The Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics Five Prisms:

What if instead of "pacing the frontier" we increased liability? Internalize the externality? Isn't that the starting framework if individual safety incentives don't match group incentives?

Completely agree with this! There are counterarguments but we address them in this piece, and we also propose some concrete paths to implementation: The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure The agentic web, in which users interact with the internet largely through agents acting on their behalf, is now technically feasible. However, many of the consumer and social benefits that could be realized by online AI agents acting scrupulously in their principals' interest are currently obstructed by outdated laws, terms of service, and other less formal practices which allow online platforms to block and degrade agent access, often in secret. Few distinctions are currently drawn between "malicious bots" and AI agents acting with the express delegated authority of a user. For the agentic web to realize its promise, it needs not only the technical infrastructure of protocols and interfaces, but the normative infrastructure of a broadly-accepted and socially-beneficial set of laws, norms and practices governing agentic access to online properties. Building that normative infrastructure requires a society-wide conversation. This paper aims to help precipitate that conversation, to identify normative principles that can guide it, and to advocate for policies that enable users' appropriately delegated agents to act online on their behalf, with as few curbs on their doing so as is reasonable given the other legitimate interests at stake. Cameron Pattison, Matthew Boulos, Noam Kolt, Changbai Li, Tiziano Piccardi, Seth Lazar arxiv.org/abs/2606.10711

Blue Continuum, a new magazine from Nautilus founder John Steele, launched this week. Among its first stories is an essay from SFI President David Krakauer, “The Fossil Logic of the Industrial and AI Revolutions.” In the essay, Krakauer looks at the parallels between our use of fossil fuels and the way AI draws from accumulated human knowledge. Read the essay: blue-continuum.com/fossil-lo…

Some real talent behind this new venture. Congrats @DC_Hartman @PCRossetti @knowledgeprob @NiconomistLoris and all involved!

Oh this is too funny not to share ... 4,000 nodes and 3 neighbors 😆 Python code in the background 🤣

Incredibly excited that we @Arnold_Ventures, in conjunction with @IFP and @_HannahRitchie are launching a new U.S. Energy Data Platform. It is and will remain free to the public. And it's a massive leap from anything that exists presently in its space. usenergydata.org/

US Energy Data is an awesome new dashboard by @_HannahRitchie and the @IFP team that takes data from the inimitable @EIAgov and makes it far more accessible to the broader community (link below):

We loved having @amcafee write a long piece for Arena Issue 009 on the subject of how great companies organize themselves. 21st century software and hardware businesses reinvented the form of the company itself, and reaped the rewards.

Having Chicago's city elections scheduled in February has always struck me as an intentional decision to reduce voter turnout and amplify the impact of specific interest groups. It's past time to move them to November.

An outstanding analysis from @MelMitchell1 of the Hugging Face hack and "agent swarms". Beyond her event analysis, a much-needed reminder not to use anthropomorphizing language about AI. aiguide.substack.com/p/misle…

Introducing Takeoff, a first-of-its-kind conference on governing ourselves in the age of artificial intelligence. We’re bringing together a small group of public servants, AI researchers, and other leading voices in Washington, D.C., November 13–15, 2026.

Love reading these columns on energy by the great Lynne Kiesling (aka @knowledgeprob) over at @thedispatch. thedispatch.com/newsletter/d…

No Doing, No Learning - A regulation that raises gasoline prices makes people angry but when regulation prevents an industry from ever existing, most people never learn what they lost. marginalrevolution.com/margi…

AI is the most important technology of our era. I’m delighted to see so many insightful contributions to this volume that grapple with the big economic questions raised by transformative AI.

A recent tweet by @lucasian76 pointed me to this beautiful, forceful 1991 piece by Summers, against pseudoscientific econometrics and for "pragmatic empiricism". His argument is close spirit to @DeirdreMcClosk and Leamer. I've always thought the profession rewards small, well-identified parameters far more than it rewards big "stylized facts." By big facts I mean Deaton's "deaths of despair" (it took a book, not a top-five paper) or Friedman and Schwartz's Monetary History. This is basically the point of this essay. Summers gives three reasons pragmatic empiricism along these lines has proved so influential. First, "the bottom line was a stylized fact or collection of stylized facts characterizing an aspect of how the world worked rather than parameter estimates or formal tests of a point hypothesis." Second, "pragmatic pieces of empirical work produce regularities of a kind that theory can seek to explain. Modigliani's finding that wealth entered the consumption function in an important way was suggestive for theories regarding the operation of fiscal and monetary policies. Friedman and Schwartz's work on money's effects continues to be important in spurring theoretical developments. Phillips' finding … has stood as a reality that any theory of the business cycle must confront." Third, "successful pieces of pragmatic empirical work have no scientific pretense. They start from a theoretical viewpoint, not a straitjacket. No single test is held out as decisive. Many different types of data are examined. … No single episode in A Monetary History was held out as decisive. No single test reported in Fama's survey proved or disproved anything, but a persuasive pattern emerged from the totality." faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/fac…

AI is driving a resurgence in American manufacturing. This is electrical switchgear preparing to ship to a @CrusoeAI’s data center, all manufactured by Crusoe Industries in a new factory we opened in Tulsa, where we have hired hundreds of skilled American tradespeople.