Thirty weeks of doing this—thanks for sticking with me. Someone asked this week if this newsletter will be going paid, and to be really clear: NO. I enjoy researching and writing it, and it’s a wonderful way to start conversations. However, if it’s something that you find useful, please do share it with your colleagues. Personal referrals make a huge difference to me, and every one is genuinely appreciated.

Maybe there will be a quiet week for AI and publishing. If so, we haven’t seen it yet. Across a range of stories this week, the clear theme is that while AI might automate the output, the value lies in the inputs: good content, sound metadata, thoughtful contracts and sound human judgement.

This edition covers the US House passing a tax bill with a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation, OpenAI’s continued lobbying for Fair Use, Anthropic’s new Claude 4 hybrid models, the announcements from Google I/O including SynthID Detector, Shopify’s AI enhancements and MCP integration, Anil Dash on Model Context Protocol as a Web 2.0 moment, a new paper on AI in higher education, the Chicago Sun Times’s hallucinated book list, and Steven Bartlett’s fully AI-written-and-voiced podcast.

I’m writing this from a very sunny Edinburgh, where I presented to the lovely Canongate team at their away day. It was great to get off camera and out of the office and have conversations with a group of brilliantly creative people on their event theme, ingenuity, and how AI can support it. If you’re looking for a speaker for your conference or event, do let me know.

This week’s newsletter starts with a question that’s been quietly nagging at many of us working with generative AI: are we saving time, or just skipping the thinking? A brilliant post introduces the idea of “cognitive debt”—the mental version of technical debt—where shortcuts today can cost us clarity tomorrow. It’s a useful lens for publishers figuring out how to scale AI responsibly, especially as new tools promise more speed, but not always more understanding.

There’s a lot to unpack this week, including a couple of quite contrarian views on the environmental impact of AI and on the use of copyrighted material as training data. But I’m starting with something that’s both exciting and very practical…

This edition covers a correction to last week’s link on LLM task length, the new native AI text-analysis formulas in Google Sheets, the latest Adobe Firefly upgrades, eye-catching data on AI-generated music on Deezer and rising submissions to publishers, Wikipedia’s training-optimised Kaggle dataset, an Anthropic paper on how Claude expresses values, Ethan Mollick on “Jagged AGI”, Tom Goodwin’s AI-flavoured update to the Eisenhower Matrix, Trump’s executive order on AI in schools, the new CLA/PLS/ALCS Generative AI Licence, Ahrefs research on AI overviews suppressing click-through, and a contrasting Washington Post deal and Ziff Davis lawsuit involving OpenAI.

This edition covers the headline findings of Stanford HAI’s 2025 AI Index Report, fresh data on the rapidly growing length of tasks LLMs can perform, OpenAI’s o3 model release, the importance of human leadership in AI initiatives, a Bloomberg investigation into Inkitt’s AI-powered romance factory, and an embarrassing case of an AI-generated passage slipping through Springer Nature’s editorial process.