17 Jun 2026
Signal Headquarters

Field Notes · 17 Jun 2026

Best explained

Anthropic explains why the government jailbreak standard used against Fable is industry-ending if generalized: applying it broadly would halt all new model deployments across every frontier AI provider.

By the numbers

Cloudflare reported that agent and bot browsing now accounts for more web use than human browsing.

New today — Evidence added

Approximately 40,000 new games launched in the App Store in one year, with zero reaching top-10 and zero sustaining top-25 or top-50 rankings.

Mark Pincus

New today — Sharp calls

FPV drones now account for 70-80% of front-line casualties and are a software-defined platform that can be upgraded overnight via software.

Maxim Bar Kogan

Generic AI utility apps with massive view counts can fail to monetize, while smaller niche passion apps convert viewers to paying users at dramatically higher rates.

Greg Isenberg

New today — Useful context

Ada Palmer on Renaissance conceptions of progress: backwards is forwards.

Ada Palmer

Tool watch

Fable: a frontier AI company shut down by US government export control directive, now a central test case for how capability-based national security restrictions could apply across the AI industry.

Worth quoting

“Trump is like sell you know he's our top salesperson for a defense ETF in Europe.”
Jan Van Eck
“We no longer have enterprise plans dated by humans. We've launched enterprise self-service.”
Anthropic Head of Industries
“Our partnership is not up to 25,000. It is over 25,000, or in other words, a minimum of 25,000.”
Alex Kendall
“If you live in a state where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave.”
Ada Palmer
“The moon's gravity on Earth is the same no matter what the phase of the moon is.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Took 30 days. That would've taken years before.”
Bobby Healy