 |
|
|
|||||
Earlier this week, social media was wowed by images from the streets of Chinese cities showing senior citizens lining up to have OpenClaw, the always-on AI assistant, installed on their laptops, desktops, and other devices. Areas like Shenzhen and Wuxi offered subsidies to try to scale up adoption of the tool and capitalize on its capabilities. An enormous proportion of all OpenClaw instances installed worldwide, as tracked by public dashboards, emanate from China. China is adopting tech at an absolute breakneck pace. A ridiculous amount of people turned up into a public event in Shenzhen today to install the OpenClaw.Some devs who work at Chinese big tech companies threw a free public event right outside the Tencent Building in pic.twitter.com/2t4y2ancyz— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) March 8, 2026 But just as quickly as China adopted OpenClaw, it now appears to be shunning it. The countrys internet emergency response center has issued an official warning about the risks the technology poses. The central government has sent out diktats to government agencies and state-owned enterprises, warning them against installing OpenClaw on their systems. The private sector has also responded. The same pop-up providers of installation services are now offering to uninstall unwanted OpenClaw instances for a fee. Its almost a notice from the Department of Stating the Bleeding Obvious, says Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey in England. Everyone has been saying ‘dont be so silly as to give agentic AI access to any valuable data. Yet Woodward points out that Chinas response is more than thatthey appear to recognize that AI adoption has been so rapid that it presents a prime target for supply chain attacks. Attackers were bound to produce malicious add-ons and plug-ins, he says. China cant seem to make up its mind about what to make of OpenClaw, says Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute covering China and its tech development. Beijing is simultaneously banning OpenClaw on government networks while local governments in Shenzhen and Wuxi are subsidizing companies that build on top of it, he says. That points to a dual focus, Fedasiuk reckons. The Chinese government aims to capture the economic upside of agentic AI while keeping it out of the party-state’s own bloodstream, Fedasiuk says. However, how long that balance can hold is debatable, not least because of the way every private-sector actor is trying to adopt agentic AI, he adds. Banning agents in 2026 is like trying to ban spreadsheets in 1985, or Google Sheets in 2013, he says. The productivity gains are enormous, and the opportunity cost of abstaining from the use of agents will eventually become untenable. Still, Fedasiuk points out that Chinas OpenClaw ban seems eminently sensible. Governments should be alarmed by the cybersecurity implications of AI agents, he says. Social norms around the technology are progressing such that many hackers will soon no longer need to crack the encryption that guards valuable files or digital services, but merely gaslight a piece of software that has already been given access to them. The problem is that its out of step with current thinking about AI. Nevertheless, it appears that China has decided that widespread use of OpenClaw could cause safety headaches in the months to come. Prompt injections and plug-in poisoning are still the thorn in a chatbots side, and it isnt surprising China is flagging it, when you consider that every layer of the AI stack has a commercial incentive to push the tools far and wide, says Jake Moore, a cybersecurity expert at ESET. There are also the same structural risks with agentic AI tools that are granted high-level system permissions before anyone has properly stress-tested what an attacker can do with them. Moore says the on-and-off relationship with OpenClaw reflects how different the pace of development is between the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence and those trying to roll it out responsibly. AI is clearly built to be fast and invasive, but it is outpacing security standards and reviews, he explains. For Fedasiuk, that dysfunction between the speed of development and the speed of security patching is evident in how Chinas Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission announced its change in policy. [It] has watched agents proliferate across government networks and moved to restrict their use within days or weeks, he says. Usually the commission would study the issue as a policy problem, issue a white paper or road map, and then come to a conclusion on which it acted. The fact that it didnt suggests preexisting anxiety within the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] about what autonomous AI means for information securityand possibly a more sophisticated understanding of where the technology is headed than many Western observers give them credit for, Fedasiuk says.
