Marketing edition
The top figures at OpenAI and Anthropic want to hit the brakes themselves, Europe wants a watermark in AI text, and Dutch government ministers turned out to have chatbots write their speeches.
AI bosses are hitting the brakes themselves: don't count on ever-faster tools
Altman, Amodei and Musk want to slow AI development down on purpose. That affects the planning of every marketer who counts on new features.
Sam Altman of OpenAI joined Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Elon Musk this weekend. They are calling for a deliberate slowdown in the development of powerful AI models, so people keep control. Altman wrote on X that competitive pressure should never be an excuse for recklessness. He warned about two things: people losing control to AI systems, and one company or person using AI to gather power. Amodei came with a three-step plan, with independent overseers who can work almost like staff inside the big AI labs. Markets reacted with a shock: on Monday, SoftBank shares fell 13 percent in Tokyo, and Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix fell more than 4 percent in Seoul. That same week, Altman told Fortune that OpenAI will not go public this year, despite an earlier confidential filing. He called the timing unwise, given the safety debate. For your work, this is not something far away. The promise that a tool will do something new next quarter is now less certain. Build your campaign planning on what tools can do today, not on what they promise. Do not set a deadline in your autumn planning that depends on an AI feature that does not exist yet. By 'pacing', they mean: making the time between two model generations longer, and only moving on once the safety checks catch up. This also affects your tools, because almost all your writing, image, and advertising tools run on the models from these few companies. If the pace slows down there, new features will reach you later. The fact that markets reacted straight away shows how tight that chain is: a statement about pace in San Francisco reaches the chipmakers in Seoul, who supply the computing power, within a day. Stay realistic about the motives: a call for regulation from companies that already lead the market also raises the bar for newcomers. The real risk for you is practical: your brand communication depends on suppliers who admit they do not know exactly where the line is. Spread that risk. If you run all your content, images, and ad copy through one provider, you grind to a halt the moment that provider pulls back or limits a feature.
Background for subscribersThis edition shows that the big AI companies want to slow down themselves, that you need to be found without a click in chatbots, that new models are more expensive but not always better for everyday work, and that AI text will soon become recognisable. For you, this means: don't plan a campaign around a feature that doesn't exist yet, make sure facts about your brand are clear and easy to find for AI assistants, and spread your dependence across more than one AI provider.
Found without a click: 374 out of 1,000 searches
A new analysis on recruitment marketing puts a number on the table that matters to every marketer. Of every thousand Google searches in the EU, only 374 lead to a click on the open web. The rest get their answer straight on the page or in a chatbot. The advice is simple: regularly ask ChatGPT and other assistants the same questions your target audience would ask, and fix your source whenever the picture doesn't match. Ask those questions this week and save the answers with a date in a document. An AI answer is built from texts the model finds and trusts. The model prefers pages that state a question literally and then answer it briefly and factually, with a clear name attached. A vague brand page without concrete answers comes off badly, even if it's beautifully written. So the work is shifting: it's no longer about tweaking keywords, but about making sure the facts about you are clear, current, and easy to find somewhere. You can't steer this like an ad. There's no dashboard, no bid, and no guarantee you'll be mentioned again tomorrow. You can only measure regularly and improve the source. Watch out: your usual figures can hide this, because your position stays the same while your visits drop. So look at visits and position together, not just one of the two.
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