Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: How the startup behind Cursor became the hottest, vibiest thing in AI

• The Top 5: The lobbyists Silicon Valley loves to hire 

• Plus, our Recommendations: The indentured servants who excel at scams; an Anxious Generation villain; and the existential link between Mel Brooks and Leonard Bernstein

See the image atop this newsletter? OpenAI’s ChaptGPT created it with this prompt: “Make a Ghibli-style image of angry lawyers pursuing Sam Altman.” Not bad, huh? 

Plenty of lawyers have been after Altman lately, and I expect the iconic Japanese animator Studio Ghibli will soon send a couple more, becoming the latest corporation to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement. Really, a lawsuit seems inevitable after what has transpired so publicly over the last several days: a social media flood of knockoff Ghibli images made by ordinary people using ChatGPT’s newly improved image-generation abilities.

The amateur Ghiblists had a blast. They did Dorothea Lange as Ghibli. Moody Ben Affleck as Ghibli. Star Wars as Ghibli! Random brands as Ghibli! Internet memes as Ghibli! And many, many family photos as Ghibli. 

It’s been a minute since ChatGPT so fully captured the zeitgeist, and OpenAI is feeling the pressure. On Thursday, Altman said the company would need to limit ChatGPT images after the enormous surge in demand caused the chatbot to lag. “Our GPUs are melting,” Altman wrote in a tweet announcing the restrictions, which he promised were temporary.

While I’m sure it’s chaotic at OpenAI, I bet the mood might be somewhat funereal at Ghibli. If the studio sues OpenAI, it’ll almost certainly cite some enormous dollar figure in damages from the alleged copyright infringement. But I wonder how much damage these knockoffs will really cause. Mainly, I think it means people will buy fewer of Ghibli’s cheaper consumer goods, like playing cards or puzzles, since they’re not so different from what ChatGPT can create.

That’s not great for Ghibli, but declining revenue from those kinds of goods won’t mean the end of the studio, which was founded by Hayao Miyazaki, director of “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Those decreased sales will be far worse for the small-fry businesses eking out an existence making licensed goods for the likes of Ghibli. They’ll also hurt the artists and illustrators on sites like Etsy who try to earn a living through their own copycat skills.

Broadly, AI is eating away at the edges of the creative economy, not its center. No one in the last few days has come up with anything at all like a Ghibli film. The next great Ghibli movie will still come from Ghibli. At the same time, it’ll probably sell fewer playing cards.

Unfortunately for Ghibli, I don’t think it’ll ever win a major settlement from OpenAI. And while OpenAI failed to get The New York Times Co.’s copyright lawsuit tossed out this week, I doubt The Times or any of the other businesses pursuing legal action against Open AI will come away with big checks either. They’re all trying to shove the proverbial cat back into the bag: In reality, though, ChatGPT is already wildly popular, and the cat has been completely spirited away. Each big upgrade to ChatGPT makes it clearer we’ll never return to a time before AI, and OpenAI has deep enough pockets to afford the lawyers who will argue at length over legal matters like “fair use” until Ghibli and any other plaintiffs take some pittance and go away. 

For Ghibli and the rest, accepting a paltry deal will be a real misery. I’ll offer a very slight silver lining.

I bet there are plenty of people who’ve been as amused by the Ghibli takeover of ChatGPT as I’ve been and who have the same weekend plan: Rent a Miyazaki film for the first time in years—something I wouldn’t have done if Ghiblification hadn’t happened. (I still haven’t seen “The Boy and the Heron,” which won a 2024 Oscar.)

Remember that the whole Winnie the Pooh economy didn’t go poof after Disney lost copyright protection over Pooh. Likewise, Ghibli will go on. And to paraphrase a Ghiblism: Life is suffering. The world is cursed. And still, you find reasons for living.—Abram Brown

Tech’s Secret Chats

And you thought your group chat could cause drama! 

Ah, but nothing—not the passive-aggressive bickering over brunch locations, not the suggestion that maybe the latest “White Lotus” season really is the funniest one yet—could spark the same sort of commotion as the leaked Trump administration group chat. 

