• Relationship Satisfaction Goal: Research indicates that couples who engage in sexual activity at least once per week generally report the highest levels of well-being.
• Optimizing Frequency: Increasing sex beyond a weekly cadence does not consistently yield higher levels of satisfaction and may lead to negative outcomes if the frequency feels forced.
• Responsive Desire: Sexual desire often emerges after physical or emotional engagement has already begun rather than occurring spontaneously in both partners simultaneously.
• Strategic Scheduling: Planning intimacy is a valid organizational tool that prioritizes relationship health and helps create necessary conditions for connection.
• Maintaining Physical Touch: Everyday non-sexual affection, such as holding hands or hugging, is essential to sustain bonding and prevent the cooling of emotional intimacy.
• Domestic Equity: Managing households fairly is a significant factor in relationship dynamics, as shared labor reduces resentment and improves the overall environment for intimacy.
• Micro Novelty: Introducing small variations in routines or settings is a highly effective, low-pressure method to maintain interest and engagement over time.
• Mindful Intention: Successful long-term intimacy is built through consistent, purposeful effort rather than an expectation of spontaneous perfection or perpetual excitement.

Source: Kenny Eliason/Unsplash

Most people don’t notice when their sex life starts to change.

Over time, what was once easy begins to feel effortful. And suddenly you’re left wondering, is this it? Is this just married sex? And then that quiet fear creeps in…” Are we having it ‘enough?’”

What I’ve learned over more than a decade of teaching and researching sexuality is that this experience is not unusual. And that actually, you’re probably more normal than you think. However, a fulfilling sex life in any long-term relationship does take curiosity, intention, and yes, a certain amount of planning. Which brings us to the question: “What should we aim for?”

The surprisingly modest “sweet spot”

Many people assume that a good sex life means having sex extremely frequently. In reality, the data tells a much more reassuring story.

Large-scale studies consistently find that couples who have sex about once a week or more report the highest levels of relationship satisfaction and overall well-being. Interestingly, these same studies show that more sex isn’t always better. In fact, the relationship between sexual frequency and well-being flattens after once a week, suggesting that despite what we may think, the most sexually satisfied couples aren’t having sex daily, or even more than once a week. Though there’s certainly nothing wrong with having sex that often, the data shows that when couples force themselves to have it more than they truly want, that pressure often backfires.

Why waiting for desire doesn’t work

One of the most persistent myths about sex is that you should only have it when you feel fully in the mood. But like many things in life, sometimes that feeling of “readiness” happens only after you’ve started.

This belief is especially problematic in long-term relationships. Research on sexual desire shows that for many people, particularly women, desire is often responsive rather than spontaneous (Nagoski, 2018). It emerges after physical or emotional engagement has already begun.

If you wait for both partners to feel spontaneously aroused at the same time, you may be waiting indefinitely.

This is why many clinicians and researchers now encourage couples to be more intentional about sex. Not in a rigid or transactional way, but in a way that acknowledges that desire often follows action, not the other way around.

Why scheduling sex actually works

Scheduling sex has an unfortunate reputation for being unromantic. But when you step back, it starts to look less like a failure and more like a form of prioritization.

We schedule workouts, social plans, and even downtime. Yet we often expect sex, something deeply tied to both physical and relational well-being, to somehow happen on its own.

Couples who maintain satisfying sex lives over time tend to have one thing in common: they create the conditions for connection. That might mean setting aside time to be together at least once a week without distractions, slowing down at the end of the day, or intentionally shifting from “task mode” to “relationship mode.” In this way, you aren’t just planning sex, you are planning to create the conditions which make it more likely to happen, rather than just expecting either partner to instantly turn on.

Importantly, scheduling does not mean obligation. It means creating an opportunity. If one or both partners genuinely aren’t interested in that moment, the goal is flexibility, not pressure.

The quiet erosion of intimacy

In many relationships, the first thing to disappear is not sex itself, but touch. And if the only time couples touch each other is once a week when they plan for intimacy, it can become a pressure-filled recipe for failure.

THE BASICS

• The Fundamentals of Sex
• Take our Sexual Satisfaction Test
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Small gestures, holding hands, a hug, a kiss when you walk in the door, often fade as couples become more focused on logistics. Over time, relationships can begin to feel more like partnerships in managing life than sources of emotional or physical connection.

Research consistently shows that affectionate touch plays a critical role in maintaining closeness. It reinforces bonding, increases feelings of security, and can help sustain sexual desire over time.

What’s happening outside the bedroom matters

Sexual difficulties are often rooted in dynamics that have little to do with sex itself.

One of the most consistent findings in relationship research is the role of fairness in household labor. When one partner carries a disproportionate share of domestic responsibilities, it can lead to exhaustion and resentment. Both are deeply incompatible with desire.

Sex Essential Reads

Want to Increase Your (or Their) Libido?

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Studies have found that couples who share household tasks more equitably tend to have more frequent sex and higher levels of satisfaction. Not because chores are inherently sexy, but because fairness fosters goodwill, and goodwill creates the conditions for intimacy.

In other words, planning intimacy once a week is a wonderful goal, but it’s unlikely to happen when resentments are brimming. Never underestimate the power of gratitude and recognition of all that your partner does.

Novelty doesn’t have to be dramatic

Planning intimacy once a week is more likely to happen when there’s something about the experience to look forward to. And the key to making that true is novelty.

But this doesn’t need to mean major changes. Research shows that in reality, small shifts can be surprisingly powerful. Enter what I call “micro-novelty.”