Category:
E-Commerce
I think the strongest indicator of how normal using AI has become is the language we use as shorthand for it. It’s now extremely common for someone to say they asked “chat” for some piece of information. We all know what they mean. But if you needed data on how popular AI portals are now, OpenAI provided it recently when the company revealed that ChatGPT has 900 million users, up from 800 million in the fall. Even if Gemini, Copilot, and Claude weren’t also rising (they are), that would be enough for the medianot to mention brands and marketing/PR agenciesto really understand how fast AI is growing as a discovery channel. Whether or not it’s a source of traffic doesn’t matter; it’s a meaningful layer between publishers and audiences. That’s obviously the reason there’s been so much interest in the infant field of GEO (generative engine optimization) lately, and why I’ve written about it more than once in the past few months. But the focus on how to get AI search engines to notice and reference content doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some kind of reckoning with how the content got there in the first place, and whatif anyvalue exchange that should trigger. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Surveys, such as this one done by OnMessage last fall, consistently show the public believes content providers should be compensated when their content is scraped by AI engines. The AI industry tends to have a different view, often suggesting that “publicly available” data (i.e., stuff on the internet) is fair game. It’s more nuanced than that, of course, but the central issue is one of leverage: The AI companies have it, and publishers by and large don’t. The push for a better bargain A new industry coalition is looking to rebalance those scales. In late February, a group of U.K. media companiesincluding the BBC, the Financial Times, and The Guardianannounced they were forming SPUR, which stands for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights. In an open letter, the leaders of those companies articulated the group’s purpose: “to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways.” In other words, SPUR is meant to help lead the publishing industry toward a better bargain between AI companies and the media. Currently, publishers have a hodgepodge of solutions: You could pursue a licensing deal with one of the big AI companies, an option available only to publishers above a certain size. You could sue the AI companies, an expensive proposition. Or you could try to defend your content through a combination of paywalls, bot-blocking protocols, and nascent technologies aimed at getting AI crawlers to pay for access. The spirit of SPUR is that there’s power in numbers. Although it’s beginning with a handful of U.K. publishers, the group is actively working to recruit media worldwide into the coalition. By taking collective action, which the news media is traditionally allergic to, the coalition stands a better chance of establishing some kind of framework for how AI services will pay for access to content. It stands an even better chance with allies. Last year, Cloudflare stepped into this fight, advocating on the side of publishers. And it brought to the battlefield technical clout: A significant portion of internet traffic goes through Cloudflare’s network, so it has an outsize say in what the rules are, and which ones get enforced. As part of its push against unauthorized AI scraping, it introduced Pay Per Crawl, a new way to charge bots for access to content. Couldflare’s solution is actually one of several on the market, and although SPUR doesn’t intend to play favorites, Pay Per Crawl is exactly the kind of technical barrier the group was created to encourage. The fact is, unauthorized AI crawling is rampant. TollBit, which publishes quarterly reports about bot activity, recently highlighted the problem of third parties leveraging virtual, “headless” browsers (essentially bots accessing sites as if they were humans and then scraping them) on an industrial scale to crawl vast amounts of datathe equivalent of a fishing trawler. For the longest time, the only technical weapon digital publishers had was the robots exclusion protocol (robots.txt), but it’s an honor system that can easily be ignored or bypassed. The main focus of SPUR, sources tell me, is to help publishers build more defenses. By making it more difficult and cost-prohibitive for AI crawlers to access content, it will encourage the people who operate them to make deals. Then come the agents The biggest wild card here is agents. AI services access content largely for three purposes: for training data, for search crawling, and in response to user requests. It’s the last category that is proving very contentious and the impetus behind a war of words between Perplexity and Cloudflare last summer. User agents have traditionally been given a pass from blocking since they effectively act as human proxies, not mass-scraping tools. Importantly, though, they don’t behav as humans (for example, they don’t look at ads), so many sites (and especially publishers) believe they should be entitled to block them. Some believe this aspect of AI crawling should be regulated, and certainly it’s part of the ongoing lawsuits between the media and the AI industry. But those approaches drag on; SPUR is acting now. You can picture this quickly leading to an arms race, and when the players were individual publishers versus the AI industry, that’s very asymmetric warfare. But a large, worldwide industry coalition, backed by technical allies like Cloudflare, might actually have a chance to push back. So now the hard work begins of herding the cats of the media industry. And the clock is ticking: User behavior is shifting rapidly, and asking “chat” what’s happening in the world means more agents are replacing human traffic to news websites. SPUR may give publishers a chance to shape that system, but it is taking form with or without them. Once those rules harden, changing them will be much harder. