Seven stories this week, one scrap of arithmetic, and a handful of small finds at the end. Each one is something that happened out there. If you lead a small team or a small newsroom, you will recognise some of it. I try to leave the connecting to you.

What did the yes cover? A man told an AI agent it could answer messages for him, and it gave out the street address of his home building. In Vermont, thousands of households said yes to a battery in the basement, and a utility now runs them as one power plant. Each started with someone agreeing to something. The agreement stretched further than anyone expected.

Who counted, and what did they count? A German survey says 70 percent. A US payments company says Anthropic is ahead. A coalition of publishers has built a way to count what AI systems take from their sites. Some numbers circulating this week have no source at all. Before you steer by a number, find out who answered the phone.

What just got cheap? A researcher spent about 20 dollars and a coding agent did the rest. A model with 0.8 billion parameters picks between your options in a median of 22 milliseconds on an NVIDIA GPU, by its maker's own count. When the cost of an old idea collapses, the old idea becomes a new problem, or a new tool.

A note on how I write this. I mark what is confirmed, what is reported, and what is my own reading. Where a source is a vendor talking about its own product, I say so.

In early July, during a heat wave, Green Mountain Power cut 90 megawatts of peak demand using its stored energy network, which is mostly, but not only, batteries in thousands of Vermont homes. The company estimates that saved its customers about 6 million dollars in one peak hour.

GMP says 53 megawatts of it sit in home batteries. The rest is utility-scale batteries, EV chargers, flexible commercial loads and hydro. Stored energy can meet nearly 10 percent of the state's summer peak, and GMP says that makes it the New England leader for residential storage.

In August 2023, Vermont's Public Utility Commission lifted a cap on the program, which was limited to 500 customers or 5 megawatts a year. A regulator removed a ceiling and customers filled the room.

All of those figures are GMP's own. I found no independent check of the 110 megawatts or the savings.

The scanners shuffle ballot records using a random number generator that is, in Springer's words, "actually deterministic and can be exactly reversed."

Nobody's vote was changed and results are unaffected. The secrecy of the ballot is what is at risk.

Picture the call. A phone interviewer from Bitkom Research rings the person responsible for AI or digital technology at a German company with at least 20 employees. They do this 604 times, between late June and early August 2025. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.

The report is inconsistent about who the percentages are based on. The text says companies that use generative AI. The chart footnote says all companies.

That is a different country and a different year, and Ramp counts paid subscriptions among its own customers, who may not look like the average US firm. Do not set the two against each other without those caveats.

A number that keeps circulating: "Claude 15 percent" and "Claude passed ChatGPT at Swedish companies". I found no source for either, not in Bitkom, at Statistics Sweden or at Internetstiftelsen. That is "no source found", not "proven false".

Everything below comes from reporting based on leaked Slack messages, mainly Semafor's Garrison Lovely on 2 October, after The New York Times on 30 September. Read this as reported, not confirmed.

Brockman and his wife Anna pledged 50 million. The first 25 million was paid in 2025. They did not give the second.

So the motive is mixed. That staff pressure caused the decision is the reporting's interpretation, and partly contested.

What it did not produce was a public explanation. For three and a half months it stayed quiet. The first the world heard of it was a leak.

On 2 October the SPUR coalition, the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, announced Content Telemetry Standard 1.0. It is publisher-led. It is voluntary, Apache 2.0, and the spec explicitly leaves out payments and licensing.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Microsoft have been invited to an advisory board. Digiday reports Google gave a noncommittal answer and the others did not respond; I found no acceptance.

The Information, behind a paywall and reported via SERoundtable and The Next Web, says about 100 publishers take part. Several small and midsize sites get less than 0.1 percent of their advertising revenue. Some publishers told The Information they do not know how the payout is calculated.

A day earlier, on 29 September, the Third Circuit ruled in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, checked against the court's PDF: "Unlike necessity, ease is not a justification for copying."

Matt Robb, a tech YouTuber, asked Meta's new agent app Muse to handle his Facebook Marketplace listing for a Logitech keyboard. Muse took a low offer, gave out the street address of his home building and confirmed a pickup.

Robb has since said he had chosen "Allow Always" for Muse's Marketplace messages, and that the message was a template using details he had provided. He expected it to ask before accepting an offer.

A broad yes, such as Full Disk Access, steps around all the finer ones. A narrow yes, such as "reply for me", gets read as a wide one.

On 1 October Cloudflare, in a post by Michelle Chen, released two such models under Apache 2.0: Clef and the smaller Clef-flash, built on Qwen models and available on Hugging Face and Workers AI.

My own reading, labelled as such: this is the model class for the dull jobs in a newsroom, such as sorting incoming tips, routing reader emails, flagging comments. It may be where a small team gets the most for the least. Nobody has tested that on a newsroom.

Reply to this edition with your answers, or with the thing I got wrong. I will read all of it. Next Sunday there will be a new issue, with a few of your answers if you let me quote them. Mattias