A different time of day. A new setting. Slight variations in familiar routines. These “micro-novelties” can help counteract the predictability that sometimes dampens desire.

No one craves tacos every night for dinner, even if they happen to love tacos. This is why small shifts in how you set the mood, slight changes of technique, or sharing fantasies and turn-ons can make you more present and excited when your intimacy date arrives.

The bigger picture

If there is one takeaway from decades of research on sex and relationships, it is this: Good sex is not about perfection, super high frequency, or constant excitement.

Yes, regular sex is important to relationship well-being, but more isn’t always better. And ultimately, connection, intention, and responsiveness matter more than one special number.

• Service Restrictions: Anthropic implemented unannounced throttling during peak weekday hours, significantly limiting access for paying Claude subscribers.
• Economic Imbalance: The subscription model remains inherently unstable, as inference costs for active users often exceed the flat monthly fees collected.
• Rationing Logic: Capacity limitations effectively function as ticket rationing, restricting service availability during critical West Coast business hours.
• Historical Parallels: The current strategy mirrors past challenges faced by companies like AOL, which struggled when flat-rate pricing models met high consumption demand.
• Pricing Inefficiency: Digital market research suggests that failing to utilize versioned pricing for goods with nonzero marginal costs leads to inverted economics.
• Operational Negligence: Management proceeded with aggressive customer acquisition strategies without scaling capacity or infrastructure to support the resulting surge in usage.
• Lack Of Transparency: The company maintains a history of imposing opaque limitations, creating a disconnect between the advertised service and actual user experience.
• Competitive Consequences: By failing to manage service availability, Anthropic risks alienating its user base and providing an easy marketing opportunity for industry rivals.

On March 23, Anthropic's paying Claude subscribers discovered their sessions had been throttled without notice. Max users handing over $200 a month watched their daily allowance vanish on a single prompt. Developers on the West Coast, opening their laptops at 8 a.m., found themselves locked out before writing a line of code.

Call it "adjusting." Better: call it rationing.

The euphemism arrived on schedule.

Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic's technical team, confirmed on Wednesday that the company now limits session capacity during "peak hours," weekdays from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific. Weekly caps stay the same, he assured. You'll just burn through them faster during the only hours that matter.

That is the logic of an airline that overbooks every flight, then explains your ticket is still valid, you simply can't board during business hours. Only 7% of users are affected, Anthropic added. One imagines the airline making the same announcement over the PA system.

The math was never hidden.

The numbers that explain this crisis were always public. Anthropic's own API pricing reveals the gap. A moderate subscriber paying $20 a month generates roughly $58.50 in inference costs. Nearly three dollars consumed for every dollar collected. Power users on the top-tier plan burn multiples more. The company acknowledged last August that some subscribers were consuming "tens of thousands of dollars in model usage" against flat-rate plans.

None of this was secret. The company sold subscriptions it knew were underwater, then flinched when customers took the product seriously.

AOL tried this in 1996.

America Online killed hourly billing that December and promised unlimited access for a flat fee. Users took AOL at its word, lines jammed for weeks, and state attorneys general forced a settlement. The lesson was plain: "unlimited" works as a customer acquisition strategy precisely until customers believe it.

Thirty years later, Anthropic is replaying the same tape at GPU scale. The technology changed. The arithmetic did not.

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Information has rules. Anthropic ignored them.

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian warned about exactly this failure mode in Information Rules, their 1998 study of pricing in digital markets. Their central argument was deceptively plain: information goods with variable consumption demand versioned pricing, not flat rates.

Flat-rate pricing for goods with nonzero marginal cost is a bet against your own success. The more customers you acquire, the faster the economics invert. Anthropic's revenue has grown by multiples since 2025. That growth, on money-losing unit economics, does not solve the problem. It compounds it.

The deeper dishonesty is structural. A casual user who asks Claude two questions over morning coffee costs pennies to serve. A developer running agentic coding loops all morning, cursor ticking through request after request, burns a hundred times the compute. Anthropic knew this distribution existed. It published the API rates that prove it. Yet it kept selling a single price tier as if usage were uniform.

When the transition from subsidy to metering arrived, Anthropic handled it the worst way possible: without warning. Its own support chatbot went down during the chaos. Google had pulled the same move weeks earlier, restricting AI Ultra subscribers without explanation. The pattern is becoming an industry template: sell the subscription, ration the service, blame the peak.

The timing is the tell.

The throttled window opens at five in the morning, Pacific time, and doesn't close until eleven. That is the West Coast workday. A developer in San Francisco sits down at eight and walks straight into the limit. Users who reorganized their toolchains around Claude, who let competing subscriptions lapse because Anthropic's product was better, discover the product they depend on carries a conditional asterisk they were never shown.

And the opacity is not new. Anthropic has a documented pattern of imposing limits users cannot see coming, creating a persistent gap between what subscribers pay for and what they receive.

Hours after Anthropic's announcement, OpenAI's Codex engineering lead posted on X that the company had lifted all usage limits. The post pulled hundreds of thousands of views. If Anthropic wanted to design a customer acquisition campaign for its chief rival, it could not have built a more effective one.

Subsidy is not a business model.

The defense will sound reasonable. Demand surged after the QuitGPT movement sent users flooding from ChatGPT to Claude. The app hit number one on the U.S. store. GPU capacity doesn't materialize over a weekend. All true. All foreseeable.

