- Essays··9 min read
The Fixed Cost That Nobody Priced
Anthropic's $518 billion compute obligation, disclosed in its September 2026 IPO prospectus, is not just a capital structure curiosity — it is the enterprise buyer's problem in miniature. Fixed minimum commitments are appearing in agentic platform contracts, and 93% of enterprises have already overshot their AI budgets before most have a production agent in service for six months. The finance owner who built the ROI case on per-task cost is holding a take-or-pay agreement nobody modelled.
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Sunday Essay · Banks Turned On the Contact-Centre Line Before the Standard Work Existed
Four US banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo) switched on production-grade generative-AI systems across their contact centres in the same quarter that federal supervisors carved these technologies out of revised model-risk guidance. Held against the Toyota Production System, the rollout reveals an industrial line running at scale with no jidoka cord to pull and no standard work to distinguish a good call from a bad one.
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The model-risk carve-out: why US banks got a temporary reprieve from agentic AI oversight while EU lenders face their deadline
SR 26-2, the Federal Reserve's updated model-risk guidance, carves generative and agentic AI out of supervisory scope. The carve-out is a placeholder while regulators decide what replaces SR 11-7. The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations arrive on 2 August. For multinational banks, the result is a structural supervision paradox: US headquarters has time but no clarity; European subsidiaries have clarity but no time.
model-riskagentic-aieu-ai-actbanking-regulationRead - Essays··8 min read
China's Bank-AI Push Forgot the Middle
China's largest banks are automating the base of their workforce (branch tellers, credit clerks, back-office processors) while importing senior AI PhDs for the apex and eliminating the middle tier entirely. A Hangzhou court ruling in April 2026 drew the first legal line against pure AI substitution; the more serious reckoning arrives when the next credit cycle exposes the judgement gap left by the hollowing. The reskilling pathway that would close it does not yet exist.
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