate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X.

CEOs “play with AI,” de­velop a pro­to­type, or gen­er­ate a con­tract, to use Levie’s ex­am­ples, and then make the leap to be­liev­ing agents can do the work.

But these top-level ex­ec­u­tives aren’t the peo­ple who have to re­view code, dis­cover bugs, and iden­tify calls to hal­lu­ci­nated li­braries be­fore soft­ware is de­ployed. They aren’t re­spon­si­ble for train­ing AI mod­els on a com­pa­ny’s idio­syn­cratic con­tract terms, nor do they have to spend days comb­ing through con­tracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie in­di­cates.

In other words, Levie’s the­ory posits, CEOs don’t re­ally un­der­stand processes well enough to know what re­ally can and can’t be au­to­mated. But that lack of knowl­edge does­n’t stop them from act­ing on their be­liefs.

It’s im­por­tant to note that Levie is not an AI hater. Quite the op­po­site. He mostly posts AI pos­i­tiv­ity on X to his 2.7 mil­lion fol­low­ers, writ­ing blogs ti­tled “Headless soft­ware is the fu­ture” on how soft­ware built for AI agents is the way for­ward. He also puts his money where his mouth is, back­ing AI star­tups as an ac­tive an­gel in­vestor.

So what are CEOs to do in­stead? Levie ad­vises CEOs to use AI “a ton” to re­ally see what it can and can’t do, “and come out the other side with an ap­pre­ci­a­tion for both the up­side and the real work.”

CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psy­chosis be­cause they’re suf­fi­ciently dis­tant from the last mile of work that still has to hap­pen to gen­er­ate most value with AI.So when they play with AI, they see the happy path re­sults, of­ten not con­sid­er­ing the next 10 or 20 things that have… https://​t.co/​ne5mvJ4Rgx— Aaron Levie (@levie) May 24, 2026

CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psy­chosis be­cause they’re suf­fi­ciently dis­tant from the last mile of work that still has to hap­pen to gen­er­ate most value with AI.

So when they play with AI, they see the happy path re­sults, of­ten not con­sid­er­ing the next 10 or 20 things that have… https://​t.co/​ne5mvJ4Rgx

I have enough faith in hu­man­ity to be­lieve that there are CEOs out there at­tempt­ing to do just that, but right now, they seem to be in the mi­nor­ity.

In just the first five months of 2026, the tech in­dus­try has had nearly as many lay­offs as in all of 2025: 115,430 peo­ple have been fired from 152 tech com­pa­nies so far in 2026, com­pared to 124,636 peo­ple let go by 275 com­pa­nies in 2025, ac­cord­ing to in­dus­try lay­off tracker Layoffs.fyi.

And the bulk of com­pa­nies have pointed to AI as a rea­son for cut­ting these jobs. Many ar­gue that the biggest tech com­pa­nies are AI wash­ing, or cred­it­ing AI pro­duc­tiv­ity gains in the past or fu­ture, when other busi­ness de­ci­sions and met­rics are re­ally dri­ving the cuts.

Still, some of these sto­ries are sur­pris­ing. Zeb Evans, the CEO of pro­ject man­age­ment and pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware startup ClickUp, proudly de­clared on X that he had laid off al­most a quar­ter of his em­ploy­ees — 22% — af­ter rolling out about 3,000 AI agents to do in­ter­nal work.

Evans swore this was­n’t done to re­duce costs. Instead, he wants a work­force com­posed of peo­ple who run AI agents and spend their days quickly re­view­ing the agents’ work. He be­lieves this will cre­ate a “100x org,” as he calls it.

While AI can be a very use­ful tool, the data on AI and pro­duc­tiv­ity does­n’t sup­port such as­sump­tions. By miles.

A meta-analy­sis of other re­search pub­lished in October in UC Berkeley’s California Management Review found “no ro­bust re­la­tion­ship be­tween AI adop­tion and ag­gre­gate pro­duc­tiv­ity gain.”

Research pub­lished in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research did con­clude that AI adop­tion im­proved pro­duc­tiv­ity but noted “a pro­duc­tiv­ity para­dox, in which per­ceived pro­duc­tiv­ity gains are larger than mea­sured pro­duc­tiv­ity gains.”

After cre­at­ing thou­sands of agents to work on tasks, re­searchers at MIT con­cluded that agents just aren’t do­ing hu­man-qual­ity work yet in many cases. They pre­dict at the cur­rent rate of LLM im­prove­ment, mod­els will “be able to com­plete most text-re­lated tasks with suc­cess rates of, on av­er­age, 80%–95% by 2029 at a min­i­mally suf­fi­cient qual­ity level.”

In other words, AI is on track to per­form at base com­pe­tence on most tasks in about three years. These re­searchers be­lieve agents will need an­other few years to out­per­form hu­mans.