But foreseeability is the point. The QuitGPT surge was a windfall Anthropic actively celebrated. It watched the download numbers climb. It updated its marketing. And it did not update its capacity planning or its subscriber communications to match.

A company that accepts a massive surge in sessions without preparing its infrastructure or warning its customers is not a victim of success. It is a beneficiary of attention that refused to pay the operational cost of receiving it.

Customers forgive price increases. They do not forgive bait-and-switch.

[

$250 a Month. No Warning. No Access.

San Francisco | Monday, February 23, 2026 Google restricted AI Ultra accounts, cutting off subscribers who accessed Gemini through OpenClaw's OAuth client. No warning, no explanation, no way to reach

The Implicator

](https://www.implicator.ai/250-a-month-no-warning-no-access/)

[

Google Restricts AI Ultra Subscribers Over OpenClaw OAuth, Days After Anthropic Ban

Google has restricted accounts of AI Ultra subscribers who accessed Gemini models through OpenClaw, a third-party OAuth client, according to a growing thread on the Google AI Developer Forum. The rest

The Implicator

](https://www.implicator.ai/google-restricts-ai-ultra-subscribers-over-openclaw-oauth-days-after-anthropic-ban/)

[

Brave Drops Free Search API Tier, Puts All Developers on Metered Billing

Brave removed its free Search API tier on Thursday, replacing the zero-cost plan available since May 2023 with a credit-based billing system that charges $5 per thousand requests, according to the com

The Implicator

](https://www.implicator.ai/brave-drops-free-search-api-tier-puts-all-developers-on-metered-billing/)

Opinion

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Tech translator with German roots who fled to Silicon Valley chaos. Decodes startup noise from San Francisco. Launched implicator.ai to slice through AI's daily madness—crisp, clear, with Teutonic precision and sarcasm. E-Mail: marcus@implicator.ai

• Routine Eating Habits: Consuming the same meals and snacks consistently is linked to higher weight loss success over several months.
• Cognitive Efficiency: Establishing predictable food routines reduces the decision-making burden and mental effort required to maintain a healthy caloric intake.
• Study Methodology: Researchers analyzed self-reported food logs from 112 overweight or obese participants enrolled in a structured weight-loss program.
• Weight Loss Comparison: Participants adhering to a routine diet experienced an average weight loss of 5.9 percent compared to 4.3 percent for those with varied diets.
• Caloric Consistency: Every hundred-calorie fluctuation in daily intake was associated with a 0.6 percent decrease in total weight loss over 12 weeks.
• Environmental Adaptation: Constant dietary repetition serves as a strategy to counter the challenges posed by modern, high-variety food environments.
• Nutritional Considerations: The observed results do not account for nutritional quality, as the focus was specifically on caloric control and routine adherence.
• Future Research: The findings suggest a need for randomized clinical trials to confirm the causal relationship between repetitive eating patterns and long-term weight management.

Consistency is key to building healthy habits, and our daily meal choices may be no exception.

Researchers at Drexel University in the US have now found evidence that indulging in the same meals and snacks day after day can lead to more successful weight loss over the course of several months.

While diversity in the diet is undoubtedly important for human health, these new results suggest that eating the same meals on repeat can come with perks for those who want to lose weight.

As long as the go-to meals and snacks are well-rounded, they may help with weight loss more than a flexible, varied diet.

"Maintaining a healthy diet in today's food environment requires constant effort and self-control," says lead author and health psychologist Charlotte Hagerman from Drexel University.

"Creating routines around eating may reduce that burden and make healthy choices feel more automatic."

For the study, Hagerman and colleagues analyzed the self-reported food logs of 112 overweight or obese adults who were enrolled in a structured behavioral weight-loss program.

In the first 12 weeks of the program, participants who ate the same meals and snacks, as well as those with day-to-day calorie consistency, tended to lose more body weight than those who chose different foods, or whose calorie intake fluctuated more widely.

Specifically, those who stuck to a more routine weight-loss diet lost 5.9 percent of their body weight on average, whereas those with a more varied diet lost 4.3 percent.

That's a small overall difference, but one that could be significant, especially in the long run if this weight loss is maintained.

The study authors calculate that for every hundred-calorie difference in a participant's day-to-day diet, weight loss decreased by 0.6 percent over the study's 12-week period.

(Johner Images/Johner Images Royalty-Free/Getty Images)

The research is small and insufficient to overturn evidence suggesting that a diverse diet holds health benefits for most people. And, of course, it's important to talk to a doctor before making any major changes to your diet.

However, it is one of the first studies to use real-time food tracking data to explore how routine eating aids weight loss across multiple months.

The findings suggest that the constant variety of food we are surrounded by, day in and day out, may be hampering some weight-loss regimens.

"If we lived in a healthier food environment, we might encourage people to have as much variety in their diet as possible," explains Hagerman.

"However, our modern food environment is too problematic. Instead, people may do best with a more repetitive diet that helps them consistently make healthier choices, even if they might sacrifice some nutritional variety."

The current study did not consider the nutritional quality of the diets participants were eating. This means that they could have been losing weight by eating an unhealthy diet.

However, participants were enrolled in a behavioral weight loss treatment program, in which they worked with coaches to determine their daily calorie intake and weekly weight-loss goals.

There were two ways participants could approach their goals: They could either keep a consistent daily calorie intake, or they could prioritize a weekly average, 'saving' some calories for special occasions.

Those who logged their food choices on the most days, which is highly predictive of weight loss, still lost more weight if they had a more routine diet.

