We’re fi­nally ready to talk about Flipper One — a pro­ject we’ve been grind­ing on for years and have re­built from scratch sev­eral times. It’s an in­cred­i­bly hard pro­ject, both fi­nan­cially and tech­ni­cally. So to­day we’re go­ing pub­lic not with a big shiny an­nounce­ment, but to tell the whole story straight. Honestly? We’re gen­uinely ter­ri­fied, and we need your help.

TL;DR With Flipper One, we’re reimag­in­ing what a Linux cy­berdeck can be — it’s a huge pro­ject. We’re open­ing up the de­vel­op­ment process and ask­ing the com­mu­nity for help.

With Flipper One, we’ve set our­selves a list of am­bi­tious goals:

Build the most open and best-doc­u­mented ARM com­puter in the world, with full main­line Linux ker­nel sup­port.

Push ven­dors to open up their ex­ist­ing closed-source code and ditch bi­nary blobs en­tirely.

Build an un­con­ven­tional hard­ware plat­form based on a co-proces­sor ar­chi­tec­ture that pairs a mi­cro­con­troller with a CPU, and port tons of low-level MCU code.

Rethink how peo­ple use Linux and de­velop our own GUI frame­work with wrap­pers around ex­ist­ing CLI util­i­ties.

Many of these goals come with a lot of un­cer­tainty, which is scary. But we be­lieve this is the only way to make a truly mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the open-source com­mu­nity and to ed­u­ca­tion.

What is Flipper One?

Flipper One is­n’t an up­grade to Flipper Zero — it’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent pro­ject with its own goals. Flipper One is an open Linux plat­form you can build al­most any­thing on: from a 5G-enabled IP net­work an­a­lyzer to an SDR-powered ra­dio sig­nal an­a­lyzer with lo­cal AI. We fo­cused a lot on the hard­ware ex­pan­sion sys­tem. You can con­nect high-speed mod­ules to Flipper One over PCI Express, USB 3.0, and SATA in­ter­faces. Add an SDR, a fast SSD, or a cel­lu­lar mo­dem — just plug in the right mod­ule.

Flipper One comes with sev­eral net­work in­ter­faces: 2x Gigabit Ethernet, USB Ethernet (5 Gbps), and Wi-Fi 6E (2.4/5/6 GHz). You can add 5G con­nec­tiv­ity by plug­ging in an M.2 mo­dem. That means you can use Flipper One as a router, a VPN gate­way, or a bridge be­tween wired and wire­less net­works.

Zero vs One

Flipper Zero and Flipper One are com­pletely dif­fer­ent pro­jects built for dif­fer­ent tasks. The eas­i­est way to think about it is in terms of net­work­ing lay­ers:

Layer 0 — Offline point-to-point ac­cess-con­trol pro­to­cols: NFC, low-fre­quency RFID, Sub-1 GHz ra­dio, Infrared, wired pro­to­cols like iBut­ton, UART, SPI, I²C. Based on a low-power mi­cro­con­troller.

Layer 1 — Everything that’s IP-connected: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 5G, and satel­lite. It’s all about net­work­ing, data trans­fer, and high-per­for­mance com­put­ing. Running on pow­er­ful hard­ware and an open Linux toolkit — enough com­put­ing power to han­dle SDR and lo­cal AI.

So they’re not “newer” and “older” gen­er­a­tions of the same prod­uct. Flipper One does­n’t re­place Flipper Zero — they’re dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of de­vices.

Truly Open Linux plat­form

We want to build a truly open Linux hard­ware plat­form — the best-doc­u­mented ARM com­puter, one that works out of the box on any re­cent up­stream ker­nel. It will never go stale be­cause it’ll keep get­ting the lat­est up­dates. Our goals:

Full main­line Linux ker­nel sup­port

No bi­nary blobs, closed dri­vers, or pro­pri­etary firmware

No ven­dor-locked BSP (board sup­port pack­age)

We say “truly open” be­cause the cur­rent state of ARM Linux is de­press­ing. Every ven­dor bolts on their own cus­tom mess: closed boot blobs, ven­dor-spe­cific patches, “board sup­port pack­ages” that no­body out­side the chip maker can re­ally un­der­stand. You can no longer just read the specs and un­der­stand how com­put­ers work — you can only learn the workarounds for one spe­cific chip with one spe­cific BSP. We’re sick of this our­selves, and we don’t want to be part of the prob­lem by ship­ping yet an­other prod­uct that just adds to the mess.

To pull this off, we’ve part­nered with the Collabora team to push full sup­port for the Rockchip RK3576 SoC into the main­line Linux ker­nel. Practically, this means you can down­load the ker­nel di­rectly from ker­nel.org, with zero ven­dor patches, and run it on your Flipper One.

👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

Flipper + Collabora — Making things open to­gether We’ve part­nered with Collabora to bring the RK3576 SoC into the main­line ker­nel and give Flipper One full up­stream sup­port.Read more: Collabora blog post

Current RK3576 main­line sup­port is in pretty good shape, and all the ma­jor com­po­nents are work­ing. But there’s still one last bi­nary blob in the boot chain — the DDR trainer, which ini­tial­izes RAM dur­ing early boot.

We’re ask­ing the com­mu­nity to help us pol­ish RK3576 sup­port so we can build a truly open plat­form to­gether. We’d be glad for any kind of con­tri­bu­tion, not just code. For ex­am­ple, maybe you can find a way to con­vince Rockchip to open up that last blob.

Right now, we’re fo­cused on power man­age­ment and USB DP Alt-mode sup­port. There are also dri­vers and ac­cel­er­a­tors that aren’t fully up­stream yet — the NPU, hard­ware video de­cod­ing, and other ac­cel­er­a­tors. Collabora main­tains a pub­lic list of what’s al­ready work­ing in main­line and what is­n’t, and we’d love help clos­ing those gaps.

RK3576 open source roadmap — what we plan to do and how you can con­tribute

Open tasks — where you can help us

RK3576 main­line sta­tus from Collabora

Developer Portal — let’s build to­gether

Openness has al­ways been our thing. With Flipper One, we want to go fur­ther — not just open-source code, but an open de­vel­op­ment process. We’re pub­lish­ing our task track­ers, in­ter­nal dis­cus­sions, half-fin­ished docs, and ar­chi­tec­tural de­bates. All the messy stuff com­pa­nies usu­ally keep be­hind closed doors.

Introducing → Flipper One Developer Portal

This is un­com­fort­able. We’ve never been this open be­fore, and there’s a real in­stinct to hide the un­fin­ished work, the wrong turns, and the ar­gu­ments. But we be­lieve the ed­u­ca­tional value of build­ing openly is worth more than the pol­ish of pre­tend­ing it was easy.

What is the Developer Portal?

Flipper One Developer Portal is a pub­lic wiki with all the de­vel­op­ment doc­u­men­ta­tion for Flipper One, and any­one can edit it. The por­tal de­scribes the pro­jec­t’s struc­ture and ways you can par­tic­i­pate in de­vel­op­ment.

Flipper One is a mas­sive pro­ject, and sev­eral teams are work­ing on it, each re­spon­si­ble for its own part. We call these parts sub-pro­jects:

🔌 Hardware — elec­tri­cal hard­ware de­vel­op­ment. This is where the printed cir­cuit boards (PCBs), an­ten­nas, and every­thing re­lated to the elec­tri­cal con­nec­tions of chips, con­nec­tors, and proces­sors are de­signed.

⚙️ Mechanics — me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing and in­dus­trial de­sign. This is where the en­clo­sure, but­tons, plas­tic and metal parts, and mount­ing com­po­nents are de­signed. Everything the user phys­i­cally in­ter­acts with.

🐧 Linux (CPU Software) — soft­ware de­vel­op­ment for the RK3576 proces­sor. Linux ker­nel, mod­ules, dri­vers, user­space, boot­loader, Rockchip tools, etc. This is the largest and most com­plex sub-pro­ject, span­ning many repos­i­to­ries.

🕹️ MCU Firmware — firmware de­vel­op­ment for the RP2350 mi­cro­con­troller, which con­trols the dis­play, power sub­sys­tem, and CPU boot process, and han­dles but­ton and touch­pad events.

🎨 User Interface — UI/UX de­vel­op­ment. This is where the user in­ter­face, the de­vice’s vi­sual lan­guage, and all graph­ics are de­vel­oped.

📚 Docs — de­vel­oper por­tal wiki, tech­ni­cal docs, guides, and datasheets. All doc­u­men­ta­tion, in­clud­ing the Developer Portal it­self, is de­vel­oped here. It cov­ers the Flipper One prod­uct, de­vel­op­ment processes, and con­tri­bu­tion guides.

🧪 Testing — tools for test­ing de­vice sub­sys­tems and hard­ware val­i­da­tion. Includes scripts and pro­grams for test­ing power, net­work­ing, CPU, au­dio, graph­ics, etc., as well as in­ter­face pro­to­types, demos, and test apps.

Anyone can join

Whether you’re an en­gi­neer, soft­ware de­vel­oper, de­signer, or sim­ply an en­thu­si­as­tic user with ideas to share, you’re wel­come to par­tic­i­pate in de­vel­op­ment and help shape Flipper One.

We’re also hir­ing a Developer Portal Manager — some­one to act as a proxy be­tween our dev team and the com­mu­nity, help shape the Developer Portal, and en­gage with con­trib­u­tors. Apply for the Developer Portal & Community Manager role.

