That's a meaningful shift. AI companies have spent the last few years asking everyone else to trust what they say about safety, and this would at least put somebody else in the room. The details that matter - who the evaluators are, when they arrive and what they're allowed to publish - are still missing.

Anthropic has always worked rather hard at being the good guy of AI. Inviting someone in to mark the homework helps, but independence gets a little murkier when the company you're checking is also the one giving you the desk.

For us, the interesting bit is getting out of the internet for a few days and into rooms with people actually trying to make this stuff useful. There's a lot of noise around AI right now, but the better conversations tend to start when somebody asks what it can genuinely change inside a business.

On Wednesday, Tanvir will be presenting Unovo at Venture Community's Startup Showcase, running from 1pm to 5pm at Avenue HQ on East Parade. We're going to be talking about our journey with Polaris, and how it is going to change the way businesses think about systems.

What makes it more interesting than the usual celebrity endorsement is that Sweeney reportedly approached Novig about an equity partnership herself, and is now both an investor and a strategic partner. She is part of the company rather than the face it hired, which puts her on the same side of the argument as the brand.

The criticism, loudest from female athletes, pushed the campaign much further than the media buy ever could. Novig is now being discussed by people who almost certainly had no idea what Novig was a week ago. A conventional campaign pays to reach an audience; the internet can create one for free, and for challenger brands with smaller budgets, attention itself is becoming the distribution strategy.