EP 09Jun 9, 2026 · 99 minNo Jargon Required
The White House just signed an order that lets the federal government test the most powerful AI models up to 30 days before you can touch them. The labs said yes. Real national security, or the backdoor frontier labs were begging for? We make the call.
Signal or Noise
The week’s AI headlines, filtered.
- SIGNALTrump's frontier-model executive order, a voluntary 30-day government early-access window, with the NSA deciding which models qualify
- SIGNALGitHub Copilot flips to token billing on June 1, and developers report bills jumping 10x to 50x
- SIGNALMicrosoft's MAI-Code-1-Flash and Google's $100 dev tier crash the AI coding party Anthropic has owned
- SIGNALChatGPT crosses 1 billion monthly users, and why the real story is Claude growing 640%
- SIGNALAnthropic calls for a global pause on frontier AI, and the 80% of its own code now written by Claude
No Jargon Required
the three words on every AI invoice, explained for anyone who signs off on the bill.
Tokens, and why your AI bill went usage-based
Inference vs training, and what "inference-efficient" actually buys you
Evals and benchmarks, and why the leaderboard is lying to you
Hot takes
Two opinions, no disclaimers.
Oscar“The executive order is not about safety. It is a distribution deal with a 30-day government waiting room on every frontier release.”
Matt“The Copilot billing meltdown is the best thing to happen to engineering leaders this year. The meter was always running. Now you can see it.”