by Dan Burns

Oct 31, 2026, 5:00 AM

AI companies are dodging responsibility for their crap products

I was a civil engineer. In that profession you always have to be aware of potential liability issues, coming from any number of directions, on every project. If I was running an office, and some AI people came along hawking their wares, the first thing I’d ask is what kind of support I’d get if those wares got me in trouble. When they hemmed and hawed I’d politely but firmly show them the door. Because they would just hem and haw, at best.

Artificial intelligence has moved quickly from a novelty on the job to a common workplace tool. Gallup found that 52% of U.S. employees and 68% of professional services workers were using AI by February 2026. Thomson Reuters similarly found in spring 2026 that 74% of professionals use AI several times a week for work…

But its rapid adoption has a big downside – AI can produce information that sounds authoritative and looks polished while being completely wrong. And when AI generates mistakes, responsibility for those errors belongs to the professional or business relying on the AI output – not companies that develop AI systems.
(The Conversation)

I haven’t encountered a problem with this yet. But I’m not trying to make a living, or for that matter any money at all, from blogging.

But the point is that whether users tend to stop at the AI Overview, or engage with it and end up in AI Mode, “more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human,” a Cloudflare report from (July) says. As less and less human traffic comes from Google Search, and more and more ads are being shown to bots, the danger is that the business model of a free and open web will become unsustainable.

After all, a study from earlier this year found that over 35% of new websites were AI generated. It turns out they’re also, apparently, more than 50% AI-consumed.
(Gizmodo)

Could Open AI go under? You bet it could. Incidentally, every time I see a picture of Sam Altman he looks like he doesn’t sleep very well. Ever notice that?

I’m not trying to be a buzzkill here, but I have meaningful concerns about OpenAI’s ability to survive, and they’ve only grown more pressing in the last few years. In the same week that it completed a $7 billion internal share buyback, OpenAI saw both COO (and former CFO) Brad Lightcap and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Denise Dresser leave the company,..

The reason I bring up the noises coming from the manufacturing consent machine is that if Anthropic beats OpenAI to an IPO, I cannot see a viable (or reasonable) path for Sam Altman to float his nasty little company. The fact that the Financial Times and Reuters are already being co-opted into softening the blow is a sign that Anthropic’s S-1 will look and smell like the inside of a tauntaun, and Anthropic is, from the reporting I’ve read, in a much better condition than OpenAI, if only because it didn’t have multiple side quests involving video generation or browsers or smart speakers, though both companies love to give away $20 to $40 for $1.

Put simply, if Anthropic goes public with its own horrifying economics on parade, it’s hard to imagine OpenAI — a company that lost $20.9 billion in 2025 on $13.07 billion in revenue — will fare much better.
(Where’s Your Ed At?)