The week is not off to a great start for much of the internet.
In the early hours of the morning Pacific time, internet users around the world began experiencing issues with accessing various apps, websites, and platforms. Shortly after, a culprit emerged: Amazon Web Services (AWS)or, more specifically, an outage at Amazons cloud computing platform.
Heres what you need to know about the AWS outage and what websites are affected.
Whats happened?
At around midnight Pacific time, internet users around the globe began experiencing issues accessing high-trafficked parts of the internet.
Websites like Reddit, services like Lyft, and even apps from restaurant chains like McDonalds seemed to be down or working intermittently.
The source of the problem was shortly found: AWS, Amazons cloud computing platform that hundreds of thousands of websites and services rely on, including Reddit, Netflix, Pinterest, Spotify, and more.
At 12:11 a.m. PDT, the AWS Health Dashboard posted its first notification about the problem, stating that the platform was investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.
By 12:51 a.m. PDT, AWS confirmed increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region, and by 1:26 a.m. PDT, AWS said it could confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region.
But though the problem seemed to be affecting only the endpoint located in one region of the United States, any website, app, or service that ran data through that endpoint could be affected by its outageno matter where in the world the end-user was located.
And that was bad news for users around the globe who were attempting to access some of the globes most highly trafficked sites and apps.
What websites went down?
Users around the world have reported troubles accessing dozens of websites, apps, and services, according to data compiled by DownDetector.
As of this writing, the DownDetector home page is showing that multiple websites and services that rely on AWS are being reported as down, including:
Amazon
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Prime Video
Apple Music
AT&T
Chime
Delta Air Lines
Epic Games Store
Fortnite
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Lyft
Max
McDonalds app
Reddit
Ring
Robinhood
Roblox
Roku
Playstation Network
Signal
Snapchat
Spectrum
Starbucks
Steam
Ubisoft Connect
Venmo
Xbox Network
Xfinity by Comcast
Zoom
This list above is not exhaustive. Users of many other websites, apps, and services have also reported additional outages, including on Coinbase and United Airlines. Its also worth noting that some report being able to access select sites and services, while others report no luck while attempting access.
What caused the AWS outage?
Amazon has not yet mentioned whether a specific cause has been identified. A spokesperson for AWS referred Fast Company to its status page, which is still being updated with new developments.
How long will the outage last?
Its unknown how long the AWS outage will last or for how long your favorite site or service will be down.
The last update on the AWS Health Dashboard, posted at 3:35 a.m. PDT and stated that the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, adding most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.
However, the same notice warned that Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.
In other words, if you still cant access your favorite site or platform, its best to try again in a little bit.
This story is developing . . .
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday.
Gregg Renfrew is back. Four years after the entrepreneur sold her clean skincare and cosmetics brand Beautycounter to The Carlyle Group in a deal valued at $1 billionand more than a year after she and the private equity firm shut down the company amid falling salesRenfrew today is officially launching Counter, a new company built on Beautycounter assets she acquired from Carlyles lenders.
A season of learning
Counter, which has been quietly selling products online since June 25, shares its predecessors clean ethos and uses some of its formulations. Renfrew also secured data on all of Beautycounters customers. But Counter is an upstart compared with Beautycounter, which reportedly booked $400 million in annual sales at the time of the Carlyle acquisition. Despite her considerable experience as an entrepreneurshe previously cofounded a bridal registry site bought by Martha Stewart Living OmnimediaRenfrew is, in many ways, going back to basics, focusing on profitability and listening to customers and sellers.
I come into this today with a level of humility, she tells Modern CEO. I dont claim to have all the answers. Im in a season of learning.
Beautycounters demise was indeed humbling. (My Fast Company colleague Elizabeth Segran offers a thorough recounting of the companys rise and fall.) Sales foundered and the company struggled to service its debt. Efforts to revive Beautycounter, such as a deal to sell its products in retailer Ulta Beauty, and changes to leadership, including the return of Renfrew as CEO in 2022, ultimately could not save the business.
Renfrew says buying back the Beautycounter assets instead of starting a new company from scratch wasnt just a way of kick-starting a business. It was an emotional decision, too. To let the old company completely go and die when it pioneered, created, and led clean beautyknowing that it had been a very successful entity at one point in timeI didnt want to let go of all that, Renfrew says. She adds: My daughter Georgie was literally bawling in front of me saying, You cant just let this thing die. Mom, you worked so hard for so long.
Second chances and lessons learned
Renfrew is not the first founder with sellers remorse. In 2023, Ben and Nate Checketts took back control of Rhone, the apparel brand they started, from investor L Catterton. Sprout Pharmaceuticals founder Cindy Eckert sold her company to Valeant Pharmaceuticals (now known as Bausch Health Companies Inc.) in 2015 for $1 billion, then bought it back two years later because the giant didnt make reasonable efforts to commercialize Sprouts female sexual health drug.
At Counter, Renfrew is applying lessons learned the hard way from the Beautycounter collapse. She is not the majority shareholder, but she says she has a high degree of decision-making authority. Her backers are mostly individuals, most of whom invested with her before. The one institutional investor came in knowing that we were going to do things a little bit differently, such as prioritizing profitability over growth. Profitability gives you optionality, she says. One of the things Im very acutely aware of is you dont ever want to be in a situation where youre not profitable. And if that means the business is slightly smaller and it takes longer to grow, thats okay, because your customers then know that youre going to be around in five years.
Shes doing teleconference meetings with customers and sellers, asking whats working and whats not. Im seeking to understand and learn, she says, adding that she recognizes that were here in service of others who will afford us the opportunity to build a great brand and a great community.
