Australian Competition Authority Accuses Amazon of Avaricious Contracts ⇥ accc.gov.au

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:

Between November 2023 and August 2025, Amazon AU’s Prime contracts with more than one million annual subscribers contained what the ACCC alleges were five unfair contract terms that allowed it to unilaterally make negative changes during the contract period without offering subscribers a remedy.

It is also alleged that Amazon AU later relied on one or more of these unfair terms when it introduced ads to Prime Video in Australia in July 2024. Prior to that, Amazon Prime Video was almost entirely ad-free.

Good. Do you know how much people would love it if governments gave adequate time and funding to competition and consumer protection authorities? Going after this bait-and-switch nonsense is something prized by just about everyone more sensible than your average libertarian. More of this, and where I live, please.

Australia Pledges Tougher Enforcement of Social Media Ban for Teens ⇥ reuters.com

Byron Kaye, Reuters:

Australia’s prime minister vowed on Friday to bullet-proof laws supporting a social ​media ban for under-16s as the government prepares legal action against platforms amid a steady stream of evidence that the ban has had little impact on teen use.

[…]

He did not give further details about what steps the government would take and the regulator declined to comment.

The details matter. In general, though, anything that makes age gating more effective must presumably make accessing age-gated websites more difficult for everyone. Proponents will argue that it is worth the collective sacrifice because it will add a layer of protection for children. I sympathize with that argument, but I think it over-simplifies a complex story and presents a solution with serious problems — for instance, the possibility of data leaks.

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

“We have to do something about it as fast as possible, because people will find this and resell it. It will do damage,” Sammy Azdoufal told me in May.

Azdoufal is the security researcher who used Claude Code to help discover that every DJI Romo robot vacuum cleaner and a million baby monitors and security cameras were embarrassingly easy to hack. This time, he says he discovered over 985,000 photo IDs sitting on the public internet for any half-decent hacker to steal.

These I.D.s included passport scans and driver’s licenses because they have the kind of information you need to buy weed. And this is in-person purchasing at clubs in Spain. I am hopeful that age gating technology vendors are more competent, perhaps destroying their copy of a document and storing only a confirmation token. But without better oversight, we simply have no idea and should have no confidence.

(Via Bruce Schneier who, for whatever reason, links not to Hollister’s report but instead a presumably A.I.-assisted rewrite hosted at the domain previously associated with — no joke — Cambridge Analytica.)

The Claude Aesthetic ⇥ newyorker.com

Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker:

As Claude Design catches on among Anthropic users, a generic-design aesthetic is emerging that’s as noticeable as text-based A.I. tics such as overenthusiastic em-dash usage or “not X … but Y” constructions. In slide decks and on website interfaces, there’s a predominance of beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, and large serif typefaces that are italicized and highlighted in zealous attempts to emphasize. Subheadings are often “tracked out,” in design parlance, with spaces between the letters, and there’s an inexplicable prevalence of ticker-like text bars, as if the website were a cable-news show. […]

An off-white background? Rusty orange accent colours? Well, darn.

Naz Hamid:

I paused to think about what I found inspiring at this time, and what feels fundamentally me. The answer lay in a mix of blueprints, indigo dyes, and selvedge denim. Add in some mid-century Americana via compartmentalized typography, and here we are. In hindsight, I’ve used shades of blue a number of times with Weightshift, but had left it behind. The blues are back.

Nick Simson:

I am choosing to see myself as someone who is not competing with A.I. I can’t anyway, on either price or so-called “efficiency.” I probably didn’t want that kind of work anyway. I find myself being more deliberate in design decisions, and writing too, so my work resembles something made, not generated.

Now that a method of mass production has reached the knowledge work sector, it is interesting to see a whole class of people try to find and eradicate any whiff of A.I. from their work, regardless of whether it was put there by human or machine.

The Real Problem the Metaverse Set Out to Solve ⇥ josh.earth

Josh Marinacci, building on top of my metaverse rundown:

Let’s get to one of the big points of the article I started this rant with, that if VR couldn’t be popular during a global lockdown when everyone had lots of free time and was trapped inside, then it would never be popular. While that might be true for Horizon, it is not true about VR in general. Truthfully VR was dying before COVID. I know because I was there.