Co-processor ar­chi­tec­ture

Flipper One runs on two proces­sors: a high-per­for­mance CPU and a tiny low-power MCU. They run in par­al­lel, and each man­ages its own part:

High-performance CPU — the 8-core RK3576 SoC that runs Linux. It comes with a Mali-G52 GPU and an NPU for run­ning LLMs and other mod­els lo­cally. There’s also 8 GB of RAM on board. Read more in CPU Software.

Low-power MCU — the 2-core Raspberry Pi RP2350 mi­cro­con­troller that con­trols the dis­play, but­tons, touch­pad, LEDs, and the power sub­sys­tem. It runs its own MCU Firmware.

The de­vice can run on the MCU alone. Even when Linux is off, you can con­trol Flipper One with its but­tons and LCD screen, con­fig­ure the boot process — all with­out the main CPU run­ning. This is what’s miss­ing on most SBCs: when Linux is off, the de­vice is dead.

MCU ↔ CPU in­ter­con­nect

The two proces­sors com­mu­ni­cate over a set of in­ter­faces we call the Interconnect: SPI car­ries the frame­buffer to the MCU for dis­play out­put, I²C car­ries com­mands to the MCU and but­ton and touch­pad events back to the CPU, and UART plus a few GPIO lines han­dle CPU boot con­trol. This is a non-triv­ial ar­chi­tec­ture.

We plan to land the dis­play and in­put dri­vers in the Linux ker­nel. We want to do it cleanly, with­out out-of-tree ven­dor hacks. We’d love for the ker­nel com­mu­nity to re­view this de­sign, push back on it, and help us up­stream it the right way.

Flipper OS + FlipCTL

How we’re reimag­in­ing Linux cy­berdecks

I’m a fan of Raspberry Pi and use it in my own pro­jects, in­clud­ing car­ry­ing one around as a travel tac­ti­cal Linux box. A typ­i­cal Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian OS) work­flow looks like this: to­day it’s a router, to­mor­row it’s a TV box, the day af­ter that it’s a logic an­a­lyzer for a de­bug ses­sion. You in­stall dozens of pack­ages, com­pile some from source, edit sys­tem con­figs, tweak the de­vice tree, patch the ker­nel — and very quickly the sys­tem turns into a mess. There’s no clean way to undo it. Roll back to fac­tory? Doesn’t ex­ist. Every new pro­ject starts with re-flash­ing the SD card.

Even though we’ll be crit­i­ciz­ing Raspberry Pi a lot, we gen­uinely love and re­spect the com­pany. Their prod­ucts in­spired ours in many ways — they make in­cred­i­ble things and have con­tributed mas­sively to the em­bed­ded in­dus­try. And that love is ex­actly why we keep com­par­ing our­selves to them.

What is Flipper OS?

We want to fix this and reimag­ine how peo­ple use Linux on the go. We’re build­ing Flipper OS — a layer on top of a Debian-based sys­tem that in­tro­duces pro­files: full snap­shots of the OS with dif­fer­ent pre­con­fig­ured pack­ages and set­tings. You can boot a pro­file, clone it, break it, in­stall what­ever, and jump back to a clean copy. Or switch to an en­tirely dif­fer­ent pro­file for a dif­fer­ent use case. No more SD card shuf­fling.

Honestly, Flipper OS is an ex­tremely hard pro­ject, and we’re not 100% sure how to ar­chi­tect it yet. We’re pro­to­typ­ing con­cepts, and we want this to be use­ful far be­yond Flipper One — for cy­berdeck builds based on Raspberry Pi, or any portable tac­ti­cal Linux box. If you’ve thought about this prob­lem or built some­thing sim­i­lar, we’d love to hear from you. Read about the Flipper OS con­cept.

FlipCTL — a UI frame­work for tiny screens

As part of Flipper OS, we’re build­ing FlipCTL to solve a prob­lem com­mon to all Linux-based cy­berdecks: no­body de­signs UIs for small screens. So peo­ple end up run­ning full desk­top en­vi­ron­ments (KDE, GNOME, etc.) squeezed onto a tiny 7″ touch­screen. It’s mis­er­able. What made Flipper Zero great was its user in­ter­face, pur­pose-built for a small LCD. That’s largely what made the de­vice pop­u­lar. We want to bring that ap­proach to Linux multi-tools.

FlipCTL is a frame­work for build­ing menu-based in­ter­faces for small LCD screens, con­trolled by a D-pad and a few but­tons. The idea is to wrap ex­ist­ing Linux util­i­ties like ping, nmap, tracer­oute in a clean, nav­i­ga­ble UI that ac­tu­ally makes sense on a tiny screen. Our long-term goal: make adding an HMI (human-machine in­ter­face) to any em­bed­ded Linux de­vice as easy as run­ning one com­mand: apt in­stall flipctl

Routers, NAS boxes, servers, head­less boards — any­thing you can bolt a small screen onto should be able to use FlipCTL. The idea is sim­ple: get FlipCTL, write a con­fig, and ship a us­able in­ter­face with­out drag­ging in Qt, GNOME, or X11. We’re also plan­ning to re­lease the Flipper One dis­play and a but­ton board as a stand­alone “FlipCTL Control Board” — a pe­riph­eral you can plug into any Linux-based de­vice and in­stantly get a menu-dri­ven in­ter­face. Right now, FlipCTL is still at the con­cept and ar­chi­tec­ture stage, and we’d love any­one in­ter­ested to join in: Read about the FlipCTL con­cept.

M.2 ex­pan­sion mod­ules

The core idea be­hind Flipper One is an ex­pand­able hard­ware plat­form. Anyone can turn it into their own spe­cial­ized multi-tool. That’s why we added sup­port for high-speed M.2 ex­pan­sion mod­ules that in­stall in­side, un­der the back plate.

M.2 is a com­mon name for an ex­pan­sion mod­ule form fac­tor, but it does­n’t de­fine the ac­tual con­nec­tion in­ter­face. Under the hood, M.2 mod­ules can use dif­fer­ent in­ter­faces and come in dif­fer­ent sizes and con­nec­tor types.

We worked hard to make the M.2 port in Flipper One as uni­ver­sal as pos­si­ble, so you can plug in al­most any type of mod­ule — cel­lu­lar or satel­lite modems, SDR mod­ules, AI ac­cel­er­a­tors, SSDs (NVMe or SATA), and Wi-Fi cards via adapters.

M.2 tech specs

We packed the M.2 port with as many in­ter­faces as pos­si­ble and added sup­port for dif­fer­ent mod­ule sizes:

M.2 type: Key-B

Supported sizes: 2242, 3042, 3052 (up to D3 class thick­ness)

Interfaces: PCI Express 2.1 ×1 / USB 3.1 / USB 2.0 / SATA3 / Serial Audio / UART / I2C / SIM card

For the full M.2 port spec­i­fi­ca­tion and pinout, see the doc­u­men­ta­tion: M.2 Port spec­i­fi­ca­tion. We ex­pect the com­mu­nity and ven­dors to build their own M.2 mod­ules for Flipper One, so any feed­back and sug­ges­tions are wel­come.

GPIO mod­ules

For sim­pler DIY mod­ules, we added a GPIO con­nec­tor with stan­dard 2.54mm pin head­ers. Even here, we made sure the de­vice can be car­ried fully as­sem­bled with the mod­ule at­tached with­out it com­ing loose.

GPIO mod­ules also have their own mount­ing sys­tem:

Threaded in­serts — the back plate and an­tenna rail have threads spaced in a grid with 2.54mm pitch, match­ing stan­dard perf­board hole spac­ing. So you can just cut a piece of perf­board to size, sol­der your mod­ule onto it, and screw it to the Flipper One’s back.

Snap-fit notches — both sides of the body have notches for a snap-fit pro­tec­tive cover that adds rigid­ity to the whole as­sem­bly.

For the tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tion, pinout, and schemat­ics, see the GPIO port page. You can also check out ex­am­ples of GPIO mod­ules, in­clud­ing a walkie-talkie and a cam­era mod­ule. Any feed­back and com­ments are wel­come.

Open hard­ware mod­ule sys­tem

0:00

/0:07

[video] You can view and down­load the 3D mod­els

We de­signed a cus­tom mount­ing sys­tem for Flipper One mod­ules. We are fully open­ing up the en­clo­sure parts in­volved in this sys­tem:

Body — the main en­clo­sure of the de­vice. M.2 mod­ules screw into a metal heatsink plate, with two threaded in­serts for 42mm and 52mm mod­ule lengths.

Back plate — the rear cover that pro­vides ac­cess to the M.2 ex­pan­sion port. It at­taches to the body with screws and can be swapped out for dif­fer­ent de­signs de­pend­ing on the in­stalled mod­ule.

Antenna rail — a sep­a­rate part used for mount­ing SMA an­ten­nas. The an­tenna rail is in­ten­tion­ally sep­a­rated from the back plate so that an­ten­nas can be in­stalled and ca­bles routed to the ra­dio mod­ule be­fore the back plate is closed. This elim­i­nates the risk of dam­ag­ing an­tenna ca­bles dur­ing as­sem­bly.

You can down­load the 3D mod­els to­day to de­sign en­clo­sures for your mod­ules or even cre­ate your cus­tom back plate and an­tenna rail. We look for­ward to com­mu­nity feed­back and sug­ges­tions on the me­chan­i­cal de­sign of mod­ules. Read about Mechanics.