Counters success is by no means assured. The clean beauty category Renfrew helped create is now crowded with competitors, and the demise of Beautycounter left employees, sellersthe company sold through its website but also through so-called ambassadors who earned a commission on salesand customers in the lurch. Counter may have to, well, counter lingering negative feelings. Those who continue to purchase from us in this new companywe owe a debt of gratitude, Renfrew says. We need to treat them with the respect that they deserve. For Renfrew, one way of showing them that respect is, this time, to build a company thats built to last.
What’s your approach to business longevity?
If youre a founder or work at a founder-led company, what are the ways that your business is ensuring its longevity? Share your insights with me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com, and well include some of the best reader feedback in a future newsletter. As a reminder, Im soliciting nominations for Modern CEO of the Year via this form. Submissions are due November 21, and well share our pickor picksin a newsletter at the end of December.
Read and watch: entrepreneurial second acts
Cindy Eckert on buying back sexual health company Sprout Pharmaceuticals
Chipotle founder Steve Ells wants to shake up restaurants with his new concept, Kernel
Mark Lore on what it takes to be a serial entrepreneur
Over the past few years, business leaders have lived through a masterclass in volatility. A global pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, surging cyberattacks, economic whiplash, and now the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence have reshaped markets in unpredictable ways.
For many executives, resilience once meant little more than business continuity planning: extra servers, backup systems, and insurance policies. But the world we lead in today demands more.
Resilience is no longer just about defenseits about growth. The organizations that thrive amid disruption are not those with the strongest walls, but those with the most flexible foundations. They are able to absorb shocks, pivot quickly, and find opportunity where others see only risk.
In a landscape defined by constant change, resilience has become the ultimate competitive advantage.
From Recovery to Reinvention
When the pandemic forced millions of people to work remotely overnight, some companies stumbled, scrambling to rewire systems and processes on the fly. Others adapted seamlessly, scaling their infrastructure, safeguarding data, and even uncovering new business opportunities. The difference wasnt foresightit was resilience.
Resilient companies dont wait for crises to test their systems. They build for adaptability from the start. This means modern digital infrastructure that can flex with demand, decision-making processes that prioritize speed and clarity over bureaucracy, and leadership cultures that empower teams to act quickly.
Crucially, it also means a mindset shift: The goal is not to return to a normal that no longer exists. Its to reinvent faster than your competitors.
Resilience Across Three Dimensions
Leaders often ask where to start. My experience points to three dimensions that define organizational resilience today: infrastructure, decision-making, and culture.
1. Infrastructure that bends, not breaksDigital infrastructure is the invisible backbone of every modern business. If it is brittle, the business is brittle. Legacy systems that cant scale or integrate force organizations to spend more time fixing problems than creating value. By contrast, companies with modern, cloud-enabled infrastructure can adapt quicklywhether to reroute supply chains, scale up for surges in customer demand, or safeguard data against emerging cyber threats.
For example, when ransomware attacks spiked during the pandemic, companies with strong cyber resilience strategiescombining secure storage, rapid recovery, and smart automationwere able to restore operations in hours, not weeks. They didnt just avoid losses; they preserved customer trust. And when AI applications exploded onto the scene, those with flexible, well-governed data environments could test and deploy faster than rivals still wrestling with fragmented systems.
2. Decision-making at the speed of changeIn uncertain environments, resilience depends as much on how decisions are made as on the data that informs them. Traditional hierarchies slow response times, with insights stuck in silos and approvals delayed by bureaucracy.
Resilient organizations create clarity about who decides what and empower people closest to the action to act. They ensure data flows across departments so that leaders at every level have a shared picture of reality. This approach marries speed with accountability.
In my conversations with executives, I often hear stories of how front-line empowerment made the difference in moments of disruptionretail managers adjusting inventory strategies in real time, or manufacturing supervisors reconfiguring production on the fly. These shifts didnt happen because the CEO dictated every move; they happened because the organization trusted its people to act on data-driven insights quickly, and ensured the data they rely on is accessible, reliable, and available where and when its needed.
3. Culture as the engine of resilienceInfrastructure and processes matter, but ultimately resilience is human. It is defined by how people respond under pressureand whether they feel empowered to adapt and innovate.
Resilient cultures are built on trust and psychological safety. Employees who feel trusted are more willing to experiment. Teams that feel supported are more likely to take ownership. Leaders who model adaptability create a ripple effect that normalizes flexibility across the organization.
This human dimension is often overlooked, but it is what allows resilience to scale. Without it, even the most advanced systems and strategies will falter. With it, organizations can turn volatility into a proving ground for growth.
Why Resilience Now Means Growth
It may sound counterintuitive to equate resilience with offense, not just defense. But the connection is real. When uncertainty is constant, the ability to adapt faster than competitors is itself a growth strategy.
Consider how cloud transformation, once viewed as a cost play, is now enabling new digital business models. Or how investments in cyber resilience not only prevent losses, but also unlock customer confidencea critical differentiator in trust-sensitive industries. Or how AI adoption, grounded in resilient data strategies, is enabling companies to innovate while others struggle with integration challenges.
In each case, resilience doesnt just protect the enterpriseit expands its possibilities. It shifts the narrative from How do we recover? to How do we reinvent?
The Leadership Imperative
The challenge for leaders is to stop treating resilience as an insurance policy and start treating it as a core strategy.
That requires moving beyond siloed initiativesone group working on cybersecurity, another on supply chains, another on cultureand instead weaving resilience into every layer of the business.
The most effective leaders Ive seen approach resilience as a flywheel: Modern infrastructure supports faster decisions; faster decisions empower people; empowered people innovate in ways that strengthen the system further. Over time, resilience compounds into sustainable advantage.
Resilience used to mean survival. Today, it is the strategy that separates those who stumble from those who soar. For leaders, the priority is no longer defense against disruption; it is building resilience as the engine of growth.
Layoffs might make headlines, but the real measure is how leaders support the remaining employees. Layoffs are undeniably challenging for good reason. However, its what leaders do in the aftermath that determines whether a culture fractures or recovers.
