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Bloomberg is out with a deep look at the circular deals fueling the AI boom, and the picture is striking. Tech giants are essentially lending each other money to buy their own services, inflating revenue figures in ways that look impressive on paper but raise real questions about whether genuine demand is keeping pace with the hype.
That tension connects directly to what Cloudflare is now threatening to do about it. The infrastructure giant says it may block Google from indexing the publishers it hosts, citing aggressive AI scraping that pulls content without compensation. It's a rare moment of leverage for the web's backbone players, and a sign that the quiet war over who profits from training data is getting louder.
And stepping back from the machines for a moment, a new federal rule is forcing colleges to reckon with a simple question: are graduates actually better off financially for having attended? Under the policy, institutions whose alumni can't outpace their loan debt risk losing access to federal financial aid entirely. It's an accountability shift years in the making, and long overdue.
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