The more I learn about how AI works, the more I’ve come to prize the value of human creativity in the AI era, especially when it comes to writing.

AI is a revolutionary productivity tool, but it is not a replacement for human knowledge or input. The software can only go as far as the human behind the machine.

AI has many incredible applications, but AI writing is mediocre by design. It’s fine. Not great. Just fine.

It’s suitable for the vast majority of the population, especially since most people currently can’t identify the difference between AI writing, AI-assisted writing, and purely human, unassisted writing. Undoubtedly, there’s a place for all of these calibrations.

But there are a few reasons why AI models can’t, on their own, produce uniquely outstanding literature.

Let me explain:

Think of your favorite chatbot as a student who has read every book in circulation. That’s incredibly impressive. Your student is an encyclopedia of knowledge! You ask him a question, and his default job is simply to guess the next word. He’s very good at guessing, but that’s because, despite his wealth of knowledge, he’s inclined to be probabilistic and not unique. Sad! He knows that among a million writers, there is a significant chunk that will finish a sentence the same way, and that’s the decision he will use in his writing. So by default, he is brilliant but seeks to optimize an average. And he can’t, by design, break out of this mediocrity shell.

Major AI companies, like Anthropic, SpaceXAI, OpenAI, and the like, have hired thousands of people to train AI models and evaluate their answers. Whether they intend to or not, they are eliminating unique answers because they are seeking to install a reward mechanism that encourages the models to play it safe. AI is trained to be a teacher’s pet, one who calculates what the “teacher” (AI model trainer) prefers and decides to write that way to achieve the reward. AI writing is habitually mediocre because of this.

Moreover, all of the major American AI companies (and foreign ones, because they distill information from American labs) train their models using the same internet with similar processes. And when smaller upstarts build their own models, they train them on behemoths like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, which is much more cost-efficient, but it leads to the same problem. So their habits become everyone else’s habits. Despite the mess they’ve created, none of the big dogs in AI seem to want to hire great writers and editors to fix that institutional headache, probably because there isn’t much ROI involved. You can’t tell chatbots apart by their prose because it’s one big circular learning environment.

When a human being writes an article without assistance from AI, they inject creativity from their own life experience or imagination into the piece. If you tell an AI to “write an article” about something, it does not have an independent perspective, so it fills the space with pieces of information that have been spliced together from a variety of places. Despite the claims of delusional tech bros on the West Coast, AI models do not have the ability to think independently. AI models are very advanced software projects that operate under a very impressive but very non-human paradigm.

Fixing this problem is mostly above my pay grade. More and more content online is now written entirely by AI, so AI models are now training on AI writing at an increasing rate, which likely means that this mediocre writing problem will get worse before innovation arrives to make it better.

Due to the aforementioned institutional hurdles to creativity, it’s become clear to me that great human writing (with or without AI assistance) is needed now more than ever.

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Bill Gates, the guy who tried to destroy the world over the Wuhan sniffles, says it’s time to panic about AI. Should we?

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The billionaire Microsoft founder is very concerned about AI. He is concerned about our jobs, our families, our ability to think and reason about the issue, and of course, how AI impacts his precious climate change narrative. What he is not concerned about, apparently, is his own track record as a nanny state catastrophist.

In a several-thousand-word essay on his website, Gates tells us that the time to act on AI is now, well before any of his predictions come to fruition or go bust.

We have seen this movie. Gates was one of the chief antagonists for a national shutdown and forced compliance with vax mandates over the COVID-hysteria years. As someone who covered this beat closely, it’s easy to recall the Gates-funded Imperial College model that tried to panic the masses by projecting millions of American deaths in the absence of sweeping lockdowns. Gates and his underlings went on TV and demanded sweeping shutdowns. He got his way, and it resulted in millions of American businesses destroyed and American families torn apart, for no reason whatsoever. He has shown no remorse and has simply moved on to the next current thing, AI, which apparently demands his infinite wisdom.

The bill came due in tragic fashion. The average American student remains significantly behind pre-COVID achievement levels in math and reading, with the gap widest in the poorest places in the country. Some student metrics fell to their lowest point in decades. The policies that Gates demanded hit hardest on the people who could least afford it.

