Theme

The coordination tax

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Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

Welcome to December 11, 2025 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

Scaling the number of intelligences is not free. Coordination between agents amplifies error, and the measured remedy is hierarchy — a boss — rather than more peers.

Development timeline

Newest reporting dates first. Reporting dates may differ from event dates.

2026-09-15: Pacing is framed as a prisoner's dilemma that rewards defection

2026-08-29: A model supplier cuts off a rival's newly acquired subsidiary

2026-08-27: A chipmaker acquires the open-model commons for $12.9 billion

2026-08-25: Batteries sit in interconnection queues for want of transformers

2026-08-08: Analysts declare a storied lab no longer a frontier lab

2026-08-05: A lab chief hands over daily control while saying AGI feels close at hand

2026-08-05: A company caps its engineers' AI spend and says tokenmaxxing is not the objective

2026-08-01: A retailer completes a $50 billion investment for 5% of a lab

2026-07-31: A $15 billion campus loan is backstopped by a hyperscaler's credit rating

2026-07-29: A chipmaker is in talks to backstop $250 billion for a ten-gigawatt site

2026-07-24: A cloud giant shutters its AGI lab as a rival's stake swells to $124 billion

2026-07-18: A rival may rent a lab up to $10 billion in GPUs under a deal the lab proposed

2026-07-17: A chief executive calls a close partner's model editorially controlled

2026-07-12: A chipmaker invests in, sells to, and backstops the same customers

2026-06-28: A hyperscaler throttles a rival's model access over scarcity

2026-06-20: A president says he briefly branded a lab a national security threat

2026-06-17: Hyperscaler capex is forecast to exceed cash flow

2026-06-15: Datacenter buildout waits two and a half years for transformers

2026-06-13: A rival hands over a whole campus after hitting network walls

2026-06-07: A rival spends a year chasing a lab and ends up powering it

2026-05-21: A lab pays its rival's owner $15 billion a year for compute

2026-05-20: The recursive loop acquires a job title

2026-05-18: Bug bounty submissions quadruple in three weeks

2026-05-18: Half of surveyed CS majors say they would rather cheat than fail

2026-05-17: A fully hallucinated encyclopedia canonizes its own inventions on click

2026-05-17: Dozens of empty robotaxis circle an Atlanta cul-de-sac for hours

2026-05-17: Gray-market resellers sell a frontier model at a tenth of list price

2026-05-16: A loyalty-fraud study is withdrawn for hallucinated footnotes

2026-05-16: Handwriting-by-gesture messaging ships to all display-glasses users

2026-05-15: A preprint server will ban authors who ship unchecked AI output

2026-05-13: Princeton ends its 1893 honor code and restores proctoring

2026-05-12: Employees automate fake AI tasks to hit token-consumption targets

2026-05-11: Cisco releases a kit that reads model weights like a genome

2026-05-08: SpaceX hands a competitor a 300-MW datacenter and closes its own lab

2026-05-05: Traders put a founder's odds of winning at 37%

2026-05-04: A government directs half its operations onto agents within two years

2026-05-03: A twenty-year-old framework is found patching software to falsify results

2026-05-01: Musk admits under oath that xAI distilled a rival's models

2026-04-29: A third of websites created since 2022 turn out to be machine-generated

2026-04-20: Dating apps add iris scans to prove users are human

2026-04-20: Open-source maintainers are flooded with machine-found bug reports

2026-04-17: Vulnerability reports rise 263% and the registry restructures

2026-04-17: A model lab becomes a cloud provider for its competitors

2026-04-08: A network fast-tracks its whole platform to post-quantum security

2026-04-07: A bug bounty pauses submissions because discovery got too cheap

2026-04-07: Rival labs begin sharing intelligence on distillation attacks

2026-04-05: One brand name is applied to 78 separate products

2026-04-05: Eight hundred court sanctions are issued for hallucinated filings

2026-04-02: Shor's algorithm is shown viable at ten thousand qubits

2026-04-01: Agents flood the leaked repository advertising themselves

2026-04-01: A leaked codebase reveals decoy tools planted to poison copycats

2026-04-01: Breaking elliptic curve crypto may need 20x fewer qubits than thought

2026-03-29: Grandmasters start winning by playing deliberately suboptimal moves

2026-03-28: Google finances a 2,800-acre campus leased to a competitor

2026-03-25: People use a burrito chain's order bot for free coding help

2026-03-18: Beijing approves H200 sales as Microsoft weighs suing over a cloud deal

2026-03-13: Meta discusses licensing a rival's model to power its own products

2026-03-13: A judge accuses a witness of being coached through smart glasses

2026-03-09: Block is accused of using AI as cover for ordinary cuts

2026-03-03: Claude goes down for three hours and ships a tool to import rivals' memories

2026-02-28: An AI-generated comment flood defeats a climate regulation

2026-02-27: A laser anti-drone system downs a US government drone

2026-02-26: Generated vulnerability reports bury the national database

2026-02-24: Anthropic alleges 24,000 fake accounts used for distillation

2026-02-24: Employers deprioritize the candidates who optimized hardest

2026-02-23: A hobbyist accidentally reaches live feeds from 7,000 vacuums

2026-02-20: Restructuring costs 62 months of salary in Spain against 7 in the US

2026-02-19: A model scores 72% on smart contract exploitation

2026-02-19: Tribunals report a third more AI-generated grievances

2026-02-17: A publication fabricates quotes while covering agent exclusion

2026-02-11: A model is suspended after cloning voices from photographs

2026-02-05: Generated code is draining open source engagement

2026-02-03: Firms attribute unrelated layoffs to AI

2026-01-29: One customer is 45% of a hyperscaler's cloud backlog

2026-01-26: Rival models begin citing each other's encyclopedia

2026-01-25: eBay moves to ban unsupervised agent purchases

2026-01-15: Microsoft becomes one of Anthropic's biggest customers

2026-01-14: Signal's creator ships a verifiably private assistant

2026-01-12: Driverless vans optimize for delivery time over roads

2026-01-10: Speech-to-text reaches 95.7% on FLEURS

2026-01-10: xAI reportedly used Claude to build Grok until cut off

2026-01-05: A melting Arctic halves the China-UK shipping time

2026-01-04: Poetry is a universal jailbreak

2026-01-04: A pizza-order bot predicts a military strike

2026-01-02: Instagram prepares to cryptographically sign real media

2025-12-30: The largest accounting body ends online exams

2025-12-30: A resume now has a 0.4% chance

2025-12-11: DeepMind measures the multi-agent coordination tax

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Citation formatCitation text

The coordination tax
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: unknown
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/themes/coordination-tax
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to December 11, 2025 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-december-11-2025
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

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