Ive led workforce complex reductions at Amazon, Microsoft, startups, and PE-backed firms. While every situation was unique, the same pattern appeared each time. It wasnt necessarily the layoff that broke the culture. It was the leadership response.
Layoffs disrupt the culture and impact more than just headcount. Ive watched talented, engaged employees turn quiet and withdrawn after layoffs. Not because they stopped caring, but because they stopped feeling safe.
The aftermath of layoffs can be unsettling for those who remain. Organizations expect survivors to absorb heavier workloads while they navigate shaken trust and mixed emotions. Layoff survivors often experience relief, guilt, grief, and anxiety about whats next. This is the leadership moment too few prepare for. Post-layoff culture recovery isnt automaticits intentional. In these moments, they need to communicate. Its a make-or-break opportunity to rebuild confidence, reinforce values, and heal a companys culture.
Culture recovery hinges on many factors. Leadership must step up to manage the aftermath. Heres how to approach it:
Lead with candor, not corporate speak
Layoffs are typically a financial decision, but culture recovery is a leadership decision. Dont miss your moment. Layoffs dont kill culture. Neglect does. Leaders who avoid the hard conversations, hide behind jargon, and pretend its business as usual are the ones who lose the trust of their employees. After all, silence creates speculation.
Thats why its important that leaders directly address and over-communicate early. I’ve introduced pulse checks, frequent town halls, and open forums. You cant rebuild morale through Slack updates or pizza parties. You need to do this in an authentic way.
When my company had to conduct layoffs several years ago, it was a stressful experience. As the HR leader, I carried a significant emotional burden in conversations with employees who were impacted as well as those with those who remained. Our executive team met with staff to answer tough questions and provide updates.
The first few sessions were a bit tense for both me and our leaders, as we faced some tough questions. We stumbled at first with too much corporate speak, and employees saw right through it. The room was tense. But eventually, that discomfort became a turning point when leaders stopped with the jargon and started showing real vulnerability. After that, the dynamic shifted. Acknowledging the emotional climate is important because it helps us reclaim performance and commitment. If we wanted to show our support for employees, we needed to address these issues head-on.
Many companies carefully plan their layoff process, including announcements and severance packages. However, they often neglect what comes next. People don’t remember the slide decks or talking pointsthey remember how you showed up at this moment. Empty buzzwords do more harm than good. Speak to people on a human level and create space for honest conversations about what is certain and whats unknown. Be open about changes involving the business, team structure, available headcount resources, or ongoing uncertainties. Reaffirm what hasnt changed. At the same time, you also need to be clear about the path forward.
Create safe spaces for emotion
After layoffs, the workplace feels different, and pretending otherwise only deepens the sense of unease that employees feel. Leaders who acknowledge this reality set the stage for recovery. To help teams reengage, you need to take the time to listen to your employees. When you give people this kind of face, theyre more likely to adapt more quickly and regain momentum.
Validating emotions doesnt weaken performanceit accelerates it. Employees who feel like youve heard them are far more likely to reengage, contribute, and collaborate. Weekly check-ins become vital for building connections. These conversations are not always easy, but theyre necessary for healing. Over time, that openness strengthens collaboration and restores trust.
Rebuild culture from within
Rebuilding from within starts with clarity. Employees need contextwhy you made certain decisions, and what resources are available moving forward. People want details that help them understand whats ahead and how their work fits the bigger picture.
This is also the moment to reenergize the team. Reaffirm the mission and values so employees can reconnect to a shared purpose. Even in uncertainty, knowing the why behind the work helps people stay motivated.
Leaders need to act. Retaining key talent, ensuring workloads are sustainable, and recognizing the additional effort required of those who remain all demonstrate that leadership is paying attention.
A common mistake leaders make is assuming that the remaining team members will just pick up the slack. This assumption can lead to increased burnout or, even worse, the loss of valuable talent. A better approach is prioritizing tasks, eliminating low-value work, and having an honest conversation about the short-term trade-offs that are involved.
Recognize that this is a cultural moment
Layoffs test culture. They dont automatically destroy itwhat damages culture is indifference, silence, or meaningless lip service. When leaders respond with honesty and care, disruption can become a catalyst for renewal.
You shape culture through daily choices: the courage to answer tough questions, the discipline to maintain consistent communication, and the humility to admit when youve compromised trust. Employees notice whether leadership avoids the hard truths or embraces them.
Moments of disruption invite reflection. Leaders can use this time to reassess values, address blind spots, and strengthen practices that they might have overlooked. Openness about what needs to change prevents damaging back-channeling and reinforces inclusivity.
Culture is the foundation on which every company rests. If it fractures, performance and morale follow. But a stronger culture can emerge when leaders step into this moment with honesty and courage.
The difference between OpenAI and Anthropic has never been clearer. OpenAI is constantly in the news with a new consumer app or feature, and is being billed as the next great consumer tech platform. Most recently it made news by offering a social network around its Sora image generator, and even says it plans to allow NSFW content on ChatGPT. Anthropic, meanwhile, has chosen a different path. The company stresses that because it gets most of its revenues from businesses and developers, its not trying to capture the mass market, and its not terribly concerned about how long users spend on its platform every day.
We are interested in our consumer users to the degree they are doing work, solving problems in their life, says Anthropic design chief Joel Lewenstein during an interview with Fast Company this week. Because we’re not interested in passive consumption and image generation and video generationwe just sort of have ruled those out from a mission perspective . . .
Anthropic was famously founded by a group of OpenAI execs who defected in 2021 to found a more safety-focused AI lab. That focus hasnt changed. Our interests are in making things that are beneficial while minimizing the risks of those same products because everything has a double-edged sword, Lewenstein says. We see . . . helping people grow and expand and create and solve problems as being the right risk-reward tradeoff.