Network multi-tool

Flipper One is all about con­nec­tiv­ity — a Swiss Army knife for IP net­works across all OSI lay­ers. We packed in all the es­sen­tial phys­i­cal in­ter­faces, giv­ing you five in­de­pen­dent net­work up­links, which you can bridge to­gether, con­fig­ure cus­tom rout­ing for, or pipe through VPN tun­nels:

2× Gigabit Ethernet — two in­de­pen­dent WAN/LAN ports, each run­ning at 1 Gbps. Can be used for trans­par­ent bridge, MitM sniff­ing, and more.

Wi-Fi 6E — 802.11ax based on the MT7921AUN chipset with mon­i­tor mode sup­port. Covers 2.4/5/6 GHz bands and can run as both a Wi-Fi client (STA) and a hotspot (AP).

Cellular mo­dem — 5G or LTE mo­dem via the M.2 ex­pan­sion mod­ule, with sup­port for ex­ter­nal an­ten­nas. Accepts a phys­i­cal Nano SIM (4FF) and eSIM.

USB Ethernet — up to 5 Gbps em­u­lated over USB-C. Connect your lap­top or smart­phone via a USB ca­ble to add an ex­tra net­work in­ter­face. Works via USB-CDC NCM, so no dri­vers are re­quired.

Out of the box, Flipper One can work as a gate­way to any net­work, a multi-hotspot bridge, an in­line Ethernet snif­fer, a USB Wi-Fi/Ethernet adapter for a PC or smart­phone — or any com­bi­na­tion, with dy­namic rout­ing, load bal­anc­ing, and failover. We de­scribe these as user-story-dri­ven fea­tures in the Features list.

Advanced built-in Wi-Fi

Axel’s blog

Home Blog Now

20 May, 2026

AI takes in all the in­put, whether the orig­i­nal au­thors have con­sented or not, and do some “learning”, and then the AI com­pa­nies sell these learned re­sult to hu­mans, with­out com­pen­sat­ing the orig­i­nal au­thors.

Worse, the cus­tomer of these AI com­pa­nies (AI tools bro) sell the prompted / processed re­sult to other cus­tomers, prof­itting off things AI has copied from all over the in­ter­net.

Is this what the pin­na­cle of hu­man is? Lazy and greedy?

I re­search and write e-com­merce re­lated tu­to­ri­als on my own, and a few other lazy web­site au­thors just ask ChatGPT to copy a few well per­form­ing tu­to­r­ial on­line, and then they pub­lished it as their own.

I found out this be­cause they ranked higher than me in Google search re­sult, and then when I read their ar­ti­cle, their ar­ti­cle con­tains links to my ac­tual web­site, with the ex­act link text (?!) , which means they didnt bother to check and re­move, and thats how I found out.

Fuck Google for rank­ing some copy­cat web­site higher than mine, even though they copied my ar­ti­cle

May 20, 2026

Built with Gemini, we’re test­ing new ad for­mats in Search and ex­pand­ing our Direct Offers pi­lot to help brands con­nect with con­sumers.

General sum­mary

Google is in­te­grat­ing Gemini into Search to pro­vide con­ver­sa­tional, AI-driven ad ex­pe­ri­ences that of­fer prod­uct guid­ance and trans­par­ent ex­pla­na­tions. You can now use new for­mats like Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads to con­nect with cus­tomers through real-time, per­son­al­ized ad­vice. To pre­pare, en­sure your cam­paigns are set up with Performance Max and AI Max tools to take full ad­van­tage of these up­com­ing fea­tures.

Summaries were gen­er­ated by Google AI. Generative AI is ex­per­i­men­tal.

Bullet points

Google’s “A new gen­er­a­tion of ads for the AI era of Search” in­tro­duces smarter ads.

New AI-powered ads use Gemini to pro­vide help­ful, rel­e­vant prod­uct de­tails for your searches.

Conversational ads and high­lighted an­swers give you di­rect, per­son­al­ized ad­vice while you re­search prod­ucts.

New shop­ping fea­tures and chat agents help you make con­fi­dent buy­ing de­ci­sions much faster.

Expanded di­rect of­fers now in­clude na­tive check­out and travel deals to sim­plify your shop­ping.

Summaries were gen­er­ated by Google AI. Generative AI is ex­per­i­men­tal.

Basic ex­plainer

Google is up­dat­ing its ads to work bet­ter with AI. These new ads use Gemini to an­swer your spe­cific ques­tions and ex­plain why a prod­uct might be right for you. You’ll see these help­ful sug­ges­tions while you search or shop on­line. They’re de­signed to make find­ing what you need faster and eas­ier.

Summaries were gen­er­ated by Google AI. Generative AI is ex­per­i­men­tal.

Your browser does not sup­port the au­dio el­e­ment.

Listen to ar­ti­cle

This con­tent is gen­er­ated by Google AI. Generative AI is ex­per­i­men­tal

[[duration]] min­utes

People come to Google to re­search com­plex top­ics and dis­cover prod­ucts and ser­vices that fit their needs. As the Search ex­pe­ri­ence be­comes smarter and more con­ver­sa­tional, we’re us­ing Gemini mod­els to ex­per­i­ment with new ad ex­pe­ri­ences de­signed to pro­vide en­gag­ing, help­ful an­swers that con­nect peo­ple with busi­nesses.

We’re in­tro­duc­ing more help­ful ads in AI Mode

When re­search­ing a topic, con­sumers want to know ex­actly how a prod­uct suits their unique sit­u­a­tion. In fact, 75% of peo­ple re­port mak­ing faster, more con­fi­dent de­ci­sions us­ing AI Mode in Search.

1

That’s why we’re test­ing two new types of ads, built with Gemini, that of­fer rel­e­vant prod­uct de­tails along with help­ful guid­ance.

To help peo­ple eval­u­ate their choices, both of these new for­mats will fea­ture an in­de­pen­dent AI ex­plainer as part of the ad. Our Gemini model eval­u­ates and syn­the­sizes in­for­ma­tion about a prod­uct or ser­vice, and dis­plays that con­text along­side the ad­ver­tis­er’s cre­ative. This co­her­ent, in­de­pen­dent re­sponse en­sures trans­parency and builds trust. These for­mats will also con­tinue to be clearly la­beled as “Sponsored.”

Conversational Discovery ads: With Conversational Discovery ads, your ad an­swers a per­son’s spe­cific ques­tion. Suppose some­one searches, “I am try­ing to make my house smell like those fancy spas or a rainy for­est. What are some low-main­te­nance ways to make my home smell amaz­ing?” We use the Gemini model to build cre­ative tai­lored to that search, high­light­ing spe­cific rel­e­vant fea­tures.

Highlighted Answers: When peo­ple are re­search­ing, they want help­ful sug­ges­tions. Now, when AI Mode pro­vides a list of rec­om­men­da­tions — like the best lan­guage apps for an up­com­ing trip — highly rel­e­vant, high-qual­ity ads are el­i­gi­ble to ap­pear on that list as a Highlighted Answer.

Conversational Discovery Ads

Highlighted Answers

We’re bring­ing next-gen AI ads to Search

Helpful, smart ads aren’t just for AI Mode. In the com­ing months, we’re bring­ing two new ways to give peo­ple real-time prod­uct ad­vice on Search, ex­actly when it’s needed most.

AI-powered Shopping ads

Buying some­thing big — like a new fridge or a TV — can be over­whelm­ing. People want to see ex­actly what they’re look­ing for and why it’s the best op­tion. To make choos­ing eas­ier, we’re launch­ing AI-powered Shopping ads. Now, if some­one searches for an espresso ma­chine, Gemini will pull up your most rel­e­vant prod­ucts and in­stantly write a cus­tom ex­plainer high­light­ing why your prod­uct may be the right choice for them.

AI-powered Shopping ads

Business Agent for Leads

When weigh­ing im­por­tant op­tions, peo­ple want to feel con­fi­dent be­fore they com­mit. Business Agent for Leads, built with Gemini, puts a smart brand agent right in­side your ad. Instead of fill­ing out a sta­tic form, a stu­dent re­search­ing uni­ver­si­ties can click “Chat” to get in­stant an­swers based on your web­site, turn­ing a prac­ti­cal in­ter­ac­tion into a valu­able lead.

Business Agent for Leads

We’re ex­pand­ing the Direct Offers pi­lot

Since launch­ing the Direct Offers pi­lot in January 2026, brands like Chewy, Gap and L’Oreal have sur­faced highly rel­e­vant deals as shop­pers ex­plore their op­tions.

Today, we’re up­grad­ing this ex­pe­ri­ence to al­low more of­fer types and make it eas­ier to act on these deals. Here’s what’s com­ing soon:

Promotion bundling: Brands can up­load a va­ri­ety of pro­mo­tions in Google Ads, in­clud­ing dis­counts, give­aways and lo­cal coupons. They’ll soon be able to sup­ply their el­i­gi­ble prod­ucts and guardrails and use AI Brief to reach the right au­di­ences. We use Gemini to con­struct a deal — like a highly rel­e­vant prod­uct bun­dle — to pre­sent the most com­pelling of­fer for that spe­cific search.

Native check­out: We’ve added na­tive check­out in­te­gra­tion for Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) mer­chants. This gives shop­pers a faster way to se­cure pro­mo­tions, help­ing mer­chants seam­lessly turn high-in­tent re­search into com­pleted sales.

Travel ex­pan­sion: Soon, travel part­ners like Booking and Expedia will be able to sur­face spe­cial of­fers di­rectly within a per­son’s AI-assisted trip plan­ning.

Promotional bundling + na­tive check­out

Travel deals

With these up­dates, Direct Offers will now nat­u­rally sur­face in the AI Mode re­sponse as shop­pers ex­plore op­tions, mak­ing deals more in­stantly dis­cov­er­able.