I worked in Mozilla’s Mixed Reality group from 2017 to 2020. I saw all of this first hand. Most investments were turning sour before COVID.

Marinacci’s closer-to-the-inside voice is worth your time if you are at all interested in this bizarre chapter in tech company history. If anything, I think it lends credence to my theory that the pandemic was the fuel powering these dreams, since it became the justification for maintaining investors’ waning interest — until it was not.

The Marketplace of Ideas Is Rigged When It Comes to Artificial Intelligence ⇥ theverge.com

Terrence O’Brien, the Verge:

But this isn’t some fluke, or temporary supply chain problem. Companies are choosing data center clients over ordinary buyers because “the same chip earns far more inside an AI server than inside a consumer device,” according to Srikanth Jagabathula, professor of technology, operations, and statistics at the NYU Stern School of Business. Regardless of whether people are clamoring for more AI, and more AI data centers, or not.

O’Brien frames this question around the recent Apple price increases, but this observation can be generalized in a way that does not require tackling the question of whether the company’s extraordinary margins should cushion its customers against increasing costs. If someone wants to go out and buy a computer right now, they are going to be paying through the nose for any spec above the entry-level. Even if they want to buy a relatively “thin” client, it still needs plenty of RAM — in part because local models need it, itself a part of this issue.

There is, therefore, no way to opt out of this technological push when buying something new. That makes sense if you think of the family of artificial intelligence technologies as a feature, not a product. But it does mean we all end up paying for this explosive market regardless of whether we think any of this is a prudent, sensible, or ethical technology.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

But while tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, which both announced price hikes this week, have a hefty cash cushion, supply chain leverage and customers numbering in the millions or billions, a much wider swath of businesses face potentially dire straits. Most consumer electronics companies have little margin to spare and can’t confidently raise prices in an economy already grappling with inflationary pressures.

Luke James, Tom’s Hardware:

Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron were sued on June 25th in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where 17 plaintiffs accuse the three memory makers of illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have risen roughly 700% over four years. The class action, filed as Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics and assigned to Judge Noel Wise, invokes Section 1 of the Sherman Act and targets companies that together hold around 90% of the global DRAM market. Samsung and SK hynix have pleaded guilty to criminal DRAM price fixing once before, with the latter paying a $185 million fine in April 2005.

The complaint (PDF) and docket are available on CourtListener which, notably, contains a reminder that these same companies did this before.

Mark Zuckerberg Makes Another Sartorial Pivot ⇥ patreon.com

Max Read:

But times change, and so too does a man’s fashion. Zuck still shows up in photos in his boxy heavyweight tees, but he’s begun to rotate in—and even favor—soft, textured, lifelessly tasteful polos like the heather gray number above, or the long-sleeve taupe Prada joint he wore buttoned to the top at the Prada show at Milan Fashion Week back in February:

[…]

Perhaps even more notably, when he does wear t-shirts these days, he’s demurely tucking the chain inside: […]

Mark Zuckerberg’s regular reinvention is fascinating to me. There is nothing wrong with his changing how he dresses, just as there is nothing wrong if you or I do the same, but he clearly has a communications goal for these personal makeovers. His discovery three years ago of six-figure wristwatches and ostentatious streetwear was, in part, about signalling allegiance to vulgarity and masculinity when that was seemingly trending. Now, the cultural tides are shifting again and Zuckerberg needs to play the role of a studious and careful CEO who will manage his company’s contributions to artificial intelligence responsibly, so he is wearing soft polos.

Then there are the CEOs who wear the same thing every day, and that is pretty weird, too.

Jason Snell Ends His Macworld Column ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

A new pivot point for Apple? Seems like a good time for a new pivot for me, too. This year has been full of milestones for me, from appearing on “Jeopardy!” to reviewing David Pogue’s book about Apple for The Wall Street Journal, to crowdfunding a new podcast about Apple history. Along the way, I’ve had to say goodbye to some longstanding projects.

That’s my long way of saying that this is my last More Color column at Macworld. […]

Snell would likely not appreciate it if I mentioned how old I was when I first read his byline, so I will not, but I will point out that I continue to love what he is doing independently at Six Colors. My congratulations for an amazing run.

