2026.38: Doomforce

(Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!

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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.

The View From Anywhere But San Francisco. It is exciting to talk about AI because there are so many unknowns; it is incredibly frustrating to talk about AI doom…because there are so many unknowns. Indeed, that’s the pushback I had on Stratechery and Sharp Tech to the debates of the last week: viewpoints that don’t harbor dissent inevitably lead to bad outcomes. The best read on the matter, however, was Andrew’s Sharp Text article Some of All Fears, that had a simple request: let’s actually solve real problems when they are, in fact, real. — Ben Thompson

The Limited Potential for a Pacing Deal. After a week of speculation over whether China would ever agree to a deal with the U.S. to slow down AI development, Bill and I discussed that question at length on this week’s episode of Sharp China, as well as why the CCP’s past successes controlling technology (they did in fact nail jello to the wall) may inform its apparent confidence in its ability to manage AI risk. At the end, I also found it interesting to learn that rising discontent across Chinese social media is not necessarily a reflection of the limits of that aforementioned censorship, but possibly a window into how the Party manages social malaise. — AS

The Salesforce Zag. We didn’t get a chance to discuss this on Sharp Tech this week (we had too much existential dread to address), but I loved Wednesday’s Update on Dreamforce and Salesforce’s integration with Anthropic. In what appears to be a climbdown from his colorful commitment to AgentForce in 2024, CEO Marc Benioff is now going the opposite direction from other enterprise AI players and leaning into Anthropic and OpenAI chatbots as the preferred UI of his customers. Rather than fight the AI tide, Salesforce will swim with it and charge a premium for it (with the caveat that these particular currents may lead to a world in which the SaaS beachhead is eroded for everyone). — Andrew Sharp

Stratechery Articles and Updates

Pacing the Frontier, AI’s Digital Limits, AI Commissars — Dario Amodei wants to pace the frontier; it’s an unrealistic proposal that seems mostly geared to political control of AI.

OpenAI Ads, Amazon Ads in ChatGPT, Walmart to Accept Apple Pay — ChatGPT ads are working, and solve Amazon’s biggest problem with chatbots. Then, Walmart finally gives in to Apple Pay, because fighting the status quo is hard.

Salesforce AI Force, Agents as UI, The Race to Headless — Salesforce is abandoning UI as a moat, which is a very smart move because it’s disappearing for everyone.

An Interview with Joanna Stern About the iPhone Duo and AI for Normal People

Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp

Some of All Fears— AI anxiety is rational, but the conversation over the past 10 days has been absurd and irresponsible.

Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

Football and the Frontier

iPhone 18 Pro

Asianometry with Jon Yu

Silicon Valley’s Got That Energy (But No Compute)

Exxon’s Office Fling

Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop

The Limited Potential for a Pacing Deal; MSS on PRC AI Risks; Distillation and Data Security; The Party’s Approach to Social Media

Greatest of All Talk

Searching for the 2026 Protagonists, The Six Most Confusing Teams This Season, Surveying the Southwest Division

Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson

Doom Debates Go Mainstream, AI Religion and the Economic Future, Several Vectors of the China Question

This week’s Stratechery video is on Write Things Down.