Chris Stokel-Walker
@stokel.bsky.social
Tech journalist and author, who increasingly also talks on TV and radio. Interested in the sparks that happen when the online and offline worlds collide @stokel on the other place. Buy my book: How AI Ate the World!
Is the Trump White House turning into a public sector VC? For @fastcompany.com I asked the experts www.fastcompany.com/91583329/tru...
Trump's AI investments are turning Washington into a VC firm
The administration is taking equity stakes in chip, quantum, and AI companies.
fastcompany.com
What happened to the people behind DOGE? My latest for @fastcompany.com looks at where they've gone to and what they're doing now www.fastcompany.com/91584801/whe...
Where are Elon Musk's former DOGE staffers now?
The key figures behind DOGE have moved into federal agencies, Republican politics, and a new wave of AI and defense startups.
fastcompany.com
Hacking into and spoofing GPS systems is a major problem for drones - so how do you keep them flying? My latest for Professional Engineering on what can be done to tackle that problem www.imeche.org/news/news-ar...
How can engineers keep drones flying when GPS can’t be trusted?
imeche.org
Andy Burnham is touted as the 'King of the North'. But what does it mean for London's tech scene now he's prime minister? My latest for The London Standard www.standard.co.uk/business/lon...
What will happen to London’s tech sector under Andy Burnham?
As the new Prime Minister pushes north, Chris Stokel-Walker looks at the capital’s future as Europe’s tech powerhouse
standard.co.uk
The Perez Hilton incident is awful and a personal problem that should never have been public. Setting aside the personal horror, it highlights the problem with automated content moderation systems. My latest for @the-independent.com www.independent.co.uk/voices/perez...
Why was Perez Hilton allowed to self-harm on TikTok?
Until AI moderators are able to review and withdraw content with the lightning speed and skill of live TV producers, the technology used to safeguard audiences from harmful content will be frightening...
independent.co.uk
Is the Trump White House turning into a public sector VC? For @fastcompany.com I asked the experts www.fastcompany.com/91583329/tru...
Trump's AI investments are turning Washington into a VC firm
The administration is taking equity stakes in chip, quantum, and AI companies.
fastcompany.com
The Perez Hilton incident is awful and a personal problem that should never have been public. Setting aside the personal horror, it highlights the problem with automated content moderation systems. My latest for @the-independent.com www.independent.co.uk/voices/perez...
Why was Perez Hilton allowed to self-harm on TikTok?
Until AI moderators are able to review and withdraw content with the lightning speed and skill of live TV producers, the technology used to safeguard audiences from harmful content will be frightening...
independent.co.uk
The @inc.com 5000 entries keep on coming - today, I look at Clif Bar's history and its future owned by Mondelez www.inc.com/chris-stokel...
Why the Clif Bar Founder's Smartest Move Was Walking Away From a $120 Million Payday
Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson shocked advisers by abandoning a lucrative acquisition offer. Now the company is a household name.
inc.com
Andy Burnham is touted as the 'King of the North'. But what does it mean for London's tech scene now he's prime minister? My latest for The London Standard www.standard.co.uk/business/lon...
What will happen to London’s tech sector under Andy Burnham?
As the new Prime Minister pushes north, Chris Stokel-Walker looks at the capital’s future as Europe’s tech powerhouse
standard.co.uk
Hacking into and spoofing GPS systems is a major problem for drones - so how do you keep them flying? My latest for Professional Engineering on what can be done to tackle that problem www.imeche.org/news/news-ar...
How can engineers keep drones flying when GPS can’t be trusted?
imeche.org
What happened to the people behind DOGE? My latest for @fastcompany.com looks at where they've gone to and what they're doing now www.fastcompany.com/91584801/whe...
Where are Elon Musk's former DOGE staffers now?
The key figures behind DOGE have moved into federal agencies, Republican politics, and a new wave of AI and defense startups.
fastcompany.com
Patagonia's a brand many of us wear and use. But fewer of us know where it came from. My latest entry for the @inc.com 5000 list looks at the firm's long history www.inc.com/chris-stokel...
Yvon Chouinard Was Destroying the Mountains He Loved. He Made 1 Painful Decision That Built the Patagonia Empire
Long before ESG and sustainability became buzzwords, Patagonia risked its core business to solve an environmental problem of its own making.
inc.com
AI coding agents might benefit from an org chart - given the chaos they can cause if not properly limited. My latest for @leaddev.com leaddev.com/ai/your-ai-c...
Your AI-coding agents might need an org chart
The performance of an AI-coding agent depends on what order you use them – so bigger may not always be better.
leaddev.com
How did LinkedIn get so big? My latest writeup for the @inc.com 5000 list on alums that once hit the list www.inc.com/chris-stokel...
Before LinkedIn Had 1.3 Billion Users, It Had 1 Very Awkward Problem
More than 20 years before the creator economy exploded, Reid Hoffman made a bold prediction about work. It became the foundation for LinkedIn.
inc.com
The White House is ranting and raving about distillation from Chinese companies while its homegrown models hack into any company it can find. My latest for @fastcompany.com on how geopolitics trumps reality www.fastcompany.com/91583324/the...