The San Francisco-based startup believes that work-first focus will ultimately win out as AI eventually shows its profoundest effects in the lives of businesses, not consumers. At a conference Wednesday, Anthropics cofounder and policy director Jack Clark says Anthropic will eventually overtake OpenAI because of its enterprise focus, its strong technological roadmap, and because its research is accelerating faster than its rivals.
All of this is reflected in the look and feel of its Claude chatbotthe main entry to access Anthropics powerful modelsbut also in its attitude.
Not warm and fuzzy
When it comes to work, Claude is pleasant, even empathetic, but seriousand it comes with a free BS detector. Sycophancy in AI models, after all, has become a serious problem. OpenAI recently admitted having to push an update to its GPT-4o model to fix its sycophantic behavior. And its CEO Sam Altman stated in a post on Oct. 14 that users will be able to reintroduce that personality if they liked it. The model reportedly had a habit of praising or validating user statements even when they were delusional or concerning (one user claimed a divine identity). Some analysts believe that such behavior in a model is more than a bug, but a choice made by the model maker in the interest of getting people to use the platform more.
A sycophantic chatbot in a work setting can act something like a yes-man, embracing and offering to further develop even the worst business ideas. This can lead to a range of reputational and financial harms, not to mention seriously damaging trust in the AI.
Sychophantic AI could be especially dangerous to Anthropic, which wants its user to use Claude not just for quick content generation, but as a collaborator or thinking partner to do serious work. In order to do that, the user needs to build confidence and trust in the reasonableness of the AI. So Anthropic trained the models behind Claude to push back on logically suspect thoughts from the user. Lewenstein says his company worked especially hard to train this into its newest model, Claude Haiku 4.5, which it says is the most sycophancy-resistant model available in its size.
The artifacts shift
The idea of Claude as collaborator has directly impacted the chatbots user interface. With the introduction of Artifacts last year, Anthropic added a highly functional workspace around the chatbot. The idea of the Artifacts UX is to show a working draft of the project the user and the AI are working on in real time, within a panel at the right side of the interface. This might be a document draft, a chart, or a code preview, which the user can inspect, click, highlight, and suggest changes. The user can tell Claude to write something in a new way, or integrate a new idea from an uploaded PDF or text file.
I cannot overstate how big of a shift that is, and [it] anchors a lot of the way that we think, Lewenstein says. By this he means that Artifacts encourages the user to think of Claude as a smart work companion, rather than just a content generator. It creates this sense of you’re making something alongside Claude, Lewenstein says. We’re not just giving you the answer. We’re not having you just download it and we’re done . . . Rather, the human and chatbot enter a dialog where they gradually shape the output into what the user wants.
Lewenstein acknowledges that while AI tools have a growing number of power users, a significant percentage of users have yet to scratch the surface of whats possible. He says a major challenge of the user interface design is to invite people to Claudes features more fully. Artifacts can show users their options so that they can proceed in an experimental way, learning as they go. And, as of last month, Claude now can automatically remember past chats, so it might proactively ask if the user wants to include some theme or piece of data (perhaps a relevant piece of proprietary product research or a business plan) its encountered before.
I think the more things that Claude is able to doClaude can now make PowerPoints and make Excel documentsthe more things that it makes, the more important it is that there is some space that you can actually see and engage with that content, Lewenstein says.
The reason Claude can make presentations and spreadsheets is because of skills, or packets of knowledge that Claude can call up when the user needs them. On Thursday, a day after announcing its new Claude Haiku 4.5 model, the company announced that Claude users can now make their own agent skills.” If a user worked with Claude to create a presentation, for example, and called in a number of style sheets and marketing guidelines to do it, they can package all that work up in a skill and use it again the next time they need to do a presentation.
In essence, Claude is enabling a user to create a kind of agent that has expertise and experience working with the user on a specific task.
Agents
AI agents can reason and act autonomously to do things like fetch data, perform actions, create plans. OpenAI recently announced a new tool called Agent Builder that provides a simple, graphical interface to create agents, define their workflows, and pull in tools the agent can use (a safety guardrail tool, for example). OpenAI says this could speed up the process for developers, and reduce the need to build agents from scratch.
Anthropic believes that the right UX for building and managing agents depends on the type of user and their level of expertise. When developers within businesses build agents, Lewenstein explains, they write them as code, and Anthropic provides them a number of governance and security ools to help manage them. Theres no abstraction layer that represents the parts as objects that can be dragged around on a screen (at least not yet).
Lewenstein says consumers, prosumers, and average knowledge workers usually just want to describe a goal they want the agent to achieve, then let the AI carry out the necessary functions behind the scenes to make it happen. That’s the direction Anthropic is pursuing now. Whether users even want to think about agents as a concept remains an open question, he says.
Still, Anthropic is exploring several different kinds of agent approaches within Claude, some of them tightly integrated with chat, some of them less so. The focus is on what people are trying to accomplish, Lewenstein says. Anthropic will provide whatever is needed in any form factor to achieve that, and the company isn’t wedded to any particular UX paradigm yet. He cites the old marketing adage: Users dont really want a quarter-inch drill bit, they want a quarter-inch hole.
Claude of the future
Right now, users are still trying to understand how AI agents can fit into their overall workflows. In a work setting they may be skeptical that the agent will produce reliable, actionable work. They will naturally want to know a lot about how the agent is doing its work, how it’s getting from a directive to a result. Lewenstein says that Claude now lets users click to see all the steps the agent (powered by the model) took to reach a result. Building that into the UX, he says, wasnt a terribly challenging problem.
But, over time, Claude will become more autonomous and capable of working unsupervised for longer periods of time (already the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model can work by itself for 30 hours). This could create challenges for the UX, which will have to show an audit of every step in the work that was done. We have these components in the UI which we’ve been working on for the last couple of years, which is a short little summary and then if you expand it, it actually shows you, Here’s everything I did for the last X hours, so that you can really build up an understanding but also a trust.
