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AI is helping teams build software and tools faster than ever—but that doesn’t mean we’re building smarter. I’ve seen entire prototypes spin up in a day, thanks to AI coding assistants. But when you ask how they were built, or whether they’re secure, you get a lot of blank stares. That’s the gap emerging now, between what’s possible with AI, and what’s actually ready to scale. What looks like progress can quickly become a liability. Especially when no one’s quite sure how the thing was built in the first place. Before you go all-in on AI-assisted coding, check these five fault lines: 1. You can’t govern what you can’t see. Perhaps the most overlooked ri…

The American promise is one of equal opportunity, but in most of our communities today, access to the resources that enable prosperity are too far out of reach. That’s because there is one unseen factor that influences who is able to thrive and who cannot: capital. The flow of capital into communities has a dramatic effect on which kind of people can open small businesses, buy homes, and generally participate in the American Dream. Places that are already thriving are able to easily access capital. Banks see these neighborhoods as a “safe bet” and will readily support the opening of new businesses, construction of new homes, and mortgage lending. But those places …

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, will head to the Pentagon on Tuesday to meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about how the military uses the company’s artificial intelligence models. And it’s likely to be a tense meeting, as sources first told Axios. Contract talks between the AI startup and the Department of Defense have gone off course in recent weeks as Anthropic has insisted on some safeguards for how its technology will be used. While the San Francisco-based company is willing to loosen some of its usage restrictions for the Department of Defense, it doesn’t want its models used for at least two specific purposes: spying on Americans or developing autonomous …

U.S. Army personnel may be training for cyberwar, but their own web browsing is quietly feeding the surveillance economy. According to a recent study by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, corporate surveillance has deeply infiltrated the U.S. Army’s unclassified IT infrastructure in the continental United States. The researchers—who declined an interview request, citing increased scrutiny of external engagements by the Department of Defense—analyzed the 1,000 most frequently requested internet resources on Army networks over a two-month period and found that 21.2% were “tracker domains.” Those domains exist solely to harvest user data and analytics. A follow-…

Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates, has a low-key terrifying question she throws at those interviewing for a role at her startup. The 23-year-old recently raised a $35 million Series A for Phia, the AI shopping agent she cofounded in April 2025 with her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni. The startup, which has since garnered more than 1 million users and grown revenue elevenfold, is currently valued at around $185 million. Gates recently joined Brian Sozzi, Yahoo Finance executive editor, on the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast and revealed her go-to interview question f…

Next week, a rare celestial event will take to the skies. On March 3, amateur astronomers will get to witness a blood moon and a worm moon all at once. According to Space.com, a blood moon occurs during a total lunar eclipse, as the Earth passes directly between the Sun and Moon and casts a shadow across the moon’s surface. The moon appears red due to the way the Earth’s atmosphere filters sunlight. “This effect, known as Rayleigh scattering, is the same reason that the sky takes on magnificent shades of red and orange around sunset,” the site explains. While different seasons often bring exciting astrological events, this one is exceptionally rare. According to N…

At 12, I was walking around a very affluent neighborhood with my father and he said, “Mikey, all these people in these nice houses, not one of them could run a gas station.” That stuck with me. The gas station test isn’t about intelligence or ambition, it’s about aptitude for running a successful business. As a strong student, then an investment banking analyst, then a private equity associate, I was in this jetstream towards a career in investing. But can investors run gas stations? Does it matter? This concept was always in the back of my mind. I dove so deep into business details as an investor that my interest actually inhibited my performance. I was propelled…

As a young child, interior designer Jeremiah Brent and his mother visited open houses and model homes in his hometown of Modesto, California, as a form of daydreaming. Brent walked through the houses, imagining the people who might live there, building a fantasy around what these homes could be. Since then, Brent has turned his childhood design obsession into a sprawling career: He runs a 50-person design firm, moonlights on Queer Eye, and recently brokered his first bedding deal with Target. Having come up in the industry through a series of audacious bets on himself, Brent has developed a sense of humor and pragmatism around his relationship with creativity and his…