Related: A 30-Year Study May Have Found The Single Best Diet For Healthy Aging

Researchers can't say for sure whether that weight loss is really caused by a more routine diet, but the association has them wanting to know more.

"Even a healthy diet high in variety may increase points of decision-making, making it more cumbersome to calculate calories, versus having go-to meals with pre-calculated calories," hypothesize the study authors.

Sounds like a randomized clinical trial in the making.

The study is published in Health Psychology.

• Management Methodology: A book titled The Algorithm by former Tesla executive Jon McNeill details a five-step process allegedly used to guide operations at Tesla and SpaceX.
• Procedural Steps: The framework consists of questioning requirements, deleting unnecessary steps, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating cycle times, and automating processes.
• Foundational Philosophy: The operational system relies on first principles thinking, which involves breaking complex problems down to their most fundamental atomic components.
• Terafab Initiative: A proposed joint project between Tesla and SpaceX involves constructing a large-scale AI chip manufacturing facility in Texas to address supply shortages.
• Strategic Vertical Integration: The decision to build internal chip production addresses perceived risks regarding supply chain dependency and single points of failure for AI-dependent businesses.
• Space-Based Expansion: Strategic plans include shifting data center operations to outer space to leverage abundant solar power and reduce operational costs.
• Performance Discrepancies: Historical projections, such as the goal to reach 20 million vehicle deliveries annually, have previously fallen short of stated targets.
• Operational Urgency: The management style emphasizes maintaining consistent pressure on existential business issues to establish a competitive advantage over industry peers.

Elon Musk in a livestream last Saturday announcing the Terafab project.

By

Tim Higgins

March 27, 2026 8:00 pm ET

Anyone can tap in to the powerful management techniques behind Elon Musk’s success.

At least that’s the thesis of a just-released book by former Tesla TSLA -2.76%decrease; red down pointing triangle President Jon McNeill. “The Algorithm” argues there are five steps that explain how Musk wants his teams at the electric-car company and rocket-maker SpaceX to operate. 

“Much of the genius in Musk’s companies come from the legions of smart people empowered by the Algorithm,” McNeill writes. “They’re chasing stretch goals with free license to question everything and innovate boldly.”

That philosophy was on my mind as I watched Musk’s most recent event to announce plans for a joint project between Tesla and SpaceX to build the world’s largest AI chip factory.

The so-called Terafab, he said, would far exceed what all of the chip fabrication plants, or fabs, on the planet can currently make. Not the sort of thing a car company or a rocket maker would naturally get involved in doing, especially given the risks of entering a competitive and different industry.

Yet AI chips are at the heart of his vision for billions of robots being made a year globally and space missions to the moon and Mars. The goal is simple, he told an audience in Austin, Texas, recently: “Turn science fiction to science fact.”

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What’s the secret sauce of Elon Musk’s management style? Host Tim Higgins and former Tesla President Jon McNeill deconstruct the operating system that powered Tesla’s massive growth and the high-stakes lessons learned along the way.

So what exactly is the Algorithm? A series of deceptively simple steps: 1) Question every requirement. 2) Delete every possible step in a process (or part). 3) Simplify and optimize. 4) Accelerate cycle time. 5) Automate.

The approach was first detailed in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography “Elon Musk.” It was Isaacson who encouraged McNeill to write his own book that goes into depth about how the Algorithm works, the new author said.

McNeill, who left Tesla in 2018, was a key deputy during Tesla’s struggle to develop the game-changing Model 3 sedan and ramp production of the Model X SUV. 

During that time, the framework for solving problems became so routine, by McNeill’s telling, that one executive at Tesla suggested calling it the Algorithm so they could better communicate the approach throughout the company. 

It is rooted in the first principles thinking popular with Musk, McNeill told me for an episode of the “Bold Names” podcast.

“First principles thinking to me is the lowest common denominator of the problem in the elements of the problem—so like I think about breaking the problem down to…atomic level,” McNeill said.

Jon McNeill, former Tesla president. Felix Wong/South China Morning Post/Getty

Pulling it off correctly is beyond basic—even for Musk.

The Terafab, which some have estimated could cost $20 billion or more, has all of the hallmarks of the Algorithm.

Musk and others are investing heavily to build more computing power to fuel AI development. Key hurdles are AI chip supply and energy required to power data centers.

Part of SpaceX’s recent AI strategy is a shift toward building data centers in outer space, where solar power is abundant and, Musk says, will eventually be cheaper than operating on Earth.

But a chip supply shortage is crimping that dream. The world’s suppliers combined are making about 2% of what Musk said his companies need for Tesla’s robotcars and humanoid robots, and SpaceX’s AI data centers, to fuel his AI ambitions with xAI.

Musk said he has been trying to encourage suppliers to expand capacity quickly, but there’s a maximum rate they’re comfortable doing.

Most in business would probably say they’re stuck waiting. Not Musk. 

Musk stepping out of a Tesla Model X SUV at a 2015 launch event. Justin Sullivan/Getty

“That rate is much less than we would like, and so we either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’re gonna build Terafab,” Musk said.

That gets to the Algorithm, McNeill told me: If Musk wants to control his own destiny, there’s no requirement that he buy chips from someone else. 

“Elon has three businesses that all depend on chips, and he understands that dependence as a single point of failure,” McNeill told me in a follow-up email. 

Musk’s next moves are being met with skepticism, especially as he prepares to take SpaceX public this year. Why would these companies want to get into the complicated and expensive business of making chips? 