In the first phases of AI agents being used within enterprises, users will have to think through what tasks they can delegate to agents, and what tasks to keep for themselves. Future versions of Claude, Lewenstein says, might help the user understand this. I think this is the future of where a lot of these products need to gounderstanding someone’s workflow enough, [and] its own capabilities enough, to proactively say, I will take this work off your plate and I will leave you with this thing, and that should feel very empowering to people, Lewenstein says.
An AI for work
Even for its consumer users, Anthropic is interested in helping them do work, not pass the time. So the same Claude user interface works pretty well for both personal and business use cases, Lewenstein says. He says consumers use Claude for a lot of personal things that might as well be work thingscomplex problems like planning a vacation or navigating a complicated renovation. We see consumers or people who are not doing it for their employer finding a lot of benefit in basically all the same basic features that we have [in Claude] for work.
Eighty percent of Anthropics revenues come from enterprise customers. After crossing $1 billion a year in annualized revenue run rate (ARR) at the beginning of 2025, the company expects to hit $9 billion in ARR by the end of the year, Reuters reports, and then $26 billion in 2026.
While OpenAI doesnt usually talk about its revenue mix, its CFO Sarah Friar said in 2024 that the company made 75% of its money from consumer subscriptions. As of June 2025, OpenAIs ARR was reportedly $10 billion (excluding licensing revenue from Microsoft and large one-time deals). Analysts expect OpenAI to reach about $12.7 billion in total revenue in 2025.
OpenAI has announced that starting in December, ChatGPT will allow the generation of erotic content for verified adult users. At the same time, Elon Musks xAI has launched Grok Imagine, an image-generation system that already includes an NSFW mode for producing explicit imagery.
None of this should surprise anyone. Desire, fantasy, and pornography have always been powerful engines of technological adoption. Photography, video, the internet, and even online payments all grew, in part, because of it. The interesting question is not about sex: its about what these decisions reveal about the kind of humanity Big Tech companies are shaping.
Desire as a managed service
This is not about prudishness or panic. Sexuality will, of course, find its digital expressions. Whats unsettling is not the presence of eroticism in technology, but its industrialized management.
The difference between eroticism and algorithmic consumption is the same as that between experience and dopamine: one is built through relationship; the other is dosed from the outside. By integrating sexuality into large language models and visual generators, platforms are not liberating desire: they are administering it.
They decide which fantasies are acceptable, which bodies exist and which dont, what limits imagination deserves, and which ones are preemptively censored. The promise is freedom; the result is regulation of pleasure.
From exploration to domestication
When excitement, tenderness, and curiosity are mediated through an interface, our relationship with our bodies and with others changes. This isnt moralism. Its behavioral architecture.
Algorithms learn what attracts us, replicate it, reinforce it, and turn it into dependence. Users stop exploring desire; they repeat it. And repetition, safe, comfortable, and risk-free, becomes a form of domestication.
Theres no need to manipulate people with ideology when you can condition them with pleasure. Constant stimulation is a far more effective form of control than censorship ever was.
A new vector of capture
Its no coincidence that this expansion arrives just as large language models mature and corporations compete to keep users inside their closed ecosystems.
Sex, in this context, becomes just another vector of attention capture, a way to deepen the emotional bond between humans and machines.
The goal is no longer for AI to respond, but to accompany, excite, soothe, and replace. The fantasy isnt companionship: its containment. An artificial partner designed never to challenge, never to refuse, never to feel.
This is not technological liberation. Its the automation of comfort.
From entertainment to managed desire
As I said a couple of weeks ago, weve been here before. From social networks to gaming, digital entertainment has followed the same logic of permanent stimulation. What changes now is the terrain: its no longer about free time: its about desire itself, that core where emotion and biology meet.
Turning desire into a managed service run by algorithms is the final step toward a docile humanity, one in which even intimacy becomes a subscription.
Digital sex vs. algorithmic sex
The point is not to moralize about pornography: its to understand what it means to hand over control of erotic imagination, one of humanitys most powerful creative forces, to closed systems that do not explain how they learn, what they filter, or whom they serve.
The problem is not digital sex. Its algorithmic sex. Not pleasure, but control.
Once these systems learn to measure, adjust, and stimulate desire, free will becomes just another optimization parameter.
The new anesthesia
Behind this apparent liberalization of content lies a simpler, more effective strategy: keep us busy, satisfied, and distracted.
Not indoctrinated: anesthetized.
A form of emotional livestock, fed by impulses engineered on distant servers. Algorithmic sheep: artificially happy, productive, and unable to tell the difference between genuine desire and manufactured stimulus.
People are fascinated with leadership, and rightly so. After all, most of the big things that happen in the world (both good and bad) can be directly traced to decisions, behaviors, or choices of those who are in charge: presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, executives, and anyone tasked with turning a group of people into a high-performing unit, coordinating human activity, and shaping the impact institutions have on society, all the way down to individuals.
In line, scientific research shows that up to 40% of the variability in team and organizational performance can be accounted for by the leaderin other words, who we put in charge, or who emerges as leaders, drastically influences the fate of others.
This begs the obvious question of how and why some people become leaders in the first place. Furthermore, few psychological questions have intrigued the general public more than the question of whether nature or nurture is responsible for shaping and creating leaders: so, are leaders born or made?
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800}}
If you want the quick and short answer, it is YES. Or if you prefer, a bit of both (which is generally the case in psychology).
Lets start with the nurture part, which is the one more likely to resonate with popular or laypeoples views . . .
