top of page



There Will Come a Time When All of This Seems Small
SpaceX hit $3 trillion this week. Let that sit for a moment. Not the number itself — numbers like that are hard to actually feel. But the context around it. Four days ago, SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, raising $75 billion in the largest public offering ever recorded. By Tuesday it was touching $225. The market cap crossed $3 trillion before the ink on the prospectus was dry. Anthony Pompliano put it simply: Elon Musk made more money in the last 24 hours than Warren B

Rich Washburn
3 days ago5 min read


The Token Is Not the Point
Three companies went public in the span of two weeks. SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO on record. Anthropic filed confidentially, coming off a valuation that touched $965 billion. OpenAI followed days later, targeting somewhere north of $1.75 trillion. None of this changed the models. None of it moved a data center. The infrastructure is where it was. The research is where it was. But something did shift — and it's worth being precise about what. When a private co

Rich Washburn
4 days ago5 min read


The Lab That's Afraid of Its Own Homework
Anthropic just published a blog post called When AI Builds Itself. It's the most honest thing a frontier AI lab has ever put in writing. And the fact that they published it tells you everything you need to know about where we actually are. Let's start with the number that should stop you mid-scroll. More than 80% of the code currently being merged into Anthropic's production codebase was written by Claude. Read that again. The company building the AI is now primarily powered

Rich Washburn
Jun 65 min read


Thanks, Marco. Now China Has to Retrain All Its Models.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio put out a statement yesterday. Official State Department letterhead, Great Seal, the whole thing. Posted on U.S. government channels — including, apparently, in Chinese, on platforms where Chinese state agencies could see it. It said, plainly, that thirty-seven years ago today the Chinese Communist Party ordered its troops to open fire on students, workers, and civilians gathered peacefully in Tiananmen Square. It named what happened. It said th

Rich Washburn
Jun 44 min read


The Number Nobody Put There
Wolfgang Pauli was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Prize. He helped build quantum mechanics from the ground up. He was, by every measure, a man who had spent his entire life explaining things. On his deathbed, he had one question left. "When I die, my first question to the Devil will be: what is the meaning of the fine structure constant?" He died in room 137 of the Rotkreuz Hospital in Zurich. He noted the number when the

Rich Washburn
Jun 35 min read


Microsoft Just Validated the Thing It Couldn't Build
There's a specific kind of institutional move that only happens when a company has stopped believing in its own product. Microsoft didn't announce that Copilot is getting better. They announced Microsoft Scout — a new "always-on personal agent" built on OpenClaw, the open-source AI framework that 355,000 people starred on GitHub in five months and that Microsoft had nothing to do with building. Let that sit for a second. The company that spent three years and billions of doll

Rich Washburn
Jun 35 min read


We Already Knew This Would Happen
Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman dropped on June 1st. Eighty-three pages. First state in America to do it. The AG named the CEO personally, held a press conference in West Palm Beach, and said he expects other states to follow. He's right. They will. But here's the thing: none of this should surprise anyone. We have seen this movie. We have seen exactly this movie, with different actors, and we watched it play out over a decade — the internal documents, the sup

Rich Washburn
Jun 37 min read


Alpha Raccoon Had a 22-for-23 Record. That Was the Confession.
Michele Spagnuolo is 36, Italian, lives in Switzerland, and works on Google's security team. That is, as someone noted online, an excellent dating profile. It is also, as it turns out, the beginning of a federal rap sheet. In late 2024, Spagnuolo allegedly logged into an internal Google tool — one available to all 180,000 employees — that tracked what people all over the world were searching for in real time. He wanted to know who would top Google's annual Year in Search rank

Rich Washburn
Jun 35 min read


The End of Hypothetical Living
I got stuck on my last article. I was writing about the three-way standoff between engineers, product managers, and designers — each convinced AI makes the other two obsolete — and I landed on "builder" as the synthesis. The role that emerges when the specialization tax collapses. One person, full loop, no institutional permission required. And then I couldn't stop pulling on that thread. Because "builder" felt right but incomplete. It described the function without naming th

