Meta just accidentally confirmed it's blocking Claude

Our next live show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on October 27th. It’s a night of comedy, music, some journalism, and, of course, a costume contest. Whoever shows up in the most brainrotted outfit wins a big prize. We also have not one, but two very special guests: Annie Rauwerda, the genius behind Depths of Wikipedia, and comedian Alex Pearlman, better known as pearlmania500. Grab tickets while you still can!!!

Over the weekend, the official Instagram page for the No Kings protest movement went offline for about 90 minutes, right as activists were mobilizing across the country. The idea that the outage’s timing was a coincidence feels impossible to accept, but that’s the story Meta is sticking to.

Meta’s head of communications, Andy Stone, on Sunday, explained that the account was mistakenly flagged by Instagram’s system due to “abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period” that resembled bots. A spokesperson for No Kings said on Threads that doesn’t make sense and that they had only posted a few times on Saturday.

Questions still abound about Meta’s little whoopsie, a bizarrely similar whoopsie to one that happened during the first round of Brazil’s presidential election earlier this month, along with all the other whoopsies around the world that Meta has been making the last few months. But I’m actually less interested in all that. Call me cynical, but I’ve long thought of Meta as a rogue state and they will continue to operate like one until they are smashed to pieces by regulators (if we ever have those again) or driven into bankruptcy if the AI bubble pops in a very specific way. Though, what I am far more interested in here is actually related to the latter.

In Stone’s X post about the No Kings account, he said that Meta’s systems, “detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17.” In other words, Meta thought someone logged into the No Kings page and was browsing, or possibly scraping, Instagram with Claude and Meta has systems in place to ban users who do that. Huh! That sure is interesting. In fact, as far as I can tell, this is the first time Meta has publicly said that they ban accounts for browsing via an AI.

This appears to be a fairly new stance. Meta spent the summer trying to get their own engineers to use Claude less, but it seems like they are still allowed to use it. And, back in June, a few different Meta MCPs, or Model Context Protocols, were listed on Facebook’s developer page. An MCP is basically a little specialized connector between an app or a website and your AI interface of choice. Meta offers three, at the moment, one for Meta ads, one for developer tools, and one for WhatsApp Business. And all of them supposedly support Claude. Though, there’s chatter on the r/FacebookAds subreddit that Claude users have been banned using the MCP. Which wouldn’t be surprising.

So what could have happened between, let’s say, June and the No Kings march this weekend? Well, Meta just so happened to have launched their own AI agent, Muse, last month. Making Meta yet another company now both cashing in on the AI boom and, also, making sure they aren’t devoured by it, themselves.

All around the web, websites and platforms are trying to block AI from accessing their content. Delta, JP Morgan, Charles Schwab, and even Amazon have tried to build — to borrow the AI industry’s favorite buzzword — a moat that can block out pesky agents. And there are some practical reasons for this. As The Atlantic wrote last week, “Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels.” Or, in Amazon’s case, imagine every AI agent on Earth scraping everyone’s orders and reverse-engineering their own e-commerce platform. This is why Amazon emails don’t say what you’ve purchased anymore. As one AI evangelist on X whined recently, “The internet is starting to block AI agents that were supposed to do everything for us.”

But it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the Delta’s and JP Morgan’s of the world aren’t fully grasping what’s happening. The world’s biggest tech companies this year quietly entered into a winner-takes-all battle royal for the future of the internet. They all want their AI to be the one that unravels everyone else’s moat. And it doesn’t just end with scraping websites or racing to buy the same paper towels.

Over the weekend, I came across a very sober video from Ed Woodruff, better known as Low Level, a vulnerability researcher who reverse engineers software professionally. He did a deep dive into a new MCP on Github called “Reverse Engineer Anything,” or REA. As the name implies, it’s meant to reverse-engineer anything you point it at. It’s likely what’s behind the working video game mash-ups and vibe-coded app clones popping up right now. “It kind of sets a more bleak tone for the future of not only software development, but software ownership as well,” Woodruff said.

One of the most high-profile projects to likely come from REA was ArtCraft, a messy open source version of the Adobe suite and, now, a whole bunch of Microsoft apps, as well. These apps do not work well, but they’re open source and, likely, close enough to build on top of. Which makes Adobe’s giddy announcement in July that they were releasing their own MCP and a whole host of AI features feel especially painful. Imagine getting so hyped up you jump off the cliff first. Baby, no one’s going to need to pay for your MCP if everyone else’s MCPs get good enough. They’ll just copy your whole app and connect it directly to their own AI agent. And, oops, MCPs just got good enough to do that.

