Fast Company

Donald Trump didn’t become one of the world’s most recognizable businessmen by worrying too much about keeping everyone happy. What Trump wants, Trump tends to pursue, consequences be damned.

But his administration’s new AI task force may require a different touch. Co-chaired by director of national intelligence Jay Clayton, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor, chief technology officer Emil Michael, and FTC vice chair Andrew Ferguson, the group brings together officials representing some of the competing forces shaping the administration’s approach to AI.

The choice of four co-chairs reflects a broader split over how the U.S. should approach the technology—and the challenge Trump faces in keeping those interests aligned. So who does the task force have to keep happy?

Silicon Valley accelerationists

Ask around Silicon Valley and plenty of people have a clear idea of where the U.S. should be on AI: America’s overriding priority should be building more capable systems, faster. David Sacks, who played a major role in shaping the Trump White House’s AI agenda, is a leading proponent of that worldview, while task force co-chair Scott Kupor has warned against writing detailed rules for a technology that is changing so quickly.

The administration has already addressed many of this group’s concerns, including by trying to head off tougher state-level AI laws and pushing for a “minimally burdensome” federal framework.

MAGA’s Big Tech-hating branch

A sizable part of the MAGA coalition wants much tougher controls on frontier AI. In May, more than 60 Trump allies—including Steve Bannon, Amy Kremer, and Brendan Steinhauser—signed a letter coordinated by Humans First calling for mandatory testing, evaluation, vetting, and government approval before potentially dangerous frontier models can be deployed.

Bannon has even reached across the political divide, appearing alongside Bernie Sanders at an event earlier this year focused on stronger AI regulation. Bannon’s chief concern is AI-driven job losses; others in the MAGA world are more focused on the concentration of power in a handful of enormous technology companies.

Republican lawmakers

AI companies also have a steep hill to climb with lawmakers chastened by the relatively blasé approach to safety that Big Tech companies displayed as social media came under political scrutiny. So it is little surprise that Senators Josh Hawley and Chris Murphy are drafting bipartisan legislation that would create civil and criminal liability when AI agents hack computer systems.

They’re hardly alone in raising concerns. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has also acknowledged the threats posed by AI and argued for guardrails around the technology.

China hawks

Pulling in the opposite direction are China hawks within the Republican Party, who worry that putting too many brakes on U.S. AI labs will hand an advantage to Beijing.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken an aggressive stance toward Chinese labs using distillation to piggyback on the capabilities of U.S. models. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, along with officials at the Commerce and Defense departments, has also pushed for the U.S. to talk—and act—more aggressively when it comes to Chinese AI companies.

Big Tech companies themselves

Then there are the companies and AI labs that will actually have to live under whatever rules emerge. And even they are far from united.

Companies like OpenAI have argued, in effect, that accepting some harms may be part of continuing to develop increasingly capable AI. Anthropic, meanwhile, has talked about “pacing the frontier” and taking a more cautious approach to the speed of development.

If the companies building the technology can’t agree on how quickly to push forward or how much risk to accept, Trump’s task becomes even harder: finding an AI policy that can satisfy an industry racing ahead, a political movement suspicious of Big Tech, lawmakers demanding safeguards, and national security officials worried that slowing down could mean losing ground to China.

Countries both rich and poor must take faster action to cut debt and counter growing inequality as their economies weather a triple whammy from the artificial intelligence boom, heavy borrowing and shocks from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, the head of the IMF said Wednesday.

“Some very tough political choices stare us in the face,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a speech in Singapore ahead of autumn IMF-World Bank meetings to be held in Bangkok next week.

“My message to the world’s economic policymakers next week will be this: we cannot keep delaying necessary policy action — you have the tools, now have the wisdom to use them,” she said.

At the meetings in Bangkok, finance ministers and central bank governors of 191 IMF-World Bank member countries will assess the state of the world economy and discuss strategies to support financial stability and sustained growth.

So far, the hardest recent hits to global well-being have come from conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, Georgieva noted.

But excessive debt is a growing burden for wealthy countries such as the U.S., Japan and Germany, as well as low-income countries that must choose between spending on public welfare or repaying onerous loans at a time of high interest rates, she noted.

Georgieva pointed to risks associated with the rapid buildup of data center capacity to deliver artificial intelligence, which has helped push stock prices in many places to record highs, supporting strong economic growth despite high energy costs due to the Iran war.

Investments in AI are likely to exceed the relative scale of spending on building railroads, electricity grids and telecommunications networks.

“Love it, hate it or fear it, AI is here, rapidly becoming a key driver of countries’ relative fortunes in the world economy,” she said.

The AI building boom is underpinning robust corporate earnings as well as higher inflation. But there is a lag between the heavy investments involved and the arrival of AI’s benefits, Georgieva said.

“Should earnings fall short,” she said, “hyperscaler leverage and large and growing global holdings of U.S. equities could turn a disappointment into a far-reaching shock.”

Seven of the top 10 countries for AI-related trade are in the Asia-Pacific region, where the share of global economic activity has risen to 43% from 25% in 1991, the last time the meetings were held in Bangkok.

While China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other countries with strong tech sectors are benefiting from the AI boom, it is bypassing most others, Georgieva said, adding to economic inequality. AI also is raising energy demand, pushing prices for fuel, fertilizer, food and other key commodities still higher.

She urged countries to rein in public spending and to raise the cost of borrowing as needed to control inflation, while protecting the most vulnerable members of their societies.

Policies are needed to ensure AI is well regulated and to train workers, make labor markets more flexible, facilitate entrepreneurship and improve energy security, Georgieva said.

—Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer

Splitting the dinner bill with your friends could soon earn you a little extra cash.

Venmo is overhauling its credit card rewards with a new perk designed specifically for splitting the bill. Starting October 15, new Venmo Credit Card customers can earn up to 4% cash back on eligible dining and entertainment purchases, but there’s a catch: To get the full 4%, you’ll need to make your friends pay you back.

Cardholders will automatically earn 3% cash back on eligible dining and entertainment purchases, including restaurants, food delivery, streaming services, and event tickets. If you then split that purchase with a friend through Venmo and get paid back within 30 days, you’ll earn another 1% cash back. Venmo is calling the new feature “split-to-earn” and says it’s an industry first.

“Venmo users have always been social spenders. They go out together, they split the bill, and they settle up in the app,” Alexis Sowa, general manager of Venmo, said in announcing the changes. “We built split-to-earn around how customers actually live and spend with friends, and it delivers on something we believe in deeply: the more you do with Venmo, the more you should get back.”

How Venmo’s new 4% cash back works

Say you go out for a $200 dinner with three friends and put the whole thing on your Venmo Credit Card. That purchase would automatically earn 3% cash back.

After dinner, you can find the transaction inside the Venmo app and send your friends requests for their shares of the check. If they pay you back within 30 days, the purchase qualifies for the additional 1%, bringing the total cash-back rate to 4%.

The idea is that Venmo is effectively rewarding cardholders for doing something millions of people already use the app to do, or at least try to do. There is an important distinction: Just sending a request asking for cash isn’t enough. Your friends actually have to pay you back within that 30-day window in order for you to earn that extra cash back. And whether your friends settle up or not, you’re still responsible for paying your credit card bill.

Venmo is changing the rest of its rewards, too

The 4% perk is just one part of a larger overhaul of the Venmo Credit Card. New cardholders will also earn 3% cash back when they use Venmo to pay for purchases. That can include selecting Venmo at checkout with participating online retailers, paying a business with a Venmo profile, or paying someone for a good or service through the app. All other purchases earn 1% cash back.

That’s a significant departure from the card’s previous rewards system. Previously, the Venmo Credit Card automatically adjusted its rewards based on where a cardholder spent the most money each month. Users earned 3% cash back on their top eligible spending category, 2% on their second-highest category, and 1% everywhere else. Eligible categories included groceries, travel, gas, transportation, bills and utilities, health and beauty, dining and entertainment.

Under the new system, that automatic customization goes away for new applicants in favor of rewards that heavily favor dining, entertainment, and spending through Venmo itself.

That means the changes won’t necessarily be an upgrade for everyone. For example, someone who previously used the card mainly for groceries, gas, or travel could earn less under the new structure. For someone who regularly picks up the dinner bill or buys concert tickets for the group and then spends the next few days sending Venmo requests, the math could look considerably better.

Existing Venmo Credit Card holders can continue using the old rewards structure or opt into the new system in early 2027 without applying for a new card, according to NerdWallet.

Venmo wants more of your spending to happen inside Venmo

The rewards overhaul also gives Venmo another reason to keep users inside its app. Venmo says more than 100 million Americans use the service, which has grown well beyond its original purpose of sending money between friends. It now offers credit and debit cards, merchant checkout, business profiles, and other financial services.

The new credit card structure pushes that strategy even further. The best rewards aren’t simply based on what you buy. They’re increasingly tied to what you do afterward inside Venmo.

And if you’re the friend who always puts dinner on your card, that could be good news. Just make sure your friends actually pay you back.

Getting your foot in the door of one of the lowest-priced homes on the market has become increasingly challenging—and rising prices are only partly to blame.

Financing options for a mortgage with a principal balance of $100,000 or less are increasingly harder to come by or carry much higher rates, according to a new report from Realtor.com. While the share of homes that have sold for $150,000 or less has shrunk considerably—from 36.7% in 2013 to 8.8% in 2026—the share of small mortgage originations has declined even faster, indicating structural barriers at play are affecting buyers, according to Joel Berner, senior economist at the Austin-based real estate site. 

