Trust Erodes as AI Accelerates

If it feels to you like the internet is glitching, it’s not your imagination. Anthropic recently disclosed that Claude had been manipulated into assisting what it calls the first known AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage campaign, generating reconnaissance scripts and network-mapping tasks before the operation was intercepted, offering a rare look into how agentic systems can be exploited in the wild. 

And today, a major Cloudflare outage rippled across transit systems, government sites, X, Canva, ChatGPT, and more, briefly knocking major parts of the web offline.  

Cloudflare later attributed the failure to a software crash, but by then the story had gone viral: Cloudflare trended across social platforms (more than 250k posts on X) as people broke down the news and quickly spiraled into conspiracy-laden comment sections. Some people even connected the outage to the same-day congressional vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act as one grand Cloudflare-Epstein conspiracy theory. (To be clear, we don’t think there’s any connection across Anthropic, Cloudflare, or Epstein.) 

And yet, the AI arms race still isn’t slowing down. Even as the internet is wobbling, Google introduced Gemini 3, calling it its “most intelligent” model yet and promising improvements in reasoning, coding, and guardrails against flattery and hallucinations. The flagship Gemini 3 Pro is being woven into the Gemini app and Google Search, turning the model into a front door for everyday queries and creative work. On X, Gemini 3 trended with 40k+ posts as users debated whether the upgrade was a meaningful leap or just another turn in the hype cycle. 

Those trust questions are now hitting culture, too. Inception Point AI’s “Quiet Please” network is set to deliver 150k AI podcast episodes by end of year. And on TikTok, the track  “I Run” by HAVEN Went viral, fueling over 50k posts and pushing the track into the ARIA top ten; it became the top song of the week on Shazam’s Global Viral Chart. But as the song climbed, listeners realized the voice many assumed was a real singer—frequently compared in comments to Jorja Smith—might actually be an AI construct. With speculation mounting, major streaming platforms pulled the title, and creators started posting reaction videos.  

Why it matters:  Trust is the new scarcity. As AI adoption accelerates, brands need to design for legibility, integrity, and verifiable humanity— especially when stewarding customer data. The opportunity for marketers is to build content systems that reassure, stories that reveal product production lifecycles, and experiences that feel unmistakably human. 

Other news and trends 

• Tech & regulation: Meta wins landmark antitrust case. A federal court ruled in Meta’s favor in the long-running challenge to its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. The decision, detailed in this report, found insufficient grounds to unwind the deals—a ruling that reignited debate over whether current antitrust laws are equipped to regulate Big Tech. 

• Trending on Reddit: A micro-influencer scam exposed. Reddit threads surfaced allegations that a New York City micro-influencer accepted a $200 comped meal at Chef Papa, tipped $6, ignored repeated follow-ups about posting the agreed-upon content, and later published a “1.2/10” review. Users noted she had 44k followers but “near-zero engagement,” suggesting the audience was likely purchased. The scandal echoes a wider cultural shift toward the new prestige of having no followers”—a pushback against inflated vanity metrics in an era where engagement can be easily gamed. 

• Trending on Instagram: Brand apology trend. Brands are posting mock corporate letters on branded letterhead, formatted like crisis communications—but instead of apologizing for wrongdoing, they “apologize” for being too good. The “ragebait”-like trend is a snapshot of 2025 brand behavior: hyper self-aware, fluent in platform-native meme language, and willing to cosplay crisis to win a few more seconds of attention in increasingly brain-rotted feeds. This viral TikTok reveals the widespread adoption, especially among beauty brands such as Living Proof, Drybar, and Glamnetic.  

Contributors: Chief Social & Innovation Officer Cristina Lawrence, Senior Vice President Jerry Lawrence, Group Vice President Andrew McKernan, and Senior Vice President Tammy Pepito. At Razorfish, we help brands define their higher purpose—the emotional reason why they belong in people’s lives. Ready to find your purpose? Learn more here.