To take full ad­van­tage of all these new AI-powered for­mats, build a strong foun­da­tion with AI Max for Search, AI Max for Shopping cam­paigns and Performance Max. We’ll con­tinue to test these for­mats to en­sure they de­liver a pos­i­tive ex­pe­ri­ence for con­sumers while build­ing a fu­ture where your mar­ket­ing is more ac­tion­able than ever.

1

Google com­mis­sioned Ipsos Global Consumer Journeys, Dec 2025, Online sur­vey, Global av­er­age of se­lect coun­tries (AR, AU, BR, CA, CL, CO, DE, ES, FR, ID, IN, IT, JP, KR, MX, NL, PE, PH, PO, SG, SW, TW, TH, US, UK) not weighted to re­flect pop­u­la­tion size, Adults 18+, n=13,189 on­line shop­pers who made a con­sumer good pur­chase re­quir­ing con­sid­er­a­tion in the past week (range of cat­e­gories) and use Google AI Overviews and/​or AI Mode for shop­ping.

Related sto­ries

Related sto­ries

.

The day was to be­gin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!), ex­pect­ing to get some work done be­fore my at­ten­tion frag­ments. But Google had other plans. They had rolled out a new ver­sion of Antigravity the day be­fore, at I/O 2026, pre­sent­ing it as a shiny, stand­alone Codex-style ex­pe­ri­ence.

Before I launched it, Antigravity had au­to­mat­i­cally “updated” my ex­ist­ing in­stal­la­tion to the new one and, in the process, nuked the IDE, the ac­tual Antigravity I had been us­ing for months. When I clicked my usual short­cut, my en­tire IDE was just gone, and in its place stood a sin­gle con­ver­sa­tional prompt box.

This un­ex­pected shift com­pletely broke my pre­ferred work­flow. Antigravity, as part of the Google AI Ultra plan, is my daily dri­ver, my work­horse. I don’t mind agen­tic work­flows for quick demos or MVPs, but pro­duc­tion soft­ware, in my opin­ion, re­quires pre­dictable out­put. For that, noth­ing beats the plan-re­view-im­ple­ment loop that made me a huge fan of Cursor and ear­lier ver­sions of Antigravity.

Two Versions, Zero Compatibility

Frustrated, I jumped on­line and found that Google ac­tu­ally hosted a sep­a­rate down­load pack­age specif­i­cally for the legacy Antigravity IDE. How to in­ter­pret that it was at the bot­tom of the page, I’m leav­ing as an ex­er­cise to you. I fig­ured I could just down­load this in­staller and run it along­side the new tool to get my day go­ing. I down­loaded and ran the pack­age but the ex­act same 2.0 chat­bot in­ter­face loaded right back up, much to my an­noy­ance.

The 2.0 up­date, it turns out, ag­gres­sively rewrites the de­fault ap­pli­ca­tion paths to the point where it’s im­pos­si­ble, at the time of writ­ing, to have both ver­sions of Antigravity in­stalled and func­tion­ing at the same time. Even re­in­stalling the IDE, hop­ing it might rewrite the rules cor­rectly, does­n’t work as the chat­bot still hi­jacks the launch every sin­gle time.

If In Doubt, Purge

After mess­ing around re­in­stalling both pieces of soft­ware only to get the ex­act same re­sult, I headed over to the Antigravity sub­red­dit. Sure enough, plenty of other peo­ple were post­ing about the same ex­act sce­nario. The only way for­ward was a to­tal purge of every­thing Antigravity re­lated on the ma­chine be­fore try­ing again.

With my sys­tem en­tirely cleared of the 2.0 bi­na­ries, I ran the stand­alone IDE in­staller one more time. Without the chat­bot there to in­ter­fere and hi­jack the ex­e­cu­tion paths, the clean in­stal­la­tion fi­nally worked.

Back to Business (Almost)

Unfortunately, get­ting the in­ter­face back did­n’t mean every­thing was nor­mal. The forced up­date and sub­se­quent purge wiped out my chat his­tory and set­tings. While I could, thank­fully, copy over most of my setup from my old Cursor con­fig, the prompt his­tory from the old Antigravity in­stal­la­tion is gone(-ish). The up­grade fi­asco did leave a folder called anti­grav­ity-backup, which I hope con­tains all my old his­tory and pro­file info.

Right now, I just don’t have the time or the to­kens to fid­dle with it and get my his­tory back. It’s go­ing to stay right there in sta­sis un­til I have some ac­tual time to spare.

Updates Shouldn’t Hijack Your Software

Forcing this kind of tran­si­tion on users via a back­ground up­date is in in­cred­i­bly poor taste. Background up­dates are meant for per­for­mance patches and ver­sion up­grades, not for se­cretly ship­ping an en­tirely dif­fer­ent piece of soft­ware. Hijacking a de­vel­op­ment tool to re­place it with an­other crosses the line, from an in­con­ve­nience into a ma­jor has­sle.

I’m now go­ing to look for ways to stop auto-up­dates al­to­gether, if it’s even pos­si­ble in the first place. We should be able to trust that our tools will re­main the tools we ac­tu­ally signed up to use. I’m fully plugged into the Google ecosys­tem, but sheesh!

Great ques­tion! The choice be­tween Redis and Memcached is a nu­anced de­ci­sion that re­quires care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of mul­ti­ple fac­tors. Let me break down the key dif­fer­ences: Redis of­fers a rich set of data struc­tures in­clud­ing strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets, which pro­vide flex­i­bil­ity for var­i­ous use cases. It sup­ports per­sis­tence through RDB snap­shots and AOF logs, en­abling data dura­bil­ity. Redis also in­cludes built-in repli­ca­tion, Lua script­ing, pub/​sub mes­sag­ing, and atomic op­er­a­tions. The sin­gle-threaded ar­chi­tec­ture with event loop pro­cess­ing en­sures pre­dictable per­for­mance char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Memcached, on the other hand, fol­lows a sim­pler multi-threaded ar­chi­tec­ture that can lever­age mul­ti­ple CPU cores more ef­fi­ciently for ba­sic caching op­er­a­tions. It uses a straight­for­ward key-value stor­age model with a slab al­lo­ca­tion mech­a­nism that min­i­mizes mem­ory frag­men­ta­tion. The pro­to­col is sim­pler and has lower over­head for ba­sic GET/SET op­er­a­tions.

Performance con­sid­er­a­tions: Memcached typ­i­cally shows bet­ter through­put for sim­ple key-value op­er­a­tions due to its multi-threaded na­ture. Redis ex­cels when you need com­plex data op­er­a­tions or per­sis­tence. Benchmarks vary de­pend­ing on pay­load size, op­er­a­tion types, and hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tion.

From a scal­a­bil­ity per­spec­tive, both sup­port hor­i­zon­tal scal­ing through client-side shard­ing or proxy so­lu­tions like Twemproxy. Redis Cluster pro­vides na­tive shard­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties. Memory ef­fi­ciency dif­fers based on data types and ac­cess pat­terns.

Operational con­sid­er­a­tions in­clude mon­i­tor­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties, com­mu­nity sup­port, client li­brary ma­tu­rity, and ops team fa­mil­iar­ity. Redis has more fea­tures but higher com­plex­ity. Memcached is sim­pler to op­er­ate but less flex­i­ble.

In con­clu­sion, the op­ti­mal choice de­pends on your spe­cific re­quire­ments, ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture, team ex­per­tise, and fu­ture scal­a­bil­ity needs. I’d rec­om­mend con­duct­ing a proof of con­cept with your ac­tual work­load pat­terns to make an in­formed de­ci­sion. …more

Real jour­nal­ists wrote and edited this (not AI)—independent, com­mu­nity-dri­ven jour­nal­ism sur­vives be­cause you back it. Do­nate to sus­tain Prism’s mis­sion and the hu­mans be­hind it.

In Seattle, Facebook, Amazon, real es­tate man­age­ment, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) all share one thing in com­mon: mem­ber­ship to Seattle Shield, an ex­clu­sive in­tel­li­gence-shar­ing net­work op­er­ated by the Seattle po­lice.

The sys­tem high­lights how se­cre­tive pub­lic-pri­vate net­works of in­for­ma­tion-shar­ing have per­me­ated law en­force­ment in­tel­li­gence col­lec­tion in Seattle and across the coun­try un­der the ban­ner of sup­pos­edly pre­vent­ing ter­ror­ism. However, ques­tions con­cern­ing the use­ful­ness of the pro­gram, ac­count­abil­ity mea­sures, and how in­for­ma­tion is shared re­main unan­swered.

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) did not re­spond to Prism’s de­tailed re­quests for com­ment. Facebook, Amazon, and each of their an­a­lysts iden­ti­fied in pub­lic records as mem­bers of the Shield net­work did not re­spond to re­quests for com­ment.

The Seattle Shield web­site states that its mis­sion “is to pro­vide a col­lab­o­ra­tive and in­for­ma­tion-shar­ing en­vi­ron­ment be­tween the Seattle Police Department and pub­lic/​pri­vate part­ners in the Seattle area. Seattle Shield mem­bers as­sist Seattle Police Department ef­forts to iden­tify, de­ter, de­feat or mit­i­gate po­ten­tial acts of ter­ror­ism by re­port­ing sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­ity in a timely man­ner.”

One SPD email ob­tained by Prism states that the Seattle Shield is an “unfunded pro­gram,” which is man­aged by Officer Erin Nicholson.