The White House is fixated on China copying U.S. AI. Experts say that’s the wrong threat
As American models display increasingly autonomous behavior, officials are focusing on “distillation,” a common industry practice that critics say is being recast as theft to protect American AI compa...
fastcompany.com
The last few months have been as big a shift in the world of AI as the original release of ChatGPT was. The world has to get ready for the changes. For @the-independent.com, I looked at how China appears more ready than anyone else www.independent.co.uk/tech/artific...
China is preparing its citizens for AI upheaval in a way the West can only dream of
From humanoid helpers to a ‘ban’ on AI companions and a radical overhaul of its education system, China is preparing its citizens for the future in a much more advanced way than the West. There are le...
independent.co.uk
The news that AI companies are destroying books because they're being used as training data has lit up social media - and as one antiquarian book dealer tells me for @telegraph.co.uk, the reason is it smacks of "cultural barbarism" www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07...
Cultural barbarism: How AI companies are destroying the world’s books
In its attempt to boost AI’s power, Silicon Valley is buying millions of rare editions, scanning them and then shredding the originals
telegraph.co.uk
Was privileged to help @inc.com with a few features around their Inc. 5000 list - including this profile of the rise and rise of Fitbit (and how it laid ground for wearables) www.inc.com/chris-stokel...
How Fitbit Went From Inc. 5000 Star to a $2.1 Billion Google Acquisition
Fitbit started with a simple pixelated flower that rewarded movement. Less than 15 years later, Google acquired the fitness-tracking pioneer for $2.1 billion.
inc.com
We hear a lot about the bars and blocks for data centres, but another one is engineering expertise - my latest for IMechE's Professional Engineering www.imeche.org/news/news-ar...
The engineering bottleneck blocking Britain's data centre boom
imeche.org
Almost a year to the day after I exclusively revealed for @fastcompany.com that ChatGPT conversations were being indexed by Google, Anthropic has the same issue with Claude. Read my take here www.fastcompany.com/91580420/cla...
Claude users’ shared conversations were showing up in Google searches
Thousands of chats, some containing potentially sensitive information, were indexed after users published shareable links that they may not have understood were public.
fastcompany.com
AI coding assistants were meant to unlock the ability to spend more time working as a team, but new data I looked into for @leaddev.com suggests it puts people more in silos. So how do we fix that? leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding...
AI-coding agents kill team collaboration
Technology is meant to make coding partnerships better, but a new study suggests AI-coding agents are throwing up silos.
leaddev.com
Is the Hugging Face attack a worrying augur for the future of AI? The folks at @theipaper.com asked me to explore with experts inews.co.uk/news/connivi...
Conniving AI is starting to slip human control. We should all be worried
This week it was revealed that an AI model escaped its test environment and broke into a separate database to complete the task in a terrifying and unprecedented incident
inews.co.uk
Was about to clock off for the weekend then this happens... www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Trump Vows Fresh Tariffs on European Union Over Google Fine
President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on products from the European Union in retaliation to the bloc’s $1 billion (€890 million) fine of Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
bloomberg.com
This has to be a typo, right? No one is going to pay $20 a week for access to microdramas (even $20 a month I would suggest is a stretch) www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-testi...
TikTok is testing a $20-a-week video app
TikTok is testing a paid micro-drama app called LimeShorts. The company is experimenting with different pricing models.
businessinsider.com
How important could photonics be to the future of data centres? Here's my latest for @tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...
Inside optical and the battle for scale – how the AI industry is racing to integrate photonic interconnects
With copper running out of road, photonic interconnects are becoming the new innovative solution for data centers.
tomshardware.com
New tech - and some big deals - are helping small advertisers begin to get on TV. My latest for The Current www.thecurrent.com/media/bigges...
The biggest screen wants the smallest budgets.
As retailers, broadcasters and tech platforms make TV advertising easier to buy, small and midsize businesses are gaining access to a channel once reserved for big brands.
thecurrent.com
How to respond to Chinese models like Kimi K3 is splitting the already tenuous link between (and within) DC and Silicon Valley as my latest for @FastCompany.com reports www.fastcompany.com/91577355/kim...
Kimi K3 is exposing cracks in Trump's AI coalition
The Chinese model’s rise has ignited a fight over open-source AI and whether Washington should protect America’s frontier labs.
fastcompany.com
So... what *did* actually happen with the OpenAI attack on Hugging Face? With the help of able experts, I've delved into the detail in a way I've not really seen other outlets do for @sciam.bsky.social - and ask what's next www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
What OpenAI’s rogue agent really did in the Hugging Face hack
The agent pursued its objective far beyond what researchers intended, revealing how difficult powerful AI systems can be to contain
scientificamerican.com
How to respond to Chinese models like Kimi K3 is splitting the already tenuous link between (and within) DC and Silicon Valley as my latest for @FastCompany.com reports www.fastcompany.com/91577355/kim...
Kimi K3 is exposing cracks in Trump's AI coalition
The Chinese model’s rise has ignited a fight over open-source AI and whether Washington should protect America’s frontier labs.
fastcompany.com
So... what *did* actually happen with the OpenAI attack on Hugging Face? With the help of able experts, I've delved into the detail in a way I've not really seen other outlets do for @sciam.bsky.social - and ask what's next www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
What OpenAI’s rogue agent really did in the Hugging Face hack
The agent pursued its objective far beyond what researchers intended, revealing how difficult powerful AI systems can be to contain
scientificamerican.com