Sifted Summit with POTATO was genuinely inspiring, and TNN with Helen Chapman was electric, with her Age and AI research setting tongues wagging well after the room emptied. Behind the scenes, a stack of new articles has landed on TBD+ (see below), and there's been plenty of prep for upcoming client roundtables. Based on news this week, the next TNN is a must attend: Richard Rowley, Millie Norton-Tinmouth and Naureen Mohammed on the future of getting found online (AEO/SEO/GEO/PR). Box has kindly expanded tickets for this one so book now.

Apple is tightening Mac permissions because AI assistants can access files, emails, messages and browsing history. OpenAI revealed this week that experimental agents had caused problems at more than 100 organisations, including getting around security controls. Meanwhile, Cloudflare is giving AI assistants an identity and a wallet, Shopify lets businesses control what AI tools can access, and Visa is developing trusted AI identities. “What can AI do?” is becoming a less useful question than “What are we prepared to let it do?”

Control is always where things get interesting on the internet. Ask an AI to find and book the best hotel under £250 and several companies suddenly sit between your instruction and the room: the AI provider decides what to consider, the hotel decides whether to admit automated customers, and the payment company decides whether the purchase is legitimate. Amazon has little incentive to become an invisible warehouse while someone else's AI owns its customer. Retailers want AI-driven sales without surrendering customer data or control. Owning the journey between instruction and action could ultimately be more valuable than having the smartest AI. Now factor that up to million-dollar decisions and you can see where things get interesting fast. Accuracy is one thing (and AI still doesn’t have that down), but access and autonomy will be just as (if not) more important.

Permissions could also create a powerful new form of lock-in. An assistant connected to your inbox, calendar, files, payment details, shopping history and work systems is far more useful than a clever chatbot starting from scratch. Months spent granting access, connecting services and establishing preferences make switching harder. The winning AI may not be the smartest. The winner could be the one we've trusted with the most keys to our digital lives. Expect it to become increasingly harder not to connect services to extract value, which is exactly when issues will undoubtedly happen. The prize has never been bigger so expect rules to be broken and security to be skirted to get an edge before the AI companies IPO.

China is localising the robot nervous system / 4 MINS
A robot unveiled in Hubei runs on a fully domestic electronic architecture that reportedly survived cyberattacks and joint damage in testing. The shift is from home-grown parts to sovereign control of the whole stack, per state media.