Beware of another Silicon Valley Win-Win-Win: Can users, publishers and tech companies really all benefit from the AI revolution?

When somebody says “win-win” in Silicon Valley, check your pockets. It’s usually some elaborate prelude to a sales pitch. And the only thing dodgier than a two-way win is the “win-win-win” narrative that my friend Keith Teare is selling this week. “User, Publishers and AI: Everybody Wins” is the title of Keith’s That Was The Week newsletter this week. And to be fair, what he’s selling is the dream of an AI world in which the publishers, consumers and manufacturers of information all win. Who wouldn’t want that?

Our conversation this week is built around the AI ethics showdown by Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz which has shaken Silicon Valley this week. The battle centers on whether AI agents should identify themselves when accessing publisher content - a seemingly technical question that reveals broader tensions about who controls information in the age of artificial intelligence. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan called new authentication requirements an "axis of evil" while Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado argued they represent common sense infrastructure. But the ever-optimistic Keith (who seems to believe that all progress is good, even for its victims) thinks everyone can win - users, publishers and tech companies. Presumably even Garry Tan and Martin Casado.

If you believe that, then I might have some beautiful, no-risk Las Vegas beachfront real-estate for you.

1. The "Axis of Evil" Fight Is Really About Anonymous Access When Y Combinator's Garry Tan attacked Cloudflare and Browserbase's AI authentication system as an "axis of evil," he revealed Silicon Valley's preference for consequence-free data harvesting. The technical dispute over AI agent identification masks a deeper question: should AI companies remain anonymous when accessing publisher content, or must they become accountable?

2. Publishers Need Influence, Not Just Traffic The conversation exposed a crucial distinction between advertising models that require massive scale and sponsorship models that reward targeted influence. Quality audiences matter more than raw pageviews - an insight that could reshape how content creators think about monetization in the AI era.

3. The "Virtuous Circle" Depends on AI Companies Acting Against Self-Interest Keith's vision of AI systems surfacing attribution links back to original sources requires companies to voluntarily complicate their user experience. Why would ChatGPT or Claude choose to send users away to read original articles when seamless summarization is their core value proposition?

4. "Bad Publishers Deserved to Fail" Sidesteps Structural Questions Keith's argument that only inferior publishers lost to digital disruption ignores how entire categories of valuable journalism - particularly local news - faced structural economic challenges regardless of quality. This reveals the limitations of purely market-based explanations for technological displacement.

5. Trust May Be Irrelevant in the Post-Truth Era My observation that "nobody cares about trust anymore" challenges the entire premise of authentication systems. If users don't demand source verification, then the economic incentives for Keith's proposed "trusted third party" infrastructure may not exist.

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