The most powerful people in AI asked the industry to slow down. Dario Amodei wrote that frontier labs are building capabilities that could end humanity. Sam Altman agreed. Even Elon Musk agreed. One day later, speaking in Ireland on 13 September, Donald Trump said: whoever wins with AI wins. And Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, opposes a moratorium too โ pause, and China catches up.
Today from Zurich: Washington, Vienna, Beijing, a courtroom, and Austria. And the thread underneath all five is the same โ rules, and who writes them.
In this episode:
๐
Whoever wins with AI wins (
01:09) โ Amodei asked labs to slow the frontier. Altman agreed. Musk agreed. Trump's answer was flat: forget it. And it isn't only Trump โ it's the establishment around him. Notice what's strange here: the people usually called accelerationists are, on this one question, the cautious ones.
๐
Vienna, MDI, and the HR dinosaurs (
05:06) โ a keynote I gave at MDI, and the numbers behind it. Job postings mentioning AI skills rose
8% quarter on quarter at the end of 2025. Another
48% by April. Another
27% by August. Year over year:
plus 165%. My father is 80 and uses Microsoft Office. The demand is not the problem. The permission is.
๐
China's playbook for AI harm (
08:56) โ it's Monday morning, you run a construction company in Austria, and a voice you recognise asks you to transfer
โฌ480,000 to a supplier account. What do you actually do? In China there's now an answer: the Supreme People's Court has issued
24 provisions for courts handling AI cases. You can be liable โ and so can the platform you did it on.
๐
Inventing witnesses for $5,000 (
13:11) โ ChatGPT fabricated a witness and a lawyer filed it. The court's response: a
$5,000 fine. Far too low. In some countries you go to jail for that. And the wider point, which lands closer to home: if you send work out without saying you used AI and without double-checking it, you are the same story with a different job title.
๐
Austria and the home advantage (
17:18) โ I don't normally go easy on the DACH region. But Austria has effectively stopped buying AI as a collection of separate departments. Started in
2026, backed by
13 federal portfolios plus the Federal Computing Centre. They are hungry for AI efficiency while most companies are asleep.
๐งต
The Tuesday thread (
21:24) โ break the rules as a lawyer in the US and it costs $5,000. Ask for a slowdown as a frontier lab and the President says he doesn't care. Meanwhile China writes 24 provisions you can actually defend yourself with. The rules are arriving from the private sector, the public sector, the courts and the politicians โ all at once, and not in agreement.
One thing to do this week: find out who writes the AI rules in your company. Not who enforces them โ who writes them. If the answer is nobody, that's the job.
๐ฑ Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
AI Neanderthal โ AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious. Stay human. Stay brave.
What is AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota?
AI news for humans, not robots.
Every weekday, Malcolm Werchota comes out of the cave and explains what actually happened in AI โ in plain language, with the numbers checked and the hype taken out. Around ten stories a day: three explained slowly, the rest fast.
No jargon. No breathless futurism. Just what happened, what it costs, and who gets handed the bill โ explained the way you would explain it to a smart friend who does not work in tech.
If you run a company, sit on a board, or simply want to understand the technology reshaping your industry, this is your daily 25 minutes. Keep the stories that touch your world.
Stay curious, stay human.