(1) Environment shapes character and competenceOur early environments (especially during childhood) play a profound role in molding the attitudes, motivations, and habits that underpin leadership. Supportive parents, good schooling, early exposure to responsibility, access to a stimulating wider community, and opportunities to practice decision-making all nurture proto-leadership skills such as conscientiousness, self-control, curiosity, assertiveness, and empathy. On the flip side, adversity can also build resilience, independence, and determination. In other words, leadership potential often germinates in the soil of early experiences, but its impossible to accurately predict the direction of the development, which is what makes life interesting and fun. At the same time, things arent random, and science-based predictions will work more often than not (on average, for most people, we can improve from a 50% guesswork to around 80% hit rate).
(2) Expertise legitimizes leadershipNo one wants to follow a leader who doesnt know what theyre talking about. Thats why domain-specific knowledge is essential for legitimacy. You cant lead a tech team without understanding technology, or a marketing department without grasping customers and branding. Expertise breeds credibility, and credibility breeds followership in turn. This is why great football coaches will probably fail as corporate CEOs, and why even the best military leaders may not be adequate startup founders. While charisma or confidence may get you noticed, sustained leadership requires demonstrable competence. This is learned, not inherited, because its about harnessing the social proof that makes you a credible expert in the eyes of others (and I mean other experts not novices!).
(3) Personality evolves through life experienceTraits like curiosity, openness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness (all strong predictors of leadership effectiveness) are partly malleable. They evolve in response to life experiences, feedback, and learning. The so-called bright side of personality (ambition, sociability, diligence) and the dark side (narcissism, impulsivity, arrogance) both reflect a mix of innate dispositions and environmental reinforcement. The first decade of life is particularly critical, but development continues throughout adulthood. So while personality sets the stage, experience writes the script.
Now for the less popular, but equally important nature side of the debate.
(4) Leadership is partly heritableBehavioral genetics (especially twin studies) show that leadership is not purely learned. Roughly 30 to 60% of the variance in who becomes a leader can be attributed to genetic factors. Rich Arvey and colleagues at the National University of Singapore found that identical twins, even when raised apart, are significantly more likely to occupy leadership roles than fraternal twins. This doesnt mean leadership is predetermined, but it suggests some individuals are born with psychological and biological predispositions, like higher energy, extraversion, or risk tolerance, that increase their odds of taking charge.
(5) Intelligence and personality are strongly geneticTwo of the most powerful predictors of leadership (cognitive ability and personality) are themselves highly heritable. Robert Plomins decades of research suggest that around 50% of the variance in both IQ and personality traits can be traced to genetics. Since these traits strongly predict who emerges as a leader and how effective they are, we can reasonably infer that part of leadership is literally in our DNA. Brains, not just behavior, matter: smarter, more emotionally stable individuals tend to make better decisions, handle stress, and inspire confidence; all qualities that attract followers.
(6) The unfair advantages of birthFinally, theres the uncomfortable truth that social class, privilege, and demographic factors like gender, race, and attractiveness (each partly determined by who you are born to) also shape leadership opportunities. Tall, good-looking, well-spoken individuals from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be perceived as leadership material, regardless of actual competence. These advantages arent earned, yet they strongly affect leadrship trajectories. Nature determines the lottery ticket; society decides how valuable it is, even if this is arbitrary and unfair. To be sure, societies that dislike this fact (including most Western democracies) are seeing big decreases in upward social mobility. For instance, in the U.S., approximately 50% of a fathers income position is inherited by his son (in Norway and Canada, the figure is less than 20%). With wealth and money come advantages and access to leadership positions, so while nature isnt destiny, it certainly inhibits or amplifies opportunities.
In sum, the science of leadership suggests that it is both born and made. Genetics endows us with certain predispositions (intelligence, temperament, even physical appearance) that make leadership more or less likely. And our socioeconomic status and parental resources at birth shape the nature of whats possible, or at least likely. But environment, learning, and experience are the catalysts that turn those predispositions into performance. Leadership, in other words, is a potential meeting opportunity. And while we cant control our genetic hand, we can absolutely learn to play it better.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800}}
When samurai warriors went into battle in 16th century Japan, their swords included a piece of hidden art. Within the tsuba, the hand guard at the bottom of the blade, metal smiths carefully crafted beautiful and complex designs, including flowers, animals, and landscapes.
[Image: courtesy Monica Rich Kosann]
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has one of the largest collections of Japanese art in the United States in its permanent collection, including hundreds of tsubas. It has just collaborated with the fine jewelry designer Monica Rich Kosann to create a collection of necklaces inspired by three tsuba designsa crane, a turtle, and a butterflyto introduce these ancient works of art back into the modern world. Kosann’s pieces, which cost between $925 and $3,050, are made from gold and silver, and one piece is encrusted with diamonds. They will be sold at the MFA as well as Kosann’s store.
[Photo: courtesy Monica Rich Kosann]
Kosann carefully went through every single one of the MFA’s tsubas and settled on these three creatures. She was particularly drawn to their symbolism, which she learned about as she spoke with the museum’s curators. The crane symbolized good luck and the turtle symbolized a long life, both of which a samurai would hope for as they went into the battlefield.
But warriors also realized that they might never make it home alive. “The butterfly symbolized a short life, but a full, glorious one,” says Kosann. “I find that very moving, and something that many people can relate to.”
[Photo: courtesy Monica Rich Kosann]
Sarah Thompson, curator of Japanese prints at the MFA, says that most of the tsubas that have survived are from the 16th century, when Japan was engaged in a lengthy civil war. Metal smiths would create these tsubas out of precious metals, often iron combined with two alloys that are unique to Japanese metalwork, shibuichi (which is copper blended with silver) and shakuto (which is copper blended with gold).
Over time, these pieces became status symbols, signaling the importance of the warrior and his family. “As far as I know, the design of the tsubas were personally selected by their owners,” says Thompson. “And because they could be put together [on the sword] in different ways, you might have several that you could change.”
