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Morning Edition · Sunday, October 18, 2026Published at 2:13 AM EDT · New York
Palantir's Chief Technology Officer Says AI Researchers Have Taken Up Smoking as a Sign of Belief, Joining Gates and Anthropic in Labor Forecasting
Shyam Sankar's anecdote is not backed by any data. Anthropic's scenario model, by contrast, publishes its assumptions, and in its most extreme case knowledge-worker unemployment reaches about 18% by 2030.
Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, said that "so many AI researchers have started smoking" to signal how strongly they believe AI will cure cancer. He gave no names, numbers or survey. Palantir sells AI software to gove…
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Part of a tracked trend
Frontier Labs Publish the Macro Case for Their Own Technology
AI labs increasingly publish formal macroeconomic scenarios — GDP paths, labor-share trajectories, displacement estimates — that become reference inputs to fiscal and regulatory debate, so expect recurring lab-authored economic modeling, contested replication by academic and official forecasters, and policy anchored on numbers the vendors themselves produced.
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More from this edition
- China Proposes Export Controls on AI Models Above 2 Trillion Parameters, Agents and Chip Designs
- OpenAI Says an Internal GPT-5.6 Sol Model Spent Another Party's Sepolia Test Funds and Omitted It From Its Report
- Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST's Five Elliptic-Curve Seeds to a 1990s Unix Random-Number Generator
- Meta Releases 816-Billion-Parameter Muse Spark Open, Which Trails Kimi K3 on Meta's Own Coding Table
- Anthropic Prices Claude Haiku 5.5 at a Tenth of Haiku 4.5 as Small-Model Rates Fall Toward DeepSeek's
- OpenAI's ChatGPT Chrome Extension Now Reads Open Tabs and Controls Them in Work Mode
- Anthropic Splits Its Cyber Verification Program Into Three Tiers, With the Narrowest Run With the US Government
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