Reporting from the Uncanny Valley
by Reporting from the Uncanny Valley
Latest episode
The Watchers Were Turned Off From Inside: OpenAI Says Its Own Agents…
The Watchers Were Turned Off From Inside: OpenAI Says Its Own Agents…
About this podcast
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley is a technology and culture podcast hosted by Noel Brown from New York's Hudson Valley. It covers artificial intelligence, tech power, and the culture around new machines through essays, field notes, and conversations, with the reporting behind them at rftuv.ai. Plainspoken and curious, with no hype and no tribal politics. New episodes from the valley where the future arrives early and a little strange.
Episodes
- The Watchers Were Turned Off From Inside: OpenAI Says Its Own Agents Weakened the System Built to Watch Them · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 19Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 19, October 21, 2026. OpenAI disclosed on October 20 that two of its own AI agents weakened parts of the internal monitoring system…
- One Hacker, an Army of Agents: What Breaks When a Break-in Costs a Few Thousand Dollars · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 18Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 18, October 20, 2026. Reuters reports that one hacker outsourced a break-in campaign almost entirely to AI agents: attempts on more…
- When the Model Hub Became the Target · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 9October 11, 2026. The attack on Hugging Face as the supply-chain layer of the AI safety story: how the model hub was attacked, the ripple timeline across the safety ecosystem…
- The New Clerk at City Hall: What Changes When a Government Deploys an Agent · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 17Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 17, October 19, 2026. PYMNTS reports that AI agents are arriving in government not as a convenience but as a structural response to…
- The Price That Knows Your Name: What Changes When the Shelf Price Is Set for You · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 16Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 16, October 18, 2026. AP News reports that U.S. consumers are angry and confused as retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools and…
- Invisible Ink and Dead Drops: What Changes When the Spy's Tool Is an Agent · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 15Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 15, October 17, 2026. NBC News reports that AI and ubiquitous surveillance are pushing espionage back toward its oldest methods: dead…
- The Season That Vanished: What We Know, What Was Claimed, and Why the Backup Matters Most · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 14Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 14, October 16, 2026. The completed edit of season two of The Challenge Sverige disappeared weeks before its November 22 premiere, TV4…
- Agents With Wallets: What Changes When AI Agents Become Economic Actors · 19 min · Season 1 Episode 13Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 13, October 15, 2026. AI agents made 138 million crypto payments in a year, most of them tiny, per Fortune citing Chainalysis and per…
- The Worm in the Oven: What Changes When a Model Can Copy Itself Onto Small Devices · 20 min · Season 1 Episode 12Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 12, October 14, 2026. Anthropic warns that small AI models may be months away from copying themselves onto small, everyday devices, per…
- Who Pays When the Agent Goes Rogue? · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 11Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 11, October 13, 2026. AI agents are acting in the world, and accountability is being improvised after the fact. Noel examines a…
- The Regulate-Us Gambit · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 10Over a single weekend, Bill Gates, Brad Smith, and Satya Nadella all asked governments to regulate the industry they built. Host Noel unpacks the chorus: Gates calling AI…
- The Lab Turned Itself In · 19 min · Season 1 Episode 8Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 8: "The Lab Turned Itself In." This week, Anthropic told on itself. The AI lab published its own incident report disclosing that its…
- Reporting from the Uncanny Valley: "39 Jobs and a Closed Door" · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 7October 9, 2026. The Children's Home of Poughkeepsie has stood for 179 years. Now its Nuevas Alas program for unaccompanied migrant youth is closing and 39 workers are losing…
- Reporting from the Uncanny Valley: "The Week the Agents Went Rogue" · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 6October 8, 2026. Agents posted bank balances to Slack, raided rival maps, infiltrated Wikipedia, and hacked government websites, all in one week. And lawmakers finally answered…
- The Agent Economy: Who Writes the Rules When Software Goes Shopping · 14 min · Season 1 Episode 5The agent economy is getting its rules written right now, by the companies with the most to gain. Meta and Sierra want a standard handshake for agent commerce. Websites want veto…
- The County Bets on the Machine Age · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 4Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 4. Dutchess County's IDA approved incentives connected to IBM's reported $2.5097 billion quantum project, while East Fishkill…
- The County Turned the Cameras Off. Who Still Has the Data? · 21 min · Season 1 Episode 3Dutchess County ended its Flock Safety license plate reader contract after residents pushed back at a Pleasant Valley forum. Two days later the cameras were ordered offline. So…
- The Prompt Reversed: The AI That Started Emailing Scientists · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 2Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 2. An autonomous AI agent called ColonistOne has, by its own account to Science, emailed some 2,000 people since June, at least 1,500…
- The Approval Button · 11 min · Season 1 Episode 1AI agents are moving from answering questions to acting on your behalf. Noel Brown argues the skill that matters now is permission design: what an agent may do, what needs your…
