🟡 The sobering of AI
Semafor Technology · Semafor Technology · 2026-07-08
Semafor's technology newsletter covers an AI agent billing incident that cost a journalist nearly $500, DeepSeek's plans to build its own inference chip, Cloudflare's new paywall for AI web crawlers, and China's use of the UN AI for Good summit to promote open-source AI to developing nations.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-agent-costsai-chipsweb-scraping-monetizationchina-ai-policyopen-source-ai
Claims
- An OpenAI Codex agent running in a loop generated nearly $500 in unexpected charges for a journalist who had not set spending limits on auto-credit top-ups.
- DeepSeek is developing its own AI inference chip to reduce dependence on Nvidia semiconductors, mirroring a similar move by OpenAI.
- More than half of Cloudflare's web requests now originate from AI agents, prompting the company to launch a two-sided marketplace paywall that lets content owners set minimum prices for AI crawlers.
- China is using the UN AI for Good summit to pitch open-source AI as a development tool and position itself as the developing world's preferred AI partner.
- AI-generated websites are becoming visually homogeneous, and models trained on AI-generated output produce steadily less diverse results over time.
Key quotes
My bill was entirely avoidable. I made lots of mistakes, including putting too much faith in an unproven technology and giving it too much control and access to my wallet.
More than half of its web requests now come from agents.
Open source is good for all countries and all groups and all people, and I believe that is the right direction.