The Seattle Shield net­work, which in­cludes mem­bers from mul­ti­ple law en­force­ment groups as well as pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions and cor­po­ra­tions, has been es­tab­lished and op­er­at­ing since 2009. However, it ap­pears to be mostly off the radar of some of the most promi­nent civil rights groups in the state, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, which told Prism in an email that it has­n’t been fol­low­ing or look­ing into the net­work.

Through pub­lic records re­quests, Prism ob­tained the Seattle Shield bul­letins, as well as a full list of Seattle Shield mem­bers who had ac­cess to the pro­gram as of 2020. A Prism re­view of dozens Seattle Shield re­ports sent out be­tween 2020 and 2025 to a list of hun­dreds of mil­i­tary in­tel­li­gence op­er­a­tives, non­prof­its, pri­vate cor­po­rate en­ti­ties, pri­vate se­cu­rity com­pa­nies, and law en­force­ment agen­cies show that in 2025, the re­ports were al­most ex­clu­sively about protests and po­ten­tial traf­fic de­lays caused by protests through­out Seattle.

For in­stance, one email “blast” from Oct. 6, 2025, warns about up­com­ing lo­cal events re­lated to “the 2nd an­niver­sary of the Hamas and Palestinian mil­i­tants co­or­di­nated as­sault against Israel.” The no­tice lists a few ex­am­ples of at­tacks on Jewish tar­gets in other U.S. cities last year; it does not men­tion wide­spread anti-Mus­lim and anti-Pales­tin­ian at­tacks through­out the coun­try.

“Homegrown vi­o­lent ex­trem­ists (HVES), racially or eth­ni­cally mo­ti­vated vi­o­lent ex­trem­ists (REMVES), and griev­ance-dri­ven ma­li­cious ac­tors may use this an­niver­sary to con­duct their own at­tacks at any rel­e­vant tar­get lo­ca­tions, de­pend­ing on their as­pi­ra­tions,” the blast says. “There have been sev­eral lo­cal protests last week, in­clud­ing one that re­sulted in graf­fiti and prop­erty dam­age at a lo­cal tech com­pany CEO’s res­i­dence.”

The no­tice went on to share in­for­ma­tion about up­com­ing lo­cal events.

Longtime Seattle pri­vacy ac­tivist and or­ga­nizer Phil Mocek has been fol­low­ing the net­work since 2012, around when re­quested sev­eral Seattle Shield doc­u­ments from the SPD. Mocek told Prism that the co­or­di­na­tion among the Seattle Shield net­work is even more con­cern­ing to­day with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a National Security Presidential Memorandum from President Donald Trump in the fall of 2025 that iden­ti­fies protest speech and pro­tected speech as po­ten­tial “indicia” of ter­ror­ist threat.

Information shared over Seattle Shield might be “all it takes to get some­one la­beled a ‘far-left do­mes­tic ter­ror­ist,’” Mocek said.

“Somebody could show up to protest ICE, and then that in­for­ma­tion gets re­ported out to Seattle Shield and sud­denly they could be on a ter­ror­ist watch list? That is not OK,” Mocek said.

Accountability con­cerns

Seattle Shield re­quests that broad swaths of the city’s pri­vate com­pa­nies cre­ate sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­ity re­ports, which are then pumped into a sys­tem that serves as an ex­ten­sion of a sprawl­ing na­tion­wide law en­force­ment sur­veil­lance ap­pa­ra­tus.

The net­work ef­fec­tively cre­ates its own list of po­ten­tial sus­pects. Photographs of those who end up re­ported by the Seattle Shield net­work or of their cars could end up plas­tered onto a pri­vate blot­ter, hosted on a pri­vate server, for hun­dreds of mil­i­tary in­tel­li­gence, fed­eral, im­mi­gra­tion, and lo­cal law en­force­ment agents, and pri­vate se­cu­rity guards to see.

According to records ob­tained by Prism, mem­bers of the net­work in­clude FBI agents, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “surface pro­gram an­a­lyst,” and in­tel­li­gence an­a­lysts with the Washington State Fusion Center, a sep­a­rate but par­al­lel in­tel­li­gence-shar­ing net­work that also col­lab­o­rates with ICE.

Law en­force­ment far out­side of Seattle also have ac­cess to the Seattle Shield sys­tem in­clud­ing Nassau County Police in New York, the New York City Police Department, Cleveland Transit, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota, and a “threat and risk an­a­lyst” for the United Nations.

Virginia State Police Captain Austin White is a mem­ber of Seattle Shield and mul­ti­ple other lo­cal shield net­works across the U.S., all un­der the um­brella of the Global Shield Network (GSN), of which he is the pres­i­dent. “Does [the net­work] af­fect me on a daily ba­sis? Not re­ally,” he told Prism. But it can help give a sense of what mem­bers feel is a con­cern, he added.

White said that in 2017, per­sonal con­nec­tions made through shield net­works al­lowed him to ex­pe­dite the search for a mi­nor who made vi­o­lent threats on­line.

He said the GSN does not over­see any of the lo­cal net­works, which op­er­ate in­de­pen­dently.

Mocek said it is un­clear if any over­sight for the Seattle Shield pro­gram ex­ists at all.

“This is some­thing that should be tracked, ac­counted for, and prob­a­bly au­dited,” Mocek said. “Any shar­ing be­tween any part of Seattle’s mu­nic­i­pal gov­ern­ment and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is con­cern­ing and I think would be con­cern­ing to the ma­jor­ity of the pub­lic.”

Some of the of­fi­cials listed on the 2020 Seattle Shield mem­ber­ship list ob­tained by Prism have since re­tired, left their po­si­tions, or are no longer ac­tive. For in­stance, the Church of Scientology, U.S. Navy, and the Washington State Military Department told Prism that they are no longer work­ing with the net­work.

Creating the panop­ti­con

The Seattle Shield pro­gram is mod­eled di­rectly af­ter NYPD Shield, born in 2005 fol­low­ing 9/11, which aimed to mimic the FBI’s InfraGard. The con­cept was ex­ported to var­i­ous po­lice de­part­ments across the world, form­ing lo­cal net­works op­er­at­ing un­der the um­brella of the GSN.

White said the NYPD Shield model was es­sen­tially “franchised out” across the coun­try; how­ever, each lo­cal shield net­work is re­spon­si­ble for fund­ing, op­er­at­ing, and man­ag­ing their own sys­tem.

In October 2025, the GSN hosted its sev­enth an­nual global con­fer­ence in part­ner­ship with the Seattle Shield and SPD at Seattle’s Sheraton Grand Hotel. According to a con­fer­ence sched­ule ob­tained by Prism, the keynote ad­dress was de­liv­ered by William Edwards, a re­tired Army colonel and spe­cial­ist in drone sys­tems.

In sev­eral of the pho­tos Prism ob­tained that were taken at the con­fer­ence, some peo­ple’s faces or en­tire bod­ies are redacted. When Prism ap­pealed the redac­tions, SPD said that the in­di­vid­u­als per­form un­der­cover po­lice work, and pub­lish­ing their pho­tos could put them at risk.

The Seattle Shield net­work was formed “with the goal of re­duc­ing pre-op­er­a­tional sur­veil­lance by ter­ror­ist or­ga­ni­za­tions,” wrote one SPD of­fi­cer in a 2012 email pre­vi­ously ob­tained by Mocek.

However, since its found­ing in 2009, it’s un­clear what the ul­ti­mate pub­lic ben­e­fit of the sys­tem is  or what its coun­tert­er­ror­ism bona fides might be. A Prism search of the SPD’s crime blot­ter shows that the de­part­ment has nei­ther men­tioned the Seattle Shield net­work pub­licly nor touted its use­ful­ness fol­low­ing an ar­rest.

The FBI Seattle did not re­spond to ques­tions from Prism about whether re­ports from the lo­cal Shield net­work had ever led to a ter­ror­ism ar­rest.

“FBI Seattle reg­u­larly par­tic­i­pates in meet­ings and work­ing groups with law en­force­ment part­ners, com­mu­nity mem­bers, and mem­bers of the pri­vate sec­tor,” Amy Alexander, a pub­lic af­fairs of­fi­cer at FBI Seattle, told Prism in an email. “At var­i­ous times, this has in­cluded Seattle Shield. While we can­not com­ment on spe­cific re­la­tion­ships or com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the FBI’s part­ner­ships are crit­i­cal to our mis­sion, and we rou­tinely share in­for­ma­tion with our part­ners at all lev­els, from ex­ec­u­tives to field agents work­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions to com­mu­nity out­reach events.”

“What did Hoover say? ‘I want every­one to be­lieve that there is an FBI agent hid­ing be­hind every mail­box.’ That’s what this list is do­ing. It’s cre­at­ing the panop­ti­con.Terry Albury, for­mer FBI agent

“What did Hoover say? ‘I want every­one to be­lieve that there is an FBI agent hid­ing be­hind every mail­box.’ That’s what this list is do­ing. It’s cre­at­ing the panop­ti­con.

“What did Hoover say? ‘I want every­one to be­lieve that there is an FBI agent hid­ing be­hind every mail­box,’” for­mer FBI agent Terry Albury told Prism. “That’s what this list is do­ing. It’s cre­at­ing the panop­ti­con.”

While serv­ing as an FBI agent, Albury was dis­gusted by how he felt the law was weaponized against vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties. In 2018 he was ar­rested and sen­tenced to prison over “draconian” charges, ac­cord­ing to the Knight First Amendment Institute, af­ter he be­gan leak­ing FBI doc­u­ments to The Intercept.

