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TECH & AI
The Leopard Is Eating David Sacks’s Face
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President Donald Trump confirmed Friday that he’s thinking about the U.S. government entering into some kind of partnership with the major AI companies, perhaps even taking a stake like he did with Intel. Trump is meeting with the leaders of the AI companies, possibly as soon as next week, to chat about the details. All of that is bad news for David Sacks, who wrote an extremely long tweet on Friday criticizing Bernie Sanders and his call for legislation that would allow the government to take a 50% ownership stake in the AI companies. But Sacks may as well have been criticizing Donald Trump, ostensibly his old boss, because the Sanders plan sounds very similar to Trump’s, at least based on what little we know of it so far. Trump says he’s interested in the government taking equity stakes in the giant AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic: “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public. The American people can benefit from the success of… pic.twitter.com/Wcy5RbbJ78 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2026 NOTUS was the first to report Thursday that OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been talking with Trump about the government taking a stake in the AI company. It echoes what some of the left have considered, and Sacks focused on those people in his criticism of the idea, not Trump.

“While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right,” Sacks wrote at the start of his tweet Thursday.

Sacks, who previously served as Trump’s crypto and AI czar, then went on to suggest that AI companies have injected too much fear into the conversation about what this new tech could potentially do to the world. Sacks said he understood the fear of regular people, especially conservatives, but that buying stakes in AI companies was not the solution. “Dario (Amodei) and Sam (Altman) have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax,” wrote Sacks.

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right. The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will… https://t.co/CqWYYhkDhC — David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 5, 2026 On Friday, the White House announced Trump would be trying to speed up adoption of AI models by the U.S. government when it comes to national security. But the Trump regime emphasized it would not be engaging in any of the practices many people are concerned about. Specifically, the White House said it would not be engaging in “unauthorized or unlawful ​surveillance activities.” Obviously, that’s a caveat which means nothing, given the fact that blank-check FISA court renewals make just about any kind of surveillance on Americans permissible, especially under the Trump White House interpretation of “legal.” But they’re clearly aware of just how freaked out everyone is. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went to war with Anthropic over its refusal to drop guardrails that would allow Claude to be used for fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. And it’s not a great sign when those two things are a deal-breaker for the government. It certainly suggests the U.S. military wants to use AI for fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance.

Oddly enough, Hegseth seems to be losing his war against Anthropic, as Reuters reported this week that the dispute between the government and the AI company “showing signs of easing.” And if Trump decides to take a stake in AI—potentially seeing it as a way to distribute stimulus checks before the midterm elections—that would mean Anthropic simply isn’t someone the Pentagon can be at war with anymore. Suddenly, every AI company is an integral part of the government. It remains to be seen whether Trump actually pulls the trigger on taking a stake in the AI companies, and if he does, there’s no telling which companies may resist. But it seems like Hegseth and Sacks are losing their respective battles to even greater forces: Trump’s fickle loyalty and his desire to control every industry in America while handing out free money to his supporters.



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TECH & AI
AI Has Come for Serif Fonts
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As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out—and reject—telltale signs of its use continues.One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the “rule of threes,” which is meant to scan as rhythmic, but often comes across predictable, hackish, and stale. And, of course, there are the clunky grammatical constructions of the “not X, but Y” variety.Now certain fonts and typefaces—specifically serifs—seem to be defining (and giving away) AI, both in actual software, and in vibe-coded design boilerplates. Some are calling it “tasteslop,” the results of the effort to make generative AI designs seem superficially sophisticated or distinguished.The shift away from slicker, more conspicuously computerized typefaces is something the San Francisco Bay Area writer, designer, and type practitioner Keya Vadgama has termed “the serif renaissance.” In a recent newsletter, published on her Substack, Vadgama suggests the move is a bid for companies to project more “personality and warmth.”“It’s not that difficult to discern why AI-native companies in particular are being drawn to serif fonts: AI is inherently cold and without opinion,” she writes. “(Using serifs) signals ‘We’re AI! But real humans use (and made) our product! We swear!’”“Serifs have an origin in calligraphy,” Vadgama tells WIRED. “It connotes a very human, fluid way of making letterforms.” Vadgama has noticed that Anthropic’s Claude was defaulting to serifs. Other AI companies—Runway, Perplexity, Manus—had also adopted similar typefaces in their UX and branding.Reached for comment, Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer tells WIRED: “Why wouldn’t we have human design? Perplexity is for people.”Vadgama believes the use of serifs is as much about aesthetics as building confidence between users and brands. Certain font choices signal, even at some preconscious psychological level, trust. Sans serifs (your Arials, Calibiris, Helviticas) are too clean, too computer-y. Good old Times New Roman, and similar typographic designs, can feel a bit more dignified. Recently, Vadgama was doing some branding work with a (since-shuttered) AI startup, which favored the serif text. “A big part of it,” she says, “is, ‘How do we position ourselves in a way that people are not afraid of us?’”Serifs can help build that conviction, or at least the illusion of it. Times New Roman itself was commissioned in the 1930s by Britain’s Times newspaper. The typeface carries a certain authoritative heft. Books and newspapers are printed using it. It was all but standardized in the decades before screen reading. Perhaps most famously, the Encyclopedia Brittanica—arguably the authoritative compendium of human knowledge, at least pre-World Wide Web—was set in Times.“In the broad public, a serif carries connotations of scholarship,” says Ali S. Qadeer, chair of graphic design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. “Claude is interesting. It’s using this slightly brown background to mirror a book page. It’s sort of emulating the feeling of reading print. And print has deeper associations with trust.”As reported by The New York Times, even the US State Department has returned to using Times New Roman after Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried Calibri as “informal,” pegging the department’s adoption of the sans serif typeface on some wider, Biden-era DEI initiative.Both Qadeer and Vadgama see the trend toward serifs as a rejoinder to AI’s perceived (and, indeed, literal) lack of soul, and the wider public suspicion of the technology. They’re not the only ones. Alongside the “tasteslop” discourse, people online have criticized the serification of AI aesthetics as “generic” and “very ugly.”



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