The SEC should adjudicate more. The entire SPAC era should never have happened.

If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.

The SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":

"Founded to help our country respond to the Great Depression, we’re the agency that protects investors from misconduct, promotes fairness & efficiency in the securities markets, and facilitates capital formation for those looking to hire, innovate, and grow."

It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.

Not that I think that applies here, just that they go beyond making sure everything has accurate filing and disclosure etc. and do have some mandate to look into the business models themselves in some cases.

Agreed, some people like to gamble, and it is not in civilizations long-term interest to preserve the fiscal integrity of the irrational.

People will learn risk-aversion vicariously, or end up living with the consequences of an inflated hubris. =3

We should just give the power to people with the most money who pay politicians to give them tax cuts and to not do anything else.

That's VERY GOOD.

Right? Right.

Found the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877

I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.

The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).

The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?

It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.

It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.

The number of people using AI at work could fall to 5%, but if those 5% of people were keeping Claude busy all day and night the overall expenditure on AI could increase.

The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it. If the software engineers are each spending $10K a month on tokens, it doesn’t matter at all if Bob from HR is doing $0.50 of Copilot queries every day.

That sentence links to https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/a...

Here's the relevant paragraph from that story:

> Yet those numbers may have recently levelled off. In May economists at the Census Bureau reported that “ai use remained relatively steady in many sectors over the last six months.” A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use ai at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.

Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int... - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.

As for the "survey by Jon Hartley", I think that's this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877 - "Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence".

They surveyed ~24,000 people with the question "Do you use generative AI for your job?", then later asked which of the following tools they used:

ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot, Scribe, Embedded products, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI (Llama), Adobe Firefly

After even more digging, I think I found the raw data for their survey in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativ...

Frustratingly, it looks like that only has their 2024 and 2025 data - the 2026 data is what would show that "33% of people now use ai at work" number quoted in the Economist article, but https://generativeairesearch.org/ no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.

That is a weird stat, I would assume it "fell" because all the insane amounts of free compute that was going around died down around those years, and some companies finally made AI policies. My employer (in one of those fancy Fortune lists) still is not using it in a meaningful way for development.

Its too early to tell what value will be found especially in large corps, where lot of the institutional knowledge that needs to be transferred into these systems is not straight forward to extract and encode. It effects who has power in different parts of large systems. So things take time.

Recent example is the time they took time to wrap their head around Cloud. Now look at the revenues they generate for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc. Early days.

I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.

Some people are being railroaded into more AI usage by mandate of their organizations, not because they're actually getting personal value out of it.

ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.

I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.

I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.

If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?

The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:

> A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.

The concern is that “bad apples” get into indices and then that starts to rot people’s futures. I’m not sure how that will play out (indices can kick them out, or if the company really fails the market cap will reflect that and the index can “heal”). I’m guessing Enron was part of the index at some point, but we survived that.

All human endeavors play favorites. We shall see if the SEC will let lightning strike two times in one year.

Yes. There are too many people entire retirements on the line to hide behind the usual song and dance people do around this. What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market, then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer? This is exactly what a government for the people could do. Or we could just keep letting rich assholes destroy everything with no consequences.

Elon Musk gave Trump $290M.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.

Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.

Do the math...

If companies were already profitable why would they go public?

A year ago Anthropic was losing billions per year. I'm sure that if it had listed and then collapsed everyone would've gone "first they run around saying how AI needs to benefit society and then they dump a cash-burning company on pension funds"

12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.

No.

The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.

These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.

Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit. An exchange or index that promotes IPOs of unprofitable companies diminishes its reputation, and the reputation of all other stocks it indexes.

Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.

What makes you think Anthropic isn’t audited?

The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.

There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.

Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails

Why do you think they will delay the IPO? I bet there's enough demand to buy their stock.

> if I was one to bet

You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.

Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.

As far as your claim, it's fine to say let the market sort it out, but perhaps consider that pension funds and index funds now represent a market distortion that means anthropic crashing is harder and even if it does would happen after the mandatory purchases by the index funds which is basically a transfer from the public to the insiders at anthropic

But we all know markets aren’t rational, I’m unconvinced we shouldn’t step in… if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me. This product might malfunction and show people how to make said anthrax which would be bad. Same with most things, everyone thinks this is a bubble. I think we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year, that would be the sensible solution tbh.

How will 'the market' figure it out when these companies have been directly angling for the too big to fail line? The end result is that they'll get a bailout due to national security interests or something so that the economy doesn't completely shit itself and then we're on the hook for it.

That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.