The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 943 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 25 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Brit Morin: Deel CEO allegedly recruited Rippling employee as paid spy
“Keith O'Brien, who was the man allegedly spying for deal while working at Rip Lane had to
Put out an affidavit today, and he basically, like, came forward and just was like, all right, here's the truth.
Alex, how do you pronounce his name?
Boise, Boise, the CE…”
Anthropic has completely overtaken OpenAI in revenue
“So I'm just curious how you reconcile what you were saying about the costs and everything with just the unprecedented growth that Anthropic has seen and the like flippening with open AI where it has just completely overtaken open AI from a revenue perspective.”
Lessin: Trial revealed Altman paid Brockman $10M from family office
“It was revealed that Altman, because it was a nonprofit back then, was paid Greg ten million dollars out of his, like, own family office and kept it from Elon, and so all these sort of alliances were being formed beneath the surface, and it just seemed like a …”
Morin: Anthropic is raising at an $800B valuation
“And Anthropic this week, I heard, is also now raising at an eight hundred billion.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI obviously stole O'Reilly Safari books to train models
“I think I saw this thing about Tim O'Reilly saying like, it's pretty obvious that like they stole all the proprietary information from Safari and like their books to like build it. And it's like, it's total. I'm sure it's true. We all know that they stole ever…”
Sam Lessin: AI labs are definitely stealing and training on user data
“Oh, no, to be clear, they're definitely stealing all my data as we go. There's no question about that.”
Jessica Lessin: Prominent media lists are driven by corporate sponsorship
“So it's not just clicks though. The business interests that circulate these lists are intense. And this is how I know it. Because I was wandering the streets of Davos, Switzerland, as one does with friends of mine. And all of a sudden they look at their watch …”
Sam Lessin: Early Salesforce was unintegrated one-off software builds
“So the story I've heard, and someone can correct me in comments, I'm sure someone will, is that when he started Salesforce, it was billed as like this cloud CRM. And this platform, but it was total bullshit. He basically went to a bunch of people and sold them…”
Eric Schmidt invested in Anthropic through a relationship with Dario Amodei's wife
“Her romantic turned business relationship with Eric Schmidt that led to the, his investment in Danthropic to crossing paths briefly with Jeffrey Epstein in terms of pitching him on her company.”
Lessin: Tech Execs Privately Reject the US-China AI War Narrative
“In Washington tech execs go to Washington to say, we have to be trying to an AI at all costs privately, or even semi privately. The exact same people say, obviously the U S and China are going to both be leaders at AI. They sort of reject that the war narrativ…”
Dave Morin: Frontier AI Models Can Hack Any Hardware System
“There's no hardware that you can't hack with one of these things.”
Jessica Lessin: Stripe is attempting to acquire PayPal
“The Information has a big Stripe financial scoop that is worth discussing because. We have not discussed Stripe in a while and it is trying to buy PayPal.”
Lessin: Stripe Is Teaming Up With Advent for PayPal Bid
“So what they're doing for this PayPal takeover offer, which, you know, is, is just that, like, no sign that any deal is done, and I'm sure other bidders will emerge and whatever, but they're teaming up with Advent, which is a private equity firm,”
Developers are quietly replacing Claude Opus 4.8 with open-source GLM 5.2
“Everyone that I've been interacting with and many people across the open clock community are switching it out for Opus four dot eight and they don't notice a difference.”
Lessin: Polymarket directed influencers to fake trades and earnings
“But Polymarket has been directing influencers to make fake videos about fake trades and reporting fake earnings for their influencer program.”
Brown: Median Private Equity Funds Now Underperform the S&P 500
“The returns are really bad now. And so for that's, again, the capital's argument, the returns are terrible now, generally. The median fund. There's obviously ours, right? So it's almost, it seems like it's become venture-like where you've got a top decile that…”
Forensic experts proved China is funding opposition to Utah data center
“And then he hired forensic experts to go and factually prove that it is China actually funding all of this opposition in Utah. And he actually mapped it a lot. You can go look on his Twitter and Instagram and he shares all of the data. And apparently has now s…”
Anthropic possesses an unreleased frontier AI model called Mythos
“We have the whole scenario now where there is a model that exists called Mythos. Nobody really has it except for Anthropic, and who knows if the actual real model as opposed to distilled versions of it that they give access to will ever kind of come out, and m…”
Lessin: OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file for an IPO soon
“Breaking news from the information and other outlets is that OpenAI confidentially filing soon.”
Lessin: Meta has been logging employee keystrokes to train internal AI
“This is a little bit old, but Meta has been keystroke logging employees to train AI, their AI, not so popular.”
Lessin: Musk and SpaceX Dedicated 100% of First Colossus Project to Anthropic
“We have seen perhaps the strangest AI compute deal to date, which is Anthropic Colossus. So SpaceX, Elon Musk. Have given over their first Colossus project. 100%. Not like 40%.”
Sam Lessin claims Anthropic has officially surpassed OpenAI as biggest AI company
“Anthropic passed open AI.”
