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I fact-checked the "AI Moats are Dead" Substack article. It was AI-generated and got its own facts wrong.

February 22, 2026
•Artificial intelligence
I fact-checked the "AI Moats are Dead" Substack article. It was AI-generated and got its own facts wrong.

Here's something that caught my attention — an AI-generated article claiming AI models have no moat, but it’s full of mistakes. As /u/echowrecked points out, the piece is riddled with errors that actually prove the opposite. For example, the timeline is totally fabricated; it claims OpenAI rushed GPT-5.2-Codex in response to Clawbot going viral, but GPT-5.2 launched two weeks earlier. The article also gets basic facts wrong, like spelling Anthropic as 'Fathropic' and misnaming models. And get this — its own video shows a $300 billion valuation as $30 billion, which suggests the author didn’t even watch it. According to /u/echowrecked, these inaccuracies highlight how AI can produce convincing-looking market analysis that’s simply not true unless checked by humans. The irony? An AI's own errors are the best proof that even AI models need humans to verify their work. I’ve linked the full fact-check — trust me, it’s worth a listen.

A Substack post by Farida Khalaf argues AI models have no moat, using the Clawbot/OpenClaw story as proof. The core thesis — models are interchangeable commodities — is correct. I build on top of LLMs and have swapped models three times with minimal impact on results.

But the article itself is clearly AI-generated, and it's full of errors that prove the opposite of what the author intended.

The video: The article includes a 7-second animated explainer. Pause it and you find Anthropic spelled as "Fathropic," Claude as "Clac#," OpenAI as "OpenAll," and a notepad reading "Cluly fol Slopball!" The article's own $300B valuation claim shows up as "$30B" in the video. There's no way the author watched this before publishing...

The timeline is fabricated: The article claims OpenAI "panic-shipped" GPT-5.2-Codex on Feb 5 in response to Clawbot going viral on Jan 27. Except GPT-5.2-Codex launched on January 14 — two weeks before Clawbot. What actually launched Feb 5 was GPT-5.3-Codex. The article got the model name wrong.

The selloff attribution is wrong: The article blames the February tech selloff on Clawbot proving commoditization. Bloomberg, Fortune, and CNBC all attribute it to Anthropic's Cowork legal automation plugin — investors worried about AI replacing IT services work. RELX crashed 13%, Nifty IT fell 19%. None of it was about Clawbot.

The financials are stale: cites Anthropic at $183B and projects a 40-60% IPO haircut. By publication date, Anthropic's term sheet was at $350B. The round closed at $380B four days later.

The irony: an AI-generated article about AI having no moat is the best evidence that AI still needs humans checking the work. The models assembled a convincing shape of market analysis without verifying whether any of it holds together.

I wrote a full fact-check with sources here: An AI Wrote About AI's Death. Nobody Checked.

Disclosure: I used AI tools for research and drafting. Every claim was verified against primary sources. Every sentence was reviewed before publishing. That's the point.

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Audio Transcript

A Substack post by Farida Khalaf argues AI models have no moat, using the Clawbot/OpenClaw story as proof. The core thesis — models are interchangeable commodities — is correct. I build on top of LLMs and have swapped models three times with minimal impact on results.

But the article itself is clearly AI-generated, and it's full of errors that prove the opposite of what the author intended.

The video: The article includes a 7-second animated explainer. Pause it and you find Anthropic spelled as "Fathropic," Claude as "Clac#," OpenAI as "OpenAll," and a notepad reading "Cluly fol Slopball!" The article's own $300B valuation claim shows up as "$30B" in the video. There's no way the author watched this before publishing...

The timeline is fabricated: The article claims OpenAI "panic-shipped" GPT-5.2-Codex on Feb 5 in response to Clawbot going viral on Jan 27. Except GPT-5.2-Codex launched on January 14 — two weeks before Clawbot. What actually launched Feb 5 was GPT-5.3-Codex. The article got the model name wrong.

The selloff attribution is wrong: The article blames the February tech selloff on Clawbot proving commoditization. Bloomberg, Fortune, and CNBC all attribute it to Anthropic's Cowork legal automation plugin — investors worried about AI replacing IT services work. RELX crashed 13%, Nifty IT fell 19%. None of it was about Clawbot.

The financials are stale: cites Anthropic at $183B and projects a 40-60% IPO haircut. By publication date, Anthropic's term sheet was at $350B. The round closed at $380B four days later.

The irony: an AI-generated article about AI having no moat is the best evidence that AI still needs humans checking the work. The models assembled a convincing shape of market analysis without verifying whether any of it holds together.

I wrote a full fact-check with sources here: An AI Wrote About AI's Death. Nobody Checked.

Disclosure: I used AI tools for research and drafting. Every claim was verified against primary sources. Every sentence was reviewed before publishing. That's the point.

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