Hard Pass

The 192-page report, authored by a Democratic strategist and first published by CNN on Thursday morning, goes in-depth on several factors found to be detrimental to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in its ultimate loss to Donald Trump. Despite the contention within the party over then-President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, however, the war doesn’t get a single mention.

Also missing from the document are the words “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Arab American,” and “Muslim.”

A spokesperson for the DNC declined to comment on the omission of anything having to do with Gaza...

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs

Archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20260528114303/https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs

Why it matters: Companies that rushed to embrace AI are now confronting ballooning IT costs, uncertain productivity gains and growing employee skepticism.

Driving the news: Microsoft canceled most of its Claude Code licenses, in part over costs, according to The Verge, and Uber's COO said AI costs are getting "harder to justify."

An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.

Companies are citing AI's ability to automate jobs as a cause for layoffs, though Anuj Kapur, CEO of CloudBees, told Axios that workforce cuts may simply be "the only lever they can pull" to offset their AI bills.

Consumer sentiment around AI is also nosediving, and employees are rebelling against the use of the technology at work. 

What they're saying: The enterprise is undergoing a "healthy swing" away from AI overuse — or "tokenmaxxing," the push to burn as many AI tokens as possible — Ali Ansari, CEO of model training firm Micro1, told Axios.

Ansari hopes this correction will push companies toward more efficient AI use.
While the market views these tools as working equally well across the enterprise, Ansari says "the reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding."
That disconnect can drive up IT bills without leading to high return on investment in agents, he said. 

Friction point: Corporate AI adoption is running into four unique problems.

Use cases: "Most people default to automating tasks they dislike rather than tasks most valuable to the company," Sophia Velastegui, CEO of Velastegui Ventures and former chief AI officer at Microsoft told Axios. Instead, they should focus on using AI to drive revenue.

Costs: One CTO told Axios that employees were using AI models to check the weather. That gets expensive fast: Enterprise AI plans are not truly 'all you can eat,' and even simple chatbot queries can carry heavy token costs.

... it's enticing!

In an open letter, the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China - a coalition of ten Canadian organizations dedicated to ensuring there is strong attention to human rights in Canada’s relationship with China, calls on the Honourable Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada, to raise 'urgent' human rights issues in her meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

...

"Jimmy Lai’s case epitomizes the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party's] use of hostage diplomacy," the letter reads.

"The 78-year-old diabetic publisher, whose family and business ties to Canada are extensive, has spent more than 1,800 days imprisoned under abusive conditions before being sentenced to 20 years under Hong Kong’s National Security Law for journalism. He was denied legal representation of his own choosing, denied a fair trial, denied adequate healthcare, and denied consular access."

...

The letter also says that Canadians continue to be held captive by China, including Huseyin Celil, a Uyghur Canadian denied consular access for 20 years; and Dr. Wang Bingzhang, a Canadian Permanent Resident sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement for supporting democracy, and whose Canadian wife and children have spent decades awaiting his return.

"We ask you to build on this record by raising the cases of Jimmy Lai, Huseyin Celil, and Dr. Wang Bingzhang publicly, prominently, and persistently — before, during, and after this meeting," the coalition says.

...

The G7 Rapid Response Mechanism housed in GAC has confirmed an ongoing CCP Spamouflage campaign targeting Canadian residents, generating 100 to 200 posts per day involving deepfakes, doxing, gendered disinformation, and swatting. Two RCMP officers have been charged with providing information on diaspora activists to the Chinese government.

...

We ask you to ensure that the Government of Canada will demand that China commit to no further hostage diplomacy and extraterritorial intimidation and removal of all the punitive sanctioning of Canadians by China if a “strategic partnership" between Canada and China is to move forward. Unless Beijing is required to demonstrate respect and reciprocity – the release of Huseyin Celil, Jimmy Lai, and Dr. Wang Bingzhang would be a testament to this – their state supported violations of Canadian law will likely only intensify.

...

During his last visit in 2016, China's foreign minister Wang Yi. publicly berated a Canadian journalist for asking a question about his country's human rights record.

Back then, Wang Yi said it was "irresponsible" of a journalist to ask about human rights and the jailing of a Canadian, Kevin Garratt ...

Wang appeared visibly angry as he delivered the scolding in the lobby of Global Affairs headquarters at a joint news conference with then Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion.

...

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Last October, Ron, a 55-year-old construction analyst for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was furloughed for 43 days as the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to federal agencies’ budgets under the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

“We voted for Trump, not realizing that he was going to slam as hard as he did, but it was on day one when he sat down, right after inauguration, and started signing those executive orders and just trashed us federal employees, it was a kick in the teeth,” Ron said.

“If people would just listen and research and do something other than just listen to Fox News, we may all be better off, but it's going to take an open mind and an ability to say, ‘I made a mistake,’ because once you say you made a mistake, you can turn the ship around,” said Chrissey Kelley, 50, a stay-at-home mom.

Speaking out against MAGA cost the Kelleys relationships with friends and family members who support Trump, but in sharing their story, they hope to inspire others having doubts about the GOP. 

“It's okay to be wrong. You made a mistake, it was a bad choice, but it's not the end of the world. We can fix it. We just got to ride it out and hold strong and support each other through it,” Ron said.

. . . Chrissey said she became a Republican as soon as she started voting.

“You were just a conservative. There was no thought behind it. You listen to Fox News, and you listen to conservative outlets, and you're spoon-fed,” Chrissey said.

Ron, who served in the military for 25 years, said the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”

When he couldn’t find work in Detroit, he moved to Georgia. He supported Republicans because he associated them with bigger spending on defense.

Ron said he supported Trump with donations, bumper stickers and the “whole nine yards” of MAGA.

“I bought into the lie about the stolen election and all that, and I thought January 6 insurrectionists were actually patriots,” Ron said.

“I just remember being content with thinking that he was what we needed, and he was going to drain the swamp in Washington until he got into office this third term, and realizing that I was dumb as a rock, and I believed everything that I was spoon fed.”

. . . “Just watching the policies of what's happening in our world today unfold one by one by one, I just started drawing up very different conclusions and found out that I was clueless, and most people are today, but now I'm awake and looking at it for what it is, and I cannot believe that he had my support,” Chrissey said.

“It's lie after lie after lie.”

Ron said he now votes for Democrats, and Chrissey said she considers herself an Independent but has voted for Democrats three times now, something she “never thought in my entire life” would happen. 

“The road we're headed down now, if we don't turn this truck around, we're so close to going off the edge of the cliff that we need to stick together,” Ron said.

“We need to put our country back together. It might take decades, but don't give up. We need to be vocal. Stay strong, and follow our laws and Constitution, and hold strong with our values, not the values that the MAGA claims that we have, but the values that we've had in the past 250 years from the founding of the country til Joe Biden's era.”

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