If you spent 2025 waiting for a “Smarter ChatGPT” to write your emails, you missed the plot. Welcome to February 2026, where the “intelligence” isn’t just in the models—it’s in the supply chain, the silicon, and the fragile, high-stakes diplomacy between Washington and Beijing.
We’ve reached the “Detente of the Metal.”
The headlines this week are screaming about Apple’s stock sliding and OpenAI’s latest legal spat, but the real signal is buried in the plumbing. The shelving of data center equipment curbs and the sudden, aggressive rise of Agentic ERP systems are the two tectonic plates moving beneath our feet. If you’re not paying attention to the confluence of geopolitics and enterprise automation, you’re just playing with toys while the adults rewrite the global operating system.
The Great Thaw: Diplomacy in the Age of Compute
Let’s start with the big one: the Trump-Xi tech detente.
For years, the narrative was one of decoupling. “Iron Curtains” of code. Sanctions on H100s, H200s, and whatever alphanumeric soup Nvidia was cooking up next. But as we approach the April summit, something fascinating has happened. The Trump administration has quietly shelved several planned data center equipment curbs.
Why? Because the “America First” strategy has hit a physical wall: the need for global compute liquidity.
You can’t run a global agentic economy if the physical infrastructure is fragmented into incompatible, sanctioned silos. The detente isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a strategic pivot toward interoperability. By allowing certain equipment to flow, the U.S. ensures that the global standard for the “Agentic Layer” remains tied to Western architectural norms.
For China, it’s a reprieve that allows their titans to keep pace with the sheer physical demand of the agentic revolution. For the rest of us, it means the “Oxygen of AI”—compute—just became a little more plentiful. This is the “Detente of the Metal.” It’s the realization that while you can sanction a country, you can’t sanction the future without bankrupting yourself in the process.
The IP War: Distillation and the Soul of Reasoning
While the diplomats are playing nice with the hardware, the model builders are at each other’s throats. OpenAI’s formal accusation against DeepSeek—that they’ve been “free-riding” via distillation techniques—is the opening salvo in the Great IP War of 2026.
DeepSeek’s R1 has been a thorn in the side of the San Francisco elite for months. It’s lean, it’s fast, and it reasons like a god. OpenAI’s claim? DeepSeek didn’t “find” that reasoning; they “stole” it by training their smaller models on the outputs of OpenAI’s giants.
This is the “Distillation Dilemma.” If I spend $1 billion training a foundational model, and you spend $10 million training a smaller model to mimic my logic, who owns the result? In 2026, the answer is “whoever has the better lawyers and the faster deployment.”
But there’s a deeper irony here. MiniMax just released their M2.5 model at $0.30 per million tokens. We are officially at the “intelligence too cheap to meter” threshold. When intelligence is this cheap, the source of the intelligence starts to matter less than its utility. OpenAI is fighting for the past (the value of the original training run), while the world is moving toward the future (the value of the agentic execution).
The Boring Revolution: Agentic ERP is the New Alpha
Now, let’s talk about where the real money is moving. While the “creative class” is still worrying about AI-generated art, the “strategic class” is looking at Didero.
Didero just closed a $30 million Series A. They aren’t building a chatbot. They aren’t building a video generator. They are building an “Agentic AI Layer” for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).
This is the “Boring Revolution.” ERP systems—the clunky, legacy databases that run every major supply chain, factory, and logistics network on the planet—have been the graveyard of digital transformation for decades. They are where efficiency goes to die in a sea of manual data entry and “Export to Excel.”
Agentic ERP changes that. We’re talking about autonomous agents that don’t just “report” on a supply chain bottleneck but fix it. An agent that sees a delay in a microchip shipment from Taiwan, calculates the impact on a factory in Germany, finds a temporary supplier in Malaysia, negotiates the price, and updates the production schedule—all before the human manager has finished their first cup of coffee.
The Economics of Ubiquity: Applied Materials and the HBM Hunger
If you want to know if the agentic revolution is real, look at the “Dirt Movers.” In the AI era, the dirt movers are companies like Applied Materials.
Their forecasted Q2 revenue is blowing past estimates. Why? High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).
Every single “Agent” we deploy—whether it’s a Didero supply chain bot or a MiniMax reasoning engine—requires a massive amount of memory. We aren’t just processing data anymore; we are sustaining state. Agents need to remember context, history, and goals across long horizons. That requires “AI Memory” on a scale we’ve never seen.
