THOMAS R. WEAVER

📚 Fiction Author of Artificial Wisdom & Infinite Wisdom 🇺🇸 Del Rey / 🇬🇧 Bantam

👨‍💻Tech builder, 1X Exit

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

If your Fable 5 access just got snatched from you, I have a fable 2050 you might enjoy

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

@dens I’m so sorry Dennis. I really, really feel for you. Huge respect for what you guys built regardless.

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

@RCarhartHarris Love your approach to note-taking when reading, Robin!

These are certainly more useful than my notes when I read this one, which are mainly “huh?!” and “woah!”

[✙ Constantine ✙ @Teoyaomiquu]

5/5 Now, I love America. I'm writing this because I want ordinary Americans to understand the consequences of these disastrous decisions.

The damage being done to America's reputation won't be reversed by the results of the next elections. It will take decades to rebuild that trust.

And the economic consequences, while not immediate, will go much further than a potential 2 cents per gallon decrease in diesel prices.

And if you think the world doesn't notice, or that everything I'm describing is just hypothetical, let me give you two examples of what is already happening.

These decisions were made even before the latest Starshield restrictions, which only make the problem much worse.

Airbus, one of the world's largest aircraft manufacturers, has already signed a contract to move 70 critical applications from Amazon AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway, with plans that could eventually include 900 applications.

Airbus specifically mentioned concerns about foreign laws and potential "kill switches" when choosing its new provider.

In the Netherlands, one of the country's largest telecom companies, KPN, partnered with German Schwarz Digits to build European cloud infrastructure using STACKIT, hosted in Dutch data centers and controlled by European companies.

The Dutch government has also approved STACKIT as an alternative cloud provider for its agencies.

These aren't some people complaining about Trump on Twitter.

These are major corporations signing real contracts, investing real money and building infrastructure to reduce their dependence on American technology.

And that's the part Americans need to understand.

For decades the USA was a reliable partner. Republicans and Democrats disagreed about plenty of things, but America's foreign policy was built around long-term strategic interests and institutions that survived changes in presidents.

Countries trusted the USA enough to build entire industries around its technology.

Now a foreign government has to consider whether some American president might wake up tomorrow wanting cheaper gas, believing another promise from Putin, getting angry with its elected leadership, or trying to get a better deal for his friends.

And suddenly technology that was supposed to make that country more productive becomes a potential political weapon against it.

The USA spent decades making the world dependent on its technology because the world trusted America.

Now American companies will be paying the price for political decisions they didn't make, long after the politicians responsible are gone.

And no election in the USA will magically restore that trust.

[Kashif Hussain @kashif1307]

@tom_weaver writes an important story that resonates with us across genres and cultures in this new era of technology and he’s packaged it in a fantastic thriller!

Check out my @BestThrillBooks review for INFINITE WISDOM

[Best Thriller Books @BestThrillBooks]

INFINITE WISDOM by @tom_weaver (pub. by @delreybooks 11/10/26)

Read a review by @Kashif1307: https://t.co/XM1o5w4Stn

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

@ElonMusk, you’ve been an underdog and never quit fighting for your ideas. Don’t abandon Ukrainians as they fight for their lives and freedom against an aggressor.

[Christopher Miller @ChristopherJM]

The mood in Ukraine is grim today. There's frustration and outrage here in Kyiv towards the Trump administration over what Ukraine's government, the troops and society believe is a deliberate attempt on the part of Washington to force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia – by withholding intelligence that allows early warning when Russian missiles are incoming, and cutting off Starlink to the military which needs it to strike and for defence against jet drones. These decisions cut intel sharing and restrict Starlink cost lives; at least 5 people killed in Kyiv, 6 more in Lutsk, dozens others badly injured.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Just so you understand the scale of betrayal: first, our "partners" didn't warn Ukraine about the incoming ballistic missiles, so the air raid alert wasn't activated before impact, robbing people of their chance to survive.

​Then, Starlink was restricted to stop working at speeds above 100 mph. This renders useless, first and foremost, our interceptor drones. It doesn't limit our ability to attack inside Russia, it limits our ability to stop another apartment building or school full of civilians from being hit.

​Wow, just wow.

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

The premise of Infinite Wisdom, my Artificial Wisdom sequel out in a few weeks, is: what exactly would an AI do if it was in charge not of an authoritarian regime like below, but the world, with a mandate to fix the climate? It would be every bit as relentless as this example.

[Tim Soret @timsoret]

This. This is why AI can be terrifying.

Because if it was in charge of an authoritarian regime, it shows how monstrous, decisive, determined, and unstoppable it would be.

And I say this as someone who really wants to see lower crime.

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

Shows the importance of not being dependent on US tech anymore.

[BRICS News @BRICSinfo]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇺🇦 US considers cutting Starlink internet access from Ukraine.

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

Question is, how do we stop it flooding back again?

[Sam @SamCKx]

Apparently Russian servers have been hit by a Ukrainian strike and immediately massive online hard right chatter has collapsed.

This particular chatter was in support of Germany’s AFD, their equivalent to Reform, but similar patterns are being seen in hard right movements everywhere, including the UK.

If anyone needed anymore evidence that Russia are driving a massive wave of hard right propaganda in Europe, this is it.

So, all you “patriots” - you’ve been duped by Russia, and you are about as far from patriotic as anyone can be. You are easily brainwashed though. This is how propaganda works.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Spencer A. Klavan @SpencerKlavan]

Andrew Scott delivers this speech too slowly; I know some viewers will hate the way he breaks up the verse. AND YET even in spite of that I think this is the best delivery of this soliloquy I’ve ever seen.

He makes it sound like it’s not a portentous speech everyone already knows but a morally serious real-time deliberation, by a highly intelligent person in extreme pain, considering what it would mean to end his own life.

[Mark Todd @MarkTodd_pol]

The Times is set to report that Russia:
- used over 150,000 Twitter accounts to influence the Brexit referendum
- sent 45,000 tweets in 48 hours to influence the vote
- Tory PM knew there was interference & told Putin but not the British people!

[Paul Shapoval @Frialum]

Well well well

[The Rest Is Politics @RestIsPolitics]

Andy Burnham becomes first PM to confirm Russian interference in Brexit referendum

@campbellclaret and @RoryStewartUK's exclusive interview with @andyburnham on tomorrow's episode of Leading is out in full at midnight.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

🔴 Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief

https://t.co/rymOkulyNN

[THOMAS R. WEAVER @tom_weaver]

@alejandr0bujan I love this. Totally quirky and we need more of this kind of design in our lives!

[Toni Mikkola 🏴‍☠️ @virtaava]

All air travel to and from Russia should be immediately suspended until this plague outbreak is fully understood.

[Annie Jacobsen @AnnieJacobsen]

🚨☣️BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident - FIVE hospitals now quarantined🚨☣️

The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an unnamed maternity hospital (Lyudi Baikala news, Moscow Times).

Quarantine is NOT voluntary. Even in the U.S., quarantine is among the most extraordinary measures gov't can impose on American citizens who haven't been convicted, or even accused, of committing a crime. Quarantine means being forcibly confined and medically examined by law. U.S. quarantine can be imposed on anyone infected by a legally quarantinable disease listed below (this can change). One should assume Russia's quarantine protocols are even more severe. As of 2026, under Executive Order 14047, legally quarantinable diseases in the U.S. are:
■ Plague
■ Smallpox
■ Viral hemorrhagic fevers
■ Cholera
■ Diphtheria
■ Yellow fever
■ Infectious tuberculosis
■ Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
■ Flu that can cause a pandemic
■ Measles

Photo: Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical defense training (w/permission from the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation) — from BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, 2026).