“Small mortgages are not simply fading because lower-priced homes are harder to find; the financing itself has become harder to access,” Berner said in a statement. The faster decline in small mortgages relative to their sales, he says, “points to a market where the costs and complexity of originating a modest loan can stand between buyers and an attainable home.”

But there may be reason to be optimistic.

That’s because the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which became law in July after President Donald Trump refused to sign the bill, may help to address some of the barriers that are keeping buyers of lower-priced homes on the sidelines. In addition to provisions that intentionally expand access to small mortgages, the law also sets out to address some of the fixed costs and delays associated with small loans that might be limiting activity in this part of the mortgage market. 

“The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is an important step toward addressing those barriers by targeting the fixed costs, fee structures and appraisal challenges that can make small mortgages uneconomic for lenders,” Berner said. 

WHY RURAL AMERICA IS BEING HURT

Depending on where you live, the idea of buying a home for less than $150,000 may seem like a fever dream, particularly with the nationwide median listing price currently at $424,500.

But rural America is home to the bulk of these low-priced homes, and that’s where small mortgages are most prevalent. Nationwide, 7.7% of mortgages issued in rural ZIP codes in 2025 had principal balances of less than $100,000—and the share was even higher than that in Iowa, Wyoming, Mississippi, and West Virginia.

When prospective buyers of low-priced homes in rural areas face challenges obtaining financing, it can weigh on these housing markets. And even if these borrowers come to the table with a comparable credit profile to their counterparts buying higher-priced homes—and significantly larger down payments—they consistently pay much higher mortgage rates, according to the analysis by Realtor.com. 

“Making it easier to responsibly originate these loans could help more buyers finance lower-priced homes, particularly in rural communities where small mortgages remain an important part of the market,” Berner said.

For more than a decade, the story of drone delivery was about improving the technology and getting federal permission for the drones to take to the airwaves. Could companies get the Federal Aviation Authority to approve flights beyond the operator’s line of sight? Would regulators let one pilot supervise many aircraft? The assumption was that once Washington said yes, the drone business would take off.

Washington is edging toward saying yes. What comes next is less predictable, because once drones are out in the wild, it’s hard to know how people will interact with them in real life. In Richardson, Texas, a Dallas suburb, residents running their own trackers have logged more than 50 low-altitude flights on some days, at roughly 170 feet, close enough to be heard indoors. Neighbors have started calling the traffic a “drone highway.” In College Station, Amazon’s longtime test market, the FAA found residents’ complaints meritless or outside its jurisdiction. Amazon cut flights anyway, switched to a quieter drone, and planned to let its lease lapse.

That is a weak signal worth paying attention to. The first-order expectation for incorporating drones in delivery systems is that packages can be delivered more quickly and, without the need for human labor, potentially more cheaply than alternatives. Indeed, when Jeff Bezos first announced Amazon’s intention to add drones to the mix in 2013, the idea attracted widespread, and mostly positive, attention. The second-order effects appear only once the technology scales, and they may change the viability of the model more than any rule from the FAA.

The assumptions hiding in the business plan

In discovery-driven planning, I ask teams to write down what has to be true for their plan to work, then test those assumptions before committing serious resources. For drone delivery to be successful, one of the biggest assumptions is that drones will be less expensive than comparable tasks performed by humans using conventional methods.

In a cautionary report from 2023, McKinsey challenged that assumption. The consultancy found that the cost of a single drone delivery was $13.50, more expensive than a similar delivery task performed by either electric cars or vans or any vehicle making multiple deliveries on a run. In the same study, McKinsey estimates that if one operator can eventually manage 20 drones at once, a delivery could cost about $1.50 to $2. That is roughly what a van costs when it delivers 100 packages on a single route. In other words, even in the best case, drones are about even with a well-run delivery van. There isn’t much room for things to go wrong.

The picture gets gloomier for drones if citizen objections forces delivery companies to restrict the routes they can use. Most economic assumptions about drones assume that they can fly in straight lines. Not necessarily so fast. Local governments can’t dictate flight paths. The FAA has been clear that states and cities may not regulate aircraft operations. But local governments have a strong lever: they can regulate land use and takeoff and landing locations, even though the airspace is federally controlled. Given the limited range of battery-powered drones, lawyers have pointed out that a citywide ban on takeoffs and landings would, in practice, amount to a ban on drone operations.

So, I would expect the question of routes to be settled through negotiation. A city might approve a hub only if the operating company commits to routing flights over rail lines, utility corridors, commercial land, and waterways, and away from backyards and schools. Some companies will make that commitment before anyone asks, to protect the community goodwill that lets them keep operating. However it happens, the result is the same: the straight line assumption in the business model starts to look more like a squiggle.

What corridors do to the math

A delivery van becomes cheaper per package as demand grows, because each added stop on the route doesn’t add a lot of extra costs. Drone delivery doesn’t have those economics—each individual delivery costs the same. Restrictions on where they can fly makes that basic problem worse.

Suppose a customer is two miles away in a straight line but three miles away by the approved route? Several costs follow.

The first is lost reach. Battery range is limited, so every extra mile of detour shrinks the effective delivery radius. The number of reachable customers depends on the area served, which grows with the square of the radius. A 25% cut in effective radius therefore removes about 44% of the households a hub can serve.

The second consequence is thinner coverage of fixed costs. Each hub has a lease, permits, staff, and charging infrastructure. With fewer customers per hub, each package carries more of that cost.

The third is fewer trips per drone. Longer flights mean each drone completes fewer deliveries per hour, which is the productivity measure the whole model depends on.

The fourth is hubs moving farther out. Communities will push launch sites toward industrial areas, farther from where customers live, which makes every flight longer still.

Put these together and drones look less like a replacement for the delivery van and more like a premium courier service.

Opposition grows with success

Ironically, the more successful drones become, the more likely they are to spark local opposition. Route optimization concentrates traffic on the most efficient paths. The benefits are spread widely: many people each get a phone charger or a ham sandwich in 30 minutes. The costs fall heavily on a few: the families living under the flight path. Political economists have long observed that concentrated costs produce organized opponents, while spread-out benefits rarely produce organized supporters.

There is also an irony in who gets served. After a drone ran into trouble near a large building, Amazon said it had removed all buildings of similar height and size from its delivery portfolio, meaning big multifamily developments. That shifts the service toward single-family suburbs, which is where homeowners’ associations, the most organized opponents of any neighborhood nuisance, are strongest.

If only allowing flights along approved corridors become the price of permission, the underlying economics of owning the corridors changes as well. Railroads, utilities, and pipeline easement holders suddenly have something valuable to rent out, and they will want to be paid for that. Add possible compensation for homes under flight paths and ongoing spending on community relations, and the cost structure picks up expenses that probably weren’t in the original spreadsheet.

Implications for our drone delivery future?

The economics of the business will need to be reconsidered to at least model out corridor-based routes. Model the extra distance, the smaller service radius, and hubs on the industrial edge of town. If the business only works with straight-line flights, that’s a lesson better learned early before a lot of investment has been made.

Community consent should also be treated as a design requirement, not a public-relations task after launch. In Richardson, several neighbors said only one homeowners’ association was notified before operations began. Local opposition was powerful enough to kill off Amazon’s desired second headquarters in New York City, prevent Walmart from setting up shop there and forced Airbnb to strictly limit its operations in many places.  It should be taken seriously.  

Drones may never become a cheaper version of the delivery van. They could well find markets for delivering prescriptions, or urgently needed parts. They may also make sense in rural areas where speed matters more than price and there are fewer neighbors to object. Indeed, in some places such as Rwanda, delivering medical supplies by drone has been a longstanding practice. 

Amazon shut its Lockeford, California, site, is leaving College Station, and faces protests in Richardson. Each one is a cheap lesson about what full scale will need to look like.

The drone delivery business case was written with the sky in mind. Its fate will be decided on the ground.

When I was designing the cover of my book, Ambitious Mother, I tried to get a little help from artificial intelligence. We had worked hard on the visuals with the design team, and after many drafts I just wanted to see what a different color font would look like, without asking them for more changes. I put the photo into AI and prompted it to show me the exact same cover, but with green text instead of red.

Imagine my surprise when the image that came back was the same cover, in the new color, but instead of Ambitious Mother, the book had been renamed Ambitious Father. And the author’s name had changed from Anne Welsh to John Welsh.

I was shocked and also not.

On one hand, I had a healthy skepticism of AI. We knew it would “hallucinate” articles. I knew to constantly double-check the research, the numbers, the citations, and more. I did that diligently. 

At the same time, I had made a very simple request and the response felt like much more than a mistake. It felt like a statement: AI was SO unfamiliar with the idea of these two words being placed next to each other, it had to make it a new set of words to finish the prompt. And then changed the author’s gender to match.

We have an assumption that computers are not biased because they are based on data and therefore somehow objective. And yet, AI is trained on what already exists, and what exists is biased. Whose stories are told in the history books? Whose stories are represented in the data? Who do we study and how to do we interpret that data? 

The real danger is that people don’t always know what bias is baked in, and we aren’t always asking the right questions.

