The day's stories reveal a widening gap between who controls AI infrastructure and who bears its costs. The Army's consolidation of 120 procurement actions into a single $20B Anduril contract signals how defense spending is concentrating capability in fewer hands, while Meta's reported 20% layoffs expose the brutal math underneath AI's infrastructure arms race: massive capex requires headcount cuts to justify the burn. Meanwhile, ChatGPT's new app integrations show OpenAI moving aggressively into the transaction layer where it can observe and influence user behavior at scale, even as North Korean operatives use similar AI tools to impersonate workers and drain European companies, and as research confirms that users trust AI-generated summaries despite a 60% hallucination rate. The pattern is clear: whoever builds the infrastructure and owns the interfaces controls the leverage, the data flows, and the margin. Builders with direct user contact are consolidating power. Everyone else is either cutting costs to fund someone else's advantage or getting exploited by it.
Sloane Duvall