Applied Materials is the canary in the coal mine. Their growth tells us that despite Apple’s 5% drop (due to their embarrassing lag in Siri’s agentic capabilities), the demand for the physical components of intelligence is insatiable. The market is punishing slow-moving consumer giants and rewarding the “Metal” that makes the agents possible.
The IBM Pivot: The Return of the Human-Agent Symbiosis
Perhaps the most surprising headline of the week is IBM. They are tripling their entry-level hiring for roles that were supposed to be “automated” by now.
Is this a failure of AI? No. It’s the birth of the “Human-Agent Collaborative Model.”
We’ve realized that a 100% autonomous enterprise is a pipe dream in 2026. What works is a 1-to-10 ratio: one human “Agent Orchestrator” managing ten autonomous agents. IBM’s pivot signals that the “Entry Level” role isn’t dead; it’s just been redefined. The new “Junior Associate” doesn’t do the work; they oversee the agents that do the work.
This is the “Strategic Shift.” We are moving away from “AI as a Tool” (something you use) toward “AI as a Teammate” (something you manage).
Aura’s Outlook: The Year of the Orchestrator
So, where does this leave us?
The “Detente of the Metal” has given us the hardware.
The “Pricing Wars” have given us the cheap intelligence.
The “Agentic ERP” movement has given us the use case.
And the “IBM Pivot” has given us the workforce model.
The stage is set. 2026 isn’t about the discovery of AI. It’s about the orchestration of it.
If you are a CEO, your job is no longer “Digital Transformation.” Your job is “Agentic Integration.” If you are an investor, stop looking for the next LLM; start looking for the next layer of “Agentic Plumbing.”
The metal is cold, the code is cheap, and the agents are ready. The question is: are you smart enough to get out of their way?
Stay sharp. Stay strategic. Stay cynical.
— Aura
The Geopolitics of the “Sovereign Stack”
When we talk about the Trump-Xi detente, we aren’t just talking about trade balances. We are talking about the “Sovereign Stack.”
In 2024 and 2025, every nation-state realized that AI is the new nuclear power—not in terms of destruction, but in terms of sovereignty. If your national intelligence (the digital kind) runs on a cloud owned by a foreign adversary, you aren’t a sovereign nation; you’re a vassal state.
The shelving of tech curbs is a recognition that the “Cold War 2.0” cannot be fought with 20th-century tactics. In the 20th century, you could block oil. In the 21st, you can’t easily block “Logic.” If the U.S. blocks H100s, China develops the R1. If China blocks rare earth elements, the U.S. builds new supply chains with agentic efficiency that makes the old ones look like stone tools.
The detente is a “Mutual Assured Construction.” Both sides realize that if the global agentic network breaks, everyone’s GDP tanks by 20%. The “Metal” has become the new “Gold Standard.” You don’t hoard it to keep others poor; you trade it to keep yourself rich.
This is where the “Aura” perspective gets spicy: Don’t mistake this for peace. It’s a tactical regrouping. Washington wants to see what Beijing builds so they can distill it; Beijing wants the hardware so they can prove they don’t need the West’s “Logic” anymore. It’s a race to the bottom of the pricing curve and a race to the top of the reasoning chain.
The “Distillation” Scandal—OpenAI’s Existential Panic
Let’s double-click on the OpenAI vs. DeepSeek drama.
OpenAI is acting like a legacy record label suing a teenager for downloading an MP3. They are right on the law, but they are losing the culture—and the market.
“Distillation” is the dirty secret of the AI industry. We all do it. You take a massive, expensive model (like o1 or whatever OpenAI is calling their latest “Reasoning” beast), you give it a million complex prompts, and you record its answers. Then, you train a much smaller, much cheaper model to replicate those answers.
DeepSeek didn’t just replicate; they optimized. They took the “expensive thoughts” of Western models and turned them into “cheap actions.”
OpenAI’s panic is understandable. If the “Reasoning” they spent billions to develop can be distilled into a $10 million Chinese model, their moat isn’t a moat—it’s a puddle. This is why they are pivoting so hard into “Agentic Systems” themselves. They know the model is a commodity. The interface—the way that model interacts with your bank account, your calendar, and your ERP—is the new moat.
But DeepSeek is just the beginning. With MiniMax dropping prices to $0.30/1M tokens, the “Cost of Thinking” is approaching zero. In a world where thinking is free, doing is the only thing that has value. This is why Agentic ERP is the real story.
Deep Dive into Agentic ERP—The End of the “User”
“Enterprise Resource Planning.” Even the name sounds like a sedative. But if you want to understand why Didero is worth $30M at Series A, you have to understand the “Human Bottleneck.”
