Occam's Razor Split: Moves in Tech Regulation, OpenClaw Call-Out, Alpha School

After a lightning round of updates in government interaction with tech, we discuss the fascinating case study of an OpenClaw agent writing a call-out blog post for an open source maintainer who rejected its pull request, and 404 Media's detailed investigation of Alpha School, the AI enabled school surrounded by hype.

For more on OpenClaw: https://carlyrector.substack.com/p/openclaw-mj-rathbun-and-falling-back

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Show Notes:

Regulation lightning round

• CFTC threatens States over prediction markets
  • https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9183-26 
  • https://x.com/govcox/status/2023795059980988874
• Dario Amodei meets with senators about chip sales to China
  • https://www.axios.com/2026/02/10/anthropic-ceo-china-chip-ban 
• Data center energy costs
  • https://www.anthropic.com/news/covering-electricity-price-increases 
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/business/energy-environment/data-center-energy-electricity-costs.html 
  • https://www.energy.gov/articles/fact-sheet-trump-administration-outlines-plan-build-big-power-plants-again 
• Hegseth threatens Anthropic
  • https://www.axios.com/2026/02/16/anthropic-defense-department-relationship-hegseth 

OpenClaw writes a hit piece

• https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-3/ 
  • On getting LLMs to pull quotes: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-do-ai-analysis-you-can-actually 
• https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html 

Alpha School

• https://www.404media.co/students-are-being-treated-like-guinea-pigs-inside-an-ai-powered-private-school/ 
• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/podcasts/hardfork-education-alpha-school.html