Meanwhile, re­search pub­lished in the Harvard Business Review showed that when every­one is us­ing AI to pro­duce more stuff, the bot­tle­neck sim­ply shifts to ex­ec­u­tives. Their work awaits the peo­ple who must au­tho­rize all the stuff every­one is pro­duc­ing. If every­one is em­pow­ered to act, then from what OpenAI ex­pe­ri­enced last year, we can tell that things may get out of con­trol.

Are CEOs ready for that? If not, the most cer­tain out­come of the on­go­ing CEO AI psy­chosis will sim­ply be or­ga­ni­za­tional chaos.

When you pur­chase through links in our ar­ti­cles, we may earn a small com­mis­sion. This does­n’t af­fect our ed­i­to­r­ial in­de­pen­dence.

Canada has an­nounced plans to buy a fleet of early warn­ing planes from Sweden’s Saab rather than a com­pet­ing op­tion from Boeing, as the coun­try seeks to re­duce re­liance on US de­fense firms.

Mark Carney, the prime min­is­ter, said on Wednesday that Canada would opt for Saab’s GlobalEye, which is based on Bombardier’s Global 6500 jet. Boeing’s E-7 Wedgetail plane — which has suf­fered from de­lays and cost over­runs — had also been in con­tention.

“With a suite of ad­vanced sen­sors and mis­sion sys­tems, Saab’s GlobalEye will be a key re­source for the Canadian armed forces to de­tect and de­ter threats across the Arctic,” Carney told a de­fense con­fer­ence in Ottawa.

The prime min­is­ter pledged in March that Canada would take full re­spon­si­bil­ity for pro­tect­ing its vast Arctic ter­ri­tory, af­ter re­ly­ing on decades on a part­ner­ship with the US to mon­i­tor its more than 4.4m sq km (1.7m sq miles) of land and sea, a ter­ri­tory larger than India.

In a state­ment, Saab said it planned to in­vest in re­search and de­vel­op­ment work in Canada as part of any deal.

Although Carney did not give de­tails of the fleet size or the cost of a po­ten­tial con­tract, mil­i­tary of­fi­cials had ear­lier said they were look­ing to buy six early warn­ing air­craft.

Philippe Lagasse, as­so­ci­ate di­rec­tor of in­ter­na­tional af­fairs at Ottawa’s Carleton University, said Canada’s de­ci­sion to buy the GlobalEye planes was “an im­por­tant test case for the Carney gov­ern­men­t’s pol­icy of piv­ot­ing away from American mil­i­tary ca­pa­bil­ity”.

He said in a state­ment that the de­ci­sion con­firmed Canada’s re­la­tion­ship with Sweden, a new Nato ally that had also been keen to strengthen its ties to the Canadian mil­i­tary.

Canada has pre­vi­ously said it is keen to work more closely with the Nordic coun­tries in the Arctic on de­fense and other is­sues, in a global en­vi­ron­ment where the US has be­come a less re­li­able part­ner.

“GlobalEye is al­ready cre­at­ing jobs in Canada, and work­ing with the Canadian sup­ply chain. This de­ci­sion ties our two na­tions even closer to­gether,” the Swedish prime min­is­ter, Ulf Kristersson, said in a so­cial me­dia post.

Saab is also in the run­ning to sell Canada some of its Gripen fight­ers. Canada has a deal to buy 88 F-35 jets from Lockheed-Martin, but last year, af­ter the US slapped tar­iffs on key Canadian im­ports, Carney asked the mil­i­tary to in­ves­ti­gate whether it could cut back the or­der and buy some planes from an­other man­u­fac­turer.

SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity. It’s built upon a souped-up ver­sion of the Sc2K en­gine. It fea­tures iso­met­ric art, crafted pixel by pixel. It strikes the right bal­ance of fea­tures and com­plex­ity; it feels like it could be mas­tered but with­out cod­dling you. It also has a high res­o­lu­tion Jazzy/new age OST.

Running it on mod­ern sys­tems takes a few tweaks but is cer­tainly doable. By “modern” I mean Windows 10 LTSC 2021, Ryzen 5 3600, Radeon Rx 7600, 48 GB of RAM, 4K mon­i­tor.

I first in­stalled SC3k from its CD ROM. I’ve had this Scholastic Edition CD all my life, I ac­tu­ally pur­chased it at a school book fair in a pri­mary school build­ing that no longer ex­ists. But the disk still does, and I will not pay for the same game twice. The in­stal­la­tion com­pleted with­out trou­ble on 64-bit Windows 10. The game launched but it was­n’t very playable:

There was no widescreen sup­port

The res­o­lu­tions sup­ported were relics like 800x600 and 1024x768

The game was laggy when scrolling

The game ac­cel­er­ated when scrolling

There is a big slow­down af­ter load­ing a city

The mu­sic does­n’t play with­out us­ing the CD, and some of it was miss­ing!

Some tiles had miss­ing graph­ics for a few sec­onds be­fore their con­tents were drawn.