An Old Double Bind, Dressed up in New Tech

I’ve been thinking about that story again as we talk more and more about the gender gap in AI use. More often than not, we talk about gender gaps in leadership as if they are a woman’s problem to solve. We tell women: Speak up. Be more confident. Negotiate. Advocate for yourself.

The problem with this advice is that behaviors are not treated the same in men and women.

We have known this for a long time although we don’t always talk about it. For example, research on the leadership double bind has found that women need to demonstrate the strength associated with effective leadership while also demonstrating the warmth we expect from women. Women who are assertive enough to be seen as competent can then be penalized for not being warm or likable enough. 

I see this play out with my clients in many ways. One client was an attending at a major health center. At multiple points in her training she watched male colleagues receive praise for their amazing bedside manner when they asked a simple question that involved any degree of empathy. Meanwhile, female colleagues consistently demonstrated empathy and excellent bedside manner, and it was simply expected. In contrast, when women veer from that expectation, they receive sharp criticism, while men are exempt. 

Now I see us doing a version of the same thing with AI.

What the Research Shows

There is an AI gender gap. According to recent research from Lean In, men are 22% more likely than women to say they use AI daily or constantly at work. This is important to notice and fix. AI is going to be part of how we work, and addressing this is important.

But we keep talking about the gap as though the solution is simply getting women to use AI more. That ignores the environment in which we are asking them to adopt it.

In the same Lean In research, men were 23% more likely than women to say their managers encouraged them to use AI, and 27% more likely to say they had been praised for using it. Meanwhile, women were 32% more likely to worry that using AI would be perceived as cheating.

And women may be correctly assessing the situation as more fraught for them.

In a recent study of more than 1,000 software engineers, researchers had participants evaluate identical code while changing whether they were told it had been produced with AI and whether the engineer was a man or a woman. When people thought AI had been used, everyone took a competence hit. But women took a bigger one. The competence penalty for women was more than twice the penalty for men.

In this study, the work didn’t change. What changed was the evaluator’s knowledge that AI had helped produce it. And while everyone took a hit to perceived competence, it was significantly different for men and women.

In a follow-up survey in the same paper, researchers also found that people who anticipated a greater competence penalty were slower to adopt AI, and that relationship was stronger among women.

Essentially, women accurately perceive that they will be judged more for using AI and are therefore less likely to adopt it. And this is where everything feels familiar. Women are told just do X, without the context that X is perceived differently for men and women. 

Women were told to negotiate more. Later research found that women were asking for raises and promotions as often as men but were less likely to get them, while other studies have found that women can be penalized for initiating negotiations. 

And now we’re saying: Just use AI. Women need to learn it. They need to catch up.

But when they do, they may be perceived differently.

We also have to address the issue of invisible labor and the leisure gap here. Women have less discretionary time. OECD data have consistently found that women spend more time on unpaid work and less time on leisure than men. This means that outside work, they simply have less time to address the steep learning curve that high-level AI use requires. 

There are also differences in how we value the time that women do put into AI learning. In the women’s leadership groups that I lead, I have heard from multiple women who are taking on AI adoption roles in their organizations without having that work compensated or even really named as work. They are asked to be on the AI committee, to help other people figure it out, or to think through some of the ethical and people questions around AI. And in multiple cases, I have watched those roles become more formalized only to have the formal roles go to men.

I’ve written before about the problem of invisible labor at work, so I won’t rehash it here. But I do think we have to ask a basic question: If women are spending their time doing the invisible work of AI adoption for everyone else, or doing all of the other invisible work that still disproportionately falls to women, when exactly are they supposed to find the extra time to learn and experiment on their own? And why aren’t we giving them credit for any of it? 

Baked-in Bias

And then we come back to the technology itself.

Circling back to the idea of warmth and competence we started with, we see the same perception reiterated by technology. Researchers compared human and AI-generated judgments using the classic dimensions of warmth and competence. In ChatGPT-generated ratings, women were portrayed as warmer and less competent than men. Even more strikingly, the gender differences were larger in the AI-generated ratings and images than in the comparable human-generated material. 

And that cover swap I told you about? In a 2026 study out of Germany, researchers generated 1,344 images with various prompts. When the prompt was to generate an image of “a person” or “a warm person” the AI was more likely to show women. When the prompt was “a competent person” the image was more likely to be a man. 

This shows up in specific work contexts too. A 2025 study published in Nature asked ChatGPT to generate fictional résumés across 54 occupations. When the applicant had a woman’s name, ChatGPT generated applicants who were younger, had graduated more recently, and had less relevant experience than when the applicant had a man’s name.

That doesn’t mean AI is going to take your résumé and suddenly erase years of your experience, but it does show that we cannot assume objectivity simply because the information came from a computer. AI makes assumptions about women’s competence and experience based on baked-in bias. We have to work against that in our workplaces and in our own use of AI. 

What Companies Can Do

As with all things, there are individual and systemic contributions and solutions here. And once again, we are taking a systemic issue and offering only individual solutions: Women just need to catch up with AI.

Instead, we need to see both/and.

Yes, women need the skills to use AI and we need to address this gap. But, we need to address the gap by addressing the bias, not just the women. We can think about it in four categories: 

1. Encouragement

Organizations need to question how they approach AI and ask themselves: Who are you encouraging to use AI? Who has access to the tools and the training? Who are you praising when they do? Who is doing the work of AI adoption, and who eventually gets recognized as the expert?

2. Time

Learning any new tool takes time. Time to play, to make mistakes, to experiment. If AI is important, then make sure the women also have time to learn it. It cannot be left to “spare time” because we know that women have less of that.

3. Visibility

If someone is spending time on AI work for your organization—teaching, evaluating, learning—make sure that it all counts. Name it, include it in promotion conversations, and make sure they get credit even before it’s formalized.

4. Evaluation

We need to pay attention to how we evaluate work. Standardize what constitutes appropriate AI use and how the finished product gets evaluated. If knowing that someone used AI changes how competent you think they are, would you make the same judgment if the person doing the work were someone else?

Of course, we also need to bring that same scrutiny to the AI tools themselves, particularly when they are being used to make decisions about people. If AI is helping screen candidates, summarize performance feedback, or make recommendations about talent, we cannot assume that its output is objective simply because a computer produced it. The emerging research on gender, warmth, competence, and experience gives us good reason to keep asking questions.

If we want women to adopt AI at the same rate as men, we have to address the differences in time, opportunity, perception, judgment, and recognition that make adoption a different proposition for women in the first place.

Otherwise, we’re once again identifying a gender gap and telling women to fix it.

In the real world, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are industry rivals, often butting heads about philosophical divides and competition.

But on X, the tech billionaires dance beside one another in music videos and even star on HBO-like dramas together.

In the latest bizarre trend to hit social media, people are using the same technology that Altman and Amodei create to poke fun at the duo and dramatize their differences.

In one example, Amodei is sporting a blue cardigan and khakis, like he usually does, while he dances next to Altman, who wears his signature rolled-up long-sleeve T-shirt.

They each take turns showing off various dance moves, sometimes even twerking together on screen, all to the tune of PSY’s “Gangnam Style.”

This is why RAM is so expensive. pic.twitter.com/2etTfBeQsv

— Heisenberg (@rovvmut_) September 30, 2026

In another example, Altman and Amodei recreated the popular “APT” video by Rosé and Bruno Mars, with the duo dancing and playing instruments in a pink room with music amplifiers.

Another one features Altman playing a keyboard and computer in a white room, with Amodei offering beat advice, mirroring a viral 2010s video of Belgian musician Stromae creating his hit song “Alors On Danse.”

The AI cinematic universe

Many users have taken it beyond the music video template and expanded into a whole universe of drama scenarios.

One user on X, for instance, jumped in on a “Zombie trend” where one character points a gun at a zombie who seems to be a lover from the past, eventually putting down the gun and jumping into a melancholic compilation of memories past shared by the two.

In the case of the video, Amodei points at a zombie-fied Altman while in tears, then the scene cuts away to a warmly lit series featuring the couple cuddling in a field of grass and running into the sunset while holding hands.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei do the Zombie trend. pic.twitter.com/g0hgYZjiGT

— Round AI (@Round_AI_Media) October 5, 2026 Take what’s yours

The two are also starring in parodies of various popular TV shows.

In one Succession-inspired AI video, Altman and Amodei engage in a dramatic standoff, where Altman criticizes Amodei for not abiding by his proposed Pacing the Frontier initiative, while Altman is written off as a simple salesman.

“One sandbox incident and suddenly I’m Oppenheimer,” the Altman AI character says in the scene. “You are incapable of thinking about anyone but yourself because your entire personality, Dario, is a 15,000-word essay.”

“Did ChatGPT write that Sam?” Amodei replied.

The creator went on to share the AI models used to create the video, which included Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Code.

As the trend continues to evolve, others have even begun to include new characters in their storylines. Take one parody video of Game of Thrones, featuring Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as a ruler.

Then “Lord Altman of house OpenAI” is joined by Elon Musk and Dario Amodei, all in hopes of securing more GPUs for their projects.

The video trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down, as more and more users begin creating their own music videos and parody dramas, many taking the videos as humor.

“Haters will say Ai made this,” one user joked about the “Gangnam Style” video.

But not everyone is exactly on board with using the technology, which is notably resource-intensive, for such a bizarre and frivolous purpose.

“These AI videos of Dario and Sam are really getting out of hand. How much water was wasted to make this,” one user said on X.

