Good morning. This is Patrick Coffee filling in for Nat Ives. Today, there's nothing weird about loving your AI agent; The kids are breaking up with discretionary spending; And competition is pushing down prices for home internet service.

To ask the most obvious post-Cannes question: how healthy is it for people to have close friends or romantic partners who are AI?

Experts unsurprisingly disagree, Andrew Blackman reports.

A “large language model” has no awareness of anything, and can’t even be aware of the other party’s existence as a person. But it can mimic this awareness, and therein lies the danger, said Shannon Vallor, philosophy professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Other research, however, finds that people rank their relationships with AI above almost all the real people they know, including good friends, according to Julian De Freitas, assistant professor of business administration in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. Concerning!

See, it’s not about whether chatbots understand you, only that they make you feel understood. AI relationships may then feel like a natural next step in a world where loneliness is rampant. Frightening! 

The biggest problem may be that tech companies have no financial incentive to make AI safe and beneficial to humanity. Terrifying!

But wait: As the indomitable Gary Vaynerchuk recently put it, “Your grandkids will marry an AI human.” End of debate. [YouTube]

The spending party is over for young Americans, Rachel Wolfe reports.

In-store and online purchases for 18- to 24-year-olds fell 13% year-over-year between January and April, according to market research firm Circana.

Why? A tough job market, credit card delinquency, and student loan payments restarting are a few reasons. In short, they have more financial obligations and less free cash.

Categories where young people’s spending has fallen the most include apparel (-11%), accessories (-18%), technology (-14%) and small appliances (-18%).

“Instead of buying the $30 wallet, they’re buying the $16 wallet,” said Ryan King, chief financial officer for Thread Wallets, an accessories brand that sells primarily to 18- to 29-year-olds. Online sales fell 29% over the first three weeks of June compared with the same days in May.

Major home-internet providers including Verizon, Comcast and T-Mobile this spring launched a flurry of price-lock guarantees, promising steady rates for as long as five years in an effort to fend off competition from mobile carriers, Patience Haggin reports.

Cable companies have struggled to retain internet subscribers since mobile carriers began offering more affordable 5G fixed-wireless internet service in 2018.

“Our pricing wasn’t breaking through in the marketplace,” said Steve Croney, chief operating officer for Comcast’s connectivity and platforms business. He said the company’s five-year price lock, introduced in April, competes well against the telecom companies’ offerings.

“The cable companies went from gaining subscribers and raising rates every year to declining subscribers and giving people price locks,” said John Hodulik, a UBS analyst. “They’re seeing churn rise in their broadband subscriber base. And they’re trying to nip that in the bud.”

A judge ruled that it's legal for AI startup Anthropic to train its models on books as long as they've been purchased. [WSJ]

Microsoft is struggling to sell Copilot to businesses, because they all want ChatGPT. [Bloomberg]

Meanwhile, OpenAI is developing features that make it look at lot like Microsoft Office. [The Information]

Major retail chains have launched their own sales to compete with Amazon's Prime Day. [Axios]

The FTC's Omnicom-IPG decision raises key questions about how brands spend their money. [Digiday]

Disney hired Ron Faris, former head of Nike's virtual studios, as SVP of global marketing for consumer products. [WWD]

The CFA's ex-CMO has been charged with embezzling almost $6 million to buy a $150,000 engagement ring, among other things. [BI]