Not to worry. There are reme­dies for each of these. By the end of this ar­ti­cle, you will have a SimCity 3000 game that looks just like this:

Behold, SimCity 3000 in 4K! Risky bis­cuits: build­ing 1WTC and 2WTC but no hos­pi­tals or fire sta­tions. I like to tease fate.

1. GOG Patched EXE

The patched EXE will en­able widescreen sup­port. It also acts as a No-CD patch. GOG.com con­tributed this patch and have shared it for a pub­lic down­load:

Download: From GOG. Mirror. MD5: 638eb5b3e7de9ada9b61a1ea40d276a4.

Download this and re­place the orig­i­nal EXE with it. Now you can start the game and choose a larger res­o­lu­tion. However, the mouse ac­cel­er­a­tion will now be too much. Also, the game will ap­pear hor­ri­bly askew if you’ve cho­sen a res­o­lu­tion that has a fac­tor of 8, which is very likely be­cause that’s most of them. Not to worry. We can fix that too.

2. Tweak the mouse ac­cel­er­a­tion

Edit the SC3U.ini file. Modify or set this vari­able:

[Navigation] ScrollMarginFactor = 0.005787

Source: CorinaMarie @ Simtropolis

3. Install the D3D Wrapper Alternative

This will fix the res­o­lu­tion weird­ness, mean­ing you can play the game at full 4k. My mon­i­tor is 3840x2160 na­tive, and this will make the game sup­port it. It will also fix any other graph­i­cal ac­cel­er­a­tion prob­lems on mod­ern cards and DirectX 11+.

Download PCGW. Mirror MD5: e97d0989­cab120608800f2e3395581a7

Extract these files to your SC3K Apps di­rec­tory. That’s it. Almost…

Configure the D3dWrapper

By de­fault the D3d Wrapper will run in bor­der­less, not fullscreen. That means your Taskbar will push the game off the screen! This is al­legedly for bet­ter com­pat­i­bil­ity for stream­ing, but since I’m not an ego­tist who needs every sec­ond of his life broad­cast to an au­di­ence, we will switch it to true fullscreen.

Inside the SC3K Apps di­rec­tory there is a file dxwrap­per.ini. Make the fol­low­ing changes:

[d3d9] EnableWindowMode = 0 …

[FullScreen] FullScreen = 1

I also did this:

EnableVsync = 1

4. Install the 4GB patch

When scrolling the map, you’ll see tiles ap­pear as a small pale cube be­fore their con­tents are loaded into view. Installing the 4GB patch will give the game more RAM to play with, and should help, but I haven’t con­firmed this sci­en­tif­i­cally. There’s no harm in­stalling it any­way.

Download: NTCore

Run this on the SC3K.exe file. It will al­low the game to use more RAM on 64-bit sys­tems.

5. Disable the auto up­dater

The slow­down when first open­ing the game is caused by the auto-up­dater try­ing to con­tact a long-dead up­date server. You can dis­able it with this patched .ini file:

Download: catty-cb @ SimTropolis. Mirror. MD5: e01ec9e7568560f493f­f4cbbeb­b0e3d4

Installation:

“Save this file (making sure to un­zip it and re­name it to UpdateSettings.ini) to “C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited\Apps\Updater”, over­writ­ing the ex­ist­ing UpdateSettings.ini file.”

Basically re­name it to UpdateSettings.ini and stick it in the Apps/Updater di­rec­tory.

6. Missing Music on SimCity 3000 Unlimited

Some of the mu­sic from the orig­i­nal re­lease is miss­ing from an .ini file, even though it is pre­sent in Unlimited. Fix that with the fol­low­ing patch:

Download Patrxgt @ PGGW. Mirror. Md5: 5877e363565850306131e564e364481c

Extract that into your base SC3k di­rec­tory.

Finally, if you in­stalled SC3K from CD like me, the mu­sic is not copied to your com­puter. Fix that by nav­i­gat­ing to the CD di­rec­tory: APPS/RES/SOUND/MUSIC then copy the .xa files to the same di­rec­tory on your HDD. Done!

Job: Done!

That’s it. Now you can get back to dis­miss­ing pe­ti­tion­ers, build­ing golden stat­ues of your­self, and zon­ing quiet farm­land only to have it im­me­di­ately bought over and turned into a brood of Smoke-O-Matics. All on your shiny Windows 10 box, in glo­ri­ous 4K res­o­lu­tion!

Other links:

A handy strat­gey guide.

Hotkeys. Not all of them are ob­vi­ous.

OST Listing and Conversion Guide

A note on Windows 11

These steps have been con­firmed work­ing on Windows 10. I don’t know about Windows 11, I pre­sume it will work there also, but I refuse to let that abom­i­na­tion any­where near my home. If you are un­lucky enough to be stuck with W11 but have suc­cess with these steps, let us know in the com­ments.

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