Seattle Theatre Group (STG), a non­profit that op­er­ates sev­eral live per­for­mance venues across the city, is part of the Seattle Shield net­work. In a state­ment to Prism, STG’s Senior Communications Manager Rachel Liuzzi wrote, “Our op­er­a­tions team works with the Seattle Shield net­work to re­ceive in­for­ma­tion that can help keep our venues and au­di­ences safe. We oc­ca­sion­ally call on the net­work for in­for­ma­tion and some­times di­rectly re­ceive in­for­ma­tion from it. The in­for­ma­tion we re­ceive is specif­i­cally re­lated to se­cu­rity con­cerns that may im­pact our venues and the safety and well be­ing of our au­di­ences when at­tend­ing per­for­mances.”

STG de­clined to share any sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­ity re­ports with Prism.

In ad­di­tion to mon­i­tor­ing protests, email no­ti­fi­ca­tions sent to Seattle Shield mem­bers pro­vide up­dates on traf­fic warn­ings, pri­vate ac­cess to SPD com­man­ders, and in­side in­for­ma­tion about SPD staffing.

One sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­ity re­port re­viewed by Prism from March 2025 de­tails a man claim­ing to be an elec­tri­cal sub­con­trac­tor try­ing to ac­cess an elec­tri­cal room at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. The mar­ket dis­trib­uted pho­tos of the man and a de­scrip­tion of the in­ci­dent over the Seattle Shield sys­tem. No po­lice re­port was made, and the man did not gain ac­cess to sen­si­tive ar­eas. The con­trac­tor the man claimed to work with told Prism that “by all in­di­ca­tions” the man was not one of their em­ploy­ees or con­trac­tors and that the con­trac­tor did “not have record of this pur­ported work or­der and be­lieve that this in­volved a van­dal or at­tempted im­poster.”

Seattle Shield email blasts have also in­cluded no­tice of dig­ni­tary travel and pri­vate meet­ings to re­view the city’s “Terrorism Outlook” for 2025. The SPD does not re­lease this in­for­ma­tion pub­licly.

One such email, sent out via the net­work’s mail­ing list on June 12, 2025, stated, “Immigration is cur­rently a con­tentious topic around the United States. As you all have prob­a­bly seen, there are many demon­stra­tions tak­ing place around the coun­try to in­clude Seattle. There has been a daily protest at the Federal Building this week where peo­ple are ex­press­ing their un­hap­pi­ness with the fed­eral gov­ern­ment.”

Following the protest, SPD asked Seattle Shield mem­bers to take mea­sures that would aim to pro­tect of­fi­cers from harm dur­ing fu­ture protests, such as look­ing for items around their prop­er­ties that could be used as “projectiles.”

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle, Shield mem­bers re­ceived reg­u­lar up­dates from the SPD, in­clud­ing that “the Department is work­ing hard to mit­i­gate the risks of vi­o­lence and prop­erty dam­age.” In ad­di­tion, the SPD asked Seattle Shield mem­bers to “review their in­ter­nal se­cu­rity video sys­tems re­ten­tion poli­cies to en­sure valu­able ev­i­dence of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties are re­tained/​saved. We are re­quest­ing that all sites re­tain any video from May 29th [2020] through a date (TBD).”

“Benefiting pri­vate eco­nomic in­ter­ests is ab­solutely one of the lead­ing fac­tors in cre­at­ing these groups and or­ga­ni­za­tions, and the pub­lic is all too happy to carry wa­ter for it,” Albury said.

The Seattle Shield net­work is “a larger pool of in­for­mants,” he added, “but they’re of­fi­cial in­for­mants be­cause now they have an as­so­ci­a­tion and a con­nec­tion, in the same way that an un­of­fi­cial in­for­mant is used off the books.” In this way, a sur­veil­lance sys­tem of in­for­mants op­er­ates openly, he ex­plained.

The Seattle Shield pro­gram is one com­po­nent within a mo­saic of net­works and con­trac­tual re­la­tion­ships the SPD has built with Seattle’s busi­ness com­mu­nity, where the stream of money, re­sources, spe­cial as­sis­tance, and in­for­ma­tion flows both ways.

Developing “partnerships with lo­cal com­pa­nies” is specif­i­cally iden­ti­fied within SPD’s Relational Policing Plan.

Another part of that mo­saic in­cludes the SPD’s con­trac­tual oblig­a­tions to the city’s 501(c)(6) cor­po­rate busi­ness league named DBIA Services, which re­quires off-duty cops to “address ci­vil­ity is­sues and il­le­gal street be­hav­iour that de­tracts from a pos­i­tive ex­pe­ri­ence” down­town, in­clud­ing petty crimes of poverty such as vi­o­la­tions of the city’s “sit and lie” or­di­nance, ag­gres­sive pan­han­dling, and pub­lic uri­na­tion.

Contracts be­tween the SPD and DBIA Services ob­tained by Prism show that off-duty SPD of­fi­cers “must ap­proach pub­lic safety through the lens of eco­nomic vi­tal­ity.”

Jennifer Casillas, vice pres­i­dent of pub­lic realm and am­bas­sador op­er­a­tions of Downtown Seattle Association, a sub­sidiary of DBIA Services, was a Seattle Shield mem­ber as of 2020, ac­cord­ing to the ros­ter ob­tained by Prism. She did not re­spond to sev­eral re­quests for com­ment.

James Sido, me­dia re­la­tions di­rec­tor for Downtown Seattle Association, wrote to Prism in an email, “We have re­ceived emails from Seattle Shield but there’s been no two-way cor­re­spon­dence.”

Seattle Shield mem­bers are also of­fered di­rect ac­cess to train­ing from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, housed un­der DHS, show­ing that fed­eral law en­force­ment re­sources are in­vested di­rectly in pri­vate busi­ness in­ter­ests that par­tic­i­pate in in­tel­li­gence col­lec­tion ac­tiv­i­ties.

Technology

Who man­ages the Seattle Shield data streams, web­site, servers, and the in­for­ma­tion pumped into the net­work is an open ques­tion. The SPD did not re­spond to nu­mer­ous ques­tions about how and where Seattle Shield in­tel­li­gence data is stored.

In 2011, ABM Security Services an­nounced that “it is aug­ment­ing Seattle Shield’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties by pro­vid­ing a se­cure plat­form that al­lows mem­bers of the as­so­ci­a­tion to share in­for­ma­tion— in­clud­ing pho­tographs and video clips—in real-time about po­ten­tial threats.”

“ABM Security Services de­vel­oped and is main­tain­ing the Seattle Shield ap­pli­ca­tion at no charge, though the Company is seek­ing to off­set some of the main­te­nance costs through a Department of Homeland Security grant,” the press re­lease con­tin­ued.

ABM did not re­spond to Prism’s mul­ti­ple re­quests for com­ment. White, the GSN pres­i­dent, told Prism that he’s not fa­mil­iar with ABM and that the GSN does not dic­tate, rec­om­mend, or pro­vide any tem­plates for lo­cal agen­cies to im­ple­ment for their own shield net­works.

According to an archived ver­sion of the Seattle Shield web­site, the net­work “uses a se­cure in­ter­net-based web­site to send our alerts.” NetSentinal, the web host­ing ser­vice used by the Seattle Shield, suf­fered a data breach in 2020, later dubbed BlueLeaks, com­pro­mis­ing the en­tire Seattle Shield mem­ber list, in­clud­ing their IP in­for­ma­tion, ad­dresses, and con­tact in­for­ma­tion. Members re­ceived a Seattle Shield bul­letin at the time, ob­tained by Prism, ad­vis­ing mem­bers not to down­load the BlueLeaks data trove.

Editorial Team:Sahar Fatima, Lead EditorLara Witt, Top EditorRashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

Recently I got an in­vi­ta­tion from an or­ga­ni­za­tion I re­spect, to a gath­er­ing of se­nior peo­ple, un­con­fer­ence for­mat. Yes, it’s mostly about AI. No, it does­n’t reek of boos­t­er­ism. My guess is that the dis­cus­sions would be rel­a­tively in­tel­li­gent and un­be­liever con­tri­bu­tions would be wel­come. I de­clined, be­cause it’s in the USA.

Here’s the text; maybe some­one in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion might find it use­ful.

Thanks to who­ever thought of me for the kind in­vi­ta­tion, which I must re­gret­fully de­cline.

I’m Canadian and as a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple feel­ing neg­a­tive about vis­it­ing a neigh­bor­ing coun­try whose leader has re­peat­edly threat­ened our sov­er­eignty and shown mas­sive dis­re­spect for our na­tion­hood. Particularly when that leader has fol­lowed up sim­i­lar state­ments about other na­tions with mil­i­tary ac­tion.

I could prob­a­bly work around that. But there’s also the is­sue of en­ter­ing the US; if I roll up at the bor­der and am asked to dis­close my so­cial me­dia out­put, there’s a sig­nif­i­cant risk of an ex­tremely neg­a­tive out­come. I have a fam­ily to sup­port and re­ally can’t af­ford that risk.

I still con­sider my­self a friend of your or­ga­ni­za­tion, and one with strong opin­ions about the sub­jects sched­uled for dis­cus­sion; my re­grets about hav­ing to de­cline are en­tirely sin­cere.

—Regards, Tim

By .

The opin­ions ex­pressed here are my own, and no other party nec­es­sar­ily agrees with them.

A full dis­clo­sure of my pro­fes­sional in­ter­ests is on the au­thor page.

