Three regulatory actions landed inside twenty-four hours, in three jurisdictions, aimed at three different problems. What they have in common is that none of them used a statute written for the technology in question. The FCC’s ban on foreign advanced robotic devices covers any new ground-based, software-controlled wireless robot weighing more than 4.4 pounds. Because the threshold is defined by mass and locomotion rather than by capability, the rule reaches warehouse automation platforms, inspection robots, delivery machines, and consumer robot vacuums alike.

In the fourth quarter Microsoft’s Anthropic investment produced a $3.2 billion gain while its OpenAI position was marked down by roughly $600 million, against a $5 billion gain on that same OpenAI position for the full year. Two frontier lab stakes, held by one company, moving $3.8 billion in opposite directions inside ninety days. There is no operating business inside Microsoft that swings that hard that fast, which makes the other income line the most volatile input in the model and the least analyzed.

I’ve been dismissive of the line that AI would create more jobs than it destroys. It always sounded like something you say to a select committee — technically unfalsifiable, emotionally reassuring, and never accompanied by a name or a wage. I assumed the people saying it couldn’t produce a single worker who was better off. They can now. It’s just nobody they were talking about. OpenAI, Google, Meta, and BlackRock are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, at some of the highest pay the construction trades have ever seen.