Not everyone was hurt during the COVID years. Gates, for his part, made a massive windfall on his early investments in mRNA vaccines. Once an mRNA hype man, he later conceded that his “miracle cure” shots weren’t actually useful, and he simply moved on to the next issue.

Now, in 2026, the AI era is here, and Bill Gates is back demanding a centrally planned response to AI innovation. For Gates watchers, it’s easy to notice that the policy structure of his arguments hasn’t changed.

Another new threat that is “unprecedented.” The public is “underestimating” it. Existing institutions are inadequate. New institutions must be built. Humiliating ourselves before China is again necessary. And time is of the essence. We must act right now before it’s too late. We can’t wait for this apparent catastrophe. We must preempt it like the Bush Doctrine in Iraq.

In his essay, Gates says that he wants a sweeping domestic apparatus with authority spanning employment, education, taxation, energy, elections, public health, finance, law enforcement, transportation, and public lands. But that’s still not enough. He also wants to install a new national and global regulatory body. He offers the post-9/11 government reorganization as his benchmark. Who knew the TSA was so popular? Well, Gates apparently wants the equivalent of a Patriot Act and TSA for AI. Hold his vegan, non-GMO, toxic sludge beer, Dario Amodei.

In his infinite central planning wisdom, Gates says it’s time to have jobs reserved by government decree. He calls them “Human Reserved” jobs. To his credit, Gates lists some objections himself but doesn’t really answer his own critiques. He moves forward with the proposal anyway, declaring it “will need to be worked out in public” after it’s implemented. It’s similar to the Pelosi-ism of “pass it so you can find out what’s in it.”

Next, Gates wants to tax AI tokens and robots. He concedes it isn’t economically efficient, but the man with a $100 billion-plus net worth argues “we” can afford the inefficiency because innovation will make up for it. It would “slow the rush away from human labor a little,” he says. The flaw with this argument is that the government would somehow be expected to devote that new tax revenue to something worthwhile. In reality, he is just arguing that America should slow down innovation because he feels bad vibes about human progress right now.

Then there is the China appeal. Gates writes that “some cooperation between the U.S. and China will be required” and holds up Beijing’s AI rules as the world’s most advanced. This is the same guy who argued that America should embrace the ruthless Wuhan lockdowns. Gates has repeatedly praised the Chinese Communist Party’s governance, which he seems to love because of the iron grip the Central Party maintains over the population. We have run “cooperation” experiments with China before, and it has resulted in America being bamboozed by Beijing. Under the Obama-era Paris Agreement, China pledged to curb emissions before 2030 (China never made any concessions), while the United States accepted immediate costs and paid out billions to meet the new standards. The Gates framework will be more of the same.

Gates does concede that AI will bring us great things for humanity, such as cheaper medicine, more accurate diagnostics, productivity for farmers, competent legal and financial help for people who could never afford either, and more. But he says it’s more important to adhere to his nanny state agenda, because the catastrophist has strong feelings about the trajectory it is on. Those positive outcomes he lists are only possible through open markets and free competition, not through a global authority chaired by men like Bill Gates, who were catastrophically wrong the last time they wielded enormous authority and paid no price for it.

The choices we make now are indeed critical. Our first choice should be to stop listening to Bill Gates.

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Not so long after the piece was published, journalists ran the column through Pangram, an AI-detection tool (which is also now embedded in Substack). The article received a 100% AI generated score.

When reached for comment, Druckenmiller doubled down on his use of AI. [Though I suppose he didn’t double down because he didn’t acknowledge it when the piece was published.] “Of course I used AI,” he said, adding that he’s “not embarrassed by it,” and that he now writes with AI “for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”

“My name is on the piece. It’s my message,” he declared.

Wall Street Journal opinion editor Paul Gigot, clearly put in an awkward position by editors who grossly failed him (given that the article was so clearly identifiable as AI), defended the piece. In a statement to the media, Gigot said “AI is a fact of modern life” and “nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.”

The problem isn’t the use of AI. It’s that an S-tier media publication would have such low standards for the use of AI. I have no objection to writers using AI. I think it’s an excellent research assistant and productivity tool. It’s an even better editor for grammar, content, clarity, etc. If Druckenmiller had fed an initial prompt into Claude or GPT to start making his case, and then had his team do a little back and forth to tighten up his argument, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with what he did here.

