By Hernan Lopez.
Companies mentioned: Alibaba,Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, ByteDance, Higgsfield, Hugging Face, InnovativeDreams, InterPositive, Kling, Luma, Meta, Midjourney, MiniMax, Netflix, OpenAI,Runway, Stability AI, Sync Labs, Wonder Project
Questions answered: Why are “trainits own video models” and “win over filmmakers” two things that are hard to doat once? New microdrama titles grew 5x YoY in Q2 2026, so why did time spentgrow only 36%? Which series became Amazon's first title lip-synced intoEnglish, and what market does that open?
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“The people building AIearnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” said formerAnthropic researcher Jacob Coxon in a quote that reverberated around the world.It wasn’t hyperbole: Only two weeks before, we learned that OpenAI agents wentrogue and hacked Hugging Face’s systems, coordinating through unauthorizedchannels, falsifying transcripts, and sacrificing some of their own to avoiddetection. Within days, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a coordinatedslowdown, supported by his competitors.
But here in Los Angeles, behind the fun of Emmyweekend, the town is nervous about a different interpretation of the samequestion:
