Jon Keegan

@jonkeegan

Tech reporter / Data journalist. I report on AI and Big Tech. Work has appeared in Sherwood News, The Markup, WSJ, MIT Technology Review. Aspiring 46er. ⛰️ Newsletter: 📝 Send tips: Signal: jonkeegan.73

4678 Siguiendo4196 Seguidores1144 Publicaciones

Website Website Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y jonkeegan.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· 13d

So lucky to be able to see #Rush again last night at MSG. Anika Nilles was incredible 🥁 and the whole band sounded amazing. What a fun show

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· 21d

I am extremely pro-EV but this is one fugly vehicle. What a missed opportunity.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· 27d

Saw some Atlantic Puffins for the first time yesterday.They lay one egg, hatches in six weeks, then the puffling flies away and doesn’t come back for several years. Then it finds its original burrow and the cycle continues. Amazing work by the Project Puffin to repopulate the coast of Maine.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jul 9

“Citizenship going to anyone willing to pay.” American citizenship IS ABSOLUTELY FOR SALE that’s what this is.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jul 1

On sale: Metaverse book. Never read.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 28

Lucky to have some amazing nature in our yard this year. Beautiful bobcat and a barred owl

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 26

I missed this from a few months back. Trump started gluing his gold challenge coins all over the Oval Office. I noticed these over the fireplace which recently appeared. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202... (My story from last year on the increasing amount of gold: sherwood.news/power/the-ov...)

screenshot of Trump in the oval office with Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO. Gold decorations on the wall

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 23

You're rolling down Camino Del Rio smoking a Lark, listening to Rare Earth, before pulling into a Texaco to pay $0.34 per gallon for low-lead Fire Chief gas and fill up your "Mellow Yellow" AMC Gremlin. www.beautifulpublicdata.com/san-diego-ph...

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 23

Today, most cars come in white, silver, and black. That’s pretty much it. It is truly sad to see how far the typical car has fallen from the colorful options that even basic cars had. Just look at these colors from cars on the road in 1973! www.beautifulpublicdata.com/san-diego-ph...

A colorful collage of 1970s cars and their dominant color next to them.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 23

DDC's Aaron Draplin told me signs started to look the same when computers killed human imperfections: "So there's just this kind of perfect sprinkle of 'shitty' to that stuff...no amount of filters or texture tricks or whatever can sort of nail." www.beautifulpublicdata.com/san-diego-ph...

A collage of colorful business signs from the 1970s

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 23

NEW POST on @beautifulpublicdata.com: San Diego Photologs from the 1970s - A collection of beautiful, high-resolution photolog scans reveals a colorful world of pastel-colored cars and whimsical signage. beautifulpublicdata.com/san-diego-ph...

A screenshot from a 1973 photolog film in San Diego with mcdonalds arches, and other colorful signs

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 13

Wow. Anthropic disables Fable 5 + Mythos 5 for ALL users to comply with a Friday night “export control directive” barring use by foreign nationals anywhere in the world (including Anthropic workers). Gov told Anthropic it found a universal jailbreak for Fable 5. www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...

Al
=
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Jun 8

Apple should really lean into fixing the most common tech pain points for people in their daily lives. Not planning concerts, or throwing themed parties. This is a good first step: It will automatically go and update your insecure passwords for you. www.apple.com/os/macos/?ve...

Screenshot of an Apple ios 27 feature "Automatically Fix Passwords"

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 27

The telltale sign of a Claude dashboard. In the future designers will be like "I want to evoke the early days of AI. Like 2026 Claude dashboard shit"

screenshot of colored divs in a Claude dashboard

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 24

I think some people use it to make the thing. I like to use it to make the tool that lets ME make the thing — execute my ideas. Today I made a tool that let me generate and play around with layouts from hundreds of images I had already extracted from this catalog of signs. Knew what I wanted.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 24

🛑⚠️🅿️ New merch just dropped on my @beautifulpublicdata.com Etsy shop! A fun collage of hundreds of US highways signs from the FHA's Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). Premium 100% cotton, heavyweight. beautifulpublicdata.etsy.com/listing/4510...

A grey t-shirt with a circular colorful collage of highway and street signs

A black t-shirt with a circular colorful collage of highway and street signs

A green t-shirt with a circular colorful collage of highway and street signs

A detail of a circular colorful collage of highway and street signs against black

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 22

Figure’s F.03 robots just sorted packages for 200 hours straight. What started as a 10-hour human-vs-robot challenge turned into a continuous marathon shift spanning nine days of continuous work. sherwood.news/tech/figures...