It got us imagining what top-secret chats Silicon Valley might’ve traded in recent days (and a reminder: these aren't real):

1. Meta Platforms Considers Response to Tell-All Book

2. Apple Discusses $1 Billion Streaming Loss

3. The Information Plans Joke Article About Group Chats

—Abram Brown and Clark Miller

The Big Read 

How the Startup Behind Cursor Became the Hottest, Vibiest Thing in AI

The four young founders of Anysphere, which makes Cursor, the much-beloved code-editing software, have enjoyed a helluva past few months, as our Natasha Mascarenhas’ Big Read shows. 

They make the software that sparked the whole discussion of “vibe coding.” And in June, Anysphere had a $400 million valuation. By November, the figure had grown to $2.5 billion. The co-founders are now talking to investors about a still bigger number: $10 billion. Meanwhile, Anysphere’s annual revenue rate just hit $200 million, which means it’s one of the fastest-growing startups ever.

When Natasha asked Anysphere investor Ali Partovi what he thought about co-founders Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark, he likened their abilities to the skills of “Bill Gates and Larry Ellison and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg.” Phew. Talk about high expectations.

The Top Five

The Lobbyists Silicon Valley Loves to Hire 

“Eight years ago, you’d never see a Tim Cook or Elon Musk in Mar-a-Lago. Now you see them all the time,” said lobbyist Brian Ballard, founder of Ballard Partners. 

Indeed, times have changed, and Silicon Valley has never seemed to hold such sway in Washington as it does at the moment. So our Julia Black asked around both towns and put together a list of the lobbyists that come highly recommended by tech clients—folks like Ballard as well as Josh Acklin, a former longtime Congressional aide turned co-founder of The Franklin Square Group, who likes to voice a well-worn refrain: “If you’re hiring someone because you’ve got an immediate problem, you’re too late.”

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, would gladly start a group chat with anyone who has juicy goss. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: “Scam Inc” (The Economist) 

No animals get harmed at the massive pig-butchering compounds scattered throughout Asia today, but they’re still unquestionably grim places: Pig butchering refers to a type of internet fraud involving false identities, sophisticated deepfake technology and cryptocurrencies. Often these schemes get carried out by dozens of people who live within furnished compounds as essentially indentured servants. They take these jobs out of desperation but find it almost impossible to leave—employees are often told they would first need to pay back the cost of their room and board, a nearly impossible sum given their low salaries. “Scam Inc” has some incredible details of how this criminal network operates, including the chilling anecdote of how one person sold a kidney in an attempt to buy his freedom from this mafia. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough.—A.B.

Reading: “Eminent Jews” by David Denby 

What does it mean to be Jewish? Oy vey. What a question—and what a thorny one these days. Nonetheless, David Denby, a longtime New Yorker writer, provides a charming answer with “Eminent Jews,” which looks at the lives of four famous Jews: Norman Mailer, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan and Leonard Bernstein. Fundamentally, Denby, himself a member of the tribe, insists that the truest form of Jewish identity lies in a refusal to shrink away in the face of adversity—no matter what the source of those challenges. And while each of his four subjects pursued a very different creative path, they all shared this mentality. They were “neither sequestered as Jews nor silent as Jews,” Denby writes. “They were ‘assimilated’ without giving up a certain exuberant brazenness.”—A.B.

Watching: “Adolescence” (Netflix)

For the past couple weeks, “Adolescence” has been bouncing around Netflix’s most-watched list and sparking headlines, so I’m hardly breaking news in spotlighting this four-episode limited series. For any of you holdouts, this series is worth every bit of hype it has generated. It’s a gritty, cinema verité-style drama about the arrest of a teenage boy in the U.K. for a female classmate’s murder. Each episode unfolds in a single camera shot, heightening the sense of immersion the viewer feels in the moment. Episode three, in particular, is an astonishing performance by actor Owen Cooper, who plays the teenager accused of killing his classmate. The series has garnered wide attention partly because of its very 2025 themes: the perils of smartphone and social media use among teens—and the influence of manosphere figures like Andrew Tate. But there’s also something timeless about “Adolescence” and how parents and kids often live in different worlds, only dimly aware of each other even as they reside together under the same roof.—Nick Wingfield

Final Thought

** glug, glug, glug **