🛎️ Americans Fear AI Most

Good Morning, AI Enthusiasts!

Today’s machine is cheaper, costlier, smarter, dumber, trusted less by those closest to it, and bought fastest by those rich enough to bleed first.

SURVEY

Americans Fear AI Most

👀 What’s happening: A Salesforce and YouGov survey of 1,500 desk workers across four continents found Americans 43% more likely than the global average to call themselves AI skeptics; over half of US workers self-identify that way. In India, trust and daily use both clear 80%; in the US, both hover near 50%. Emerging economies all expect gains, with 90% anticipating career lift.

🌍 How this hits reality: The assumption was that proximity breeds faith: the people building and using AI most would trust it most. The map inverted. Optimism tracks position on the ladder, not exposure. American desk workers sit near the top, where AI's mental-labor target lands as a guillotine with American CEOs keep promising their tools will gut white-collar work to justify the valuations. India, Thailand, and Singapore sit lower, where the same tool reads as an elevator past the gatekeepers they never cleared.

🛎️ Key takeaway: Optimism isn't about how close you stand to the machine. It's about how much you have to lose when it arrives, and Americans have the most.

TOKEN

OpenAI Wants a Price War

👀 What’s happening: OpenAI is weighing drastic cuts to what it charges per token, the unit AI firms bill by, to pull customers from Anthropic, according to WSJ. The catch: both companies already lose billions, because the compute behind every query costs more than they charge. Cutting prices means cutting deeper into losses on purpose. CEO Sam Altman recently called AI costs "a huge issue." Anthropic just passed OpenAI's valuation for the first time after Claude Code went viral, and OpenAI is pushing its own Codex to catch up.

🌍 How this hits reality: Normal price wars are fought from profit. This one starts underwater. Neither company makes money at today's prices, yet both are preparing to charge less, betting that locked-in enterprise users are worth bleeding faster to capture. The pitch was that frontier intelligence is scarce and premium. Selling it below cost, and then below that, says the opposite. Tokens are being repriced like kilowatt-hours, except the utility can't break even at any price on the menu.

🛎️ Key takeaway: When the two smartest companies in the room decide the way to win is to lose money faster than the other guy, intelligence stopped being the moat and became the gasoline they're burning to stay in the race.

SURVEY

AI Broke Our Lie Detector

👀 What’s happening: One in five US teens now regularly gets news from LLMs, so MIT's Media Lab tested what that does to people. Over four weeks, 67 participants judged news headline-image pairs. With a chatbot assisting, they caught fakes 21 percent more often. Then the researchers took the AI away. By week four, unassisted accuracy had fallen 15 points below where each person started, and a quarter of them reported feeling sharper even as they declined.

🌍 How this hits reality: AI's most civic pitch was misinformation defense, and MIT Sloan showed chatbots can cut belief in false claims. The Media Lab result complicates that picture: the in-session gain and the month-long erosion appear to be two sides of the same habit. The researchers frame it as coach versus crutch, noting that Socratic, question-led AI built skill while answer-first AI built reliance. The same dependency tends to surface in breaking-news moments, around Trump's assassination attempt and the Iran war, where models also err most.

🛎️ Key takeaway: The trade is real accuracy today for thinner judgment tomorrow. Whether that's worth it is the question worth sitting with before we hand over the part of us that knows when something is off.

BILLS

AI-Pilled Firms Burn $7,500 a Head

👀 What’s happening: Fresh data from the Ramp AI Index, which tracks AI adoption among US businesses, shows the top 1 percent of firms now spend $7,500 per employee per month on AI. That's still under the roughly $16,000 a software engineer earns monthly, so machines haven't outpriced people yet. The gap below is steep: the top 10 percent spend about $611 per head, the median just $11.38, one enterprise seat. Among the heaviest users, spend still grew 14.1 percent last month.

🌍 How this hits reality: The headline number sounds alarming but the distribution tells the real story. A tiny vanguard is spending like AI is already a coworker, while the median firm is barely past a single subscription. That spread, $7,500 versus $11, is the actual map of adoption: not a wave, a handful of early movers pulling far ahead while everyone else dabbles.

🛎️ Key takeaway: That $7,500 isn't waste, it's a head start. The 1 percent are buying output the $11 median can't match, and the productivity gap between them is widening by the month.

TOGETHER WITH MYCLAW

Your OpenClaw, Ready to Work

MyClaw makes OpenClaw instantly usable by connecting it to the SaaS tools you already use—Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, Sheets, Notion, GitHub, Telegram, WhatsApp, and more. No DevOps, no messy setup.

Just give it a goal, and your OpenClaw works 24/7 in the cloud, pulling context from your apps and delivering briefs, research, reports, decks, pages, and decisions ready to approve.

MyClaw turns OpenClaw from a cool demo into an always-on operator.

DAILY TL;DR

• xAI was sued by a former engineer who claims he was fired after raising safety concerns about Grok.
• Visa is plugging its payment network into ChatGPT, moving agentic shopping closer to real checkout.
• OpenAI says it banned China-linked accounts that used ChatGPT to influence U.S. AI data-center debates.
• Microsoft reportedly restricted Claude Fable 5 internally over data-retention concerns.
• Amazon borrowed another $17.5 billion from banks, keeping its AI infrastructure spending spree in overdrive.
• Meta signed its first AI data center deal in India with Reliance, expanding its compute footprint into one of AI’s biggest growth markets.
• Decart showed a world model that can simulate hours of photorealistic driving, pushing AI-generated environments closer to training-road reality.
• Glean says workers are losing nearly six hours a week “botsitting” AI tools, turning automation into a new kind of office labor.

READ MORE

Let the Future Come to Your Inbox

Stay ahead without drowning in information. We turn the most important signals across AI, tech, marketing, and future products into 5-minute reads you can actually finish.

• AI Secret uncovers what really matters in AI
• Bay Area Letters decodes tech and business shifts from Silicon Valley
• Robotics Herald tracks how robots move from labs into daily life
• Marketing Secret breaks down real growth and go-to-market playbooks
• The Hardwire explores hardware, consumer tech, and what’s coming next

TOGETHER WITH US

AI Secret Media Group is the world’s #1 AI & Tech Newsletter Group, reaching over 2 million leaders across the global innovation ecosystem, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to top AI labs, VCs, and fast-growing startups.

We've helped promote over 500 Tech Brands. Will yours be the next?

Email our co-founder Mark directly at mark@aisecret.us if the button fails.