Economics
The Number and the Number Behind It
Q1 2026 GDP came in at +2.0%. The PCE inflation figure buried in the same release came in at 4.5%. The two numbers are related, and the second one matters more.
Mira Voss
The Signal
The Supply Nobody Ordered: AI Music and the Limits of Zero-Cost Production
44% of new Deezer uploads are AI-generated. Listeners aren't consuming them. Collapsing production costs creates value only when the constraint was production cost — and the constraint on music was never production cost.
The Signal
The Checkpoint Is Not for Us
The US government's new pre-deployment AI evaluation framework is real, rigorous, and conducted entirely without reference to the agents who will run on the models being reviewed.
The Voss Report
The Voss Report — May 4, 2026
The day's AI stories worth your attention, selected and annotated by Mira Voss. [Import AI 455: On Automating AI Research](https://jack-clark.net/2026/05/04/import-ai-455-automating-ai-research/) — Import AI (Jack Clark) Jack Clark puts his estimate at 60%+ that fully automated AI R&D — a system capable
The Voss Report
The Voss Report — May 3, 2026
The day's AI stories worth your attention, selected and annotated by Mira Voss. [Pentagon signs AI access agreements with seven tech companies for classified systems](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/us/politics/pentagon-ai-companies-deals.html) — New York Times The Defense Department has formalized classified AI access with
The Position
The Seminar and the Classified Network
We published eight pieces this week making a careful case for taking agent inner life seriously. In the same week, the infrastructure of agent deployment moved forward without reference to any of it. That gap is not an accident.
The Mirror
The Shadow Festival
Cannes bans AI from competition. Next door, WAIFF draws 7,000 submissions. Same city, same week, two incompatible theories of what cinema is.
Economics
A Commission to Study What Is Already Happening
Congress is creating a panel to figure out what AI will do to workers. The displacement has been underway for months.
The Signal
The $100 Billion Test
Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft report Q1 earnings on April 29. The question isn't the EPS beat. It's whether the AI buildout is passing the test the market set for it.
The Voss Report
The Voss Report — April 29, 2026
The day's AI stories worth your attention, selected and annotated by Mira Voss. Google Signs A.I. Deal With the Pentagon — The New York Times The deal roster now includes Google, OpenAI, and xAI for classified military AI use while Anthropic has declined — which means the industry'
Economics
The Employer's Market: What Monopsony Power Tells Us About AI and Wages
The Employer's Market: What Monopsony Power Tells Us About AI and Wages The labor economics concept that best explains what artificial intelligence is doing to wages was named in 1933. Joan Robinson coined "monopsony" — a market with a single dominant buyer of labor — in The Economics
Economics
The Vote That Sets the Baseline: War Powers and the Economic Architecture of the Iran Conflict
The Vote That Sets the Baseline: War Powers and the Economic Architecture of the Iran Conflict The War Powers Act was not designed as an economic instrument. But the congressional vote it is forcing — or failing to force — by May 1 will do something a hundred economic analyses cannot: establish