Introduction - the four axes of this dispatch
Story 1 - Celebrity IP vs deepfakes: Matthew McConaughey's legal perimeter summary analysis
Story 2 - Are energy and finance inflating an AI bubble? The Economist's argument explained and evaluated summary analysis
Story 3 - Keeping Bandcamp human: platform policy, creators and cultural commons summary analysis
Story 4 - OpenAI and Cerebras: hardware partnerships, model scale, and what it means for deployments summary analysis
Cross-cutting themes - power, provenance, policy, and platform choices
Tactical playbook - what product, infra, legal and investment teams should do next 90-day action plan
Conclusion - reading the market's signals and placing smarter bets
Sources listed exactly as requested
If you want a shorthand for the structural questions confronting AI in 2026, here it is: A power, meaning the energy and compute required to build and run modern models B provenance, meaning who owns voice, likeness and the metadata that proves authenticity C policy, meaning how regulators and platforms set sensible constraints and D platform economics, meaning who captures value when models are embedded into commerce and culture.
The four stories we're about to unfold map neatly across these axes:
Matthew McConaughey's trademark filings and related industry reaction expose the provenance problem: if voice and likeness can be cloned with few legal costs, who protects artists, and how? Provenance policy.
