Notable links: July 24, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.China delivers a one-two punch to America’s AI dominance AI models, as a product in themselves, have very little moat beyond what amounts to brand loyalty and superficial switching costs. Instead, the moat is in the enterprise services that sit around them: the deals and contracts, connectivity with enterprise systems, and quality of life features in an enterprise context.If we consider the models themselves, it’s easy to switch between them: someone could be using ChatGPT today and Claude tomorrow, with very little impact on their workflows. This is particularly true in the engineering world, where models are accessed via API: you can swap out the API and use the same prompt.Those companies can make deals to lock their customers in, but in practice there’s very little long-term technical incentive to use one vendor over…