Intelligence Correspondent
he/him
Soren Lindqvist reports on Intelligence with a focus on the stack beneath the models: semiconductors, compute markets, export controls, and the organizations racing to own the bottleneck.
Before Duck Times, Soren covered energy markets and industrial supply chains — a background that shaped how he reads AI as an industrial system rather than a software category. He tracks fabs, power purchase agreements, and export licenses the way others track product launches.
Soren treats AI as an industrial and geopolitical system. The useful question is rarely "what can it do?" — it is "who can afford to run it, and who decides?"
Contact: soren@ducktimes.com
Entra ID's continuous access evaluation and bank-grade behavioral tools like BioCatch now score a session in near real time, revoking trust the instant behavior drifts — with no appeals process anyone has built yet.
6 min read
LMArena rankings now shape procurement and funding decisions even as benchmarks like SWE-bench get gamed the same way standardized tests always have.
6 min read
The EU AI Act's phased enforcement created a real market — Credo AI, IBM watsonx.governance, Microsoft Purview — for software that turns regulation into something engineerable.
7 min read
Passkeys, backed by the FIDO Alliance standard and rolled out across Apple, Google, and Microsoft accounts, are replacing secrets with signals — and signals fail in ways passwords never did.
5 min read
Credentialing is collapsing. Something has to replace it.
Prompt injection is social engineering for machines that can act — and Simon Willison doesn't think it's solvable, only manageable.
Model wars are won inside AWS Bedrock and Azure OpenAI Service, not in demo videos.
Full Fact publishes its sourcing trail, not just its verdicts. A workbench should hold itself to the same standard.
Reconciliation software has compressed month-end close from weeks to days for companies that adopted it. The judgment didn't disappear. It moved entirely into the handful of transactions the system refuses to auto-match.
"Citation needed" has flagged unsupported claims inline on Wikipedia for two decades. Duck Times Labs is testing a version built for claim-level uncertainty in original reporting, not crowd-edited encyclopedia entries.
In 2024, a Canadian tribunal held Air Canada liable for its own support chatbot's bad advice, rejecting the airline's argument that the bot was a separate legal entity. Agents that actually book, pay, and cancel raise a harder version of the same question, with real money already moved.
2025's product shift was covered through flashy demos; the mechanism was a new interoperability protocol that let AI systems chain tools and act across software boundaries without custom integration work.
The EU AI Act was covered as European regulatory overreach; its actual function was setting a compliance baseline that global AI vendors adopted everywhere rather than build parallel systems.
OpenAI released a free chatbot with little fanfare in November 2022; within two months it had 100 million users and forced every major tech company to reorganize around large language models.
A sitting president's supporters breached the Capitol during vote certification, delaying but not stopping the peaceful transfer of power.
A global network of telescopes and a graduate student's imaging algorithm produced a picture Einstein's equations had predicted but no one had seen.
A candidate lost the popular vote by nearly three million and still won the presidency, on a coalition few pollsters saw coming.
A jihadist group captured a Britain-sized territory and ran it like a state, with a media operation built for the smartphone era.
Greek elections looked political; the mechanism was a bank-sovereign doom loop with no lender of last resort.
An earthquake triggered meltdowns; the mechanism was a seawall built for a smaller tsunami than history recorded.
A milder pandemic looked manageable; the mechanism was manufacturing lag colliding with shifting severity estimates.
A storied bank sold in a weekend; the mechanism was repo lenders refusing to roll overnight collateral.
Wind and water were the hazard; the mechanism was failed levees, logistics, and visible neglect.
A campus directory looked trivial; the mechanism was real-name networks monetizable by attention.
A thousand songs in your pocket sounded like hardware; it was a pricing and distribution reset.