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America voted yesterday, and somehow the loudest AI fight of the day wasn't on the ballot (though data centers kind of were, more on that below). It was Google telling schools that turning off its AI means turning off Search too, then scrambling to explain itself by dinner. So this week is a single-story deep dive, because those few hours say more about where AI is going than any model launch this month.

In today's edition:

DeepSeek just opened DeepSeek Harness to everyone in public preview. It's open source (MIT), runs as a desktop app or in your browser, and handles docs, spreadsheets, code, and scheduled tasks. Everything is a plugin, and it can write new plugins for you.

💡 Pro tip: After any task, open the trace view. You'll see every tool call and every file it read, which is the fastest way to debug a bad output and to know exactly what the agent touched.

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📉 Data center stocks got hammered after Democrats swept Congress. CoreWeave was down nearly 10% while Big Tech rallied. Texas, home to a huge share of planned US capacity, also elected a governor who wants to pause new builds. Texas spent years pitching itself as the easiest place in America to build.

🧑‍💻 Meta bought Conductor, the startup that lets developers run Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor agents in parallel, on the same day OpenAI moved to buy another dev tools startup. Meta just bought a tool whose entire job is to run its competitors’ agents side by side.

🍿 Netflix launched AI Discover, a new tab that picks titles by mood with themes like "scare me" and "quick watches," and it's Netflix's first real swing at killing the endless scroll. If you’ve ever spent longer picking a show than watching one, this tab is aimed at you.

💸 YC's Garry Tan says he spends up to $200K a year on tokens, and his personal agent has read his email, his Dropbox, and two decades of his notes. It could be a sign of things to come in the future of work. But it’s also a privacy horror story. $200k a year is roughly $550 a day, which is a lot to pay for a coworker to read all your email

On Tuesday, Google said its AI tools will be off by default for K-12 student accounts starting next year, which sounds like a win for teachers until you hit the second half: schools that block AI entirely lose Google Search too.

Google's VP of education Chris Phillips summed up the logic: "Search and AI are deeply integrated.” The internet did not take it well.

What happened, in roughly eight hours:

Here's the uncomfortable part:

Google's clarification didn't touch what people were actually mad about. NBC News points out that a school can now enable Search without Gemini, but it still can't get Search without AI summaries. The AI is baked into the results page. So the real menu is Google Search with AI, or no Google Search. Same deal as Tuesday morning, nicer wording.

And these districts aren't being dramatic. In July, Common Sense Media gave Google's AI Search its lowest possible rating, “Unacceptable Risk,” and asked Google to switch AI Overviews and AI Mode off by default for school accounts. New York City and Los Angeles have since banned most AI for younger students. Google has around 50 million Chromebooks in schools. When a district says "no AI," it's following its own rules. Google just told it those rules and its search engine can't coexist.

DuckDuckGo, meanwhile, runs noai.duckduckgo.com with every AI answer switched off, and says installs jumped 30% earlier this year as people pushed back on AI search.

Consider this: This isn't really about kids. It's about whether AI is a feature you can turn off or the product itself. For two years, Big Tech sold AI as an add-on. This week Google admitted that in Search, it's the foundation. Once that's true, "opt out of AI" quietly becomes "opt out of us."

🔮 Prediction: Within six months, Google ships a schools-only version of Search with AI Overviews either off or locked into a tutoring mode. Here's the reasoning.

First, the political math changed overnight. Democrats took both chambers in yesterday's midterms, and the two loudest critics this week were Democrats. A Democratic Congress means hearings, and "Google cut off search for kids whose schools said no to AI" is about the cleanest antitrust soundbite anyone could write, aimed at a company a federal judge already ruled a search monopolist in 2024.

Second, giving in is cheap. K-12 students are a tiny slice of Google's ad business. What's expensive is a generation forming its search habit on DuckDuckGo at age 12 because their school switched defaults.

Third, and this is the part to watch, Google will fight to keep the fix as narrow as possible. A working "no AI" toggle for schools is a blueprint. Once it exists, parents ask for it next, then adults, then European regulators. That's why Phillips said, "deeply integrated." It's a legal position as much as a technical one.

So expect the compromise to look like this: AI Overviews rebranded around Guided Learning, which walks students through problems instead of handing them answers (Google already said it's building this), sold as the "safe" setting, plus a quiet admin flag that kills Overviews for K-12 only. Google gets to say AI stays. Critics get their switch. Nobody else does.

The bigger signal for operators: the AI tools you rely on are moving from "feature you enable" to "layer you can't remove." Plan your workflows and vendor choices around that now.

💬 Your turn: Should schools be able to use Google Search with zero AI in it? Hit reply with a yes or no and one sentence on why. I read every reply, and I'll share the sharpest takes next week.

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Until our next AI rendezvous,

Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI