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Adoption Outruns Governance
KPMG’s 2026 US family business survey found 86 percent of respondents piloting AI or running it at scale, and 40 percent with a formal AI governance framework. Fifty-one percent named AI strategy and deployment as their largest skills gap. The sample is 109 US responses collected in the first quarter.
Signal: the gap between what is running and what is governed is now measured, and it is forty-six points wide.
TechInformed (4 minutes)
Open Advice
Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang both spoke at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles from 13 to 15 September, and both argued for model choice and for open weights. Huang has been making the case since July, when he told reporters in Washington that American industry needs open weight for security and needs it for safety.
Signal: every vendor now agrees you should run several models and own some of them, which is advice almost no office’s current setup can take up technically.
Yahoo Finance (4 minutes)
Metered And Mined
Alex Karp has spent a year arguing that enterprises feeding their workflows into closed models pay by the token while handing over the value of what they feed in. He calls it the Token Industrial Complex, and in August he named the habit tokenmaxxing. Palantir’s answer, from 8 September: open models on Nebius hardware, inside the customer’s perimeter.
Signal: your workflows and data can become someone else’s product, and that’s what you need to decide on. If large players aren’t comfortable with that, should you be?
MarketBeat (5 minutes)
Dell Goes Private
Sequence Holdings and DFO Management, Michael Dell’s family office, agreed on 14 September to take insurance brokerage The Baldwin Group private for $7.70 billion, at $32.50 a share. That is 49.65 times EBITDA and a 9.61 percent premium to the last close. Closing is expected in the first quarter of 2027.
Signal: a family office is the buyer of record on a $7.7 billion take-private, a different institution from the one most governance documents describe.
InsideArbitrage (2 minutes)
Regulating Themselves
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind have discussed a self-regulatory standards body modelled on FINRA, reviewing frontier models up to 30 days before release. OpenAI’s Chris Lehane confirmed the coordination on 15 September at a Washington briefing. Demis Hassabis floated the comparison in July. Nothing has been agreed about what the standards would contain.
Signal: the three firms selling the technology are drafting the body that will certify it, which is a conflict worth naming before it is settled.
Forkast (7 minutes)
Who Pays For Power
The US House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417 to 3 on 16 September. It requires states to consider standards making customers above 100 megawatts post financial assurances and pay the full incremental cost of generation, transmission and distribution. States get one year to deliberate and two to decide.
Signal: the cost of compute is starting to be allocated in public, which makes it a line item rather than someone else’s problem.
Utility Dive (5 minutes)
Built By Hand
Anthropic disclosed on 17 September that Claude leads 26 percent of its AI research and development work, against effectively zero in February. Asked at an event last week how the finance team there uses Claude, one of its members said they mostly do not. The spreadsheets still get built by hand.
Signal: the automation figures a lab publishes describe its engineering function, and your office is a finance function.
Quartz (3 minutes)
Seventy Offices
At a conference last week, across seventy family offices, five questions came up: do AI note-takers break legal privilege, who owns the chat when the tool is the frontier provider’s, how do you run several models rather than depend on one that agrees with you, how do you host open models on-premise, and what about the principal’s own use?
Signal: none of the five questions was about capability, or how I used Claude to screen a deal. All five were about control, which makes this a governance brief, not a technology one.
The Last Word
"Any intelligence I have is artificial. Everything I have is artificial."
Dolly Parton, at a London press conference in June 2023, asked what she made of artificial intelligence.
She died on 25 August, aged 80. Asked at the same press conference whether she would allow an AI hologram of herself after her death, she said she did not want to leave her soul here on this earth. In the weeks since, AI-generated images and video of her have spread widely enough that her sister Stella posted about “a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday”. Her voice is now the test case for whether Tennessee’s ELVIS Act survives the federal AI framework.
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Hi, I’m Francois. I have been tracking how family offices actually run for over a decade, and at Simple we openly publish what we learn: the research, the frameworks, the vendor landscape, what worked and what quietly did not. This newsletter is part of that.
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