2026.25: The Stuff of Myth(os)

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings.
On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- Anthropic Again. Well, Fable was fun well it lasted: last Friday the Trump administration slapped export controls on the model, limiting access to U.S. citizens, leaving Anthropic no choice in the short term but to make the model unavailable. We still don’t entirely know what happened, although Occam’s Razor suggests that people still don’t really understand how AI works. Ultimately, however, the power and problem of Anthropic is the same: the company’s safety superpower is that every action it takes looks, from the outside, to be self-serving, even as the company becomes ever more convinced its motivations are pure. — Ben Thompson
- E-Commerce in the Age of AI. The semi-regular e-commerce summits between Ben and Michael Morton are generally an auto-rec for me, and this week’s Stratechery Interview was no exception. Morton covers the sector for Moffett Nathanson, and the conventional wisdom about the future of that space in the AI era seems to shift every six months. This week, Morton and Ben talked Shopify and its durability, OpenAI getting its butt kicked with the ChatGPT checkout experiment, milkmen in the 1960s, and a bit of Uber and Waymo at the end. Come for an information dense update on a variety of fronts, and stay for a good vibe throughout.— AS
- The Finals Were a Perfect 10. The Knicks are NBA Champions for the first time in 53 years, the NBA just had its highest-ratings for an NBA Finals in 28 years, and from start to finish, the show was fantastic for casual and hardcore fans alike. We had a great time reliving all of it on this week’s Greatest of All Talk, and on Sharp Text this week, I wrote about Wemby alienating fans on and off the court, an accounting of everything I got wrong about this Knicks team, and a refreshing reminder that as maddening as pro basketball can be, certain NBA formulas will work until the end of time. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
- Anthropic’s Safety Superpower — Anthropic’s belief in its own commitment to safety gives the company license to aggressively favor its business and even challenge the U.S. government.
- Fox Buys Roku, The Problem With Fox’s Smart Strategy, Streaming That Works — The market hates Fox’s acquisition of Roku, but the company is trading extraction from rights holders for leverage as a renter.
- The State of Fable, The Jailbreak Problem, SpaceX Acquires Cursor — The administration is very likely wrong about Fable, but that is ultimately Anthropic’s responsibility.
- An Interview with Michael Morton About E-Commerce in the Age of AI — An interview with Michael Morton about e-commerce and AI, including the challenges of unfalsifiable bear cases, distribution versus referal models, grocery, and autonomous vehicles.
Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp
- Aura and the Lack Thereof — Looking back at the NBA Finals where Victor Wembanyama became a villain, the Knicks became legends, and the NBA mattered again.
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Greatest of All Talk
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Stratechery video is on The iPhone’s Last Stand.

Facts Only

* Anthropic faced export controls on its model access from U.S. citizens, limiting short-term options.
* Anthropic’s safety superpower allows the company to aggressively favor business and challenge the U.S. government.
* The market views Fox's acquisition of Roku negatively.
* The NBA Finals featured the Knicks as champions for the first time in 53 years.
* The NBA had its highest ratings for an NBA Finals in 28 years.
* An interview discussed e-commerce trends, including Shopify’s durability and challenges related to AI distribution models (referal vs. distribution).
* The content references historical parallels, including milkmen in the 1960s, Uber, and Waymo.
* Specific entities mentioned include Anthropic, Fable, OpenAI, Shopify, Fox, Roku, and the NBA/Knicks.

Executive Summary

The provided content offers a blend of commentary and interviews spanning several high-level topics. Key discussions focus on the intersection of AI safety and corporate power, trends in e-commerce driven by artificial intelligence, and cultural observations derived from sports phenomena. One segment examines Anthropic’s approach to safety as a competitive advantage, noting that their commitment to safety licenses them to pursue business interests. Another discussion provides an information-dense update on e-commerce evolution, referencing topics such as Shopify's durability, the impact of OpenAI's experiments, and historical parallels in distribution models. Finally, the content includes reflections on sports, specifically the NBA Finals, analyzing how individual performance (like Victor Wembanyama) can affect fan perception and establishing enduring formulas within competitive structures. The overall theme is an update on evolving technological, economic, and cultural paradigms.

Full Take

The narratives presented focus heavily on framing corporate power (Anthropic, Fox) and market durability (Shopify, e-commerce). The concept that safety is a "superpower" being leveraged against government action requires scrutiny regarding whether this reframes risk management as an exploitable competitive advantage rather than a fundamental responsibility. Similarly, the analysis of e-commerce challenges often relies on historical analogies; while these provide context, they risk creating false equivalences by assuming that past distribution or market dynamics perfectly predict the current AI era. The sports commentary uses emotional resonance (Wembanyama alienating fans) to assert enduring formulas in competitive systems. This type of framing can be used to simplify complex systemic shifts into deterministic outcomes. The underlying assumption is that powerful entities operate within predictable, quantifiable rules, ignoring the agency and chaotic variables inherent in rapidly evolving technological and social landscapes.
Patterns detected: ARC-0043 Motte-and-Bailey, ARC-0024 Ambiguity

Sentinel — Human

Confidence

This text exhibits strong human signals, characterized by a focused, eclectic curation of topics and an established, nuanced editorial voice common in specialized newsletters.

Signals Detected

Moderate sentence length variance and shifts in focus (from AI safety to NBA finals) suggesting a human editorial voice.

The piece successfully weaves disparate topics (AI, e-commerce, sports) under a consistent newsletter structure, implying intentional curation rather than purely random generation.

Quotes and references are specific, using established figures (Ben Thompson, Michael Morton) which limits generic LLM fabrication.

No immediately egregious errors or overly flowery prose were detected; the tone is characteristic of specialized commentary.

Human Indicators

The text contains specific, niche references (e.g., 'Stratechery bundle,' 'Shopify and its durability,' names like Ben Thompson, Michael Morton) that suggest a shared intellectual context typical of human beat reporting.

The transition between high-level AI/corporate commentary and sports reflection is fluid, reflecting an idiosyncratic editorial style rather than mechanical linkage.

The embedded quotes ('Anthropic’s Safety Superpower,' 'Fox Buys Roku') possess a specific argumentative bite that aligns with specialized critical writing.