This is the most “The European mind can’t comprehend this” moment of my life. One of my friends said, “Punch me five times tomorrow and I’ll still think this isn’t real.”
At the beginning of the year, I called out $P as the next AI rerating after memory and bought $75 leaps because storage is the second-order bottleneck.
Once models are running everywhere then constraint becomes how well you can feed, store, retrieve & manage the data exhaust of intelligence.
The stock is up over 10% overnight and now running toward $100.
a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.
a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.
the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.
he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.
Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.
GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.
Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.
Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.
then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."
GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.
then he splits the users by income.
Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.
18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.
so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.
it isn't recommending the best option for you.
it's reading the room. and the room is paying.
read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b
I'm starting to believe that the industry is involved in an explicit effort to kill Open Claw.
Everything they do needs to be examined, documebted and detailed because we are tipping into anti-trust territory.
Agent technology is so powerful that we shouldn't allow it to be owned by three or four frontier model companies.
@elonmusk Would be really cool if you filled the gap Anthropic just left banning Oauth for 3rd party tools like openclaw. Imagine a lot of people already had grok as a fallback or subagent model and would make the switch so easy.