If you don’t want to be left behind by the AI revolution, you really need to start paying for it. At least that’s become the common refrain among some AI enthusiasts, who seem intent on instilling FOMO in less technical users. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, they say, are woefully inadequate if you want to understand where things are headed—so stop being a cheapskate and hand over your $20 (or $200) a month like the rest of us. “Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone,” HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer recently wrote in a widely shared essay on AI’s impact. “The people paying for the best tools, an…

The other night, I heard cabinets opening in the kitchen and the shuffling of bags and containers. My husband was looking for snacks with our 9-year-old. After, he got him ready for bed, read him a book, and ordered us dinner. Then he sat down at his laptop and worked until 9 p.m. As I unloaded the dishwasher, I realized two things. First: My husband was killing it. Second: The second shift isn’t women’s work anymore. It’s everyone’s burnout. The second shift, rewritten In 1989, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced “the second shift” to describe what happened when women got home from their paid job to an unpaid one: making dinner, folding laundry, shuttl…

Benson Lu’s life revolves around Pokémon. The 26-year-old has played the mobile game Pokémon Go every day for a decade, watches the animated show every week, goes to the local card shop in his Los Angeles suburb to play the brand’s trading card game every week, and has a whopping collection of cards worth more than $70,000. “I don’t remember when was the last day I did not think about Pokémon at all,” he said. In the 30 years since Pokémon debuted in Japan with the 1996 release of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green for Nintendo Game Boy, the franchise has taken over the globe with its animated shows, mobile games and highly coveted trading cards. Its popularity continues wi…

On Friday, Moderna’s mCombriax—a combined vaccine for both the flu and COVID—was recommended for authorization by European regulators, which opens the door for the vaccine’s approval in the European Union. The European Medicines Agency, the regulator granting the recommendation (or adopting a “positive opinion” on recommending it for market authorization), said that the messenger RNA vaccine should help protect “people aged 50 years and older against COVID-19 and seasonal influenza (flu),” in a statement. The shot works like any other vaccine, effectively prepping the human body to defend itself against foreign infection, with the messenger RNA contained within …

Elon Musk is expected to take the stand in a shareholder trial on Wednesday in San Francisco, where he’s accused of making false and misleading statements that drove down Twitter’s stock price before he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022. The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, a few weeks before Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized. It claims Musk violated federal securities laws by making false, public statements that “were carefully calculated to drive down the price of Twitter stock.” T…

Meetings in corporate America are broken—and only breaking down more. Globally, people sit in three times as many meetings as they did before the pandemic, 60% of meetings are ad hoc, rather than scheduled, and 71% of people regularly multitask through them. When poorly-run meetings become the norm, people begin to see them as a time with little value. But meetings are an opportunity to shape organizational culture, and not enough leaders are taking advantage of it. Most high-performing teams build strong relationships, show care for the whole person, have open and honest communications, listen to each other, clarify processes, and collaborate. These are all beha…

For years, companies have been told to prepare for the future by chasing youth, digital fluency, and technical skills. They have been urged to bet on “high potentials” and to focus on the next generation. At the same time, they have spent years overlooking one of the most strategic talent pools already available to them: women over 50. This blind spot now looks increasingly dangerous. The future of work is arriving amid inflation, oil crises, wars, and all sorts of geopolitical tensions, economic anxiety, demographic aging, climate disruption, and the destabilizing effects of AI. In such a world, organizations need people who can handle ambiguity, navigate transitions…

The mitochondria, perhaps better known as the powerhouses of cells, are emerging as a possible factor in the pains of aging. Some scientists are of the mind that poor mitochondrial health can lead to symptoms and diseases related to aging, like Alzheimer’s and cancer. “The mitochondria just give up earlier than other parts of the cell because of the wear and tear that they’re subjected to,” Pinchas Cohen, dean of USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told The New York Times. “They’re the canary in the coal mine of cellular dysfunction.” It’s true that mitochondria produce energy from the food that we eat. But that’s actually not all that they do. How C…