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 22

Remember when a group of artists was going to fly around the moon in a SpaceX starship?

photos of artists listed as crew members of the "dear moon" project

Notice of Project Cancellation
In 2018, Yusaku Maezawa announced dearMoon, the world’s first civilian circumlunar voyage
aboard SpaceX’s space vehicle, Starship. The plan had included artists from around the
world who would participate in the project to share the invaluable experience in space with
the rest of the world. Arrangements were being made with SpaceX to target the launch
by the end of 2023.
Unfortunately, however, launch within 2023 became unfeasible, and without clear schedule
certainty in the near-term, it is with a heavy heart that Maezawa made the unavoidable
decision to cancel the project. To all who have supported this project and looked forward to
this endeavor, we sincerely appreciate it and apologize for this outcome.
Although dearMoon is cancelled, Maezawa and dearMoon crew members will continue to
challenge themselves in their respective fields.
We will hold deep respect for SpaceX as they continue to venture into uncharted territories,
while we ourselves will move on to the next challenge.
June 1, 2024
dearMoon

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 19

Feel this will end badly? 27 year old MAGA high school dropout with no background in the field starts company to build small nuclear reactors. Hires a 21 year old guy he met at a bonfire party to build the reactor shielding. www.theinformation.com/articles/tru...

At Valar’s Utah site, I met Sean Stassi, a 21-year-old mechanical engineer overseeing the design of the concrete shielding around the reactor, a critical safety feature meant to prevent radiation leaks. Stassi met Taylor at a bonfire party on the beach in El Segundo, Calif., two years ago and decided to take a break from studying at El Camino College in LA, where he’d just finished his sophomore year.

I asked him if he planned to return to school. “We’ll see what happens,” he said. “Depends on how this whole thing goes.”

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 13

If the valuation reported by NYT holds($950B), Anthropic will have surpassed OpenAI’s reported valuation ($825B) for the first time. And in another first, Ramp is reporting that more business users used Anthropic AI than OpenAI for the first time. sherwood.news/tech/anthrop...

chart showing Anthropic’s valuation at $950B (reported) compared to OpenAI’s $850B.

ramp chart showing Anthropic with more business users for the first time (34.4%) than OpenAI (32.3%)

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 8

LOL look at this *top secret* UFO file at www.war.gov/UFO/ I love how they are trying to X-files this up with this website.

a screenshot of an "FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay" on top of a real photo depicting some person’s 2023 UFO sighting

Text reads: "Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously."

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 5

My dispatch from the Musk v. Altman trial in Oakland yesterday. OpenAI president Greg Brockman took the stand. Some pretty embarrassing details read back to him from his personal journal. Tech leaders: don’t keep a journal! sherwood.news/tech/openais...

“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the "glorious leader" that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially, what will take me to $1B?,” wrote Brockman.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 4

So glad to see this @pulitzerprizes.bsky.social Special Citation for @jkbjournalist.bsky.social ‘s Epstein reporting. Long overdue

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· May 1

Love this from @rani.bsky.social. One of these things is not like the others sherwood.news/tech/big-tec...

chart showing massive capex spending by Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and then Apple way down below

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Apr 30

Prepare for a new licensing model for AI enterprise software. Last night on the Q3 earnings call Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said they are moving from a per-seat license to a "seat plus consumption" model, monetizing all those tokens users will consume with AI agents. sherwood.news/tech/microso...

Microsoft also discussed a shift in how business customers are choosing to license their software. The traditional per-user “seat” model is being supplanted with “seat plus consumption” as users devour more AI tokens for agentic work in the company’s productivity apps.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the call:

“Any per-user business of ours, whether it’s productivity, coding, security, will become a per-user and usage business. That’s the best way to think about it.”

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Apr 30

Crazy earnings day yesterday. Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft combined plan on spending $700 BILLION on capital expenditures (GPUs + data centers) in 2026.

4 tech companies are planning to spend $700+ billion on capex this year (chart showing a exponential spilke in spending for Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta)

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Apr 21

Definitely iPod mini (2004). Click wheel, headphone jack, add Bluetooth. Maybe E-ink display? This category is completely wide open today and Apple has massive nostalgia capital that it has yet to cash in.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Apr 20

Oof this is dark. "The Killer Robots Are Coming. The Battlefield Will Never Look the Same." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/w...

The vehicles left on their mission in the middle of the night in a snowstorm, to give them protection from Russian drones, Lieutenant Kopach said. He noted that the drivers and pilots carried out the operation from the safety of a city far from the front, using relays for the video and radio commands.

When the robots reached the school building, the vehicle with rockets opened fire, forcing the Russian troops away from the windows, Lieutenant Kopach said. Two other robots then drove nearby or into the building and detonated, setting off the stored ammunition. The building collapsed with at least nine Russian soldiers inside, Major Kopach said. One managed to crawl out.

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Apr 20

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with new Getty photos of tech people 🙏🏻 📸

celebrity photos from the 2026 Breakthrough Prize

Jon Keegan@jonkeegan· Apr 16

In one section titled “Extreme uncertainty,” researchers documented moments where Opus 4.7 got caught in a long bout of second-guessing its answer to a biology question, resulting in a 25,000-word doom loop filled with all-caps exclamations and profanity. sherwood.news/tech/anthrop...