The case for the Terafab probably isn’t helped by grandiose ideas that Musk has touted in recent years that fizzled out—such as aiming to scale Tesla to build 20 million vehicles a year. (The company delivered 1.6 million vehicles last year.)

But supporters point to his success turning Tesla into an EV powerhouse and SpaceX into the dominant player in the burgeoning space economy as examples of what can happen when Musk succeeds.

An image of the Advanced Technology Fab project, from the livestream announcement last Saturday.

The Algorithm was honed during years of struggle. Supplier bottlenecks have been huge issues for Musk’s manufacturing companies. That’s especially true in dealing with new technologies where everyone isn’t as confident as Musk is about the size of a potential new market.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think Elon Musk’s success is replicable by others? Join the conversation below.

Shortly after the success of Tesla’s Model S sedan, for example, Musk began making plans for building a giant battery factory. Similar to now, Musk envisioned requiring more batteries for EVs than the world was producing and he wanted to jump-start things.

Eventually, Tesla would convince battery supplier Panasonic to open a giant factory in Nevada, an important part of making the Model 3 successful.

A key ingredient to the Algorithm, McNeill told me, is the sense of urgency that it injects into everyday work. For Musk, that means latching on to one or two existential issues and riding them week after week.

“I used to sit in those meetings, saying I’m pretty dang sure that our competitors’ CEOs are not sitting in these weekly engineering reviews and not driving their companies as fast,” McNeill said. “Therefore we’re compounding an advantage against them.” 

Today it’s clear that Musk’s new urgency is around AI in space.

Elon Musk Inc.

More coverage of the billionaire entrepreneur and his businesses, selected by editors

Funding Tesla's AI Future

How Musk Wants to Wire the Human Brain

His Quest to Make Men Great Again

Using His Empire to Kickstart xAI

Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX

Musk Is Planning a Texas Utopia—His Own Town

SpaceX Wields Power Over Satellite Rivals to Boost Starlink

Behind Musk’s Management Philosophy

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the March 28, 2026, print edition as 'The Playbook That Makes Elon Musk’s Wild Ideas Work'.

Tim Higgins is a business columnist for The Wall Street Journal, frequent contributor to CNBC, and author of books about Apple (“iWar”) and Tesla (“Power Play”). He also co-hosts “Bold Names,” the Journal’s weekly interview podcast with top business leaders.

His weekly column focuses on influential companies and their leaders, such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. Tim became a columnist in 2023 after working for more than two decades as an award-winning reporter, covering everything from the bankruptcy of General Motors to the presidential campaigns of 2016.

A Missouri School of Journalism grad, Tim also earned an M.B.A. from Michigan State University. He lives in San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence is currently the white-hot center of America’s economy. Big Tech is investing more than $750 billion in data centers this year, mostly domestically. Unsurprisingly, wages for construction workers and the skilled trades are skyrocketing. Communities like Virginia’s Loudoun County are almost covering their entire operating budgets through data-center taxes.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders want to put a stop to all of that. On Wednesday, the pair jointly proposed a universal halt to America’s AI economy. Their bill would enact a moratorium on new and existing data-center growth as well as a ban on exporting AI chips. The pause would last until Congress passes a “framework” to regulate the industry.

In other words, the degrowth duo want to tie up America’s most innovative and globally competitive industry using the same bureaucratic process that has recently resulted in TSA airport security lines snaking through terminals and parking garages. And they want to take advantage of Americans’ understandable fears about new technology to impose their radical beliefs on the nation’s economy.

It’s a far cry from how we used to think about growth. Back in 1996, as the World Wide Web was spreading but before the dot-com boom took off, a bipartisan group of legislators passed the Telecommunications Act, which opened up the nascent internet economy to bountiful innovation with a carefully crafted regulatory framework. That bill passed 414–16 in the House and 91–5 in the Senate. It’s unimaginable that a law with such a singular focus on openness and American growth could win such broad support today.

What Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders imagine goes hard in the opposite direction. They want to take Ezra Klein’s “everything-bagel liberalism” and add in even more “everything,” while toasting the American economy to boot.

Their wish list starts with wealth distribution. A regulatory framework that meets the law’s standards to end the moratorium would put “policies in place to prevent job displacement due to artificial intelligence.”

Their word choice is sneaky: job displacement means job change, not job loss. Even if America’s economy had extensive net employment growth, that would not meet the standard to “prevent job displacement.” The simple moving around of workers would be enough to keep data center growth checked.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders also demand a framework “ensuring the wealth generated by those [AI] companies is shared with the people of the United States.” AI companies already do this: their employees pay income tax, the companies pay corporate tax, the data centers pay property taxes and utility fees. A moratorium until the gains are “shared” implies taking an even larger slice of the pie.

Next on their wish list is every degrowther’s dream, a NIMBY veto: “communities that would be affected by the artificial intelligence data center are empowered to approve or reject the construction or upgrading of that artificial intelligence data center.” This is a sop to the AI backlash, designed to hinder the industry’s growth even as the vast majority of Americans take advantage of the apps and platforms built on that infrastructure. Of course, local communities already control their own zoning, which is why local moratoriums on data centers have already passed in multiple cities. Again, what more do they want?

Note also that the community that hosts a data center isn’t the only one that could be affected. Given the bill’s focus on climate and environment, any city sharing the same power grid or water supply with a proposed data center would presumably also get a veto over construction. One shudders to think what would happen if even one city council surrendered the fight and became pro-prosperity.