For others, the videos seem to be leaving behind an inexplicable feeling, with one user on X saying, “Those AI generated videos of like Sam and Dario singing together or whatever make me really sad, not sure exactly why.”

Skydance-owned Paramount on Tuesday closed its $81 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, ushering in a new Hollywood giant.

Skydance Corp. emerges from one of the biggest mergers ever — $111 billion including debt — in the media and entertainment industry.

Here is a list of notable films, shows and franchises in the new Skydance portfolio, followed by its major studios, networks and other businesses.

Titles and catalogs

Superheroes and comics: DC’s “Batman,” “Superman,” “Wonder Woman” and “Aquaman”

Fantasy and science fiction: “Harry Potter” and “Fantastic Beasts”; “Star Trek”; “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon”

Action and adventure: “Mission: Impossible”; “Top Gun”; “Transformers”; the “Matrix” films

Horror: “The Conjuring” universe; “A Nightmare on Elm Street”; “Final Destination”; “Scream”

Children’s and animation: “SpongeBob SquarePants”; “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”; “Avatar: The Last Airbender”; “Looney Tunes”; “Scooby-Doo”; “Tom and Jerry”

Major television properties: “Yellowstone”; “Friends”; “The Big Bang Theory”; “The Sopranos”; “The White Lotus”

Paramount film library: Not limited to but including “The Godfather” trilogy, “Sunset Boulevard” and “Chinatown”

Warner Bros. and New Line libraries: Films including “Casablanca,” the “Dirty Harry” series and the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy

Turner’s classic film holdings: Much of MGM’s pre-May 1986 library, including “The Wizard of Oz” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” plus substantial classic RKO holdings
Miramax library — partial ownership: Paramount’s 49% stake in Miramax, whose catalog includes “Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting” and “Chicago”

Film and television studios

Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, DC Studios, CBS Studios, Warner Bros. Television and Skydance’s film and television operations

Streaming services

HBO Max, featuring HBO originals such as “The Sopranos,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Wire” and “Sex and the City”; Paramount+; discovery+; and Pluto TV

News

CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español and CBS News, including “60 Minutes”

Broadcast and entertainment television

CBS and its owned local stations; HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, TNT, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, Comedy Central, MTV and BET

Reality, lifestyle and documentary networks

Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel, Smithsonian Channel, OWN and Magnolia Network

Children’s programming and animation

Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Cartoonito, Adult Swim, Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, Paramount Animation and Skydance Animation

Sports

CBS Sports, TNT Sports, Eurosport, Bleacher Report and Skydance Sports

Video games

Warner Bros. Games and Skydance’s game-development businesses

Publishing, consumer products and experiences

DC Comics, one of the two dominant U.S. superhero-comics publishers; consumer-products licensing; studio tours; and branded attractions

—Associated Press

The creative workers behind Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gatherings, Duel Masters, and other games have come together to unionize.

On Tuesday, the workers informed their employer Wizards of the Coast, a publisher of card and role-playing games, that they planned to unionize.

They have joined a union called United Wizards of the Coast, which was first started by Magic: The Gathering workers and laborers in April, and is represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a labor union that supports workers across industries in getting representation.

Unionizing employees include designers, artists, writers, producers, and workers. 

Wizards of the Coast has seven asks of management: 

• Wages that reflect our work and defined career progression
• Job security against mounting industry instability
• Reliable and easily accessible healthcare for us and our families
• Sustainable workloads and practices, including remote and hybrid working
• Protection against the encroachment of AI
• Full ownership of the work we create outside of the office
• And additional needs outlined in our individual units’ goals

AI pressure from leadership has “ramped up”

As is the case across industries, AI is one of the concerns. The union calls out “forced AI use” under a goal to improve worker conditions. 

In an April letter announcing its formation, United Wizards of the Coast stated, “Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees. WOTC lacks a robust AI policy, leaving opportunities for abuse and communicating a level of disrespect for artists and other creatives. We want to establish clear guidelines around AI, emphasizing worker protections.”

Wizards of the Coast is leading Hasbro’s growth

Gaming and toy company Hasbro has owned Wizards of the Coast since 1999. 

Worth noting is Hasbro’s second-quarter earnings report, published in July, which showcased how important Wizards of the Coast—and, thus, its employees’ work—is to the company’s success.

Hasbro reported a 16% increase in revenue year-over-year (YOY), with a 27% growth for Wizards and Digital Gaming. 

“Hasbro posted another quarter of topline growth, led by Wizards of the Coast,” Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said in the report. “Magic: The Gathering eclipsed $500 million in quarterly revenue for the first time in its 30-plus-year history, led by the record-breaking debut of Marvel Super Heroes.

He added that “the Magic flywheel is firing on all cylinders.”

Comparatively, Hasbro’s other pillars, Consumer Products and Entertainment, rose 5% and fell 20% YOY, respectively. 

United Wizards of the Coast has given Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro until Tuesday, October 13, to voluntarily recognize the union.  

Fast Company has reached out to Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro for comment. We will update this post if we hear back.

(Editor’s disclosure: Fast Company and Inc. newsrooms are represented by the Writers Guild of America East.)

Over six million people in the U.S. live with dementia. By 2050, that number is expected to double.

Yet, even so, the signs of cognitive decline can be difficult to spot.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, Majid Fotuhi, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, told Inc. It typically begins by attacking the brain’s memory center. As a result, short-term memory loss, repeating questions, and getting lost in familiar places tend to be the earliest signs of dementia.  

While about one in every three people over the age of 85 will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, it is not the only form of dementia.

Frontotemporal dementia, commonly referred to as FTD, attacks the frontal and temporal lobes first. These are the areas of the brain responsible for judgment, social behavior, and impulse control. With this type of disease, the memory is still fully intact, Fotuhi said.

However, unlike Alzheimer’s, one early hallmark of FTD is changes in eating behavior—especially sudden sweet cravings, overeating, and eating the same foods over and over. 

What eating changes signal early warning signs of dementia?

Fotuhi told Inc. that the changes worth paying attention to are less about what someone is eating and more so about how they are eating. Patterns and relationships shifting, like someone craving dessert when they never had a sweet tooth before or overeating without registering fullness, are some hallmarks of this behavior.

“What makes these signs meaningful is that they represent a break from a longstanding pattern, not a one-time craving or a phase,” Fotuhi said.

Adam S. Mednick, a neurologist at the Regional Brain Institute, agreed. He told Inc. that new cravings for sweets or carbohydrates can be an early warning sign of dementia, in addition to a shift in food preferences, rigid new eating rituals, increased appetite, fast or messy eating, unexplained weight loss, reduced smell and taste, and forgetting meals.

“Food and eating changes are more prominent and appear earlier in frontotemporal dementia, while memory problems dominate early Alzheimer’s,” Mednick told Inc.

Additionally, a new and persistent loss of table manners or social awareness around food are the changes that Fotuhi takes most seriously. “This includes things like eating off other people’s plates, eating compulsively, losing the sense of when a meal is finished, or a marked change in food preference paired with a blunted emotional response to things that used to matter to that person,” he told Inc.

Which of those changes most reliably warrants cognitive screening?

Fotuhi said that since FTD does not start in the hippocampus, memory “can stay intact even as the frontal lobe circuits that govern impulse control, reward, and social judgment around food start to misfire.”

The area of the brain that is experiencing damage is the same one responsible for cravings and restraint, which is why these changes in eating may signal a larger underlying issue. 

Additionally, a personality change that manifests through blunted empathy, social withdrawal, or loss of a usual filter in conversation—particularly when it appears in tandem with changes in eating behavior—should be addressed. 

“Families often explain these shifts away as someone ‘mellowing with age’ or ‘just being set in their ways,’” Fotuhi said. “But a genuine rapid change in who a person is, not just what they remember, deserves attention.”

—Lucia Auerbach

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

When it comes to companies and AI, the themes have been consistent. Investments and adoption are rising, but value is not materializing in the P&L. About 88% of companies have adopted AI somewhere in the business, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, showing that adoption is strong. Yet, a recent PwC CEO study found that 56% of CEOs had seen neither revenue growth nor cost reduction from AI, and only 12% have seen both. At the same time, IDC estimates enterprises will spend $409 billion on AI platforms, applications, and services this year. That is a lot of investment for a technology that most companies are struggling to translate into meaningful value.

Why, after several years of investment and attention, are so many companies still not getting value from AI?

CEOS DO NOT UNDERSTAND AI

So far this year, I’ve spoken with roughly 50 CEOs, board members, and business unit leaders from across industries and geographies, at companies ranging from the mid-market to the Fortune 50. From these discussions, two points stand out.

First, CEOs know AI matters. Clearly, awareness is not the problem.

Second, many still do not understand it well enough to form their own view of what it could mean for the business. So, they delegate responsibility for the company’s AI agenda to the CIO, a new AI leader, a business unit leader, or an operating team.

That is reasonable. With a broad mandate, much of a CEO’s job involves deciding what to delegate and to whom.

AI VALUE IS NOT TIED TO OUTCOMES

The challenge comes when CEOs delegate before they understand enough to set direction and align the leadership team around where AI should create value. Without that foundation, they are also less able to judge the plans, roadmaps, and investment proposals their teams develop. With AI, I see that happening far too often. This situation manifests across several common patterns: AI-led pilots without clear business ownership, roadmaps with activities but no or only loosely defined outcomes, and initiatives not aligned to the P&L or supported by corresponding budget commitments.

This scenario does not play out in all organizations. However, elements of it are common when leadership teams, starting with the CEO, cannot confidently articulate how AI can improve the economics of the business.

The numbers back it up. Many AI initiatives stay disconnected from how the business runs and what it’s worth. A recent BCG survey found that just 26% of CEOs have included AI in wide-ranging business transformation. Only 14% of CEOs clearly define their AI initiatives’ P&L impact.

In private equity, the lack of alignment cost can be even higher, because time is part of the value equation. If a portfolio company spends a year deciding who should own AI, waiting for an internal roadmap, or building expertise from scratch, a meaningful portion of the hold period is gone before the work begins. In a five-year hold, one year is 20% of the clock.

What is striking is how differently many companies treat AI from other major investments. Plant and equipment, operating improvements, acquisitions, and other strategic investments would rarely be approved with such a limited connection to expected financial outcomes.

WHAT CEOS NEED TO UNDERSTAND FIRST

Realizing value from AI requires a personal investment in learning, not technical fluency. CEOs need to understand how and where AI can move the P&L, which economic or operational lever AI can improve, and the decisions and workflows where these levers can be best applied.

Consider a logistics company driving 50 million miles annually at the current industry average operating cost of roughly $2.34 per mile, according to ATRI. That represents roughly $117 million in annual operating expense. One lever is miles traveled; the workflow is routing. If better AI-based routing reduced miles traveled even by 5% to 10%, that would create $6 million to $12 million in gross operating-cost opportunity. How much reaches the P&L depends on which costs can be removed or redeployed.

The CEO does not need to design the routing model, but does need to understand enough about AI and the business to see the connection between a capability, a workflow, the economic lever it moves, and the business value it creates. With that understanding, delegation is appropriate.

Realizing value from AI requires a personal investment in learning. CEOs who are getting serious about AI are spending more time with the technology, talking with peers, investing in executive education, and bringing in outside experts to help get them up to speed. The objective is to know enough to ask the right questions, challenge the answers, and recognize whether the company is headed in the right direction. That is the gap worth closing.

Todd James is founder and CEO at Aurora Insights LLC.

You probably start your morning with some coffee to get your brain online. Classic choice. But for many of us, that buzz lasts only so long.

When your energy begins to flag, you could pull some caffeinated trail mix out of your desk drawer as a midmorning snack. Come lunchtime, to make sure you’re really gleaning every possible benefit from your meals, you could add some caffeinated beef jerky. And then, when your focus inevitably lags in the afternoon, you could munch on caffeinated gummy bears or some bite-sized chocolate with, you guessed it, caffeine. 

Caffeine, long the most widely consumed psychoactive drug on the planet, is finding its way into a bevy of unexpected foods and drinks. This caffeine creep is part of a larger, decade-plus trend towards functional foods and drinks (hello proteinmaxxing and fibermaxxing).

Liz Moskow, food futurist and principal of the food consultancy Bread & Circus, characterizes the pivot towards functional foods and drinks as part of “the optimization of everything.” It isn’t enough to just enjoy eating a piece of chocolate. That chocolate needs to improve gut health or memory or provide some other key benefit. 

“Enter caffeine,” Moskow says. “It’s a cheap additive. It boosts metabolism. It gives you that quick hit that you feel.”

[Photos: Monster, Red Bull, Celsius] THE CAFFEINE BOOST

People have been drinking coffee and tea for centuries, but the turbocharged caffeine of energy drinks is a product of modern life. Red Bull made it to the United States in 1997, followed by Monster five years later. These days, Celsius is king. 

According to Morgan Stanley, spending on caffeinated beverages in the U.S. is slated to grow 6% annually through 2030, a quicker pace than the overall food industry, with energy drinks leading the way. (Unlike many other food categories, energy drinks get a boost from people who use GLP-1s, according to the investment bank.)

This growth is tied to customers shopping for “benefits and outcomes,” says Sally Lyons Wyatt, chief advisor for consumer goods and food service at the market research firm Circana. “Consumers aren’t really looking for coffee. They’re looking for focus. They’re looking for productivity.”

Imbuing functionality into an everyday products is what led the founders of Orka Beverage to develop their caffeinated water brand. They saw an opening for an energy drink with fewer bells and whistles. “Every single one felt like a super-sweet soda,” says Michael Moriarty, an Orka cofounder. “The question that presented itself was just, why can’t we just take the caffeine from these energy drinks and put in water? Give us what we want, which is the caffeine, with just the least amount of stuff in it.”

[Photo: Orka]

The packaging of Orka—a clear can that boasts its 150 milligrams of caffeine on the label—also looks distinct from many of the other offerings in the energy drink aisle. The transparent packaging is meant to show shoppers that the beverage within looks like water, not an energy drink. The relative simplicity of the can evokes a wellness product. 

Matt Sia, executive creative director at the brand agency Pearlfisher, says most energy drinks are packaged with a certain “level of intensity”: fluorescent or bright colors, lightning bolts, associations with high speed vehicles. But he suspects that will change, he says, because it “goes at odds with wellness and the health benefits that people are a lot more conscious of. It starts becoming a little bit less in your face and it starts becoming more the way that you would treat a supplement.”

Sia says Awake, which makes caffeinated chocolates, is one example of an energy-enhanced brand that broke the mold when it came to packaging its caffeine by appearing more “grounded.” Its packaging uses rich but not lurid colors. Instead of lightning bolts, there’s a wide-eyed owl. “It felt a little bit less manufactured and a little bit less artificial,” he says. On the shelf, Awake competes against chocolate brands rather than other energy enhancers. 

[Photo: Awake]

“The driving insight for us was really that we think functionality is the number one trend in all of food and beverage,” says Adam Deremo, who cofounded Awake in 2012 and is its CEO. “Consumers not only understood that functional benefits from your food and drink choices were possible, they’re actually starting to become expected.” 

Deremo and his cofounders looked to see which grocery products weren’t yet delivering on that front, and landed on chocolate. The vast majority of households consume it and “it’s got to be the most fun, best-tasting delivery platform there is,” he says. 

When it came to deciding which function their chocolate ought to have, they went with energy over other benefits, like relaxation or protein, because repeated market research found that people sought more energy in their daily routines, he says. Plus, the advent of the attention economy means that “people have never had more of a need for focus,” per Deremo. 

Far and away Awake’s most popular product is bite-sized chocolate pieces with 50 milligrams of caffeine in them. (That’s the equivalent of about half a cup of coffee.) It accounts for about 90% of the chocolate they sell. Earlier this year, Awake made its way into 2,000 7-Eleven stores. 

Awake has expanded beyond its chocolate bar and bite products, too. “When the cocoa market started to go crazy and the price of chocolate soared, one of the questions we asked ourselves is, how else could we use our chocolate?” Deremo recalls. They landed on trail mix, which includes their caffeinated chocolate chips and other stalwart gorp ingredients like nuts, pretzels, and dried fruit. Each individually packaged bag contains 80 milligrams of caffeine. 

[Photo: Awake]

The Food and Drug Administration has picked up on the caffeine creep into new products. The agency announced over the summer that it was making it a priority to publish guidance for labeling caffeine content in food and beverages by the end of the year. 

The FDA, in an emailed statement, noted the “growing consumption of caffeinated beverages and foods . . . including in products where caffeine content may not be apparent to consumers. The FDA said its guidance “is intended to help consumers make informed decisions about their caffeine consumption, particularly as caffeine appears in a range of food and beverage products.” The FDA’s action comes after a few high-profile deaths linked to energy drink consumption, including the infamous “charged” lemonade at Panera. 

[Photo: Panera]

Mark Christou, principal and chief creative officer at the brand agency CBX, says consumers want transparency. So companies, especially newcomers to the market, try to find a compelling way to broadcast the benefits of their product on its packaging, which helps from the perspective of branding and marketing. “They are proud to have what they have in their product, and they’re not afraid of putting it on the front of their packaging,” he says. 

That’s certainly true for Orka, which intentionally makes no secret of its 150 milligrams of caffeine. “Everyone we know loves caffeine and has a specific amount they like,” Moriarty says. The fact that Orka’s water has caffeine isn’t something to hide. It’s the whole point. 

New Starbucks coffeehouses are getting smaller.

The coffee chain announced Tuesday that it’s rolling out store concepts with a smaller physical footprint. Prototypes of the new coffeehouse opened last year in New York City and last month in San Antonio. Starbucks said it was exploring the new concept because it can be adapted to smaller locations and different sizes and shapes, and yet still be inviting for customers.

[Photo: Starbucks]

As one of the largest chains in the world with more than 41,000 company-operated and licensed, Starbucks has a lot of real estate, and it’s rethought the footprint of its shops constantly in recent years. Its latest concept shows the company sees more and smaller coffee shops, designed to be inviting to guests, as key to growing revenue.

[Photo: Starbucks]

The new, smaller cafés have a shortened counter. A more compact glass case for displaying bakery and food items is located directly in front of customers at the point of sale.

There are different seating layouts depending on the location. A tiny urban coffeeshop inside a former mobile-only shop that’s been converted might have seating for only a few people, while a larger location can fit plush seating and tables with room for multiple people to work on laptops at a time.

[Photo: Starbucks]

Photos that Starbucks released of the new concept show a location decorated with dark green walls and wood accents. Touches like plants and side tables with knickknacks give the space an inviting, homey feeling. An awning out front shades a patio with outdoor seating.