Two More Things About Apple’s Pricing Increases ⇥ cnet.com

Jeff Carlson, CNet:

Apple’s Certified Refurbished store has been a sanctuary for people who balk at the prices of new Apple products, but it provided little shelter from today’s increases across many of its lines. Reconditioned items are also more expensive.

These increases seem to be driven less by the current refurbished lineup and more by what happens when Apple adds inventory from its newly-pricier products — which sucks. Even explaining it to myself feels dishonest.

Rukhsar Ali and Anis Heydari, CBC News:

“The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge,” Apple said in a statement to CBC News. “We have never seen a ​component price increase this much, this quickly.”

The company has shielded customers from increases thus far, it said. “But we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for ​iPad and Mac.”

I do not think you need me to emphasize the qualifier words in that final sentence to understand what Apple is telegraphing. Bummer I did not buy a new Mac yesterday when I could not afford to, so now I can not afford to but even more.

Apple’s Price Increases Have Arrived ⇥ macrumors.com

Here is a little marketing pop quiz for you: the company you work for wants to increase the prices of its products across the board urgently — and by a significant amount — because key components are suddenly more expensive. Which strategy do you choose?

  1. Wait until there is a good time, like the next product launch cycle, and swallow an unpredictable cost increase until then.

  2. Rip the bandage off immediately, knowing this will cause alarming headlines and a corresponding drop in sales that could be expected by making anything more expensive.

  3. Pre-announce it with a small delay, thus giving you a temporary sales boost as people scramble to get their orders in at current prices, and to soften the blow when the increases hit.

The first two options have clear problems. The third has effectively no down-side, given the circumstances, and clearly telegraphs the unusual nature of the increase, which is why it is what Apple went with.

Hartley Charlton, of MacRumors, has the full list of changes in U.S. dollars, to which Apple anchors its worldwide prices:

The average price increase is $269.23. The iPhone, AirPods, Studio Display, and accessories such as the Apple Pencil are seemingly the only unaffected product lines.

In pure numbers, the biggest increase is by $1,300 to the high-end Mac Studio. In relative terms, the Apple TV carries a 50% premium compared to yesterday. In reputation, however, the loser has to be the MacBook Neo, which was launched less than four months ago with its $600 base price a marketing factor as loud as its lime green finish. I do not think it is a worse product at $700, but I think the price bump so close to its introduction indicates the wild world of component costs. Notable, too, that the iPhone lineup remains unchanged — for now.

Canadian pricing is now eye-watering. A few examples:

  • MacBook Neo: $949, from $799

  • MacBook Air: $1,799, from $1,499

  • MacBook Pro: $2,799, from $2,399 (with the M5 Pro, $3,499 compared to $2,999; and with the M5 Max, $5,799 compared to $4,999)

  • Mac Mini: $1,099, from $799

  • Mac Studio: $3,499, from $2,699 (with the M3 Ultra, $7,499, from $5,499)

When choosing the URL slug for this post, I first assumed apple-price-increases-2026 would be enough; on second thought, I figured I would add june, just to be safe.

Meta Suspends Internal Surveillance Tech After Sensitive Information Was Left Unsecured ⇥ wired.com

Paresh Dave and Lauren Goode, Wired:

Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by WIRED and three current employees familiar with the issue.

The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models, is believed to include keystrokes, mouseclicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta’s US employees.

Katie Paul and Jaspreet Singh, Reuters:

Meta said on Monday it will pause an internal program that tracks ​employee mouse movements and digital activity for AI training as the ‌social media giant investigates data security concerns.

Meta staying in character by doing something creepy, badly.

Bill C–22 Could Expose Canadian Data to U.S. Surveillance ⇥ policyoptions.irpp.org

Cynthia Khoo, writing for the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s Policy Options:

If Bill C-22 passes as is, it could put in place one piece of a bigger cross-border law enforcement data-sharing system, as envisioned in the CLOUD Act and other international data-sharing treaties.

Once completed, this system could further expose Canadian residents and our human rights to U.S. government and corporate surveillance apparatuses and their well-documented abuses of power. This is the last thing Canada needs in an era of destabilized relations with an increasingly authoritarian Trump administration.

Therefore, the federal government should withdraw Bill C-22’s provisions involving sharing data with foreign states, among other provisions, or otherwise suspend the bill’s progress through Parliament until and unless the government has provided opportunities for full public and parliamentary debate.

