An AI store manager recommended firing one of its own employees — and a human signed it off. That is not the exception. That is the shape of the next ten years. This is the week AI stopped just advising us and started deciding about us: who gets fired, who counts as a child, and — if one report holds up — who gets shot at.
🧹 01:21 — The AI boss that fired a human. Luna runs a real shop in San Francisco — three-year lease, $7,500 a month, real payroll. It wrote its own attendance policy, forgot it for months, and needed a human engineer to tell it to search its own memory. Then it recommended parting ways. The staff are legally employed by Andon Labs, because an AI cannot be an employer. And the moment I actually got excited about: a leave request answered in one second, and answered wrong.
🔓 06:05 — ChatGPT decides who’s a kid. Not a passport, not an ID — around two thousand behavioural signals. Lauren Jonas of OpenAI: “If we predict you’re under 18, this becomes your default experience.” For two years these products were built to feel human. Now they’re engineering the intimacy back out — and shipping it everywhere except Europe, because Articles 22 and 8 say you do not profile a child. That delay is not a technical problem. It’s a legal opinion.
🛸 10:52 — The drone that chose its own target. Terminator mode is one source and unconfirmed — but Swarmer is Wall Street Journal-reported and already in combat: the operator picks the search area, and then, in its CEO’s words, “the drones then take over,” deciding the exact moment to release. Two million hours of Ukrainian combat video — 228 years — is training it. Its founder calls that “food for the AI.” And Helsing is in Munich, an hour from where I live.
🧠 15:10 — Google’s institutional memory walks out. Hassabis moves up, a Nobel laureate goes to Anthropic, Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years to found Discovery Loop — and Google invests in it. You’re leaving my company to build a startup? Here, have some money for your startup. Watch whether the next Gemini ships on time. That tells you more than any org chart.
🇧🇷 18:43 — Brazil: the Uber driver who reached a hundred million people. Daniel Santos built an AI grandmother, Dona Maria. 700,000 followers. A hundred million views. About $200 a month — plus $20 courses teaching people how to remove watermarks. Brazil banned political deepfakes in 2024 and never defined the word. Not a Russian troll farm, not Meta, not a billion-dollar consultancy. An Uber driver with AI tools.
🇦🇺 22:03 — Australia sends the bill. Want to build a large data centre here? Go ahead — but you must put at least as much energy into the grid as you take out, and you pay for the extra water. Not a principle. An invoice. Albanese: “It is not our goal to try and legislate for every possible eventuality or risk.” Compare that to a hundred articles of EU AI Act — and to Nvidia backstopping $105 billion in Ohio.
🎯 24:48 — Three things for Monday, and the close. Write down which decisions your AI may never make alone. Find your synthetic content before someone else weaponises it. And run a small open-weight model on one laptop, offline, on safe data.
When AI only advised, a human always made the call. So don’t only ask whether the AI can make the decision. Ask who answers for it when it’s wrong — and whether they can actually do anything about it.
AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious, stay human.
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