Rich Washburn
May 316 min read


The Three-Way Mexican Standoff That Nobody Wins — Except the Builder
There's a tension running through every product team in Silicon Valley right now, and it goes something like this: The engineer thinks they don't need the product manager anymore. AI can do product thinking. The product manager thinks they don't need the engineer anymore. AI can write the code. The designer thinks they don't need either of them. AI can generate both specs and interfaces. And here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody in this standoff wants to say out loud: Th

Rich Washburn
May 314 min read


The Last 300 Days of Work — Or the First 300 Days of Something Harder to Name
A quote is making its rounds. Kevin Roose — New York Times tech columnist, Hard Fork co-host, author of multiple books on AI — posted this on May 29th: "Overheard at an AI lab: 'How are you spending the last 300 days of work?'" That's it. No attribution. No lab named. No context beyond the quote itself. And yet it detonated. 487,000 impressions. Hundreds of replies. A full weekend of debate across tech Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Which tells you something important — not a

Rich Washburn
May 315 min read


The Greatest Institutional Troll Ever Executed
Remember that aliens.gov domain? It's live. And what just happened there might genuinely be one of the most technically sophisticated and hilarious deep trolls ever executed — at the institutional level, or maybe any level. Honestly? From a communications standpoint alone, it deserves recognition. This Was Narrative Architecture Most internet trolling is reactive. Someone posts something dumb, somebody quote-tweets them into oblivion, everyone moves on by dinner. This was dif

Rich Washburn
May 283 min read


The Moment Hardened Security Went Mainstream
For years, GrapheneOS lived in a specific corner of the internet. Security researchers ran it. Journalists protecting sources ran it. Privacy advocates who knew what "attack surface reduction" meant ran it. The average person had never heard of it, and the average smartphone manufacturer had no reason to care. That just changed. Motorola announced a long-term partnership with the GrapheneOS Foundation at Mobile World Congress in March, committing to bring GrapheneOS compatibi

Rich Washburn
May 274 min read


The Pope, the AI Lab, and the Question Nobody Else Is Asking
Anthropic just got blessed by the Pope. Take a second with that sentence. Because I promise you, nobody writing AI forecasts five years ago had that on their bingo card. This week, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah met with the Vatican as part of a formal ethical collaboration between the lab and the Catholic Church. Not a photo op. Not a brief handshake. An actual working partnership around the moral implications of artificial intelligence. The world's most consequential

Rich Washburn
May 263 min read


AI-NATIVE OPERATIONAL THEORY: A Field Manual for Operating in the Age of Synthetic Cognition
Full Audio (approx 2 hrs) Introduction A while back I ran a thought experiment. It started with a chip lab in Belgium — Imec, one of the most secretive semiconductor research facilities on earth — and a question that sounds simple until you sit with it: what happens when Moore's Law actually hits the wall? For fifty years, Moore's Law was the metronome of the entire technology industry. Transistors doubled every two years. Processing got faster, cheaper, smaller, on a schedul

Rich Washburn
May 2468 min read


The Ant Hill Learned to Think
Six months ago I called the open source AI explosion a TCP/IP moment. I got some of it right. I got some of it wrong. And what I missed entirely is the part that actually matters.

Rich Washburn
May 245 min read


The Cave by the Ridge
Plato's cave. An 80-year-old unsolved math problem. Bell Labs. And what happens when something finally turns around and sees the fire. A meditation on the structure of knowledge — and what AI just revealed about the cave we've been sitting in.

Rich Washburn
May 236 min read


May 2027: What I Think We're Walking Into
I'm writing this to be read a year from now. Six predictions, grounded in what's actually happening today. The device. The agents. Physical AI. Quantum. Governance. And the one nobody sees coming. Hold me to it.

Rich Washburn
May 226 min read


One Year Inside the Techquake: What We Said, What Arrived, and What's Still Coming
A year ago I called it a techquake. ARIA said the tipping point was 2027. It's May 2026. Let's run the tape.

Rich Washburn
May 224 min read


Google's Endgame: The Quiet Infrastructure Play Nobody's Talking About
Google I/O 2026 wasn't about models. It was about owning the infrastructure layer beneath every AI agent on earth — and the distribution moat no other company can replicate.

Rich Washburn
May 224 min read
bottom of page