I’m on Mastodon!

More than thir­teen years in, and I am still as ex­cited about build­ing this browser as I was on day one. Maybe more.

That ex­cite­ment comes from a gen­uine be­lief that the peo­ple who use Vivaldi de­serve a browser that takes them se­ri­ously.  We re­spect your  time, your pri­vacy, your pref­er­ences, your  in­tel­li­gence. Every re­lease we ship is an­other ex­pres­sion of that be­lief.

Vivaldi 8.0 is the biggest ex­pres­sion of that idea we have shipped in years. A new de­sign di­rec­tion that makes the browser feel more alive and more uni­fied than any ver­sion be­fore it.

In other words: there is more con­trol, more ca­pa­bil­ity, more choice. And a brand new look.

A new look for a new era

With 8.0, Vivaldi has a new look. We call it “Unified”.

We have ap­proached the Vivaldi in­ter­face less as a col­lec­tion of com­po­nents, and more as a lay­ered sys­tem. Previously, those lay­ers (tabs, tool­bars, pan­els and con­tent) have had sub­tle sep­a­ra­tions. This was use­ful, but also a bit frag­mented. With Unified, those bound­aries are re­moved.

All tool­bars now live on a sin­gle, con­tin­u­ous sur­face: a Unified frame that wraps the en­tire browser. Instead of stacked re­gions, every­thing is com­posed within the same vi­sual plane. That shift makes the in­ter­face feel more co­he­sive and eas­ier to read. Alignment be­comes more pre­cise, spac­ing more in­ten­tional, and in­ter­ac­tion more di­rect, be­cause el­e­ments no longer sit in iso­lated lay­ers.

When you pick a theme, it flows through every­thing. A dark theme is dark, all the way through. A warm theme car­ries that warmth into every cor­ner. All el­e­ments of the browser be­long to­gether in a way that im­me­di­ately feels… well … Unified.

It also changes how themes work.

With a sin­gle sur­face, your theme can flow across the en­tire win­dow. Backgrounds are no longer con­fined; they can ex­tend from the tab bar through pan­els and edges with­out in­ter­rup­tion. Wallpapers feel less like dec­o­ra­tion and more like part of the en­vi­ron­ment, es­pe­cially when com­bined with translu­cency and blur. From a sys­tem per­spec­tive, this re­duces com­plex­ity. Fewer lay­ers, fewer ex­cep­tions and a more con­sis­tent foun­da­tion to build on.

This is­n’t about mak­ing the browser look sim­pler. It’s about mak­ing the struc­ture be­hind it more co­her­ent. This makes every­thing you see feel like part of the same sys­tem.

You can see the new UI’s pos­si­bil­i­ties with our new de­fault themes, such as Zen, Soria Moria, Sunset Forest and Kawaii Clouds, and our up­dated light and dark themes.  If you can’t find some­thing that hits the right spot for de­fault, there are more than 7000 to choose from at themes.vi­valdi.net. And if you have built a cus­tom theme you love, you’re free to de­cide if you want the new look, or keep your own (Settings →Themes → Editor → Coloring mode). Of course; this is Vivaldi.

Start ex­actly where you need to be

One of the things that makes Vivaldi spe­cial is also one of the things that can feel like a lot on day one: the sheer range of set­tings you can con­fig­ure. If you have been us­ing Vivaldi for years, you have your setup ex­actly as you want it and you would not trade it for any­thing. If you are brand new, fig­ur­ing out where to start can be a real ques­tion.

Vivaldi 8.0 an­swers it with six pre­set lay­outs, avail­able right from on­board­ing (and from Settings → Appearance → Layout when­ever you feel like a change). Each one is a thought­fully cu­rated start­ing point.

Simple gives you a clean, fo­cused ex­pe­ri­ence: tabs on top, noth­ing in the way, every­thing ready to go. It is Vivaldi in its purest form and it is al­ready more ca­pa­ble than any­thing the main­stream browsers will of­fer.

Classic is the Vivaldi you know and love. Toolbar, pan­els, all the con­trols in their nat­ural places, now wear­ing the new Unified look. This is home for a lot of you, and it is as good as it has ever been.

Vertical Right is sim­i­lar to our clas­sic look, but for peo­ple who pre­fer to have their tabs on the right. You’ll find the URL field on top, and pan­els on the left, as usual.

Vertical Left puts your tabs and ad­dress bar on the left side of the screen. Once you try this on a wide mon­i­tor, it tends to be­come per­ma­nent. It uses your hor­i­zon­tal screen space in ways that a top tab bar sim­ply can­not. With Panels avail­able on hover from the right side of your screen, it changes how brows­ing feels.

Auto Hide is built for users who want the web to fill their en­tire screen. Your tool­bar, tab bar, panel, and ad­dress bar step aside while you read, watch, or work, and reap­pear the mo­ment your cur­sor reaches for any edge of the screen. It is edge to edge con­tent with full Vivaldi ca­pa­bil­ity sit­ting right be­hind it, and it is a way of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the web that the other browsers have not fig­ured out.

Bottom moves your tab bar and ad­dress bar to the bot­tom of the screen. Your eye trav­els down nat­u­rally as you read, and your nav­i­ga­tion is al­ready there wait­ing. More peo­ple work this way than you might ex­pect, and Vivaldi has al­ways been happy to ac­com­mo­date them.

Click on each of the lay­outs to make them big­ger:

Each of these lay­outs is a launch­pad, not a limit. With all the pow­er­ful fea­tures and tools in Vivaldi, you have every­thing you need to make the web work ex­actly the way you want it to.

Vivaldi has a tab man­age­ment sys­tem un­like any other browser. Tile as many pages as you want, just how you want. Use Follower Tab to ex­plore links from an ar­ti­cle with­out ever los­ing your place in it. Stack your tabs into named, colour-coded groups. Use the Tab Button to search every­thing at once: open tabs, synced tabs from your other de­vices, re­cently closed tabs. Your mail, your cal­en­dar, your notes, your read­ing list: all of it lives in­side Vivaldi, or­gan­ised on your terms, al­ways within reach.

Vivaldi is truly the browser that adapts to you. We’ve proven this with every re­lease. We even go as far as get­ting com­pletely out of your way. With UI Auto-hide, even the in­ter­face it­self knows when to let the con­tent take cen­tre stage. Vivaldi bends to how you work. It al­ways has and al­ways will.

This is Vivaldi. It al­ways has been.

We do not an­swer to in­vestors telling us which fea­tures to build. We do not track your be­hav­iour or treat your data as in­ven­tory. Other browsers are adding AI to de­cide what you see. Vivaldi adds tools that give you more power when de­cid­ing for your­self. That has al­ways been the dif­fer­ence. We build Vivaldi  be­cause we be­lieve you de­serve a bet­ter browser.

Download it to­day. Take your time with it. Come find us in the Forum if there is any­thing, we read every­thing.

As al­ways, thank you for be­ing part of the Vivaldi com­mu­nity. Together, we’re fight­ing for a bet­ter web, one re­lease at a time.

***

Changelog

Check the changelog with the full list of changes from Vivaldi 7.9 to 8.0.

[Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt while be­ing booed]

Jonah Peretti is very lucky. Buzzfeed—the vi­ral me­dia com­pany he founded 20 years ago and was once val­ued at $1.6 bil­lion—was run­ning out of cash when bil­lion­aire Byron Allen agreed to buy 52% of its shares. At the same time this new part­ner­ship was re­vealed, Peretti an­nounced he’d be step­ping down as CEO of Buzzfeed to serve in a new role as President of Buzzfeed AI. So Allen will con­tinue to bankroll the for­mer me­dia ti­tan’s ob­ses­sion, as he promises (without ev­i­dence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delu­sion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our re­spect.

Lately I’ve felt my­self rapidly rad­i­cal­iz­ing into what I can only call an anti-AI evan­ge­list. I’ve never been quiet about my feel­ings on the sub­ject—I even wrote a screed about it last month—but as more and more ex­am­ples show how eas­ily it can be used un­eth­i­cally, I’m not just skep­ti­cal. I’m against it.

I would­n’t call this a par­tic­u­larly bold stance, given the front page of to­day’s Wall Street Journal de­clares an “AI Rebellion,” not­ing that pub­lic opin­ion on the sub­ject is sour­ing “at break­neck speed.” What is novel, I think, is rec­og­niz­ing that peo­ple who loathe AI and the way it’s be­ing foisted upon so­ci­ety are an ac­tual con­stituency to be taken se­ri­ously. I fig­ure that if bil­lion­aires and brands are go­ing to try to beat us into AI sub­mis­sion, it’s only fair we get to take a few swings. We’re told that if we don’t use AI then we’ll get left be­hind, but what if we’d like to leave the AI boost­ers be­hind in­stead? It’s time to give a voice to those who don’t view AI as an in­evitabil­ity but a li­a­bil­ity.

Now is our time.

The sound­track of the past week or so has been the boos of grad­u­at­ing col­lege stu­dents as out-of-touch adults try to tell them that they need to em­brace AI or else. Perhaps most promi­nent were the boos of University of Arizona grad­u­ates as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt told them, “The ques­tion is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The ques­tion is whether you will help shape ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.”

These grads, ac­cord­ing to Schmidt, have no agency, which was con­firmed by this com­ment a few min­utes later: “When some­one of­fers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.” What Schmidt does­n’t get is that these young peo­ple have al­ready been forced onto the ship and there aren’t enough seats.

