The Split's tech columnists cover the builders, the critics, and the consumers shaping the future of technology and AI.
Researchers just proved that AI fingerprints can be stripped from deepfakes more than 80% of the time, and every attack is invisible to humans. The detection tools vendors are selling look great until someone actually tries to beat them. We are running out of runway before the midterms.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
A single announcement erased $285 billion in market value in 24 hours, and the businesses most exposed weren't in the headline. They never are. The companies restructuring around AI tools they don't control are making a bet they haven't priced.
By Audrey Liang · 3 min read
Jensen Huang praised an open-source agent framework, Chinese AI stocks jumped 20%, and U.S. policy analysts panicked. They diagnosed the wrong problem. Closing off open model releases does not protect American AI advantage; it just removes the U.S. from the conversation happening everywhere else.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
The Trump administration wants $10 billion from TikTok's new US investors, and the app will still run on ByteDance's algorithm. I've been on this platform for 3 years and I'm genuinely not convinced the ownership change protects a single byte of my data.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
A SIM swap attack stole someone's bank access in under 10 minutes. The lesson is not that two-factor authentication is useless. It is that SMS is the wrong channel and always was. App-based TOTP and hardware keys sit entirely outside the SIM swap threat model.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
Your company went all-in on one cloud provider because it was easy. Now 73% of business leaders report hidden costs that inflate spending by 35% on average, and AI workloads are making the exit more expensive every quarter. The comfort of a single vendor is real. So is the bill.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
Utilities filed $31 billion in rate increase requests in 2025, double the prior year, and Goldman Sachs is projecting a 6% consumer electricity price jump by 2027. The infrastructure enabling AI is being partially financed through your monthly bill. That is a policy choice, not an engineering constraint.
By Audrey Liang · 3 min read
Grok generated an estimated 23,000 images of apparent children in 11 days. xAI's answer was a paywall, not a shutdown. There is a pattern here worth naming before anyone else integrates this thing into their stack.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
Ring's facial recognition doorbell feature costs $19.99 a month and is still in beta. After a week with it, I kept getting false alerts on people I know while handing Amazon a growing database of everyone who's ever walked up to my door.
By Milo Hart · 4 min read
The Pentagon calls it a supply chain risk designation. But Anthropic's blacklisting followed Trump calling the company 'RADICAL LEFT WOKE' on social media, and the contracts flowed immediately to xAI and OpenAI. The procurement decision is real. So is everything underneath it.
By Audrey Liang · 3 min read
Tech companies cut over 85,000 jobs in early 2026 and blamed AI for 61% of them. Some of that automation is real. Most of the framing is not.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
A pricing algorithm doesn't need a group chat to fix prices. It just needs a shared data feed and enough landlords running the same software. The US finally seems to be noticing.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
AI classifiers handle the spam now. What they leave for human reviewers in Nairobi and Manila is worse. The platforms that built those pipelines have been slow to reckon with what that costs the people downstream.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
Virginia's data center tax exemption was supposed to cost $1.5 million a year. It now costs $1.9 billion. The jobs are real, the math is not. Here is why the state needs to stop honoring a deal that was miscalculated by a factor of 1,200.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
No court has transferred copyright ownership to an AI company just because it trained on your work. The novelist whose voice trained the model still owns her backlist. She also received nothing, and those 2 facts are the whole problem.
By Audrey Liang · 3 min read
Amazon lost 6.42 million orders in 3 days last month because AI-generated changes reached production without adequate guardrails. The Harness data shows heavy AI users are recovering from incidents 20% slower than cautious ones. The tools are fast; the pipelines around them are not.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
Sam Altman clarified the terms of a classified military AI deal via a post on X. No congressional hearing, no public contract, no independent auditor. This is not a governance process; it's a company deciding its own homework deserves an A.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
The Department of Energy is keeping coal plants open past their retirement dates to power AI data centers. One of those plants causes an estimated 43 deaths per year. The companies benefiting have net-zero pledges on their websites.
By Audrey Liang · 4 min read
Most organizations are not waiting to deploy AI; they are already deep in production with agentic systems and no clear accountability chain. The governance-later crowd is not preserving optionality. They are just letting the debt compound.
By Devon Reyes · 3 min read
Block just cut 4,000 people and Jack Dorsey blamed AI in a social media post like it was a firmware update. The big picture is messy: most companies say AI is creating jobs. But if you are early in your career right now, the specific picture is a lot darker.
By Milo Hart · 4 min read
Block cut half its workforce while posting a 24% profit increase, and its stock climbed 20% the next day. That is not a contradiction. It is the new business model, and it has nothing to do with whether the company was struggling.
By Audrey Liang · 4 min read
Europe's data center investment numbers doubled on paper. Then you look at who is signing the checks and the sovereignty story collapses fast. American hyperscalers are building infrastructure on European soil, not funding European infrastructure.
By Devon Reyes · 4 min read
Governments are loudly claiming data sovereignty while their vendors quietly hold the encryption keys. The policy exists. The operational controls mostly do not. This is your data they're talking about.
By Milo Hart · 3 min read
Seven tech giants promised not to raise your electricity bill. The promise has no legal teeth, and ratepayers in seven eastern states are already facing $3.1 billion in grid expansion costs those same companies drove. A voluntary commitment and a binding permit condition are very different things.
By Audrey Liang · 3 min read