Next up is Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders’s offering to organized labor. Their moratorium would be lifted when federal law requires that “the artificial intelligence data center creates union jobs with strong labor standards, including payment of prevailing wages and use of registered apprenticeship programs and project labor agreements.” “Prevailing wage” is the artful term that legally demands private industry pay the nonmarket wages offered by government. “Project labor agreements” are the mechanism that hamstrung Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, requiring union negotiations for every proposal.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders seem to understand that terminating America’s most important growth industry amid a competitive race with China is bad industrial policy. So they reinforce their degrowth agenda in the bill’s final section, mandating a sweeping export ban of AI hardware to countries that don’t enshrine equivalent legislation. Given that no country—not just China, but all of Europe, the Middle East, and the Global South—would pass such a progressive fever dream of a regulatory framework, their ban on exports as proposed is essentially absolute.

In fact, the European Union, which launched its own AI Act in 2024, has now started what liberal critics decry as a “massive rollback” of its strict privacy and governance provisions. That’s because of Europe’s declining competitive position in what is currently the twenty-first century’s most important industry. Maybe our own legislators can take a lesson from the regulatory vanguard’s missteps and avoid repeating them.

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s bill opens with a litany of cherrypicked quotes from tech titans—Elon Musk, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and others—on the potential dangers of AI. In a final flourish, the bill specifically applies the export ban to these individuals.

It can’t be overstated enough: the AI backlash is real. Consumers are worried about rising utility prices, employees are waiting for pink slips, and parents are concerned about the safety of their children. All these fears are understandable and should be addressed with thoughtful legislation.

What political entrepreneurs like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders recognize is that those fears can propel their dangerous agenda. By tying voters’ fears to tech and capitalism, they can undermine the principles that have enabled the United States to become the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world.

Responding to the extraordinary growth underway in the AI economy, the Left has decided to replace Barack Obama’s “yes, we can” with the command-economy pessimism of “halt!” It amounts to a freeze on innovation, a moratorium on expansion, a stop to change. One struggles to understand how such ideas get labeled “progressive.”

Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

• Proposed Configuration: A February 2026 Ubuntu Discourse proposal outlines plans to strip support for btrfs, xfs, zfs, hfsplus, LVM, LUKS, and image rendering from signed GRUB bootloaders.
• Security Justification: The initiative aims to reduce the attack surface of the bootloader, which has recorded over 60 potential vulnerabilities since 2020.
• Lack Of Exploitation: None of the identified vulnerabilities for GRUB currently appear in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
• Operational Impact: Removing support for encryption mechanisms like LUKS would force /boot partitions to remain unencrypted, potentially exposing kernels to tampering.
• Developmental Patterns: The proposal reflects a five-year trend of removing legacy features and specific boot functionalities from the Ubuntu software ecosystem.
• Historical Context: The lead engineer previously authored a tool named sicherboot in 2016, which functioned as a GRUB replacement using systemd-boot.
• Systemic Conflict: Changes to the bootloader requirements conflict with established Ubuntu Server defaults, such as the standard use of LVM.
• Implementation Path: The proposed update would effectively mandate that /boot partitions use a raw ext4 filesystem to maintain compatibility with Secure Boot.

The Proposal

6 Filesystems Cut

[

Klode wants to strip btrfs, xfs, zfs, hfsplus, JPEG, and PNG from signed GRUB for Ubuntu 26.10.

](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/streamlining-secure-boot-for-26-10/79069?ref=sambent.com)

The Engineer

APT Lead Developer

[

Julian Klode controls APT, the package manager for every Debian and Ubuntu system, plus the Secure Boot signing pipeline.

](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JulianAndresKlode?ref=sambent.com)

The History

sicherboot (2016)

[

Klode built a GRUB replacement using systemd-boot a full decade before proposing to gut GRUB.

](https://github.com/julian-klode/sicherboot?ref=sambent.com)

The Pattern

5 Years of Cuts

[

os-prober disabled (2021), GRUB targets dropped (2023), Rust forced on APT (2025), GRUB stripped (2026).

](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2021-December/041769.html?ref=sambent.com)

CVE Data

60+ Vulnerabilities

[

GRUB's filesystem parsers produced 60+ CVEs since 2020, including 8.8 HIGH in HFS. The attack surface is real.

](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-56737?ref=sambent.com)

The Catch

Zero Exploited in Wild

[

None of those 60+ CVEs appear in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

](https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?ref=sambent.com)

The Cost

Unencrypted /boot

[

Removing LUKS means boot partitions sit unencrypted, vulnerable to kernel tampering and bootkit injection.

](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/streamlining-secure-boot-for-26-10/79069?ref=sambent.com)

Canonical

Same Pattern, New Cut

[

Snap forcing, Amazon spyware, terminal ads, age verification, and now boot stripping. Canonical keeps reducing what your system can do.

](https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/)

On March 25th, 2026, a Canonical engineer named Julian Andres Klode posted a proposal to the Ubuntu Discourse titled "Streamlining secure boot for 26.10" that would strip support for btrfs, xfs, zfs, hfsplus, JPEG, PNG, LVM, and LUKS-encrypted disks from Ubuntu's signed GRUB bootloader builds. The practical consequence is that every Ubuntu system running 26.10 or later would need its `/boot` partition on a raw ext4 filesystem, unencrypted, on a GPT or MBR disk, or it simply will fail to boot with Secure Boot enabled.

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This is a demolition project, it's been running for five years now.