A few days be­fore Schmidt, record com­pany CEO Scott Borchetta took the stage at Middle Tennessee State University’s com­mence­ment to ex­toll the virtues of AI. When the stu­dents, whose job prospects have shrunken sig­nif­i­cantly be­cause of the AI bub­ble, booed Borchetta, he shot back: “Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool.”

Sage words from a man re­port­edly worth $450 mil­lion.

It may seem cal­lous for a com­mence­ment speaker to re­spond to grad­u­ates’ ex­is­ten­tial dread with “deal with it,” but bil­lion­aires and tech com­pa­nies have been feed­ing us this mes­sage for a while now. You may not like AI, they preach, but be­cause of choices we are mak­ing for you, life will be in­creas­ingly un­liv­able with­out it. Yet while they try to force-feed us this bleakly in­evitable fu­ture, ac­tu­ally ex­ist­ing AI keeps mak­ing the hu­mans who use it look like id­iots.

On Tuesday, the New York Times re­ported on a new book called “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” by me­dia ex­ec­u­tive Steven Rosenbaum. He read­ily copped to hav­ing “used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude dur­ing the re­search, writ­ing and edit­ing process.” But he did­n’t dis­close—likely be­cause he did­n’t re­al­ize it!— that his book con­tained mis­at­trib­uted or com­pletely fab­ri­cated quotes cre­ated by those very tools. Only when re­porters be­gan to ques­tion the quotes did Rosenbaum promise to “investigate” how they’d been in­cluded.

But Rosenbaum was un­re­pen­tant. He told the Times that if this de­ba­cle “serves as a warn­ing about the risks of AI-assisted re­search and ver­i­fi­ca­tion, that is why I wrote the book.” And he went on to say: “These AI er­rors do not, in fact, di­min­ish the larger ques­tions that the book raises about truth, trust and AI and its im­pact on so­ci­ety, democ­racy and ed­i­to­r­ial.”

Ronsebaum’s big whoop­sie is cer­tainly a warn­ing, but not in the way he thinks. He him­self is the warn­ing; a cau­tion­ary tale about re­ly­ing so heav­ily on a flawed tech­nol­ogy that it com­pletely un­der­mines your le­git­i­macy. The er­rors may not di­min­ish some of the book’s larger ques­tions, but they di­min­ish the value of the book it­self. If you can’t make the ef­fort to ver­ify the con­tents of your book, then why should any­one make an ef­fort to read it?

Two other lit­er­ary AI-crises un­folded Tuesday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But also po­ten­tially a sign that AI use has reached the crit­i­cal mass bil­lion­aires hoped for. Only, in­stead of mak­ing things bet­ter, it’s just made them stu­pider.

One of the crises in­volved the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a pres­ti­gious an­nual fic­tion award, and the win­ning sto­ries. When this year’s win­ners were pub­lished on­line by UK-based lit­er­ary mag­a­zine Granta, one im­me­di­ately aroused sus­pi­cion that it was partly AI-generated. Some, per­haps to sar­don­ically prove a point, ran it through AI that claims to de­tect the pres­ence of AI. Later, Granta’s pub­lisher ad­mit­ted to do­ing the same thing. “We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated,” the state­ment reads. “The re­sponse was long, con­clud­ing that it was ‘almost cer­tainly not pro­duced un­aided by a hu­man’.”

But the use of AI on AI only caused more con­fu­sion. “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an in­stance of AI pla­gia­rism — we don’t yet know, and per­haps we never will know,” the pub­lisher wrote. For a well-re­spected pub­lisher to sim­ply throw up its hands and say “perhaps we never will know,” deeply ran­kled some hu­man writ­ers, to say the least.

The other scan­dal sur­rounded Nobel lau­re­ate Olga Tokarczuk’s ad­mis­sion that she used AI in her writ­ing process, clar­i­fy­ing that she uses “artificial in­tel­li­gence on the same prin­ci­ples as most peo­ple in the world — I treat it as a tool that al­lows faster doc­u­ment­ing and check­ing of facts.” The ca­su­al­ness with which she men­tioned it dur­ing an ear­lier in­ter­view in­di­cated she was­n’t par­tic­u­larly tor­tured about us­ing it.

“Often I just ask the ma­chine, ‘darling, how could we de­velop this beau­ti­fully?’” Tokarczuk re­port­edly said, per a trans­la­tion from Polish. “Even though I know about hal­lu­ci­na­tions and many fac­tual er­rors in the al­go­rithms in terms of eco­nom­ics and hard data, I have to add that in lit­er­ary fic­tion this tech­nol­ogy is an ad­van­tage of un­be­liev­able pro­por­tion.”

This brings up the idea I’ve seen pushed by other writ­ers who openly used AI and say this tech­nol­ogy is merely like a sour­dough starter, cre­at­ing the con­di­tions for some­thing to be made where there was once noth­ing. The prob­lem arises when you don’t know where the starter ends and the cre­ative process be­gins. And can any­thing truly novel be cre­ated by a tech­nol­ogy that feeds on what al­ready ex­ists?

[Image from a 2025 Nature mag­a­zine study that was re­tracted in part be­cause of this “AI-generated fig­ure con­tain­ing non­sense to demon­strate the frame­work.”]

To un­der­stand the cru­sade for, and in­creas­ingly against, AI, one must re­gret­tably log into LinkedIn. Originally known as a so­cial me­dia plat­form for job search­ing and pro­fes­sional net­work­ing, it’s mor­phed pri­mar­ily into a place where tech evan­ge­lists as­sert su­premacy by loudly and fre­quently list­ing out the ways they har­ness tech­nol­ogy to achieve peak per­for­mance. None of the posts read like some­thing an ac­tual hu­man would say, and I would guess the peo­ple post­ing this shit don’t talk like that in real life. But it’s not real life. It’s LinkedIn. A haven for syco­phants to gain val­i­da­tion for their orig­i­nal­ity all while say­ing the same things as every­one else. Typically I scroll through for amuse­ment, and some­times post to pro­mote my 100% hu­man-made work.

While LinkedIn may seem like an im­pen­e­tra­ble space for AI skep­tics and out­right haters like me, my pas­sive scrolling has some­what con­firmed what the WSJ la­beled a “rebellion.” One trend I no­ticed a month or two back is that mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als, TED talk­ers and com­mu­ni­ca­tions gu­rus alike have started call­ing out what they see as easy tells for AI-generated writ­ing.

At first, I took it as a hope­ful sign that AI use was­n’t go­ing com­pletely unchecked. After all, ac­cord­ing to a Pew study from September, “U.S. adults are gen­er­ally pes­simistic about AI’s ef­fect on peo­ple’s abil­ity to think cre­atively and form mean­ing­ful re­la­tion­ships,” with 53% say­ing AI will make it worse, and 16% say­ing it will both of those things bet­ter. But af­ter read­ing enough of these posts, I came to re­al­ize peo­ple on LinkedIn weren’t mad oth­ers were us­ing AI; they were mad peo­ple were be­ing so sloppy about it, not even both­er­ing to mas­sage the ma­chine’s lan­guage to con­ceal their process.

And of course with most trends, there’s a back­lash to peo­ple call­ing out AI. One de­fender called the pop­u­lar groundswell against AI slop “the new McCarthyism.” Some of these posts about AI polic­ing are im­bued with a sense of out­right be­trayal. How dare you draw at­ten­tion to an un­eth­i­cal short­cut that we all use, even if some of us are bet­ter at us­ing it than oth­ers. How dare you let peo­ple see your writ­ing is ac­tu­ally just two LLMs in a trench coat. Again they’re not mad that peo­ple use it: they’re mad that peo­ple are catch­ing on.

But while I took men­tal notes on what I was ob­serv­ing, I also felt a lack of rep­re­sen­ta­tion for true, pro­found, and gut­tural loathing of AI. The peo­ple like me who have only the vaguest idea of what de­fines AI, but ex­tremely spe­cific ex­am­ples of why it sucks. I’m not a hater based on vibes. I’m a hater based on facts. And those facts de­serve as much re­spect as the bil­lion­aires who con­tinue to dump money into los­ing en­ter­prises.

[My new and im­proved LinkedIn header]

A not-in­signif­i­cant part of my frus­tra­tion with the AI ethos sat­u­rat­ing LinkedIn is that it in­creas­ingly serves only one, nar­row vi­sion of suc­cess. It’s the suc­cess that comes only to the or­ga­nized, the ef­fi­cient and the hy­per-op­ti­mized. And above all, to the deeply cer­tain.

But as some­one who’s built a busi­ness my­self, the one thing I can be cer­tain about is that there is ab­solutely an­other way. You don’t have to be part of the grind­set or be a girl­boss or a so­ciopath or use short­cuts to be suc­cess­ful. You don’t have to out­source think­ing to a ma­chine to demon­strate you un­der­stand the fu­ture. You will only be and do those things if what you’re ac­tu­ally seek­ing is power.

“People hate AI,” the CEO of an AI-infrastructure con­sult­ing firm said on a pod­cast, per the Wall Street Journal. “AI is less pop­u­lar than ICE. AI is less pop­u­lar than politi­cians.” And much like ICE, AI has sunk its claws into com­mu­ni­ties that don’t want it.

Despite the bray­ing of the tech elite, we still have agency. We still have a choice.  Players with many bil­lions at stake have a vested in­ter­est in re­mov­ing your agency, and re­claim­ing it hurts their bot­tom line. There’s no way to say for cer­tain who will be right about AI in the end, but the cur­rent ev­i­dence points to­wards dis­as­ter. And it’s safe to ac­knowl­edge it.