Last Week In AI: When The Storm Stopped Being A Forecast

For two years the AI conversation ran on slideware and vibes, with everyone forecasting a future that sat comfortably over the horizon and never quite arrived. Last week the future started showing up as paperwork. A regulatory filing put a hard number on the layoffs, a government letter yanked a frontier model off the shelf in fear of what it would do if released, and a national survey caught Americans reaching for these tools more often while trusting them less than ever. Three stories, three separate sets of receipts, with one through line worth staring at until a clearer view…