A few months ago I ended a consulting gig on my terms. I had built a brand strategy from scratch, a business development framework, nearly 20 years of experience poured into work that was meant to last. Then I was told: "AI said to do marketing this way." That was the whole argument. And it pointed at something much bigger than one bad meeting.

When my roofer walked through my front door wearing Meta smart glasses that were actively recording, I didn't know how to respond. I wish I had. That moment opened up a much larger question: who is protecting bystanders from a technology that records first and asks permission never? From Meta's shifting data policies to the complete absence of federal privacy law in the United States, the ethical and regulatory gaps around smart glasses are wider than most people realize.

OpenAI's enterprise pivot looks like a strategy decision. It's actually a pattern. One we've seen before in American corporate history, with GE, with IBM, and with consequences that took decades to surface. The difference this time is that AI is compressing that entire arc into years, and the governance infrastructure meant to catch the harms isn't moving anywhere near fast enough to keep up.

The men running AI companies have their justifications. The rest of us have the consequences. A conversation with Claude, annotated, on ego, power, and who gets left out of the frame.