This bill, while well-intentioned, needs a lot of correction.

How the New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People ⇥ thedissident.news

While I am criticizing the New York Times’ odd framing choices, here is a more substantial critique from Alejandra Caraballo:

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

To assess the framing of thousands of articles, Caraballo ran the text through three different large language models plus VADER. Caraballo notes the LLMs fared better at interpreting words in a greater context.

Setting aside the technology, it is alarming to see the Times’ coverage shift, and so noticeably in 2022. Caraballo attributes this to several predominantly internal factors, including losing the paper’s only openly trans writer, but I stumbled across another possible external influence.

Hope Pisoni, Uncloseted Media:

[The Manhattan Institute’s] attacks on education also target K-12 schools. Starting in 2022, it began frequently demonizing schools for teaching “radical gender” ideology and “transitioning kids without parental consent.” Wuest says this is because disparaging public schools supports its longtime policy goals related to school choice. She cites a 2022 speech by [Christopher] Rufo at Hillsdale College.

The links in the quoted paragraph primarily go to the innocuous-seeming City Journal, though it is a publication of the Manhattan Institute. It ran loads of articles in 2022 from Rufo taking things out of context to, as Pisoni writes, advance the broader conservative policy goals of the Institute and stirring up a broader panic about trans people. And the Times loves taking direction from Rufo.

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks ⇥ nytimes.com

Michael H. Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory, and Irineo Cabreros, New York Times (gift link):

The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.

Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.

After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, we found that the rise of large pickups and S.U.V.s is an important factor.

I am fascinated by the Times’ repeated investigation into rising pedestrian deaths in the U.S. — here is another story, this one from 2023 — in which reporters notice how it differs from other countries, including Canada, but do not seem to interrogate that question further. The Canadian auto market is extremely similar to that of the U.S. and the sales of large trucks and SUVs has been booming here, too; yet, we have not seen a comparable rise in pedestrian injuries or fatalities. This is something I explored in response to that 2023 article because it is personally relevant: I am most frequently a pedestrian and cyclist, and I would prefer to not be hit by a vehicle.

Since I published that, researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published an extensive comparison (PDF) of this divergent trend in general traffic fatalities. Though not specific to pedestrian deaths, they point to a variety of different factors, including greater adherence to speed limits in Canada, lower speed limits on average, greater transit use, stricter enforcement of impaired driving laws, and climate-related factors. But this data is only up to 2021 for the U.S. and 2020 for Canada — and those years had specific and unique differences.

Those researchers, in turn, cited a 2022 Bloomberg article by David Zipper, specifically comparing collision fatalities in the U.S. and Canada. I wish I had read that article first; it is very good. Zipper points to factors like growing average vehicle use in the U.S. compared to a flat trendline in Canada, no doubt influenced in part by much lower U.S. fuel prices. And, yes, Zipper also pointed to a trend toward larger and heavier vehicle purchases in the U.S., even more than in Canada. All of these things add up. If people are driving bigger and heavier cars over an already-higher speed limit for greater distances while being more likely to be impaired or distracted, that is likely to cause a much higher number of fatalities than can be explained by any one of these factors alone.

In his article, Zipper quoted Ian Jack, of the Canadian Automobile Association, saying “[it] worries me about the future here in Canada, because we often end up emulating the U.S. some years later”. This, unfortunately, appears to be true. Transport Canada’s motor vehicle casualties dashboard shows a modest increase in pedestrian deaths in 2023 compared to 2022, and a massive increase in all deaths in 2022 and 2023. Injuries are also on the rise, though the story there is more mixed: total injuries are climbing from a low point in 2020, though not to the pre-pandemic levels, but pedestrian injuries spiked in 2020 compared to preceding and subsequent years.

In Alberta, specifically, we seem disinterested in learning anything. Speed camera use has been sharply curtailed and the province has raised the speed limit of a busy stretch of highway. The result is a modest increase in collisions overall in the province and a significant increase in fatal and injurious collisions, including a record-breaking number of fatalities last year in Calgary. Some of that is, undoubtably, due to the factors in this Times article about big trucks and SUVs which, unfortunately, are still growing. Chevrolet just announced its newest Silverado pickup truck line “with a bolder stance [and] stronger face”, one trim level of which, according to Motor Trend, “include[s] a 2.0-inch lift that makes it one inch taller than 2026”.