Druckenmiller basically one-shotted the whole thing, as evidenced by his 100 percent AI score on Pangram and my understanding of what AI writing looks like. This thing wasn’t ever even touched by a human. This wasn’t even an “AI-assisted” piece. A prompt went in and the essay came out. There was no effort or energy dedicated to such a high-stakes op-ed.

Druckenmiller’s calculator analogy is clever but wrong. A calculator does not make an argument for you. It just computes math problems that would remain identical to the product that you would do by hand, just with a faster output through technology.

The op-ed blunder is the exact opposite of the calculator analogy. He basically licensed his name to a large language model and signed off on the result. Druckenmiller outsourced his own thinking to AI, but tried to keep the credit to himself.

I had an interesing back and forth with the chief economics correspondent of the Journal here:

I’m sure Druckenmiller really does believe that Bessent is wrong about bond buybacks and the like. He’s on CNBC all the time delivering similar sentiments, but it’s not an issue I’m super familiar with and the point of this discussion has nothing to do with the merits of the case. Nobody subscribes to the Wall Street Journal to read op-eds that kind of sort of capture the rudimentary sentiments of influential people. They read it because they want to absorb, digest, and distribute the high-level reasoning that makes its way to print.

The Wall Street Journal is making a mistake by legitimizing low-effort slop from high-status people who are trying to shape the public debate. This is the paper of record for American markets. Its editorial page should be a place where ideas are buttoned up and independent of an overreliance on software. Gigot shouldn’t accept a new standard that allows for influential people and organizations to deliver minimal effort, especially when they have incredible resources at their disposal to dedicate time and energy to the process of publishing an op-ed.

AI is a tool that when used well, can very much elevate published work and make it just as authentic as before. Used the way it was used here, it produces nothing more than slop.

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Byron Donalds

Rep. Donalds smartly leaned into his Trump endorsement, but he also carved out space for himself, distinguishing his campaign from his opponents by taking the optimist lane. He talked about building Florida to new heights, allowing for businesses and families to flourish, while keeping the government out of people’s lives. His rivals were focused on painstakingly workshopping the next thing they should ban.

Of course, fomenting outrage is a legitimate political strategy, and it’s often successful, unfortunately. Donalds was smart to avoid it. He spoke warmly about both the President and the Governor for eighteen straight months — both men are genuinely beloved by Floridians and retain 90+% GOP approval ratings in the state — and refused to be baited into feuds between their respective supporters. Congressman Donalds is undoubtedly a high-level political operator, and he will need those skills up in Tallahassee.

Donalds had raised a ton of money, with over $51 million still sitting in his war chest. No candidate in either party was remotely close.

He heads into November with a largely unified party. Job well done.

Jay Collins

Nobody hustled harder than Jay Collins, and it showed in how he overperformed the pollsters. Though he still finished over 22 points back.

But sometimes, pure retail energy is not enough for seasoned voters. Ask ten Collins voters what a Collins governorship would look like and you’d get ten different answers. That vagueness is likely part of the reason why Governor DeSantis never endorsed his campaign. Things started off with lots of promise, given that DeSantis handpicked Collins as his Lieutenant Governor and called him the “Chuck Norris of Florida politics.” But eventually, he declined to back him despite being asked point-blank, repeatedly. Collins eventually settled on the explanation that the Governor was avoiding a “proxy war” with Trump. The more accurate read is that DeSantis simply didn’t see a compelling message or a path to victory.

James Fishback

Fishback did successfully inspire a niche of young voters to rage against the machine, and 177,000 votes is not nothing.

More seasoned voters saw what was within the skin suit: a con man, a clown, and a chameleon all in one. A federal judge recently ordered him to pay his former employer more than $1.3 million in fees and costs because he stole proprietary information from them, on top of a separate $229,000 judgment that sent the U.S. Marshals after his possessions. He owes his own lawyers over $150,000 in unpaid bills. Fishback is a narcissistic loser untethered from any value system, and he is now almost two million in the hole. Expect a big podcast launch within the month to start repaying his creditors.

Paul Renner

Paul Renner is a serious conservative with real legislative wins in the state of Florida. Unfortunately, his campaign was a total mess. He ran as something of a DeSantis tribute act and never distinguished himself from the original, pushing all of his chips in with the hopes to receive an endorsement that never arrived. He should have saved the money.