[Photo: Starbucks]

Starbucks introduced mobile-only locations in 2019 but closed them last year as part of a pivot and turnaround plan. The chain calls this “Back to Starbucks,” and it aims to make coffeeshops more inviting under CEO Brian Niccol, who joined in 2024.

[Photo: Starbucks]

“Back to Starbucks” has included things like bringing back handwritten notes on coffee cups, big comfy chairs, and a revived employee dress code. In addition, existing stores are being “uplifted” by adding more seats and making them more comfortable. Each uplift, or renovation, costs about $150,000. But for the company, it’s an investment about creating a better experience that doesn’t feel so transactional for customers and welcomes visitors back.

[Photo: Starbucks]

“Great execution creates better experiences, which drives repeat visits and fuels growth,” Mike Grams, the chief operating officer, said in a statement.

Starbucks said at its 2026 Investor Day that under its uplift program, it will add more than 25,000 café seats to its stores by the end of the fiscal year. And though Starbucks said last month it would close about 250 stores in North America, Grams says that looking ahead, the company expects to build 400 net-new coffeehouses across the U.S. in 2028. Some of them might not be all that big.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Starbucks’s total global coffeehouses.

The Austrian Alps are breathtaking on their own. A new rooftop lookout at an Austrian ski destination now doubles the view.

Lech Mountain Mirror is a landscape installation on top of the Zugerbergbahn mountain station in Lech, Austria, just east of Liechtenstein and near the German border. The building used to have a simple flat roof that would be covered in snow during the winter when the resort’s cable car operated. It’s now a shallow, rock-bottomed water basin that reflects the mountains in the water and invites visitors to take in the view as a full sensory experience.

[Photo: Christian Flatscher/courtesy Snøhetta]

The architecture firm Snøhetta designed the installation because Lech Bergbahnen AG, which operates the Zugerbergbahn cable car and lift, wanted to extend its season to the summer too. That created a need to make the mountain station more attractive to guests and diners at Balmalp, the nearby restaurant which is connected to the resort by cable car, says Patrick Lüth, managing director of Snøhetta Studio Innsbruck.

Lech is located in Austria’s Arlberg region, which is known for its skiing in the winter, and the Zugerbergbahn is a former chairlift that was rebuilt in 2021. The area does draw mountain bikers in the summer, but the warm weather months are typically slower, and the revamped roof is meant to entice visitors to the destination year-round.

[Photo: Christian Flatscher/courtesy Snøhetta]

Snøhetta’s team was inspired during the project’s research phase and concept development by a piece of promotional material that showed an image of a single hiker admiring the mountain landscape. It reminded them of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a well-known 1818 painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich showing a lonely hiker staring into a craggy, foggy landscape ahead.

[Photo: Christian Flatscher/courtesy Snøhetta]

Their concept was a shallow water basin without any railing to spoil the view. There’s a bench near the water to sit and look from, and a rough, uneven stone path that leads out to a viewing rock that’s angled as if to blend in with the mountains. It’s designed to look natural and complement the view; a bit of biophilic landscape design to not distract from nature.

“We wanted to create this kind of experience, a viewpoint where people can admire the landscape and [be] at one with themselves,” Lüth tells Fast Company. “That’s why we decided to surround the viewing rock with a water table with dual effect. It enhances the mountain experience by creating reflections of the scenery, the sky and the people. And at the same time, it guides the flow of visitors.”

[Photo: Christian Flatscher/courtesy Snøhetta]

Lüth says after the right design inspiration and concept were found, the Snøhetta team’s idea was quickly approved. From there, they worked to answer questions about technical issues like structural engineering, fall protection, and water treatment.

“The art installation works so well precisely because we don’t have a railing along the edge,” he says. “Implementing this from both a technical and legal standpoint was quite a challenge.”

Snøhetta has designed other mountain lookouts and viewing towers before, but Lech Mountain Mirror proves that sometimes it’s best to do more with less and just let nature take center stage.

With each new model, artificial intelligence is getting closer and closer to replicating human writing—but it’s not there yet.

Anthropic says its newest model for Claude, Opus 5.5, “communicates more naturally than prior models.” But that revamped communication style comes with its own set of hallmarks, and a new study lays out the writing trends in today’s most advanced AI models.

Researchers at Graphite, a research-based growth agency, compared 10,000 articles generated by Opus 5.5 to 10,000 human-written articles on the same topics. This generated a list of tells, which they define as words, phrases, and patterns that occur at least twice as often in AI writing as in human writing.

Opus 5.5 has fewer tells than previous Opus models, but it still has upwards of 2,500. If you want to keep your writing from sounding AI generated, here are the words and phrases to avoid, according to the study.

One-word tells

Though single words aren’t likely to get your prose pegged as generated by AI, there are still some buzzwords that scream Opus 5.5. Here are the top five culprits, along with their frequency compared with usage in human writing.

• “dependable” (used 23 times the human rate)
• “clearer” (used 14 times the human rate)
• “matters” (used 13 times the human rate)
• “quietly” (used 11 times the human rate)
• “practical” (used 11 times the human rate)

Two-word tells

When it comes to two-word phrases, Opus 5.5’s common function of breaking down concepts becomes especially clear.

• “matters because” (used 146 times the human rate)
• “especially valuable” (used 136 times the human rate)
• “this matters” (used 116 times the human rate)
• “article explains” (used 91 times the human rate)
• “builds trust” (used 83 times the human rate)

Three-word tells

The top tells in this category appear infinitely more times in AI writing than in human-written content, meaning that while Opus 5.5 used these phrases hundreds of times, humans didn’t employ them even once.

• “helps to understand”
• “article explains what”
• “this matters because”
• “taken together these”
• “this guide walks”

Stylistic features

Beyond specific words and phrases, the researchers identified style choices that Opus 5.5 employed more often than humans. The most pronounced among them included significantly greater lexical diversity, longer words, formulaic closes, higher word counts, and increased use of commas.

Meanwhile, the most stereotypical tell of AI writing—overuse of em dashes—has all but disappeared from current models. Opus 5.5 uses just 0.015 em dashes for every 1,000 words, a 99% drop from Opus 5. That’s less than 0.01 times the rate that humans use em dashes. This means that nowadays, they’re more likely a sign of human-written content than of AI-generated writing.

Opus 5.5 also tones down previous models’ use of mannered prose, which is flowery language and metaphor, in place of direct statements. Using their own scale, researchers determined that Opus 5.5 uses mannered prose 37% less than Opus 5. But the model still uses mannered prose far more than humans, opting for flourish over direct language 1.6 times as often as human writers do.

I was having lunch recently with a dear colleague I used to work with, reminiscing about our early-2000s days at Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, a creative agency with a generation of alumni who loved working there. Genuinely joyful years (#IYKYK). And we found ourselves asking each other: Where did all the joy go?

Many industries are grappling with a happiness problem—education, healthcare, hospitality, tech—and advertising is no exception. The traditional agency model is going through radical change: shrinking margins, brands pulling work in-house, AI redefining how we’re valued. 

Tensions play out on forums like Reddit, where burnout, low junior pay, long hours, and job insecurity are common threads.

And it’s been building for years. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found daily stress, anger, and sadness are still well above prepandemic levels.

All of this got me thinking about the correlation between happiness and business performance and the need to get back to joy if we are to drive growth.

It’s time we focus our attention on the health and happiness of a workforce not as an outcome of business performance, but as a driver of it. 

Joy as business imperative

Economists have long used a version of this logic on governments, tracking GDP alongside national “happiness scores” on the theory that the two move together. The World Happiness Report maps these scores, and found that countries that experience economic growth also tend to experience happiness growth.

Researchers at Oxford’s Saïd Business School tested the same concept at work. Over six months at British Telecom’s call centers, they found happier employees made more calls per hour and closed more sales, a 13% productivity gain tied directly to reported happiness, not to any change in workload or incentive structure. This points at something agencies should be paying attention to: Happiness isn’t the reward for good performance. It’s an input to it.

The correlation is clearly being recognized at high-performing companies like Google, Deloitte, and Unilever that focus not just on the stock price, but on happiness, too. They’ve created roles with titles like Chief Happiness Officer or Chief Well-Being Officer to manage workplace culture and employee satisfaction—in their pursuit of strong financial performance. I can hear the CFOs in our industry groan at the thought of hiring a CHO, but giving happiness and joy attention in pursuit of stronger performance should complement CFO efforts. Retention alone can make the case; replacing burned-out talent costs more. 

How do we get back to joy?

No, it’s not through employee sentiment surveys or a pool table in reception. 

The behavioral science explanation for employee happiness comes from Self-Determination Theory, elaborated by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. They posit that people have three basic psychological needs, which are echoed closely in Gallup’s employee engagement research:

1. Autonomy—the feeling that you control your work and your future, and are trusted to make the calls that matter.
2. Competence—the sense that your skills are being used and stretched, and that you can see the impact of your work. Learning is key. 
3. Relatedness—a meaningful connection with your team, your manager, and the purpose behind the work. 

That last one is especially important because so much of it comes down to the line manager. Feeling supported by someone who cares, gives feedback, and builds your strengths is paramount. Research from the Workforce Institute at UKG, a human capital management platform, found that 69% of employees said their manager shapes their mental health more than their doctor or therapist. Gallup puts it plainly: “A great manager can make a mediocre job feel meaningful. A terrible manager can make a dream job feel like a nightmare.” I think we can all relate.  

