The Ken

3 stories

The KenAsiaHDFC, Kotak banks find out what happens when AI goes rogue Banks and NBFCs are giving AI agents access to troves of customer data to sell more. But the safeguards haven’t kept pace, despite repeated regulator warnings

The KenAsiaInside, a treasure trove of govt data. Outside, AI agents One door is API Setu, the government’s audited data marketplace. The others are side deals, one of which leaked vehicle owners’ details for Rs 5

The name is the button.

An agent writes the code now, and a human thumb hovers over Accept all a hundred times a day. The honest question of this decade is what, exactly, you just accepted. So I read the diff.

Eight years as a backend engineer in Stockholm, back in Tokyo since 2023, and I still ship something small most nights, usually badly. My one rule: the only real review of a model is the thing you built with it. That is why there is no leaderboard on this site.

Around a hundred and forty sources come through — the labs' own posts, the papers, the tools, the runtimes and languages nobody is watching yet, the chip under the demo, and the newsletters people actually forward. What is moving gets counted so the week reads at a glance, and every few days I explain one mechanism in plain words.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one image and the link to whoever wrote it. We never reproduce the post; the images belong to their authors. A post written in Japanese appears in Japanese, exactly as it was published, and the link goes to the original.

— Yuki Halvorsen, Tokyo

One letter a week, starting soon.

The Ken

The KenAsiaJio eyes 340 million users as AI eats phone chips and SIM rules tighten

The KenAsiaHDFC, Kotak banks find out what happens when AI goes rogue Banks and NBFCs are giving AI agents access to troves of customer data to sell more. But the safeguards haven’t kept pace, despite repeated regulator warnings

The KenAsiaInside, a treasure trove of govt data. Outside, AI agents One door is API Setu, the government’s audited data marketplace. The others are side deals, one of which leaked vehicle owners’ details for Rs 5