Weekly Intel - 2026-02-22

A lot of Solow’s paradox this week: the gap between what technology promises and what it actually delivers. That theme runs through almost everything I’m reading right now.

Policy & Markets

Trump’s global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court . The Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose global tariffs was unconstitutional:Congress sets taxes, not the president. He’d used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy 10-50% on imports from most countries, citing the trade deficit. The court shut it down. This will move markets for weeks.

Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock . Berkshire sold 77% of its Amazon stake (7.7 million shares) and invested $352 million in The New York Times. NYT shares jumped 10% on the news. Buffett moving out of tech and into traditional media is a signal worth watching, especially given the timing.

AI Adoption & Productivity

AI adoption and Solow’s productivity paradox . This one’s worth your time. In the 1970s, computers were everywhere, but productivity gains were nowhere. Robert Solow famously said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” We’re living the same story with AI. Companies are buying tools, running pilots, and building demos, but the actual productivity numbers aren’t moving. The article argues (and I agree) that the problem then and now is the same: organizations adopt the technology without changing how they work. The tool isn’t the bottleneck. The org is.

How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe . Europe has a strong research base but trails the US and China in actual AI deployment. The concern here is that the gap between AI-ready countries and everyone else could widen rather than narrow. More of Solow’s paradox here: having the technology and actually getting value from it are two different things.

The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) . Good technical read on the two things actually holding AI back: latency and infrastructure cost. The argument is that until AI can respond fast enough to feel seamless in a workflow (not “wait 10 seconds for a response”), it won’t reach its full potential in most real-world applications.

Security & Trust

PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months . A bug in PayPal’s Working Capital loan application exposed Social Security numbers and personal data from July through December 2025. Six months. From a routine software update. If you’re a small business that applied for a loan through PayPal during that window, your SSN was sitting in the open, and nobody noticed.

Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails . Microsoft 365 Copilot was reading and summarizing confidential emails, bypassing data loss prevention labels entirely. This has been happening since January 21st. Think about that: companies spend real money setting up confidentiality controls, and the AI assistant they’re paying for just ignores them. If you’re rolling out Copilot in an enterprise, this should give you pause.

AI Models & Infrastructure

Claude Sonnet 4.6 . Anthropic released an updated Sonnet model with a 1M token context window in beta. The notable thing: this model delivers performance that used to require their top-tier Opus model, at the same price as the old Sonnet. In practice, that means the mid-tier AI just got a lot more capable without getting more expensive.

Gemini 3.1 Pro . Google updated Gemini Pro with higher usage limits and broader platform access through NotebookLM, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. Both this and the Claude release reflect the same trend: the major AI providers are racing to make their best capabilities cheaper and more widely available.

Science

Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus . Stanford researchers have developed a vaccine that could protect against most respiratory infections like flu, COVID, and the common cold. One shot instead of multiple seasonal vaccines. It still needs clinical trials, but if it works, this is a big deal.

That’s what I’m watching. What caught your attention this week?

-Eric