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Bulletin: Trump Brushes Off Affordability Worries in State of the Union Speech (Bloomberg)
Addressing one of his biggest audiences at perhaps the lowest moment of his second term, President Donald Trump returned again and again in his State of the Union speech to the same message on the economy: Everything is going great.
A resolute Trump was determined to will Americans into a better economic mood, seeking to paint over the affordability concerns at the center of upcoming midterm elections with statistics and self-congratulation.
He bragged, weaved, smiled and sparred his way through 108 minutes of prime-time television, projecting his vision of a "Golden Age" for a country that — according to recent polls —
mostly isn't buying it,
Axios reports.
But what was missing was a vision of the future, Politico Playbook writes. To hear the president speak, the job is already done. The border is fixed, the economy is booming, prices are rapidly coming down.
There were few new policy proposals — even the announcement of retirement accounts for low-income workers is essentially a Biden policy from 2022, Politico notes. Where, beyond the Dem-bashing, was the reason to vote Republican in 2026?
Watch the full address here.
Under the Microscope:
Fact-Checking Trump’s State of the Union Speech (New York Times)
AI Agent Race: Cowork and Plugins for Teams Across the Enterprise (Claude)
Anthropic just gave its Cowork platform a major upgrade, rolling out department-specific AI agents, private agent stores, and new connectors to tools like Gmail, DocuSign, Google Workspace, FactSet, and Harvey, escalating the enterprise agent race with OpenAI.
The update includes pre-built agents for 10 teams, from HR and engineering to banking, equity research, and wealth management, along with partner plugins such as Slack, S&P Global, and LSEG.
Companies can now create private agent stores
to deploy custom bots to specific teams with admin controls, and a new research preview lets Claude move between Excel and PowerPoint, analyzing data in one and automatically building a presentation in the other.
Cowork rattled SaaS stocks even as a preview, and now, wired into the tools companies already use, Anthropic is adding a new vertical with every release. If this pace continues, much of the knowledge economy could start running quietly on Claude.
States Fight Back: RFK Jr. Sued Over US Vaccine Changes by More Than a Dozen States (Bloomberg)
US
health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule is facing a fresh legal challenge from 15 states that argue the changes will make people sicker and strain local budgets.
Over the past year, Kennedy dramatically reshaped a key US advisory panel to incorporate vaccine skeptics, then later changed the national immunization schedule to pare back the number of shots recommended for America’s children.
The state action is the latest legal challenge Kennedy is facing over sweeping changes that have been labeled dangerous by doctors, medical groups and public health leaders.
Big Media News: Warner Bros. Says Paramount’s $31-a-Share Offer May Beat Netflix’s Bid (Bloomberg)
Productivity Paradox: AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It (Harvard Business Review)
In the course of in-progress research, the Harvard Business Review discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.
In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a US-based technology company with about 200 employees, HBR found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools).
On their own initiative, workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.
Cost Revolution: The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived (New York Times Opinion - Paul Ford)
When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting, Paul Ford writes in a New York Times op-ed.
Ford was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made him a professional software cost estimator.
"When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000," Ford writes.
That last price is the full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive.
"Today, though, when the stars align
and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan," Ford writes.
Digital Ambition: India Has Its Own Unique Recipe for ‘AI Sovereignty’ (Bloomberg)
At the 2026 AI Impact Summit in India, Bloomberg New Economy
convened senior global leaders at The Leela Palace New Delhi for a special session themed Who’s in Control?
Ahead
of the eighth Bloomberg New Economy Forum, October 13-15, 2026 – hosted by India for the first time – the discussion focused on AI sovereignty: who builds and steers the infrastructure, sets the rules and captures the economic upside of artificial intelligence.
Notable attendees included H.E. Ashwini Vaishnaw—India’s Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting, and Electronics & Information Technology—who delivered the opening remarks, as well as former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and H.E. Joko Widodo, former President of Indonesia.
The weeklong AI summit,
a sprawling affair with tens of thousands of delegates, hundreds of participating companies and keynote speeches by everyone from Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis to Emmanuel Macron, sent a clear message to the rest of the world: India has grand ambitions in artificial intelligence and the convening power to match them.
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