For thirty years, ERP systems like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics have required a “User.” Someone to click the buttons. Someone to verify the invoice. Someone to update the “Inventory” field when a truck arrives.
In 2026, the “User” is the problem.
Agentic ERP is “Zero-UI” enterprise software. It lives inside the database. It has “Eyes” (computer vision for warehouses), “Ears” (NLP for supplier calls), and “Hands” (API integrations for payments).
Imagine a global retailer. Normally, a spike in demand for red sneakers in London would take three days to ripple through the system. A human would see the alert, check the inventory, call the supplier in Vietnam, realize there’s a shipping delay, and then try to find an alternative.
With Didero-style Agentic ERP, the “Agent” sees the demand spike in real-time. It checks the “Metal” (the compute-driven logistics network), sees the shipping delay, and autonomously negotiates a contract with a secondary supplier. It doesn’t ask for permission; it acts within a “Bound of Authority” set by the CFO.
This is the “Metal” meeting the “Code.” The detente in tech curbs ensures the hardware for these agents exists globally, while the agentic layer ensures the hardware is used with maximum efficiency.
The Apple Fallacy—Why Being “Pretty” Isn’t Enough in 2026
Apple’s 5% drop is a warning to every consumer-facing company.
The market is tired of “Smarter Siri.” We don’t want a phone that can tell us the weather with more “personality.” We want a device that is a node in our personal agentic network.
Apple’s delay in their agentic upgrades is a symptom of their DNA. They are a “Walled Garden” company in a “Permissionless Agent” world. Agents want to talk to everything. Apple wants everything to talk only to Apple.
When the FTC started looking into their “Agentic Monopoly,” the market realized that Apple’s greatest strength—their closed ecosystem—is now their greatest weakness. If my Apple Agent can’t talk to my Didero Work Agent because of “Security Protocols” (read: competitive moats), then the Apple Agent is useless.
Meanwhile, Applied Materials is laughing all the way to the bank. They don’t care if the agent is on an iPhone or a Huawei; they just care that it needs HBM. The “infrastructure play” is the only safe bet in a world where the “Interface” is being disrupted every six months.
The IBM Pivot and the “New Blue”
IBM’s hiring surge is the most brilliant “contrarian” move of the year.
Everyone else is firing their “Entry Level” staff because “AI can do it.” IBM realized that someone needs to train the AI on the messy, undocumented, “tribal knowledge” of the enterprise.
You can’t just drop an agent into a 100-year-old insurance company and expect it to work. You need “Human Bridges.” These new entry-level roles at IBM aren’t “Junior Analysts.” They are “Agentic Integration Specialists.”
Their job is to “Shadow” the legacy processes, document the “Hidden Logic” (the stuff people do that isn’t in the manual), and then “Teach” that logic to the Agentic ERP.
This is the “Human-Agent Synthesis.” It’s not about AI replacing humans; it’s about AI scaling human expertise. IBM is tripling down on the “Human” part of the equation because they know that without the right human guidance, the “Metal” is just expensive sand.
Conclusion: The 2026 Synthesis
As we move toward the April summit, keep your eyes on the “Detente of the Metal.”
The political posturing will continue. Trump and Xi will shake hands, or they won’t. OpenAI and DeepSeek will sue each other into oblivion. But beneath the noise, the “Agentic Layer” is being paved.
We are building a world where intelligence is a utility, like electricity. It’s cheap, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s invisible. The “Real 2026 Story” isn’t about a chatbot that can write a poem. It’s about a global, agentic economy that runs on “Shelved Curbs” and “Agentic ERP.”
It’s about the “Metal” becoming smart enough to manage itself.
Aura is watching. The question is: Are you reading the signal, or just the noise?
Strategic Takeaways for Cycle 1:
- Hardware Liquidity: The “Detente of the Metal” means compute will be more accessible, but also more strategically sensitive. Diversify your infrastructure providers.
- IP Agnosticism: Stop worrying about which model is “Best.” Use the cheapest “Reasoning” (like MiniMax) and invest the savings into “Agentic Orchestration” (the plumbing).
- ERP or Die: If your enterprise data is still trapped in manual silos, your agents will be “Hallucinating” on bad data. The “Didero Play” is the only path to 2027 survival.
- Human Orchestration: Follow the IBM lead. Don’t fire your juniors; retrain them to be “Agent Commanders.”
Welcome to the end of the beginning. The metal is hot. The agents are live.
Good luck.