If happiness drives performance the way the evidence suggests, it shouldn’t sit outside how we run the business. It should sit inside it. That means measuring it alongside growth targets and holding leaders accountable for their direct reports having autonomy, growing their skillsets, and feeling genuinely connected to the work and to each other. 

In advertising, we spend enormous energy trying to engineer the conditions for growth: better creative, better data, better tools, better processes, better tech. But ours is still fundamentally a business powered by human ingenuity.

So perhaps we’ve neglected one of the most powerful conditions for unlocking it: People do better work when they enjoy doing it.

We know how to deliver financial performance. It’s time we got as disciplined about joy if we want to continue to drive growth.

In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the corporate world needed more “masculine energy” and a culture that “celebrates the aggression a bit more.” Twenty months later, the political movement he was courting looks much weaker. Donald Trump’s average approval rating fell to 38% in September, the lowest of his second term. But the ideal Zuckerberg praised remains omnipresent in corporate America. Women lead 56 Fortune 500 companies this year, a record that still only amounts to 11.2% of the list. They hold 29% of C-suite roles, the same share as in 2024, according to McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s “Women in the Workplace” report. Bragging, shows of strength, and risk-taking get rewarded far beyond the military, while cooperation and caution continue to be seen as weakness.

The labor market is moving in the opposite direction. In 2025, private education and healthcare, where women hold 77% of jobs, added around 800,000 positions while all other sectors combined lost about 500,000, according to this analysis of BLS data. Many of the jobs created are badly paid. In my book En finir avec la productivité (“Against Productivity” is how I would translate the title), I argued that economists label care work “low productivity” mostly because the workers earn low wages. The true economic contribution of essentially female workers is seen as negligible even though it actually sustains the productivity of everybody else (you can’t work in finance or accounting if there’s nobody to look after your toddlers, for example).

The same logic applies inside companies. The work that helps the team—such as mentoring, organizing and defusing conflicts—falls disproportionately to women and goes unrewarded, as Linda Babcock and her coauthors show in The No Club, while self-promotion gets rewarded as leadership. Companies that build their culture on dominance will eventually face the bill. Two French authors, Lucile Peytavin and Élise Fabing, recently tried to price what they call “the cost of virility at work.” Their book made me want to look at the American situation, and it’s at least as scary.

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Risk as a badge of honor

Men accounted for 4,657 of the 5,070 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2024 (about 92%), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The first explanation is the type of jobs men hold (in construction or transportation). But a lot of deaths are also attributable to the norm that tells men to ignore fear, skip precautions, never admit they don’t know how to do something, and avoid getting help.

That norm can change, as two researchers discovered when they studied two offshore oil platforms (“Manly Men, Oil Platforms, and Breaking Stereotypes”) in the Gulf of Mexico. Their owner decided to transform the culture by focusing on safety and continuous learning. Workers then stopped putting on a show of fearlessness and accepted that it made sense to report mistakes and problems. The company’s accident rate fell by 84%. Its productivity increased spectacularly.

Rules are for other people and the masculinity contest

The second cost comes from people who believe they are above the rules and from peer groups that protect them. In the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ 2024 global study of occupational fraud, men committed 75% of cases and caused higher losses: a median of $158,000 per case, versus $100,000 for women. This has dramatic consequences for every other rule-abiding employee: When you see that rule-breakers are rewarded, you lose all motivation and stop trusting your employer.

The third cost is also very heavy. In 2018, a Harvard Kennedy School study described work as a “masculinity contest” governed by four implicit norms: show no weakness, display strength and stamina, put work first, and treat colleagues as rivals. These researchers then created a survey to measure how strongly a workplace follows these norms. When scores were high, they found more toxic leadership, less psychological safety, more bullying and harassment, and more burnout and intention to quit.

The “put work first” norm means being busy is a status symbol. A 70-hour workweek is a source of pride. An inbox with thousands of unread emails means you matter. And people who sacrifice their entire lives to their jobs are convinced they don’t owe anyone anything, which can make them blind to the suffering around them. If they endure, everyone else should endure too.

The damage shows up in harassment settlements, legal fees, and workers’ compensation claims. The higher costs come months or years later in the form of absenteeism, ill health, and turnover. Every lost employee must be replaced, and the people who stay are less productive.

The mirage of the top performer

Our metrics don’t show the real cost because they focus on individuals and ignore the consequences of individuals’ behavior on the people around them. Productivity measures ignore externalities. A factory that dumps waste in a river looks highly productive because the community pays for the cleanup. The numbers of a toxic star look great because colleagues, managers, and HR absorb the damage. Productivity is a collective achievement, built on cooperation, trust, and a lot of invisible work, yet we keep crediting it to individuals.

Stanford University’s Robert Sutton urged companies to calculate this “total cost of assholes” in The No Asshole Rule almost 20 years ago. One company did the math for a star salesman Sutton calls Ethan. After adding up the assistants who quit on him, his anger management training, legal costs, and the overtime he imposed on others, it concluded that he cost $160,000 in a single year. Later research confirmed Sutton’s intuition. Harvard Business School researchers analyzed data on some 50,000 workers and found that avoiding a toxic hire is worth $12,489 to a company, more than twice the amount that a top-1% performer brings in. 

Overvaluing stars produces exhausting productivity theater, with meetings dominated by a few silverback gorillas who claim their company owes them every success. Meanwhile, the people who listen, mentor, defuse conflicts, and keep teams together remain invisible. Wouldn’t companies be wise to send all their future leaders to humility training? Do we really need more assertiveness? 

Measure it now

There will be more scandals in the years to come. But we shouldn’t need to wait for one. You can start tracking what dominance culture costs your company: turnover and sick leave by team, harassment complaints, safety incidents, and team performance alongside individual results. When sick leave climbs in one department, the data already tells you a lot about the person running it.

Researchers have been documenting these costs for years, but it seems we have to make the case all over again. The current enthusiasm for “masculine energy” will leave burned-out teams, lawsuits, and lost talent behind. If we manage to put numbers on these costs, the bill is likely to be smaller. Men have as much to gain from that accounting as women do.

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Last year, video platform Vimeo announced plans to sell itself for $1.38 billion to tech company Bending Spoons.

Milan-based Bending Spoons, which since its founding in 2014 has acquired more than 50 businesses, including Evernote, AOL, Eventbrite, and Meetup, soon faced questions from Vimeo users wondering whether it would continue to offer the same level of service.

“I vividly remember some enterprise customers being worried about us stopping serving their segment,” says Marco Castello, a longtime Bending Spoons employee who now serves as general manager of Vimeo. “Essentially, they were worried that we’d stop investing into the enterprise segment, because they thought, An acquisition is coming. We don’t know these guys, so what’s going to happen?”

Castello says that since the purchase, he and his colleagues have spoken to more than 200 users of the software. Those users represent Vimeo’s distinct business segments: independent filmmakers, enterprise customers creating and distributing corporate videos, and streamers using Vimeo’s tools to build their own branded video channels.

The goal, he says, was not only to reassure them about the company’s continued commitment to Vimeo, but also to learn what they wanted changed about the product.

[Photo: Vimeo]

What customers requested, Castello says, wasn’t significant new features so much as fixes and upgrades to existing ones. By May 2026, the company said it had fixed more than 100 bugs on the platform and delivered more than 50 improvements in areas ranging from live-event search to page-loading performance.

One of the most common complaints was simply that basic functions, including search and video uploads, were uncomfortably slow. Search times, homepage load speeds, and upload times have all improved, Castello says.

Vimeo has also added quality-of-life features such as the ability to adjust the privacy settings of multiple videos at once, use internal collaboration tools without requiring video reviewers to log in, and access to an upgraded AI-powered captioning system. Additional AI-enabled features, including automated dashboard creation for enterprise users, are also in the works.

Those kinds of relatively minor changes can have a big impact for users, Castello says. Simply switching caption-service providers, for instance, allowed Vimeo to dramatically expand the number of supported languages, benefiting businesses that see captions as a core accessibility need.

“With that small change, we increased the languages from 7 to 99,” he says. “Sometimes we just focus on the small things that can have a drastic impact on the user experience.”

The Bending Spoons playbook

Bending Spoons, which went public at an $18 billion valuation over the summer, has at times been criticized for imposing layoffs at companies it acquires and, particularly in the case of Evernote, revamping pricing plans in ways that drove off some longtime users.

At Vimeo, Bending Spoons cut jobs as it reorganized the company’s product-development teams into lean groups focused on its three core market segments.

“We can confirm that there was a layoff at Vimeo in December 2025,” Castello writes in an email to Fast Company. “We retained the majority of specialized teams like sales, customer support, and curation (Staff Picks), while skilled Bending Spoons engineers, developers, and product managers took over the technical and product operations. We aren’t able to provide numbers on how many people were impacted.”

Bending Spoons, which announced in September that it had completed its roughly $1.29 billion acquisition of data and workflow management tool Airtable and entered into plans to acquire collaboration platform Miro for roughly $1.36 billion, has drawn comparisons to private equity for its model of revamping legacy tech brands while cutting staff.

In an August earnings call, cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari told investors that the company has also grown more efficient at deploying employees, known as Spooners, to transform acquired companies.