Julian Klode is the lead developer of APT, the package manager that powers every Debian and Ubuntu system on the planet. He's been a Debian Developer since October 2008 and an Ubuntu Core Developer since July 2016. He was promoted to Senior Engineer at Canonical in November 2025, four months before dropping this proposal. He manages the entire shim/GRUB/kernel signing pipeline for Ubuntu's Secure Boot infrastructure, meaning he controls the keys that decide what your computer is allowed to run at boot time.

And in 2016, a full decade before this proposal, he built a tool called sicherboot that replaced GRUB with systemd-boot and handled Secure Boot signing automatically. "Sicher" is German for "secure." He archived it in January 2023 and recommended users switch to sbctl instead, but the intent was clear a decade ago: he wanted GRUB gone.

CLICK TO REPLAY

In December 2021, Klode disabled os-prober in GRUB 2.06, which broke automatic dual-boot detection for millions of Ubuntu users who also run Windows or other Linux distributions. His exact words on the mailing list were that the outcome was "obviously a bit controversial and not necessarily in the best interest of our users," and he did it anyway because os-prober mounts all partitions on your disk using grub-mount, which he called a security risk.

In October 2023, he proposed dropping grub-coreboot, grub-efi-ia32, grub-xen, grub-uboot, and grub-firmware-qemu from Ubuntu, claiming "we believe nobody uses them." Steve Langasek pushed back, pointing out that removal requires demonstrating actual maintenance burden. In the same email, Klode floated killing BIOS support entirely, calling it "a risky platform."

In October 2025, he announced a hard Rust dependency for APT starting May 2026, effectively threatening four Debian architectures that lacked Rust toolchain support: DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Motorola 680x0, and Hitachi SH4. He closed with "thank you for understanding," which is corporate shorthand for "the discussion is over." John Paul Adrian Glaubitz called his wording "unpleasant" and "confrontational."

And now, March 2026, the biggest cut yet: remove six filesystem drivers, all image rendering, LVM, and LUKS from signed GRUB. His own words in the proposal: "We understand these are controversial options; however we believe they'd substantial [sic] improve security, but also simply pivoting to new boot solutions in the future."

Someone will point out that Fedora and other distributions are also moving toward systemd-boot. True. The difference is that Fedora offers it as an option alongside a fully functional GRUB. Klode is gutting GRUB's functionality so aggressively that switching becomes the only viable path. There's a canyon between offering an alternative and burning down the incumbent so the alternative wins by default.

That last phrase is the tell. "Pivoting to new boot solutions in the future" means systemd-boot or Unified Kernel Images, and Klode has been building toward this since sicherboot in 2016. Every removal makes GRUB less functional, and eventually replacing it becomes the path of least resistance, which is exactly how you boil a frog when you also happen to control the signing keys.

And before anyone says I'm attributing malice where there's only engineering pragmatism: pragmatism doesn't require a decade of groundwork. One bad decision is a judgment call. Five decisions over five years, all moving in the same direction, all made by the same person who built the replacement tool in 2016 and controls the signing keys in 2026, that is a trajectory. I'm reading the commit history, not his mind.

Ok so the security argument has real teeth.

The NVD CVE database contains over 60 GRUB-related vulnerabilities across 2020-2025. The BootHole bug (CVE-2020-10713) was a buffer overflow in GRUB's config parser that allowed arbitrary code execution and Secure Boot bypass. Since then, GRUB's filesystem parsers have been an assembly line of heap buffer overflows: CVE-2024-56737 in HFS scored 8.8 HIGH, CVE-2025-0678 in SquashFS scored 7.8 HIGH, and the 2025 batch alone found heap overwrite bugs in seven different filesystem drivers (UFS, SquashFS, ReiserFS, JFS, RomFS, UDF, and HFS). These are all the same bug class, integer overflows leading to heap corruption, repeating in the same C codepaths year after year because GRUB's parser code was written without bounds checking.

CLICK TO REPLAY

From what I found, the filesystem attack surface is genuinely massive and continuously producing new vulnerabilities even in GRUB 2.12, the current release. Klode has a point about reducing attack surface.

But look at which modules are actually being cut and which ones are being kept. btrfs has zero CVEs. XFS has zero CVEs. ZFS has zero CVEs. All three are marked for removal. Meanwhile SquashFS, which has two CVEs including a 7.8 HIGH, gets to stay. The aggregate number of 60+ GRUB vulnerabilities sounds terrifying until you look at the actual modules on the chopping block and realize the ones users depend on have cleaner security records than the ones being retained. He's using the total to justify removing things that have no vulnerability history.

CLICK TO REPLAY

But his solution creates a bigger problem than the one it solves, and the community identified it within hours.

Removing LUKS support from GRUB means your /boot partition sits unencrypted on disk. An attacker with physical access, or malware with root privileges, can modify kernel parameters, swap initramfs images, or inject persistent bootkits without breaking any cryptographic seal. As one Discourse commenter named peb pointed out, removing encryption from the boot chain breaks the chain of trust that Secure Boot claims to protect. You harden the bootloader by making the thing it loads completely defenseless. Zero GRUB vulnerabilities appear in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, meaning every single one of those 60+ CVEs is theoretical. The attack surface exists on paper while the protection being removed, encrypted boot partitions, stops real attacks against production infrastructure right now.

