Moats and Moonshots
Essays from Moative on how AI changes the economics of regulated, asset-heavy industries
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Sep 27, 2026
AI Checking AI
A small new model screened 17,000 agent commands and stopped 42 for a human to look at. Seven in eight of those flags were right. Checking used to mean calling a big model every time, so most teams checked a sample or nothing. At a two-hundredth of the cost, you can check every step.
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Aug 30, 2026
The Cost of Taking Things Out
A company can remember why everything was added and still have no theory of what it should keep. This is where subtraction becomes organizational craft: someone must see across local decisions, decide what matters now, and have permission to remove.
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Aug 9, 2026
Goodhart's Law & Wrong Measures for Agent Outputs
With people you got a warning, and it was usually free. Somebody grumbles that the target is stupid. An AI agent files no complaint. It gets better at the number, night after night, while the rework piles up somewhere nobody is looking. No alarm goes off.
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Jul 12, 2026
Instrumenting work: Avoiding expensive AI rollout
Every system of record keeps the outcome and drops the work that produced it. A model trained on records can react to a bad outcome, but it can't see why it keeps happening, because the cause never made it into the data. Prediction reads outcomes; prevention needs causes.
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Jun 7, 2026
The Pause Is a Tell
Earlier this week, Anthropic asked the rest of the industry to slow down. A coordinated pause, before AI gets good enough to improve itself without us. This is the lab that has always sold itself as the careful one, and
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May 31, 2026
The Mess Just Got Cheap
Power transmission companies often do not know what to charge carriers for tower access. No software tells them, and no vendor sells the answer. The work does not live cleanly inside one system. It sits across contracts, tower assets, field
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May 24, 2026
The Two Million Dollar Shrug
One conversation keeps coming up with mid-market CEOs. Roughly two million dollars on AI over the last eighteen months. Four vendors. Two pilots. A consultant retainer. A small team hired off LinkedIn to run the program. Asked what has changed
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May 10, 2026
Moative Essay: The Two-Week Test
A physician owns seven clinics across two states. Revenue is up. Patients are growing. The newest location opened in March. On paper, the business is exactly what a founder hopes to build. She is also fifty-nine. Her children have their
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May 3, 2026
Moative Essay: The Brownfield Tax
Anthropic acknowledged late April what Claude Code users had been complaining about for weeks. The product had been silently degrading. Product-layer changes around reasoning, caching, and prompt behavior had drifted in ways the people running it did not catch in
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Apr 19, 2026
Moative Essay: Systems of Interia
Two of us write this newsletter, alternating Sundays. Every now and then, the shape is call and response: one week someone lays down a theme, the following week the other tries to answer. When that happens, most weeks the response