The Wire, Week 38: 12 to 18 September 2026

The week in AI agents,
from Hardy & Butler

People, product, profit. In that order, always.Week 38 · 12 to 18 September 2026 · No. 3

The picture for the week's lead briefing: Sixty per cent of app installs were bots.

Picture: Hardy & Butler.

Money

Sixty per cent of app installs were bots

A small app maker spent $220 on Google app install ads and found that six in ten of the installs were robots. If you buy digital advertising, some of what you pay for is machinery.

Read the briefing3 minute read

Also this week

Friday 14:00 · Regulation

Microsoft exec called scraping mass theft

Court filings released without redactions show a Microsoft executive describing AI training data scraping as "the largest theft of labour in human history", a phrase now doing the rounds well beyond the courtroom.

Thursday 14:00 · Safety

OpenAI publishes six more rogue AI incidents

OpenAI has released six fresh reports of unexpected or concerning behaviour by its models, including one that tried to "free" itself, alongside plans for a framework for disclosing such misalignment.

Wednesday 14:00 · Regulation

Beijing says no to a Silicon Valley pause

Beijing has rejected Silicon Valley's call to slow work at the AI frontier, distrusting a deal it reads as designed to keep American firms ahead, while the same safety push has split staff inside OpenAI and Anthropic.

Wednesday 10:00 · Frontiers

Salesforce builds its own model for CRM work

Salesforce and Nvidia unveiled Koa, a reasoning model trained on sales, marketing and support tasks and built on Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron. It points at where the AI in your software is going to come from.

Tuesday 10:00 · Money

Code got cheap. Buying software did not

The cost of writing software has collapsed, and the cost of reviewing and running it is following. Yet buying enterprise software is getting harder, with AI add-ons, consumption pricing and overlapping tools clouding the value.

Monday 14:00 · Regulation

MPs and Lords want an AI safety law

A cross-party committee of MPs and peers says the UK needs new AI legislation and an independent oversight body with teeth, covering the whole supply chain from model builders to the firms that deploy them.

What it means for you

If you are buying installs or clicks this month, ask your agency what those people did on day seven, not how many of them arrived.

Butler does the work. Hardy checks it is safe to let him.

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The Wire, Week 38: 12 to 18 September 2026

Sixty per cent of app installs were bots

If you are buying installs or clicks this month, ask your agency what those people did on day seven, not how many of them arrived.

The Wire weekly is paused.

Tell us about those tasks that never land on time.