User mlocik97 called it "absurd" and compared it to "improving security of planes by forbidding them to fly." DClauzel from France pointed out that encrypted `/boot` is mandatory in regulated European environments, and Klode lives in Marburg, Germany. Multiple users noted that Ubuntu 24.04 Server defaults to LVM during installation, meaning Canonical's own recommended server configuration would be incompatible with their own proposed boot requirements two releases later.

The obvious defense is that Ubuntu Server's LVM defaults and Klode's GRUB proposal come from different teams. That makes it worse. Either Canonical's internal teams have zero coordination and the left hand is stripping features the right hand depends on, or they coordinated and the server team gets overruled by the boot team anyway. Both answers are damning, and neither one helps the sysadmin whose 3 AM pager just went off.

And the migration path Klode offers is brutal: restructure your disk layout, disable Secure Boot, or stay on 26.04 LTS forever. For enterprise deployments running hundreds or thousands of Ubuntu servers with LUKS-encrypted boot partitions, "restructure your disk layout" is a euphemism for "rebuild your entire infrastructure."

CLICK TO REPLAY

Klode's own blog reveals a philosophical contradiction. His APT solver, solver3, is explicitly designed to "always keep manually installed packages around, it never offers to remove them." His 2025 post on sound removals argues that "the solution to remove A rather than upgrade it would still be wrong" when upgrading would resolve the conflict. He built a package manager that protects user choices and then built a boot infrastructure that overrides them.

And his 2021 post on migrating away from apt-key contains this gem: the "security increase is minimal, since package maintainer scripts run as root anyway." Klode treats security pragmatically when it comes to package signing, but treats the boot chain as sacred ground where user capabilities get sacrificed. The inconsistency is either dishonest or convenient, and both options lead to the same place.

CLICK TO REPLAY

This is the same Canonical that forced Snap packages on users by silently routing `apt install chromium-browser` through their proprietary store, the same Canonical that piped desktop searches to Amazon without consent and then tried to silence the critic who built a fix with trademark threats, the same Canonical whose VP of Engineering Jon Seager already distanced the company from one controversial proposal this month when a developer tried to put age verification into the Ubuntu installer.

CLICK TO REPLAY

The pattern is consistent, and it runs across multiple Canonical engineers operating in the same direction: reduce what your system can do and route the escape hatch through something Canonical controls. Dylan Taylor wanted to collect your birthday and Julian Klode wants to control which filesystems you boot from, and they both wrapped it in compliance language while generating immediate community backlash that Canonical has yet to meaningfully address.

CLICK TO REPLAY

The inevitable response is that I'm 'harassing' an open source developer for doing his job. Every single source in this article is a public mailing list post, a public Git commit, a public Discourse proposal, or Klode's own public blog. He's a Senior Engineer at a company that controls Ubuntu's boot infrastructure for millions of machines worldwide. He posted this proposal publicly and invited feedback. Public accountability for public proposals affecting public infrastructure is called journalism. If the argument against scrutiny is that the person making sweeping changes to how your computer boots deserves to do it in silence, then the argument is that you don't deserve to know what's happening to your system.

Klode's proposal remains just a proposal, and the Discourse thread is actively hostile to it. But Klode controls the signing pipeline, manages the shim and GRUB packaging and the kernel trust chain, and he has the keys, and he's been removing capabilities from GRUB for five years in a trajectory that points at exactly one destination: replacing it with the tool he built in 2016.

Phoronix covered it today. Hacker News is discussing it. The community is paying attention. Whether Canonical's leadership treats this like the os-prober incident, where the removal went through despite objections, or like the 32-bit library removal, where Valve threatening to drop Ubuntu support forced a reversal, depends entirely on whether anyone with enough market leverage cares about their boot partition.

My guess is that most Ubuntu users will find out what happened after the update breaks their server at 3 AM.

Ubuntu GRUB Stripping Proposal Quiz

Test your understanding of Canonical's controversial boot security changes

Progress 0/10 answered

Question 1

What did Julian Klode propose removing from Ubuntu's signed GRUB builds for 26.10?

Only JPEG and PNG image support

btrfs, xfs, zfs, hfsplus, JPEG, PNG, LVM, and LUKS support

All filesystem drivers except FAT

Only legacy BIOS boot support

Question 2

What tool did Klode build in 2016 that replaced GRUB with systemd-boot?

grub-alternative

bootctl

sicherboot

shim-manager

Question 3

What does "sicher" mean in German?

Simple

Boot

Fast

Secure

Question 4

What did Klode disable in GRUB 2.06 in December 2021?

Secure Boot verification

LUKS encryption support

os-prober (dual-boot detection)

UEFI firmware updates

Question 5

How many GRUB-related CVEs were found between 2020 and 2025?

12

Around 30

Over 60

Over 200

Question 6

What severity score did CVE-2024-56737 receive for GRUB's HFS filesystem driver?

5.3 MEDIUM

6.7 MEDIUM

7.8 HIGH

8.8 HIGH

Question 7

How many GRUB CVEs appear in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog?

3

12

1 (BootHole only)

Zero

Question 8

Under Klode's proposal, what filesystem must /boot use?

Any Linux-native filesystem

btrfs or ext4

ext4 only

FAT32

Question 9

What phrase in Klode's proposal hints at replacing GRUB entirely?

"reducing the attack surface"

"pivoting to new boot solutions in the future"

"streamlining the boot process"

"improving security posture"

Question 10

Which Canonical executive distanced the company from the age verification proposal earlier in March 2026?

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO

Jon Seager, VP of Engineering

Steve Langasek, Release Manager

Julian Klode, Senior Engineer

0/10

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