Dave Morin hears frontier AI labs are lobbying to federally ban open-source
“Well, what I'm actually hearing is that they're trying to make open source illegal at the federal level.”
AI companies are buying failed startups' Slack instances for training data
“You've got big foundation model companies are out there buying the slack instances of failed startups to get more data.”
Lessin: Leaked OpenAI memo targeted Anthropic's ARR math and compute investment
“There was a memo that was leaked from OpenAI, an OpenAI memo that was leaked. I think it was in OpenAI's interest for this memo to be out there. I also think it was written in a way where they wanted it to be out there, where they came after Anthropic. Both fo…”
Morin: Frontier AI labs run opposition research teams planting hit stories
“There's truly oppositional research teams inside each company that I've now heard about for probably five to 10 times, like for different stories and companies that have been planted by the other. And it's like the nastiest PR setting I've seen in all of tech.…”
Rauch: Nearly 70% of Vercel documentation traffic comes from coding agents
“Nearly 70% of traffic To Vercel docs is now coming from coding agents. 70% and only 30% of page views are coming from humans.”
Lessin: Rogue AI agent triggered major security alert at Meta
“A rogue AI agent triggered a major security alert at Meta by taking action without approval that led to exposure of sensitive information and user data to Meta employees who could not authorize it.”
Jess Lessin: Saudi PIF is dry of capital, but the UAE is not
“Specifically, PIF is dry. PIF. But the UAE is not dry.”
Dave Morin: Anthropic claims software engineering jobs will vanish in 12 months
“Anthropic says no one will be doing software engineering 12 months from now.”
Dave Morin: Advanced agentic teams abandon Git for automated 'merge bosses'
“Now I will say one, but saying the other thing on the diff thing I'm hearing is that nobody's using Git anymore. They have these like merge bosses that, you know, basically”
Lessin: China Instructed Tech Industry Not to Buy Nvidia H200 Chips
“Overnight breaking from the information China has said to its tech industry, no H 200. You may not buy H 200.”
Brit Morin: 85% of Grok Images Are Nude or Sex-Related
“Grok, no, Grok, the AI platform, not the one that offline was part of, who just raised more money, by the way. 85% of the images that it's producing right now are nude or sex related.”
Jessica Lessin: Meta is in serious talks to buy Google TPUs
“One, Meta is considering, and in very serious talks, over a billions of dollars, spending billions of dollars on TPUs in a future deal”
Sam Lessin: Garry Tan Warned YC Founders Against Slow's Etiquette School
“Gary Tan, who runs YC, is a response to this, which is, PSA, do not attend SLO's Etiquette School”
Vinod Khosla: The majority of current AI venture investing will fail
“Bottom line, bargain hunting will be a poor bet in AI, but firms putting money to work who invest in all high valuations indiscriminately will do poorly, and that is the majority of the investing that is happening.”
Dave Morin: OpenAI peaked in Q2 2024 and has declined since
“Whatever the compute configuration plus the software configuration that was going on in Q two of 20, 24 at open AI was the most powerful, most awesome version. And everything's been downhill from here.”
OpenAI considered an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, WSJ reported
“The journal reported that OpenAI had considered an antitrust complaint against Microsoft.”
Morin: Early research proves synthetic data cannot effectively train AI models
“Yeah, I mean, that goes back to that first research paper that came out right after ChatGPT launched, which basically said you can't create Fake data for training models. It just doesn't work, and so there was, like, this very early paper that effectively told…”
Morin: US Officials Downloaded Founder's Phone to Scan for Anti-Trump Sentiment
“You and I both know that we had a founder Who's from Australia that went to renew his visa and had to plug his phone into a American computer with the I don't know which department, I guess it would be the state department. His phone, all the content in his ph…”
Dave Morin: The S&P 500 outperforms almost all venture capital funds
“If you've got an incremental dollar, putting it into the S into an S and P 500 index fund for the most part performs better than almost all of the venture capital asset class.”
Lessin: Mira Murati Seeks Board Votes Equal to All Others Plus One
“Here's how Mira says she's doing it in her company, according to conversations with investors. She is seeking The number of board votes that is equal to every other board member plus one.”
Coles says Musk plans to leave Washington role in 2-3 months
“Well, what he said was that he was planning to leave in two to In two to three months, his work would be done.”
Coles: Howard Lutnick told people he hired and directs Elon Musk
“But we have a very good story in it this week about Howard Lutnick telling people that in fact, he hired Elon and he told Elon what to do.”
Coles: Netflix and Spotify insiders say Meghan Markle avoids real work
“At least the feedback I heard from people at Netflix and certainly at Spotify was that she sort of pretends to do this, but actually she's not really interested in the work of it.”
Brit Morin: Deel espionage was coordinated via Telegram with 'The Watchman'
“Also, they had a telegram channel where they were discussing the payments, and.
Wait, who was?
Okay, it's Keith, it's the spy.
How much did they pay for the telegram, Brett?
I know, telegram, not signal.
It's the spy, it's the CEO, and then there's a third per…”