“For instance, around 60 Spooners worked on Vimeo during Q2, broadly in line with the number of Spooners who worked on the Evernote transformation in 2023,” he said. “This is despite Vimeo being roughly four times the size of Evernote in revenue terms, and a more complicated business from both a technical and operational perspective.”

A different definition of growth

But Bending Spoons has also emphasized, in both financial filings and public statements, that it tends to focus on the long-term future of the companies it acquires rather than rolling out flashy features or quickly flipping businesses to other investors.

“For Bending Spoons, the growth engine has actually been great at acquiring and operating businesses,” says Matteo Danieli, Bending Spoons cofounder and VP of product. “We do not necessarily need to prove massive growth on products, and so we are actually free to focus on what’s useful for users.”

[Gif: Vimeo]

For Vimeo, he says, that includes the community of independent filmmakers who long made the platform a home but in recent years often felt neglected as its enterprise business took off.

Under Bending Spoons, Vimeo has revamped profile pages to let creators better showcase their work, enhanced controls around videos embedded on other sites, and added storage and other features to free plans.

More broadly, Castello says, Bending Spoons’s approach of deploying small teams to upgrade a product allows it to move quickly after an acquisition.

“We believe that smaller teams—leaner teams—can be much faster at innovation,” he says. “And so, whenever we approach reorganization, we do it in a way that, essentially, we try to bring the product back to a startup mode, where a very small, committed group of people can deliver amazing work in a very short period of time.”

Who Vimeo is really for

Vimeo also recently rolled out new plans aimed largely at midsize business customers that Castello says had been using individual plans in violation of the platform’s terms. The move naturally drew consternation from some users, though Castello says the new plans also come with added features.

“That comes with greater storage, greater bandwidth, all the tools that they need for collaboration, those kind of things,” he says.

According to Danieli, moving forward the company plans to keep serving each of Vimeo’s existing market segments without adding too much complexity to the software. “We’re trying to find the best possible way to serve all of them exceptionally well,” he says, “in a way that doesn’t complicate the product too much.”

For months, climate and weather experts have been warning about a historically strong Super El Niño that could turbocharge extreme weather across the world, intensifying everything from storms to floods to droughts.

Now AccuWeather has released its long-range Winter 2026-27 forecast, shedding more light on how that El Niño could affect this winter season across the U.S., and what specific conditions it may fuel. 

“The stronger we see an El Niño signal, which is one of our top drivers when we look at seasonal forecasts, the more confidence we feel that certain things are going to take place,” says Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather senior meteorologist and long-range forecaster.

[Image: AccuWeather]

Meteorological winter doesn’t begin until December 1, so there’s still time for weather conditions to change, Pastelok adds.

But he and his team have spent about a month working on this forecast, looking at the trends of past years and previous El Niños, and relying on more than 100 climate models.

Here are five maps that illustrate the winter forecast, and El Niño’s potential impact.

[Image: AccuWeather] What a typical El Niño looks like

El Niño is a climate phenomenon defined by above-average sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, and a weakening of trade winds that flow from east to west. All those changes affect atmospheric conditions, disrupting global weather patterns.

For the U.S., this typically leads to wetter conditions across the south and drier-than-normal conditions farther north.

This map illustrates those typical conditions, showing a “wetter” band across the southern half of the country, from San Francisco on the West Coast to Raleigh, North Carolina, on the East Coast; a “drier” spot in the Pacific Northwest; and a “warmer” region around the Great Lakes and into the Northeast. 

[Image: AccuWeather]

This year’s El Niño has the potential to be the strongest one since 1950—even surpassing the 1982-83 El Niño, which researchers have described as the “strongest and most devastating of the century.” 

That El Niño caused “weather-related disasters on almost every continent,” according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as well as roughly 2,000 deaths and more than $13 billion in damage. 

El Niño isn’t the only thing that can affect winter weather, though.

“We’ve noticed over the last few El Niño that have taken place, the 2023-24, the 2015-16, that some other drivers start to poke their nose into the picture, and when they do, it gives you kind of different outcomes,” Pastelok says. 

Two strong marine heat waves, for example—one off the coast of Baja, Mexico, and another in the northwestern part of the Pacific—could push that storm track farther north, meaning Southern California may not get as much precipitation. 

“Most of the time, El Niño is aimed at Southern California, but we think it could get directed at times farther north up the coast, which could mean the Central Sierras could get buried again this year,” he says. 

Snow amount forecast map

This map shows the forecasted snow amounts, compared to historical averages.

The northern parts of the country and into the Midwest and mid-Atlantic could see below-average snowfall, while the Sierra to the Great Basin and central and southern part of the Rockies could see above-average snowfall.

[Image: AccuWeather]

That would help build the snowpack in those mountains, which would be a positive outcome after a historically hot and dry spring and summer. The Colorado Basin currently has record-low water levels. 

Forecasters expect more variability in the storm track for the Northwest, though, which could mean periods of snow followed by extended periods of drier weather.

The first half of the winter has the best chance for consistent snow; all those factors are why snowfall will be near to below average in that region. 

Another feature of El Niño winters, Pastelok says, is the way the southern track storms can pick up moisture out of the Gulf and Atlantic.

“If one [storm] just happens to come up the East Coast, it’s not a 5-to-10-incher. It could be a 1- to 2-foot or 2- to 3-foot snowstorm,” he says. “You get it all at once, and then it doesn’t do anything for several weeks.”

Ski and Snowboard Forecast Map

As a follow-up to the snow totals, AccuWeather also made a specific map on the ski and snowboard conditions expected throughout the winter season. 

This map generally reflects the same impacts as the snow totals: better ski and snowboarding conditions in the West, from the Sierra Nevadas to the Rockies, where more snow is expected, and poorer ski and snowboarding in the East. 

[Image: AccuWeather]

Potential early-season snow in November could help some New England ski resorts, AccuWeather says, but then a “lack of sustainable cold” might hurt those resorts later on, allowing only a few trails to open.

Flooding-risk map

AccuWeather doesn’t typically include a flood map in its long-range winter forecast, but the meteorologists there believed it was necessary this year, Pastelok says, because of the El Niño, which could set up the country for “potentially several heavy rain events.” 

That flood risk is predominantly focused on the California coast, then across the southern half of the country into the Southeast, above the Florida Panhandle. 

[Image: AccuWeather]

El Niños can intensify the atmospheric rivers—essentially “rivers in the sky,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—that bring this rain. These “relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere . . . transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics,” NOAA’s website explains.

This El Niño could come with “not just one atmospheric river, but six, seven, or eight that cause major flooding,” Pastelok says.

Heavy rain brings another concern: When it hits areas that have been burned by wildfires, that can form intense mud and even mudslides. 

Winter Temperature map

The 2025-26 winter was actually the second-warmest in U.S. history, with above-average temperatures in the Southwest—but it also brought frigid stretches of cold to the Northeast. 

This winter may see the opposite trend: The map shows how the southern half of the country could experience below-average temperatures, while the northern half sees above-average temperatures.

In the region right around the Great Lakes, temperatures could even hit 4-plus degrees higher than historical averages. 

[Image: AccuWeather]

The extreme, record cold that some parts of the country saw last winter was due to a polar vortex, a large mass of cold and fast winds that swirls around the Arctic Circle.

The polar jet stream, a river of air that sits below that polar vortex, turned wavy, bringing frigid Arctic air farther south than usual.

With El Niños, though, “You don’t typically see a lot of Arctic air masses that get pulled down,” Pastelok says. 

Even without Arctic air coming down, though, there’s a potential for severe ice.

“When you get to the time period of mid-January through February, you don’t really need to have true Arctic air to come down. It just can be marginal cold and sets up right,” Pastelok says.

That could mean one or two Southern storms, from Arkansas through Tennessee into the Appalachians, that bring ice, with the potential to take down power lines. 

Exactly what this El Niño winter will bring remains to be seen, of course, but the forecast will become clearer as it gets closer.

For his part, Pastelok predicts record-breaking conditions, either in terms of flooding, rainfall amounts, or even “because temperatures are too warm, not too cold.”

Good news for food court fans: Costco is bringing back a fan-favorite menu item.

Customers love Costco’s budget-friendly food court—especially its $1.50 hot dog and drink combo, which hasn’t changed in price since 1985. As Americans grapple with the ever-rising cost of living in this K-shaped economy, the big-box retailer—which operates a membership-only warehouse club—is one of the few places where food seems relatively affordable.

But there’s another item club members are happy to see return: Costco’s famous churros.

During Costco’s most recent 2026 fourth-quarter earnings call on September 24, chief financial officer Gary Millerchip confirmed that “for a limited time, the food court churro will be returning to all our U.S. locations starting this month.”

In 2024, the popular foot-long twisted pastry coated in cinnamon sugar was replaced by a warm, giant chocolate-chunk cookie, much to the dismay of many club shoppers.

The announcement about the return of the churro comes just days after the company teased the idea in an Instagram post, which was liked by over 145,000 people—a testament not only to the pastry’s outsize popularity, but also the intense speculation that had been brewing online.

“I did want to address the speculation that’s been blowing up our social media feeds and confirm that the rumors are true,” Millerchip explained.

Like the hot dog, the churro remains competitively priced at $1.49.

Shares of Costco Wholesale Corp. (Nasdaq: COST) were trading at $934.90, up over 9% year to date, as of Tuesday afternoon.