Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- Anthropic Again. Well, Fable was fun well it lasted: last Friday the Trump administration slapped export controls on the model, limiting access to U.S. citizens, leaving Anthropic no choice in the short term but to make the model unavailable. We still don’t entirely know what happened, although Occam’s Razor suggests that people still don’t really understand how AI works. Ultimately, however, the power and problem of Anthropic is the same: the company’s safety superpower is that every action it takes looks, from the outside, to be self-serving, even as the company becomes ever more convinced its motivations are pure. — Ben Thompson
- E-Commerce in the Age of AI. The semi-regular e-commerce summits between Ben and Michael Morton are generally an auto-rec for me, and this week’s Stratechery Interview was no exception. Morton covers the sector for Moffett Nathanson, and the conventional wisdom about the future of that space in the AI era seems to shift every six months. This week, Morton and Ben talked Shopify and its durability, OpenAI getting its butt kicked with the ChatGPT checkout experiment, milkmen in the 1960s, and a bit of Uber and Waymo at the end. Come for an information dense update on a variety of fronts, and stay for a good vibe throughout.— AS
- The Finals Were a Perfect 10. The Knicks are NBA Champions for the first time in 53 years, the NBA just had its highest-ratings for an NBA Finals in 28 years, and from start to finish, the show was fantastic for casual and hardcore fans alike. We had a great time reliving all of it on this week’s Greatest of All Talk, and on Sharp Text this week, I wrote about Wemby alienating fans on and off the court, an accounting of everything I got wrong about this Knicks team, and a refreshing reminder that as maddening as pro basketball can be, certain NBA formulas will work until the end of time. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
- Anthropic’s Safety Superpower — Anthropic’s belief in its own commitment to safety gives the company license to aggressively favor its business and even challenge the U.S. government.
- Fox Buys Roku, The Problem With Fox’s Smart Strategy, Streaming That Works — The market hates Fox’s acquisition of Roku, but the company is trading extraction from rights holders for leverage as a renter.
- The State of Fable, The Jailbreak Problem, SpaceX Acquires Cursor — The administration is very likely wrong about Fable, but that is ultimately Anthropic’s responsibility.
- An Interview with Michael Morton About E-Commerce in the Age of AI — An interview with Michael Morton about e-commerce and AI, including the challenges of unfalsifiable bear cases, distribution versus referal models, grocery, and autonomous vehicles.
Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp
- Aura and the Lack Thereof — Looking back at the NBA Finals where Victor Wembanyama became a villain, the Knicks became legends, and the NBA mattered again.
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Greatest of All Talk
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Stratechery video is on The iPhone’s Last Stand.