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Despite considering themselves successful, most Americans also feel like theyre lagging on at least one major milestone. But experts warn that dwelling on it could put them further behind. In a recent survey conducted by daily development app Headway, 77% of respondents said they consider themselves successful. At the same timein what researchers label the success paradox81% said theyre falling behind their peers in at least one major personal or professional domain. Roughly one-third said they feel behind others their age financially, 11% feel theyre behind in life experiences, 10% feel theyre lagging in their career progress, and another 10% said the same about their relationships. Its very easy to get caught in the trap of, Im not good enough, says Cindy Cavoto, a certified productivity coach for Headway and one of the studys coauthors. People put these expectations on themselves, and I think as a society we don’t give ourselves enough slack. Though many are facing economic challenges and career stagnation in the current job market, Cavoto says those setbacks can feel even bigger in the age of social media comparison. People are only posting their best lives, she says. Rather than focusing on others, Cavoto encourages folks to compare their progress against their own individual benchmarks, which most survey respondents felt positively about. Are you in a better place than you were last year? Are you feeling better about where you’re going this year? Cavoto asks. Stop looking around and just compare yourself to yourself. That’s your best measure, because we’re all on our own journey. The Fog of Work Part of the frustration many workers express is driven by feelings of persistent economic insecurity and career doubt, despite making personal sacrifices to further their professional ambitions. According to the Headway survey, 44% of respondents have forfeited free time, 37% have sacrificed sleep and mental health, and 30% have compromised relationships in pursuit of their goals. Despite those sacrifices, 66% of American workers feel like their career has stalled, according to a recent survey from online résumé builder MyPerfectResume. Furthermore, 45% said they want to leave their jobs but feel they cant in this market, and 70% have questioned or reconsidered their entire career path in the past year. Thats pretty astronomical, says career expert Jasmine Escalera of MyPerfectResume. There are a lot of employees out there who are dissatisfied with their day-to-day work. Of those who said theyve reconsidered their career path, 21% feel like its too late to make a change, 19% believe they should be further along than they are, and 17% admit to just going through the motions. This state of uncertainty, in which workers struggle to see whats ahead, is what MyPerfectResume refers to as career fog. There are a lot of employees out there who are feeling like they’re not having the upward mobility that they want, they’re not developing the skills that they want, they don’t have the career progression that they want, Escalera says. There are also a lot of employees who feel like they’re not getting paid what they should. According to a MyPerfectResume survey conducted last fall, 78% of workers have been assigned new duties without a raise or promotion, and more than half were promised promotions or opportunities that never materialized. In an analysis of U.S. wage growth between 2020 and 2024, MyPerfectResume found that despite an 18% increase in real wages during that period, spending power declined by 2.6% due to inflation. Our recent reports show that a lot of people are struggling financially, Escalera says. The question is, are people also not feeling like theyre moving in the right direction because theyre not being paid enough to afford basic necessities? In another recent MyPerfectResume survey, 74% of respondents cited high expectations, peer comparisons, or personal perfectionism as a driver of self-doubt, and 58% said self-doubt is negatively affecting their career growth. In other words, those negative feelings are further driving negative outcomes. Focus on what you can control Lots of workers feel like theyve lost control of their careers, their personal finances, or their mental health, and for good reason. Economic instability, job market stagnation, layoffs, and AI fears have many workers questioning whether theyre on the right pathand that self-doubt can put a damper on their motivation. How they approach these challenges can play a significant role in the outcome, according to former Stanford lecturer and behavioral design expert Nir Eyal. In his new book, Beyond Belief, Eyal explains that our perception is driven by a set of beliefs that are neither pure fact nor fiction, making them uniquely malleable. Beliefs are tools, not truths, he says. You can change how you see reality based on your beliefs. Adopting what Eyal labels limiting beliefs anchored in self-doubtsuch as Im not where I should be, despite my best effortssaps our motivation and increases suffering. Rather than looking for opportunities to improve our situation, Eyals research suggests those who maintain limiting beliefs wire their brains to look for evidence of their victimhood. How hard am I going to work if I’m thinking, I’ve been working this hard, and look, I still am not where I should be? To me, it’s pretty demotivating, he says. We must reconcile that limiting belief to push beyond it, and we do that by adopting a liberating belief that serves us better. Turning a limiting belief into a liberating belief, according to Eyal, starts with questioning the truth behind the limiting belief, and considering how outcomes might improve if we reversed it. With this inquiry-based stress reduction, we learned that the belief that we think is a fact may not be a fact, and there might be an alternative explanation, he says. We learned that holding on to the belief doesn’t necessarily serve us, doesn’t make us better off, and that actually not holding on to that belief might be much better for us, all in a matter of seconds. In other words, the more workers believe theyre falling behind their peers, the more likely that sentiment is to become reality. Those who instead focus on their own success and potential are more likely to reduce the weight of their personal and professional challenges, and their negative feelings toward them. We can actually use the science behind belief to help us increase our motivation to do what we need to do to decrease our suffering around that situation, so that we can reconcile it, Eyal says. Who do you become hen you believe I’m exactly where I should be and I’m still learning? Youll feel so much more motivated to go learn and keep working at it.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||