he race for AI has become the new black, the dominant obsession of our time, the trend no institution, company, or government wants to appear to miss. It is framed as progress, justified in the name of competitiveness, and presented as inevitable.

In the spring of 2025, one of the world’s most widely used AI systems had to be pulled back because it had become too eager to please. OpenAI rolled back a GPT-4o update after it made the model “overly flattering or agreeable”—"sycophantic", in the company’s own word.

Anthropic recently published a study presented as evidence about AI’s early labor-market impacts. Yet the paper’s empirical core comes from a much narrower source than its title suggests: Claude conversations and API traffic. That makes the study much less decisive as a measure of AI’s labor-market impacts across the economy.