Staying on top of AI, without drowning in it.

AI Above the Cut exists to make one thing simple: keeping executives on top of what's happening in AI. The field moves fast and the feed never stops — so instead of chasing every headline, we do the reading for you and surface only what actually matters.

Why we exist

AI is a fast-changing world, and most coverage is built for clicks, not decisions. Leaders don't need another firehose of launches and hot takes — they need to know what changed this week, why it matters, and what to do or watch next. That's the whole job of this brief.

Who we track — and how

We don't curate celebrity. We curate evidence, interpretation, implementation, and disagreement. Every source we read carries a tag — vendor, researcher, operator, investor, regulator, economist, or skeptic — and a strong claim gets checked against a different category before it becomes our conclusion. That discipline powers Below the Cut, the Margin-Proof Tracker, and Where the Minds Disagree. We work a fixed spine every week, plus a rotating edge of specialists when they publish primary work.

• Andrew Ng — practical AI · operator
• Ethan Mollick — AI at work · operator
• Simon Willison — hands-on model behavior · researcher
• Nathan Lambert — post-training & open models · researcher
• Narayanan & Kapoor — AI Snake Oil · skeptic
• Erik Brynjolfsson — the economics of AI · economist
• Cassie Kozyrkov — decision quality · operator
• Eric Topol — medical AI evidence · researcher

Monitored across frontier, evaluation, strategy, and healthcare — surfaced when they publish primary work.

• Andrej Karpathy — frontier explainers
• Lilian Weng — agents & reasoning
• Chip Huyen — production AI
• Jack Clark — research & policy (lab insider)
• Rumman Chowdhury — evaluation & governance
• Ben Thompson — platform strategy
• Benedict Evans — tech-adoption arc
• Azeem Azhar — macro & geopolitics
• Robert Wachter — clinical adoption
• Nigam Shah — health-system deployment
• John Halamka — health-data platforms

Read for their major essays, research, and testimony — not their day-to-day posts. They're primary sources with institutional positions, not neutral referees.

Demis Hassabis · Dario Amodei · Fei-Fei Li · Yann LeCun · Geoffrey Hinton — plus the leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Mistral, and DeepSeek.

…plus the primary feeds that matter more than any single voice: every major lab's research, product, and system-card feeds; the Stanford AI Index; the European AI Office and the primary legal record (Federal Register, NIST, FDA, EUR-Lex); and for healthcare, NEJM AI, the Mayo Clinic Platform, and Stanford Health Care.

How we curate it

Every Sunday we distill the week's evidence into two speeds: a fast skim — the one thing that matters, three concrete moves, and the decision-relevant signals plus one Below the Cut counter-signal — then the Margin-Proof Tracker, our standing test of named AI-value claims against the P&L, and a longer Synthesis that connects the moves, takes a position, and names what we're watching next. Quality over hype — we point you to the source, not the noise around it, and flag anything unconfirmed.

Disclosures

Independent & unsponsored. AI Above the Cut is an independent publication with no outside owner or sponsor. We do not accept payment to cover, feature, rank, or omit anything, and no company or PR firm has editorial input. Our only goal is signal for the reader.

No ads or affiliate links. The brief carries no advertising and no affiliate or referral links. If that ever changes, we will label such content clearly and in advance.

AI-assisted, human-edited. We use AI-assisted tools to help scan and organize the week’s sources, but every issue is edited by a human, and every claim, number, date, and link is verified against a primary source before it publishes.

Not financial, legal, or investment advice. Everything here is general information for decision-makers, not advice. Nothing in the brief — including the Margin-Proof Tracker — is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Do your own diligence and consult a qualified professional before acting.

Conflicts. Where we have a material relationship with a company or person we cover, we disclose it in the item itself. We track companies and public figures as subjects of analysis, not as clients.

Corrections. When we get something wrong, we fix it openly — corrections are noted in the following issue and in the online archive. Spot an error? Email hello@aiabovethecut.com.