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At Garbage Day, we like to have fun online. But not everyone does — some bad guys are out there whose entire job is to collect your personal information and sell it to random strangers. Your phone number, birthday, even your Social Security number. Then it’s out there, floating around in cyberspace.

If you’re lucky, that just means more annoying targeted ads. If you’re not, scammers breach those brokers’ databases and make money off your identity on the dark web. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi flick, right? Except it’s not cool like that.

Lucky for you, there’s Incogni, a service that goes after data brokers and requests that they delete your information. Incogni even tackles those creepy People Search Sites that somehow know where you lived in like 2008.

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Brett Adcock, the CEO of AI startup Hark, announced on X on Friday that he was giving away $1,000,000 in pizza to anyone who downloaded Hark in the US. Hark is meant to be a privacy-focused AI personal assistant à la Meta’s Muse. It seems like Hark was not quite ready for primetime. It also seems like Hark is not nearly as focused on privacy as its team claimed.

If you click into the post above, you will see that some users were able to successfully order their pizzas, but a huge amount were not. The bot charged one user’s card the $30 rather than use Hark’s stipend. Several users reported that Hark wanted not just read, but also write access to their entire Google suite. And for a while, the entire process for ordering pizzas through the agent were just offline.

As one X user wrote, “I connected my Gmail to order a pizza, and afterward the AI casually admitted it had collected information about my family, closest friends, businesses, travel habits, loyalty programs, favorite restaurants, and even Citi Bike usage.”

The purple monster thing in the video above is named Hugo, and its the first release from Boston Dynamics’ Dynamic Creatures. It’s an animatronic robot with 57 joints and 43 actuators and they want you to leave it alone with your child.

Obviously, the biggest question with anything like this is how is it managing vision. According to Dynamic Creatures’ documentation page, it runs on a Vision-Language-Action model that can, apparently, even read facial expressions.

Dynamic Creatures seems to be targeting theme parks, hoping to license Hugo and his robot friends to different entertainment brands. If you’d like to watch a four-and-a-half-hour video explaining why this is not nearly as simple as you might expect, boy, do I have a Defunctland video for you!

So this is a surprising development. Bluesky announced it was launching an AI-powered “site builder.” It runs on Attie, which is an AI interface for building on top of AT Protocol, which what Bluesky runs on.

As you can imagine, Bluesky’s core user base of mega libs and anti-tech artists are not happy about this at all. A bulk of the responses underneath the announcement are just users writing the word, “no” lol. And Bluesky’s announcement on X didn’t go so well, either. Infamous poster @pukicho replied, “Are you guys fucking stupid?”

I have a slightly more open mind with this honestly.

The bulk of my criticisms against Bluesky over the years could mainly boil down to, “cool site, what are you going to do with it?” And it seems like Attie is an attempt at answering that question. I signed in out of curiosity and went through the onboarding, which was kind of nifty. It scanned my feed and suggested projects it could build for me based on what I post about. Those included a “Garbage Day story hub,” and “internet oddities feed,” and “your month in review.” I don’t really need most of those, but it kind of immediately solved my main problem with almost every AI service, which is that I just don’t know what to do with them. Unfortunately, I had it generate the “internet oddities feed” and it kind of didn’t work. So, you know, there goes that, I guess.

There are a bunch of AI slop videos on TikTok advertising something called the “losercore playlist.” The videos are profoundly embarrassing, but, actually, the playlist is pretty good! It’s a bunch of mopey lofi stuff that is kind of a fun listen.

The playlist and the videos were created by a user that goes by @depay.178 on most platforms, who has apparently built a bit of a reputation for creating viral playlists. Usually through aggressive social media marketing, like the AI slop videos embedded above. There are more over at this TikTok account.

I’ve seen a few users confused as to why you would work so hard to advertise a Spotify playlist. “You can’t make money from people listening to a Spotify playlist of yours what are they attempting here,” one user wrote. That’s true! But you can absolutely make money from artists paying you to put them on your playlist. Which is almost certainly what users like @depay.178 are doing.

P.S. here’s Viral Cheez-It Girl.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***