Hard Fork

@hardfork · Podcast

Latest segments

• Microsoft AI buyouts, 2026-10-30
  Puts a number on the buyout take-up
  Puts a number on the take-up: Microsoft expects 3 to 5 percent of its roughly 230,000 employees to accept, so at most about 3,000 departures. Frames it as the latest in rolling tech layoffs and flags Microsoft's line about giving employees control.
• Black October, 2026-10-30
  Recaps Black October and points to a defender's essay
  Recaps Black October for a general audience - what PHP is, why the flaw was so wide, and whether AI will find more bugs than it fixes. The one new thread is a pointer to Joshua Sachs's essay arguing defenders still have a window.
• California's Proposition 40 Wealth Tax, 2026-10-30
  Sizes the $333 million fight against Prop 40
  Lays out the measure and the money against it: a $333 million opposition committee funded mostly by Sergey Brin, with John Doerr and Patrick Collison brought in, and Planned Parenthood as a partner because the one-time tax is not sustainable funding.
• Data center backlash, 2026-10-30
  Reports from Wisconsin and Michigan primaries
  Reports from Wisconsin and Michigan on how data centers played in primaries, then sizes the issue nationally: AI ranks around 22nd of 39 issues in polls, and 1 to 5 percent of voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania name data centers first. Adds Abbott's pseudo-moratorium on grid connections.
• Gebru on AI doom funders, 2026-10-30
  Ties safety philosophy to early EA backers
  Ties Anthropic's safety philosophy to its early funding, naming Sam Bankman-Fried and Jaan Tallinn as EA-linked backers, then argues later VCs treat it as a SaaS business. It stays inside the funding-pattern frame Gebru already put on the record.
• Anthropic's public benefit fund, 2026-10-30
  Walks through the five-class governance setup
  Recaps Anthropic's origin as an OpenAI safety spinout and walks through the governance: five stock classes, founders holding 50.1 percent of votes, a trust controlling a majority of board seats, and a secret successor list. A retelling of what the S-1 coverage already put on the record.
• Anthropic's $2T IPO slip, 2026-10-30
  Reads the S-1's model-welfare clause
  Reads the odd corners of the S-1's risk factors: the passive-voice catastrophic-risk warning Matt Levine flagged, and a model-welfare clause that could delay deprecating older models, credited to Joe Weisenthal. Notes the founders' voting control would blunt any activist push on it.
• Anthropic's $2T IPO slip, 2026-10-30
  Adds the 44 percent Q3 growth figure
  Erin Griffith puts a number on the Q3 deceleration: 44 percent growth, down from the first half's Claude Code surge, with token-spend pullback and OpenAI and open source competition as the causes. She frames why the stated reason matters for the wider AI buildout.
• Anthropic's $2T IPO slip, 2026-10-30
  Recaps the headline S-1 numbers
  Walks through the S-1's headline numbers: the $80 billion net loss as convertible-debt accounting, a first-half operating loss of $600 to $700 million against $16.3 billion in revenue, and the non-cancelable compute contracts underneath it all. A plain retelling of figures already on the record.
• Anthropic's $2T IPO slip, 2026-10-30
  Frames the filing as a first full look
  Frames the S-1 as the first full look at a pure-play LLM company's business model, with investors nervous last week and calmer now that leaked numbers have circulated. Sets up the document without adding anything to the record.
• Anthropic's $2T IPO slip, 2026-10-30
  Previews the IPO as an AI bubble referendum
  Opens the episode by framing the Anthropic IPO as a referendum on the AI bubble: $100 billion at a $2 trillion valuation, or a lot less and a market tailspin. Recaps the filing and its existential-risk language without adding to the record.
• Theranos documentary backlash, 2026-10-23
  Dates the fraud to the fall 2013 Walgreens launch
  Carreyrou, the reporter who broke Theranos, reads the documentary's 'miscommunication' defense and the Abbott and Costello scene as calculated. He dates the full-fledged fraud to fall 2013, when Theranos went live in Walgreens on hacked, double-diluted Siemens machines.
• Theranos documentary backlash, 2026-10-23
  Answers whether Balwani was behind it all
  Carreyrou answers a listener's devil's-advocate question about whether Balwani was behind it all. He points to thousands of texts the government obtained from 2009 to 2016 showing the pair ran Theranos as a couple, and notes Holmes held roughly 90 percent voting control as CEO and chairman.
• Theranos documentary backlash, 2026-10-23
  Tells the whistleblower backstory the film leaves out
  Brings in Carreyrou to tell the whistleblower backstory the documentary leaves out: how Rosendorff pointed him to Tyler Shultz, Shultz's failed warnings to Holmes and his grandfather, the ambush at the Shultz house, and Holmes's appeal to Murdoch to kill the story.
• Theranos documentary backlash, 2026-10-23
  Cites the one-drop promise and the Minilab mix-up
  Carreyrou answers a listener question on the strongest fraud evidence: Holmes promised hundreds of tests from one drop while the Edison did 12, all voided. He adds that the device Holmes unpacks in the film is the unfinished Minilab, not the Edison.
• Theranos documentary backlash, 2026-10-23
  Reports the Bad Blood sellout and new printing
  Carreyrou, back on the show, describes the documentary's viral reception: Bad Blood is sold out in New York bookstores and Knopf has printed another 10,000 copies. He also says the film is built around whether Holmes knew she and Evans would profit from the A24 deal.
• Musk floats SpaceX-Tesla merger, 2026-10-23
  Weighs Musk's merger talk against SolarCity
  Picks up Musk's confirmation on SpaceX's earnings call that independent director committees are exploring a Tesla merger, and reads it through his SolarCity track record and his thinner control over Tesla.
• CoreWeave debt distress, 2026-10-23
  Frames CoreWeave as the AI debt canary
  Rob Copeland frames CoreWeave as the canary for AI infrastructure financing, putting a fresh figure on the record: about $70 billion in liabilities across 51 data centers, with debt service costs roughly doubling. Ken Griffin's bubble remark this week is new to the file.
• OpenAI office bugging arrest, 2026-10-16
  Recaps the arrest and compares a past case
  Recaps the arrest and OpenAI's statement that it used its own models to identify the device and the employee, then compares the case with a past Twitter spy prosecution that went to trial. A retelling that stays inside the week's coverage.
• You Can See Everything, 2026-10-16
  Reads Holmes's wardrobe against the trial texts
  Reads Holmes's wardrobe in the film against the turtleneck era and lands on the photography-studio scene, where she cries and blames her entourage for pushing her into the spotlight; Carreyrou calls it a brazen lie and points to trial texts showing she sought the coverage.