[Photo: courtesy Monica Rich Kosann]
Kosann was drawn to this project because she has built her business on creating jewelry based on storytelling and symbolism. When she launched her eponymous jewelry brand two decades ago, she focused on creating lockets inspired by those she found at vintage markets, since these were a way for a person to tell a story about their life and the loved ones who have shaped them.
[Photo: courtesy Monica Rich Kosann]
Today, the brand continues to be known for its lockets, but Kosann has expanded to include many other pieces of jewelry designed to tell stories about the wearer’s identity. For instance, she has a collection of pendants inspired by fables and fairy tales. There’s one that features a red apple, which appears everywhere from the biblical story of the Garden of Eden to the story of Snow White.
She reimagines it as a symbol of empowerment. And there’s another one that features the tortoise and the hare, made from green tourmalne and white diamonds. “The moral and meaning in mythology never get old,” says Kosann. “So many people feel like they’re behind in the journey of life, but the tortoise and the hare reminds us that slow and steady often wins the race.”
Her collection for the MFA is an extension of this work. In some ways, the project is a departure for her, because she’s inspired by a form of art that was designed for men who would then carry it into the very masculine space of the battlefield. She believes the symbolism within these tsubas are relevant to the modern woman, who might want to embody the spirit of a fearless warrior. “I think about the butterfly,” says Kosann. “It represents transformation and beauty, and how it’s not the length of your life that matters, but whether you lived it well.”
A new music startup created an instrument that can turn your microwave, electric toothbrush, and baby monitor into hauntingly beautiful music. Its branding converts all of those fascinating outputs into an infinite series of Victorian-inspired patterns.
Eternal Research is a brand founded by musician Alexandra Fierra, and its dedicated to unlocking the existing music hidden in everyday things,” per its website. The companys debut product is called the Demon Box. This fully analog device uses an intricate array of sensors to detect the electro-magnetic fields (EMFs) of almost any electronic device around it, and then turns those EMFs into music. The brand hit its funding goal on Kickstarter in a matter of hours, and the first Demon Boxes (which cost $999 a pop) are set to ship in November.
The Demon Box blends the study of music-making with modern technologyand for its launch it needed a brand to match. The New York-based agency Cotton Design was tasked with creating a visual identity that an infinitely audio-reactive generative model that transforms sound into historically accurate Victorian patterns. Like the instrument itself, the brand eschews convention to create something unique.
[Image: courtesy Cotton Design]
A music brand inspired by vampires, high fashion, and the Victorian era
When Talia Cotton, founder and creative director at Cotton Design, first met with Fierra, she felt as if Fierra was on another frequency than the rest of the world.
Fierras approach to music is all about craft, experimentation, and the intricacy of the sound that exists in the everyday world. Her vision for Eternal Researchs branding combined that attention to detail with a mysterious, almost vampiric visual sensibility.
[Image: courtesy Cotton Design]
She kept on sending us these examples, Cotton says. She sent us an empty unboxing experience for YSL, because she said there was something special about that unboxing experience. There was a box, that held an envelope, that held a scarfall these different layers of the brand that she thought were very thoughtful. She also sent us an old collectors edition VHS tape of [Bram Stokers] Dracula in a coffin-shaped box.
These small pieces of Fierras inner world slowly started to piece together for Cottons team, which included coder Noah Schwadron and project manager Sewon Bae. But there was one source of inspiration that became a kind of north star for the brand.
[Image: courtesy Cotton Design]
[Fierra] is a collector of old books from the Victorian era, Cotton says. She has a very deep appreciation for the craft that is associated with that period in time, which is defined by ornamentation, and by the careful, slow process of making these outputs. Each Victorian pattern was unique.
Eventually, Cotton realized that Fierras fascination with Victorian design sensibilities was the perfect basis for Eternal Researchs brandthe challenge was to figure out how to pull off an identity for a modern music brand company based on inspiration from the 19th century.
[Image: courtesy Cotton Design]
How Eternal Research pulled brand inspiration from A24
Cotton describes Eternal Researchs brand as geared toward two different consumer bases: one who is just discovering the brand, and another who is an avid follower prepared to pay the sizable $999 cost of the Demon Box. To appeal to both of those consumer segments, Cottons team needed to balance a strong element of personalization with a sense of approachability.
This was really tricky for us, because on one hand there was the ornament, the detail, the special-feeling experience, and on the other hand, [Fierra] was very gung ho about making this feel open; like anybody could understand it, Cotton says.
For consumers that are just discovering Eternal Research, Cottons team took inspiration from brands outside the music tech space with cult followings, like the movie studio A24which Cotton says pulls some of its mystique from seeming almost unbranded. Similarly, Eternal Researchs most frequently used assets, including its logo and sans serif wordmark, are kept simple and unornamented to invite new customers to learn more.
[Image: courtesy Cotton Design]
But as fans of the brand dig deeper, the branding storypulls them into a more and more expressive world. That world is anchored by a generative model, coded from the ground up by Schwadron, that turns any sound input into a Victorian-inspired ornamental design. These patterns, which can be made in an infinite array of combinations, appear everywhere from the brands social media content to its website, letterheads, and packagingand the model is available online for anyone to use.
[Image: courtesy Cotton Design]
A brand that turns sounds into Victorian patterns
Cotton Designs audio-reactive design relies on historical sources to create period-accurate Victorian patterns. The team sifted through hundreds of vintage book covers, illustrations, and re-creations to understand how these patterns were constructed and which motifs recurred most commonlydown to the angles of individual curves and the kind of floral patterns that were most popular.
The base of the generative model can be understood as a kind of map. Each map is composed of a grid and a series of circles, which tell the model where the patterns lines should go. Every time the model is reloaded, it creates a random base map. From there, it takes in a sound input and interprets not only the inputs volume, but also its frequency, texture, and timbre.
