Common Sense Media just released its first full “census” of AI use among kids 9 to 17 (1,204 kids, surveyed this March). The headline: 86% of kids use AI, and 1 in 4 use it daily.

Three findings in particular jumped out for me:

Kids who report feeling lonely are using AI a lot more. The study can't tell us which direction it goes - lonely kids seeking out AI, or AI use displacing the friendships that prevent loneliness but either way it is concerning that 54% of kids who say they feel lonely at least some of the time are using AI on a dailiy basis, far higher than the ~25% of tweens and teens using AI daily overall.

Kids who struggle lean in hardest. Kids who have a hard time focusing on school assignments are more likely to use AI for schoolwork weekly (56% vs. 45%). Same pattern for kids who find math, essays, or just sticking with hard things difficult. Translation: the kids who most need to build those cognitive muscles are the ones most likely to outsource the reps.

(On this note, I came across an article in Scientific American about building kids’ cognitive endurance in the age of distraction).

There are already signs of AI dependency. Kids are even self-reporting it, with 42% of daily users say going without AI for a month would be hard.

My thoughts: While I’m not surprised at some of the trends, I am surprised about how pronounced they already are. And anecdotally, I sense a growing anti-AI sentiment even among younger kids which will be important to pay attention to. This past weekend, my boys were drawing posters for their room and I used AI to increase the resolution, clean them up, and initially, to add a little “extra” to the backgrounds of their art. They were horrified… “mom! that’s way obvi AI!”

Things are moving fast guys. Perhaps even faster than the most ambitious AI researchers anticipated. With recent progress in the AI frontier labs, we could get to the point where AI has “officially” surpassed human level intelligence (what is referred to as AGI) - and is self-improving on top of that - within the next few of years (if not sooner).

And the fact that, in its current form, global and country-level governance, policy, and regulation moves at glacial pace is now an urgent problem.

Within the span of a week, the three most prominent AI leaders, across different labs, published essays or conducted interviews asking for urgent guardrails, policies, and even a temporary global pause on... themselves.

Anthropic's research institute showed that Claude now writes more than 80% of Anthropic's production code and said outright: if a verifiable way existed for every frontier AI lab to pause at once, Anthropic would pause. Dario Amodei called for FAA-style regulation - mandatory third-party testing of frontier models, with the government empowered to block release. Even OpenAI's Sam Altman wrote that the world needs an international body that can slow frontier development when necessary.

And then, also this week, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 the most powerful AI model ever released to the public. It is a "Mythos-class" model, which I spoke of a few editions ago, and it is an undeniable leap above any AI model before it.

tl;dr: I believe the warnings are sincere, and also, the race hasn't slowed one bit.

That's why Pope Leo's encyclical (last issue) matters so much - the people with the most information are telling us the decisions are too big (and urgent) to be left to them. They're asking for the rest of us to show up. (Yes, parents included!).

If you sent that legislator letter from two weeks ago, this is the moment it was for. If you didn't, the link still works.

You’ve probably noticed that “maxxing” is everywhere right now… looksmaxxing, fiber-maxxing, sleepmaxxing, solo-maxxing - it’s definitely one of 2026’s cultural trends. (Side note: if you're raising boys, NPR has a helpful guide for parents on looksmaxxing).

But I think we’re wrong to get wrapped up in any sort of “maxxing” culture. For many years, psychologists have studied "maximizers" - people who relentlessly strive for the best optimal choice and have consistently found that maximizing, as a strategy, correlates with less happiness, less optimism, lower self-esteem, more regret, more depression, and more social comparison.

Moreover, maxxing is exhausting when we live in a time with such an overabundance of choices (the human mind makes thousands of choices a day).

Counter to maxxing, there’s a mindset referred to as “satisficing” (term comes from a blend of satisfying and suffice ), which is essentially “good-enough” decision making. It’s having a clear sense of what’s the bar and then picking the first option that clears it and moving on. No overthinking.

Satisficers are shown to be happier and feel more fulfilled. This is largely because this approach hands you back precious time and attention (hint: crucial ingredients needed for connection… like what I did there?).

A couple ideas to try “satisficing”:

Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5 is the most capable AI model the public has ever had access to. I’ve tried it, and it really is next-level impressive.

For right now, it is included on all paid Claude plans at no extra cost, but this is ONLY through June 22 (aka 10 more days). After that, it will cost more. So, we have about ten days to try out the world’s most cutting edge AI model without breaking the bank.

Trying it out may sound intimidating, but it’s actually super easy. Simply go to claude.ai, or better yet, Claude Cowork, and select Fable 5 as your model (In case you don’t have a Claude paid account, I have a few 1 week free passes for Cowork here).

The impressiveness of Claude Fable is it’s ability to work on it’s own, for a long time, on really complex problems. So, I wouldn’t recommend wasting it on something like summarizing a lengthy news article or drafting an email.

Instead, think of something that is really difficult and multi-step. Something that has been keeping you up at night or that you’ve been putting off for along time because the thought of trying to tackle it is simply overwhelming. Give it something hard like this and see what it can do for you.

For example, a big life decision that has really been weighing on you:

FWIW, I tried out this very prompt on something that has been weighing deeply on me and Brian and was thoroughly impressed (and appreciative) of it’s detailed insights and recommendation.

Side note: another way to really see the power of Claude Fable is to ask it to build you some sort of nuanced video game or city simulator. People report it can build a “better” Minecraft following a single one-line prompt.