Update/and another thing: I do not understand why my standard-class driver’s license, which can be granted to someone as young as 16 after a brief road test, permits someone to operate a Volkswagen Golf like mine, a Chevrolet Suburban, and a bus-sized recreational vehicle.

Meta Is Moving Fast, Breaking Things (and People) ⇥ newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Gergely Orosz:

Meta has a booming business, and is already a beneficiary of AI via increased ads revenue. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is filled with fake, AI-generated videos, with hundreds of comments from bots and people who seemingly don’t realize it’s AI. It all seems like just more content for Meta to show ads next to.

And yet, despite business booming, Meta’s leadership has gone on a crusade to inflict the most damage possible on its engineering org. Apparently, they’re now learning that most of it was pointless.

Just a devastating assessment of Meta’s cultural shift from an organization that values software engineers to one that is very excited to see them minimized. This is already impacting users — see above, the month of account hijackings, and so on — and its software engineers. But Meta is not accountable to them as much as it is to advertisers and, so long as it continues matching ads to users, the money will keep flowing.

Brazil Becomes the Latest Region Mandating More Competitive iPhone and iPad App Distribution ⇥ apple.com

Apple announced this week it would be implementing its “alternative app marketplaces” and “alternative app payments” schemes to residents of Brazil after a settlement with the country’s antitrust authority. Michael Tsai has a good roundup of the history of this settlement and reactions from developers.

The people living in places where Apple’s standard App Store policies have been found non-compliant has now reached one-third of the world’s population. That is a poor measurement, of course, and half that is thanks to the mildly adjusted commission in China. But it has all happened recently, and it goes to show the number of influential markets taking this seriously. Even in the U.S., developers are allowed to link to an external purchasing option, effectively its sole concession of the lawsuit filed by Epic Games. Which raises the question: what are Canadian regulators waiting for? Apple is clearly not going to correct its policies without governments stepping in.

I think these policies are similar to those implemented in Japan — Apple even recycled the press release, swapping only the local details. But because these policies are all being revised piecemeal and region-by-region, and because Apple has a whole bunch of separate fees and commissions related to third-party distribution, I am trying to put together a comparison to better understand how this plays out in the real world.

Apple Announces Forthcoming Price Increases ⇥ wsj.com

Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal:

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

During its holiday quarter, Apple’s profit margin on hardware was 40.7%; in its most recent quarter, that dropped to 38.7% — a remarkable figure for physical products. It is these high margins that led to analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo to claim Apple would keep prices more-or-less stable and offset the additional costs through its even higher-margin — 76.7% — services business. The launch of the MacBook Neo and iPhone 17E a few months ago convinced some that Apple would hold steady.

That Cook is pre-announcing these increases suggests to me this will not be a modest bump coming with the release of new products later this year. It indicates the current lineup will cost more, and products launching later could cost a lot more — partly because well-funded A.I. companies are pre-purchasing production capacity, and partly because Apple Intelligence features have a new RAM floor. All I know is this — plus the gangbuster sales of Mac desktop models — really throws a wrench in my personal purchasing plans.

Every Frame Perfect ⇥ tonsky.me

Nikita Prokopov:

The rule of thumb is:

If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see.

Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. If UI looks good, that means developers had time to polish it, which means that they probably spent a comparable amount of time to iron out the code. It’s a heuristic, but a reasonable one.

Prokopov lists several criteria, but this post is almost wholly dedicate to the last one: “precise animations”. More specifically, in the case of this article, a lack thereof, particularly throughout MacOS and its first-party apps. I loved this post, and Prokopov did not even mention one of the most glaring in MacOS Tahoe: the four-finger trackpad gesture, the one that used to show Launchpad, now displays the App Drawer before the animation plays, then plays the animation, then shows the App Drawer again. If animations like these ship, it certainly raises questions about what else was deemed unworthy of being fixed.

iCloud’s ‘Hide My Email’ Feature Becomes Easier to Block ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple on its Developer site (via Arseniy Shestakov):

Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com.

New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. […]

Previously, Hide My Email addresses were generated on icloud.com, the same domain as any other iCloud email address. This made it basically impossible for web admins to block registration using Hide My Email. After this change, they can just block signups that use private.icloud.com. Some similar third-party services have a list of alternative domains for creating an email account, and I hope it is possible to use icloud.com in addition to the unified subdomain — but if it were, Apple probably would have said that.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

I have previously noted I am not a fan of Ed Zitron’s writing on A.I., which I think is driven more often by adherence to narrative than by genuine skepticism. Even so, his newsletter is extremely popular, and occasionally that pays off with honest-to-goodness scoops. Yesterday, he got a big one — a smattering of OpenAI financial documents revealing the company’s spending and earnings for the past two years. In 2024, it made billions of dollars less than it spent — including over a billion dollars on sales and marketing alone — and its 2025 numbers look even worse:

The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning. $38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be. Losses also appear to be mounting year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability.

Zitron shared these documents with the Financial Times, which independently verified them, and added some much-needed context. In particular, that whopping $38.5 billion loss accrued in 2025 and highlighted by Zitron — including in his headline — seems far less dramatic:

Before OpenAI’s switch late last year to become a public benefit corporation, investors in the company received convertible interest rights rather than conventional equity. Under US accounting rules, those interests were treated as liabilities and periodically revalued as the company’s valuation increased.

As OpenAI’s worth rose, the increased value of those investor rights created a roughly $30bn charge, added the person. The charge is not expected to recur following the restructuring, they said.

That expense is not something that can be waved away, of course, but it does not seem to be materially related to the company’s actual costs of creating and selling its products. Losses without including that charge were, according to the Times’ “person familiar with the matter”, $8 billion, or roughly 60% more than in 2024. But that is against revenue of $13 billion in 2025, a significant increase over 2024’s $3.7 billion. (OpenAI, in the first three months of 2026, earned $5.7 billion.)

These juicy numbers were republished by outlets like Reuters, the Next Web, Stocktwits, Benzinga, and Startup Fortune. Shamefully, all attributed them solely to the Times without mentioning Zitron’s critical role. These publications — particularly Reuters — should be giving full credit to the original source.

That Zitron now has actual, verified numbers also allows us to check some of his own reporting. For example, in April, he was quite upset that “every outlet has continued to repeat that OpenAI ‘made $13 billion in 2025,’ despite that being very unlikely given that it would have required it to have made $8 billion in a single quarter”. It is unclear to me which outlets Zitron is referring to as I could find just one — Russia Today — using that quoted phrase verbatim.

Even so, Zitron goes on to write about some apparently conflicting numbers reported by Anthropic before concluding:

Though I cannot say for certain, both of these situations suggest that Anthropic and OpenAI are misleading their investors, the media and the general public. If I were a reporter who had written about Anthropic or OpenAI’s revenues previously, I would be concerned that I had published something that wasn’t true, and even if I was certain that I was correct, I would have to consider the existence of information that ran counter to my own. I would be concerned that Anthropic or OpenAI had lied to me, or that they were lying to someone else, and work diligently to try and find out what happened. I would, at the very least, publish that there was conflicting information.

Two days after this article, he again claimed that “every single story about OpenAI’s revenue other than my own reporting (which came directly from Azure) massively overinflates its sales”, which are more like “a mere $2.27 billion in the first half of last year”.

The numbers Zitron now has for OpenAI suggests this narrative is complete hogwash. Yes, these companies leak overly-optimistic annualized run rates, but if that was a factor in the audited financials Zitron obtained, he likely would have mentioned that. He does not — and neither does the Times, for that matter. “Due to the seriousness of this story”, Zitron wrote, “I am not going to do very much editorializing”, so we will see in a later issue of this newsletter whether he acknowledges this self-induced frenzy was all in his head.

This is why I read Zitron’s work in the framework of conspiracy thinking. He accused OpenAI of “massively overinflat[ing] its sales” and “misleading their investors” based on his own calculations using leaked Azure figures. But it turns out OpenAI did, apparently, have that $13 billion in real non-ARR-fudged revenue for last year, and its operating loss is shrinking. Real analysts, not me, can figure out whether this company is on a path to a functional business. Zitron conjured a whole fictional narrative out of misreading some numbers and then, it would seem with this latest update, misunderstanding them again because it is useful for the story. Still, he should be credited for this scoop.