John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch.ft.com)

@adamposen.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 1:16 PMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

This is a really super analysis of US wage trends since 1982, all in clear English and simple charts. Well worth a read by everyone. Very solid on the facts and I largely agree with the interpretations

open.substack.com/pub/agglomer...

@josephpolitano.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 8:50 PMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Was an honor to speak to Marketplace on NPR this morning about my piece on AI-driven arts job loss & what it means for creative industries. Give it a listen!
www.marketplace.org/episode/2026...

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 7, 2026, 9:39 AM

Thank you! 🙌

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 7, 2026, 7:38 AM

This is great work from Will, breaking down the evidence on the impacts of rent control according to the finer details of the policy 👇

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 4, 2026, 2:03 PM

And here’s the meta-analysis where I got the data for the chart on the impacts of rent control: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 4, 2026, 2:03 PM

In particular, where one big reason rents are rising is a housing shortage, rent controls do nothing to address that and may worsen it.

Here’s my full article on the right and wrong lessons to learn from Spain’s housing crisis www.ft.com/content/437c...

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 4, 2026, 2:03 PM

Doesn’t mean rent controls never have any place in housing policy at all, but they have many proven downsides and unless they’re accompanied by big increases in supply they risk making the overall housing situation worse.

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 4, 2026, 2:03 PM

What’s the evidence on rent control? I charted the findings from 112 studies: Great for rent-controlled tenants ✅ But: Pushes up rents for other people ❌ Pushes down new housing construction ❌ Pushes down building quality ❌

@hetanshah.bsky.social Oct 3, 2026, 6:48 AMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Good piece from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & @sarahoconnorft.ft.com on AI in science. It’s making some bits faster, but there is a new ‘verification tax’ taking up time. And there are heightened bottlenecks in physical experiments & data collection. AI is a workflow problem
www.ft.com/content/4508...

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Oct 2, 2026, 11:19 AM

FAO anyone at a loose end in London next Monday evening:

I’m excited to be joining Anna Louie Sussman at the Frontine Club to discuss her new book on how uncertainty and instability among young adults are contributing to falling birth rates www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/panel-disc...

A few tickets left 👇

@tonytassell.bsky.social Oct 1, 2026, 6:20 AMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Man City’s Emirati chair was granted diplomatic immunity 6 yrs ago in a move that could complicate any legal action resulting from findings that the club artificially inflated its finances by more than £900mn - scoop by Caroline Binham @journosooz.bsky.social as.ft.com/r/d717fb9e-2...

@stephenkb.bsky.social Sep 30, 2026, 10:13 PMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

'Actually existing Manchesterism' meet 'Manchesterism as a device for making Labour feel good about itself'

@danneidle.bsky.social Oct 1, 2026, 7:31 AMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Manchester City cheated Premier League rules, the Commission found. Did it also cheat HMRC? We've examined the decision and leaked Mancini documents. We think City likely failed to pay £12m in tax. There should be a criminal investigation. Thread:

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Sep 19, 2026, 4:54 PM

Yep — precisely the point I made in the piece

@hetanshah.bsky.social Sep 17, 2026, 12:20 PMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Helpful points from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com here on what AI solving big maths problems might mean for the future of the maths community
www.ft.com/content/c947...

Many mathematicians are leaning "bad". few days after the OpenAI Navier-Stokes
announcement, a group of 25 winners of mathematics' prestigious Fields Medal published a letter arguing that the goals of the AI companies and the human
mathematics community are fundamentally misaligned. Their core position is that although solving complex technical problems has historically accompanied expansions in our understanding, the former was only ever a proxy for the latter. A brute-forced solution without the
deliberation and painstaking accumulation of human knowledge along the way is the signal of expanded understanding without the actual expanded understanding.

Another big question is what this all means for the incentives to share progress towards new discoveries. It's not hard to see how the threat of being scooped by AI could exert a chilling effect on the culture of sharing important incremental findings or promising new avenues, which has underpinned scientific progress for centuries. And for the Al labs themselves,
the backlash over the Navier-Stokes case may mean future Al-powered breakthroughs are kept under wraps. If AI is amazingly capable at turning new theories into findings, but stifles the development and sharing of those theories, there may be a bumpy road ahead.

@sarahoconnorft.ft.com Sep 14, 2026, 9:39 AMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

In both China and the west, the gig economy has become a sort of safety net/labour market shock absorber. But automation is coming for a lot of this work. Which means the biggest impact of AI/robots might unfold in the dark, in the part of the economy hardest to track. www.ft.com/content/a2c3...

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Sep 11, 2026, 3:25 PM

I mean, the entire piece is us saying “this looks bonkers and goes against both economic theory and real-world evidence to date”

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Sep 11, 2026, 2:08 PM

Wow, yeah no quite the opposite! We thought the extreme scenario looked bonkers so we wanted to understand how they could explain it. Slightly alarmed that didn’t come across from all the times I said their assumptions and overall model of the dynamics didn’t line up with what we see in the world 😅

@sky.skymarchini.net Sep 11, 2026, 1:11 AMReposted by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

>the houthis were trying to use claude to build their rocket guidance system

just get me off the fucking ride

www.anthropic.com/threat-intel...

GTG-87001: Disrupting a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell using Claude to develop guidance software
Summary

We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the “R2000” set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.

The actors used Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle. For example, they used Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing the control and position estimation software, tuning the control settings, running a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation. The actors managed several Claude instances at once, assigning each one a role, much as a lead would delegate work on a small engineering team: the actors tasked one instance with writing the code, another with research, and a third with reviewing the code the first instance produced.

Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them. The actors used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards, including hiding their goals and the products the software was meant for, and they split their work across multiple sessions so no single session revealed their full intent.

These actors carried out a sustained effort to develop guided weapons, including using Claude to design guidance software. We do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device; but they did test-fire a guided rocket. This field test appears to have failed: within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.

We identified this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected weapons development. We banne…

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com Sep 11, 2026, 7:44 AM

Almost verbatim in fact