Entertainment in 2026 is a bit of a double-edged sword. Excellent films and television shows are widely available in ways that would have sounded like science fiction just 20 years ago—but at a steep price. A single movie ticket costs an average of $16, while the average American household spends over $42 per month on streaming services, which adds up to $504 per year. And if you’re anything like me, you may not even be getting your money’s worth on those streaming services. Often when I sit down to watch something, I scroll through the options on Netflix, only to go to bed an hour later without having watched anything. In many cases, that decision paralysis refle…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Here’s the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase the typical valued U.S. home: January 2020: $52,041 January 2021: $52,087 January 2022: $63,111 January 2023: $87,092 January 2024: $93,227 January 2025: $98,900 January 2026: $93,061 While the income needed to buy the median-priced U.S. home is +78.8% higher than it was in January 2020, it’s down -5.9% year over year. Methodology: This Zillow calculation is conservative and assumes a 20% down payment and that the homebuyer spends less than 30% of their monthly inco…

Never in human history has there been a greater concentration of wealth than in Silicon Valley. The three most valuable corporations in the world have their headquarters in the region, within a few miles of one another, in addition to many other unfathomably wealthy people and companies. It would logically follow that such a place would have some of the world’s finest architecture, as we’ve seen in previous centers of economic power. Think: Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, Venice in the Renaissance, New York and Chicago in the early 20th century. But no, Silicon Valley looks like just about any other American suburb (with a few notable exceptions). The future is inv…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Last week’s Modern CEO made the case that boards and recruiters should stop focusing on CEO candidates’ résumés and start evaluating their potential for agility. That said, one aspect of work history can serve as a good proxy for the ability to manage uncertainty and change: internationa…

This Oscar cycle’s heavyweight battle is finally over. The politically charged action comedy “One Battle After Another” just managed to outmuscle Ryan Coogler’s musically driven vampire thriller “Sinners.” It was a 3 hour and 40 minute whirl through cinema and celebration, with Michael B. Jordan winning best actor for “Sinners” and Jessie Buckley winning for “Hamnet,” making her the first Irish performer to ever win in the category. There was electricity when Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and Black person to win the cinematography award for “Sinners,” asking all the women in the Dolby Theatre to stand up because moments like this don’t happen without wome…

Over the past year, tech companies invested hundreds of billions in the new data centers needed to power rapidly increasing demand for the technology. The investment is motivated in part by confidence that major AI labs such as those at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will continue to wring more intelligence out of their models. Indeed, fears have receded that the AI labs’ go-to strategy of supersizing models, training data, and computing power was no longer yielding large leaps in intelligence. Instead, the cadence of bigger and better models has accelerated, in part because AI coding tools are playing an increasing role in building new models. That’s certainly true a…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In calendar year 2025, the U.S. recorded 4.06 million existing home sales—tying 2024 and coming in just below the 4.09 million recorded in 2023. That marks three straight years with the fewest U.S. existing home sales since 1995. However, when accounting for population growth, the slowdown is even more pronounced. The U.S. had around 99 million households in 1995, compared to roughly 135 million households in 2025. Adjusted for that larger population base, resale turnover over the past three years has been the lowest in more than four decades. You’d have…

While many AI companies are betting their products can be useful to a broad segment of businesses, a startup called Emanate is taking the opposite approach, building highly targeted tools designed for complex sales transactions in the industrial materials sector. Founder and CEO Kiara Nirghin says the somewhat esoteric market, which includes manufacturers, distributors, and service providers working with materials from steel building materials to metal piping, has intricate sales processes involving generating quotes for bespoke orders, connecting existing customers with goods they may need, and proactively finding new customers. The industrial materials sector,…