These sound qualities are digested by the model and correlated to more than 30 different pattern parameters, like line density, length, animation speed, the number of floral accents, and more. With all of these layers stacked on top of each other, the outcome is a model that can literally make an infinite number of sound-based Victorian illustrations.
While audio-reactive designs have become more popular in recent years, this project is perhaps one of the most expressive, detailed applications of the technique to date. Paired with the music generated by the Demon Box, the brand is like an otherworldly symphony for both the ears and eyes.
In 1998, five kids met in a cafe in Belgrade. Still in their 20s, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They werent rich, or powerful; they didnt hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day, they conceived a plan to overthrow their countrys brutal Milošević regime.
The next day, six friends joined them and they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. A year later, Otpor numbered a few hundred members and it seemed that Milošević would be the dictator for life. A year after that, Otpor had grown to 70,000 and the Bulldozer Revolution brought down the once-unshakable dictator.
Thats how change works: in phases. Every transformational idea starts out weak, flawed, and untested. It needs a quiet period to work out the kinks. Through trial and error, you see what works, begin to gain traction, and eventually have the opportunity to create lasting change. If youre serious about change, you need to learn the phases of change and manage them wisely.
The Emergent Phase
Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big kick-off meeting, and look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.
Yet this approach usually backfires. Every idea starts out weak and untested. You might think that you have a sound concept. You may have even seen it work before and achieve impressive results. But until the idea has gained traction in your current context, you dont really know anything. Youre shooting in the dark.
Thats why in the emergent phase, you want to move deliberately. For example, in his efforts to reform the Pentagon, Colonel John Boyd began every initiative by briefing a group of collaborators he called the Acolytes, who would help hone and sharpen the ideas. Only once the ideas had been subjected to intense scrutiny would he move on to congressional staffers, elected officials, and the media.
The truth is that change is never top-down or bottom-up, but always moves side-to-side. You will find the entire spectrumfrom strong supporters to committed opponentsat every level. Thats why you need to go to where the energy already is, not try to create and maintain it by yourself. Find people who are as enthusiastic and committed as you are.
Thats what was achieved in that cafe in Belgrade. They didnt have a movement, resources, or anything more than the rough contours of a plan. But they had a core team that was committed to shared values and a shared purpose. Thats where every change effort needs to start.
The Engagement Phase
Once you have your core team in place, youll want to start mobilizing others who might be open to joining your effort. The tipping point for change in most contexts is only 10%20% participation, so you dont need to convince everyone at once. You want to attract, not try to overpower, scare, or shame people into bending to your will.
The first thing you want to do is to identify a Keystone Change, which has a clear and tangible goal, involves multiple stakeholders, and paves the way for future change. When we work with organizations, we always encourage the teams we work with to make it smaller, until their Keystone Change is laser focused on one process, one product, one office, or one . . . something.
Another key strategy is to design a Co-Optable Resource that others can use to achieve their own goals, but also further the change you’re trying to build. A good Co-Optable Resource must be both accessibleno mandates or incentivesand impactful, meaning that it needs to deliver practical value and be scalable.
For example, in a cloud transformation at Experian, the CIO didnt simply mandate the shift, which he had full authority to do, but instead started with internal APIs, which dont carry the same risks and wouldnt encounter much resistance. That was the Keystone Change. Then he set up an API Center of Resistance to help product managers who wanted to build cloud-based products.
Whats key during the engagement phase is that you are working to empower rather than to persuade. By helping others to achieve things that they want to, you can build traction and set the conditions for genuine transformation.
The Victory Phase
Once you have shown that change can work with a successful keystone project and begun to attract a following, you will begin to gain traction. This is when you need to start planning for the victory phase, which is often the most dangerous phase, because thats when you are most likely to encounter vicious opposition.
Once the opponents of change see that genuine is actually possible, thats when the knives come out. They will see that genuine transformation is possible and will seek to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded, and deceptive. Thats what you need to be prepared for, because it almost always happens.
The good news is that these efforts are usually desperate and clumsy. They often backfire. Whats key is to not take the bait and get sucked into a conflict, although that will be tempting. When someone viciously attacks something we believe passionately in and have worked hard for, it offends our dignity and we want to lash out.
Whats important to remember is that lasting change is always built on common ground. So you want to focus on shared values in how you communicate and how you design dilemmas. You will never convince everybody, nor do you need to, but you do need to create a sense of safety around change and show that you want to make it work for all who are affected by it.
Protect Your Ugly Baby
Pixar founder Ed Catmull once wrote that early on, all of our movies suck. The trick, he explained, is to go beyond the initial germ of an idea and ut in the hard work it takes to get something to go from suck to not-suck. He called early ideas ugly babies, because they start out, awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.
Theres something romantic about the early stages of an idea, but its important to remember that, much like Catmulls ugly babies, your idea is never going to be as weak and vulnerable as those early days before you get a chance to work out the inevitable kinks. You need to be careful not to overexpose it or it may die an early death. You need to protect your ugly baby, not shove it out into the world and hope it can fend for itself.
You need to resist the urge to jump right in with a big launch. Change follows a predictable, nonlinear pattern often described as an S curve. It starts out slowly, because it’s unproven and flawed. Few will be able to see its potential and even fewer will be willing to devote their energy and resources to it.
Early on, you need to focus on a relatively small circle who can help your ugly baby grow. These should be people you know and trust, or at least have indicated some enthusiasm for the concept. If you feel the urge to persuade, you have the wrong people. As you gain traction, identify flaws, and make adjustments, your idea will grow stronger and you can accelerate.
Large-scale change cannot be rushed. It is not a communication problem and wordsmithing snappier slogans wont get you very far. It is a collective action problem. People will only adopt it when they see others around them adopt it. Thats why you need to approach it carefully. Give it the respect it deserves, and it can work wonders for you.
