2/2
ER: ECG fine, vagal confirmed. MRI tomorrow for the shoulder.
 When my wife later asked him what happened, he said: 
"Dad was just sleeping on the floor like Elon Musk." 😂 @elonmusk

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

It's been 3 days now that I posted my Dev Fund essay! Have two takeaways so far. First: there's clear support for change. Not necessarily for phasing it out entirely, yet, but for changing how it's configured. Good! Means it's important to have this conversation. Second: I didn't do a great job explaining where this came from / my intentions. Here are some clarifications: 1. The essay was my personal initiative. I was never asked to write the essay, go on this "crusade", etc. it's literally just me feeling strongly about this. I similarly went on a "mini" crusade a few weeks ago regarding the Sprout deprecation, it's just the way I operate. 2. I really do believe in the fact that phasing out the Dev Fund is what's right for the future of Zcash. I got to that conclusion from reading a lot of Hayek for the past few weeks / months, as part of the process of writing my Mastering Zcash book. 3. I'm not receiving any kind of financial incentives (don't even have CYPH equity / stock options / incentives or compensation of any kind, I'm only employed by Winklevoss Capital). I'm also the first one to recognize that I may or may not have a bias :) 4. I really got into Zcash in 2025 and I work where I work. Both are fair to note, but neither is actually an argument. It took me weeks to write this >5000 word essay, and I feel like it has a lot of arguments that merit consideration. If the essay is wrong, show me where! More importantly I'm just interested in this becoming an actual discussion and debate. I found it rather disappointing that this felt like a "taboo" subject before I brought it up. I'm very open to changing my mind about this if better arguments are presented, and especially interested in learning the various viewpoints people have. You can find my Signal on my website for anyone looking to chat. I don't bite!

BUYER BEWARE This extremely meticulous article will now be used to start Phase2 of “shut down open source” because “if we can’t control our closed models, imagine what happens to everyday life when anyone can just allow their open source models to proliferate”. Some will use this example and point to future grid outages, utility outages, transportation chaos, bioweapons, uncontrolled cyber swarms and the like to try and make the case for yet another attempt to limit US AI model control to a few folks. Then, one layer beneath the propaganda, one sees that these things are always written and promoted by a web of well organized existing shareholders or shareholder-adjacent of the closed frontier labs and groups of folks organized by a shared ideology roughly rooted in them knowing best. This article, more than anything else, should demarcate the beginning of a well organized effort to stand up a Closed Model Industrial Complex. These cartels exist in other markets as well and it now exists in AI. Bottom line, read everything carefully before signing up for the consequences. How we react will define the next hundred generations of Americans and their lives. Do not give up your rights or sovereignty because of fear of the unknown from articles that, at the root, are as much about the hidden incentives of an emergent cartel and their proxies. If you take the time to understand the incentives, you will be less likely to fall for it and overreact and have intelligence metered from a few suppliers. Bottom line: Keep Calm. Carry On.

Bitcoin’s most profound breakthrough is the ability to convert economic energy into digital form and bind it securely to a person, family, company, machine, or nation.

2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI.  I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative.  In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I’ve written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I make sure to frequently mention the incredible benefits as well as proposing possible solutions to the risks (short clips from my interviews that end up on social media tend to be disproportionately negative, as that gets clicks).  In fact, I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.  The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!).  And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process.  I feel the urgency here: I lost my father to Hepatitis C only a few years before the development of direct-acting antivirals (sofosbuvir), which cure 95% of patients and probably would have cured him. I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.  I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.  The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.  I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.  The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*.  I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.  That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing. We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months.  When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.  But until then I don’t want to make empty promises, and in the meantime I feel compelled to speak honestly about the very real risks of AI and how to address them.  Honesty is the right thing on the merits, and in terms of public credibility and trust it is no worse than, and may in fact be better than, an approach that ignores or distracts from risks which people instinctively understand are real.

⚡️What is emerging now is a permanent war economy without the declaration of war. The equity stakes are the tell. Washington is no longer treating semiconductors as an industry. It is treating them as territory. Once the state owns pieces of the firms building memory, packaging, photonics, interconnects, and secure supply chains, those companies begin changing category. They become extensions of national capacity. Privately operated. Publicly financed. Politically protected. Strategically directed. That is the architecture now forming. The old American model separated government from enterprise in public mythology while connecting them through contracts, regulation, and crisis support. The new model makes the connection visible on the balance sheet. Ownership creates a stronger form of control than subsidy. A grant can be spent. A contract can expire. An equity stake remains. It gives the state participation in the upside, visibility into the company, leverage over future decisions, and a political reason to prevent failure. That changes capital allocation. The firms closest to national power will receive cheaper capital, regulatory preference, procurement guarantees, diplomatic support, and rescue capacity. Companies outside the strategic perimeter will face market discipline alone. The economy begins splitting into two classes: Companies the state permits to fail. Companies the state has decided must survive. That distinction may matter more than ordinary valuation. America is building a sovereign portfolio of the future while preserving the appearance of private capitalism. The government does not need to nationalize the whole company. Minority ownership, grants, procurement, export controls, tax credits, and security rules can produce effective direction without formal command. Control arrives through the stack. Capital. Regulation. Supply chains. Customers. Security clearance. Export permission. Once all six depend on the state, legal ownership becomes almost secondary. The danger is equally large. When strategic importance becomes a shield against failure, bad projects survive longer. Political access starts competing with technical merit. Losses become national-security expenses. Private upside remains concentrated while public capital absorbs the risk. That machine can build extraordinary capacity. It can also build enormous waste. The strongest conclusion emerging is this: The AI economy will not remain a normal market economy. It is becoming the productive core of the American state. The companies that matter most will increasingly resemble sovereign infrastructure with publicly traded shares. And the real competition will no longer be company against company. It will be state-backed industrial systems against state-backed industrial systems. America has already entered that war. It simply has not named it yet.

Anthropic is destroying millions of physical books, including rare books with no surviving copies, to train their private model… Legitimately evil.