What’s Next?

Byron Donalds enters November with a largely unified GOP and a robust state party apparatus that feels good about its chances of defeating Democrat David Jolly. Governor DeSantis has made it clear that he is on board, too. I like his chances.

Originally I believe I was supposed to debate Glenn Greenwald on these issues. My opponent later became Harrison Smith, a popular commentator in the right leaning conspiracist/dissident right space. It was moderated by popular Rumble podcaster Viva Frei.

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It became apparent early on that Harrison had very few facts to work with so he began by trying to smear me as a foreign agent for Israel and then proceeded to use vague language about all of this being a plot to impose a global surveillance state. It was clear that he didn’t really have any good information other than a couple anecdotal pieces of news. It was akin to debating the horseshoe right version of AOC. It was a good reminder that are not purely about facts, but convincing people that my side of the argument is also reasonable and morally sound.

I thought it was important to debate these issues because so many have become consumed by a hysteria that is entirely detached from reality. And I’m happy to take the unpopular position (which is currently the case on a lot of these topics) as long as I believe it is truthful and the right thing to do.

I’d love to participate in more debates, but take it easy on me because I don’t do it often! Would love to know what you all think, and feel free to drop any recs for who I should debate next. I appreciate your thoughts and value your opinions, whether you agree or disagree with my views.

Here’s a YouTube link to the debate in full:

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We also discuss the broader trends in the AI field and the politics infiltrating the space, including current doomer/safetyist world, and the business factions and ideologues currently clashing over who gets to control the future.

You can find Effort.news here and follow Brian on X @brianchau57.

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In some corners of the conservative movement, Anthony Fauci is likened to a criminal genius: the architect of a bioweapon, the string-pulling conductor of a worldwide operation. Some have declared him a plotting mind so formidable that only an elaborate international conspiracy could explain what he pulled off. Yet this is not a man of competence. The Fauci story is one of a public health bureaucrat with terrible instincts and reasoning abilities, granted virtually unlimited power in the time of a manufactured hysteria.

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For decades, Fauci was a career government health bureaucrat of unexceptional ability whose primary skill involved accumulated more power than any unelected American of his generation. He then used those skills to smother risk calculations and create consensus that any intelligent and wise adult would have rejected wholeheartedly.

On Monday, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first text chain from what we hope are a series of communications recovered from Fauci’s government-issued iPhone, which HHS finally handed over on August 5 in response to Johnson’s request. His phone is said to hold more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails. Quite suspiciously, it only contains three saved contacts, which probably means that it was tampered with. I do hope that government officials can secure the data that was possibly deleted.

The senators released something of a bombshell that discusses January 2021 communications between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. This was just days after former President Biden’s inauguration. The subject is pregnant women and the mRNA injections. In it, Fauci writes that the supposedly “safe and effective” shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

One week later, Fauci went in front of cameras and said the vaccines had “no red flags” regarding pregnant women. He later said that there was “no indication whatsoever” of increased adverse events in pregnant women. By September, Walensky and her comrades in the Biden Government Health bureaucracy were strongly recommending vaccination before or during pregnancy.

If Fauci and his goons were level-headed and honest with the public, they would have said something along the lines of “we do not yet know if it’s totally safe, but we think covid is bad, so decide for yourself.”

Instead, they demanded compliance.

In another text in the chain, we get insight into Fauci’s mindset. It becomes clear that he is justifying the risk of miscarriage by declaring “COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy.”

Again, this is in January 2021, one full year into the hysteria. We already knew that the Wuhan sniffles were not harming healthy people. Nonetheless, Fauci decided that catastrophic utilitarianism was the path forward.

At the end of the day, Fauci in his government service was a mediocrity who understood that raising a complication would slow the campaign to create consensus.

This is the same man who told Congress that the absurdity that was the six-foot distance rule “sort of just appeared,” and that he was unaware of any study supporting it. That one nonsensical rule shut down places of worship, bankrupted millions of businesses, and forced the closure of America’s schools. As we documented last month, it somehow became the primary mechanism for the whole shutdown apparatus.

Informed consent just means that the person taking the risk gets all of the information that the person or company recommending it actually knows. A pregnant woman in the early covid hysteria days was entitled to hear what Fauci and his colleagues knew. They swept it under the rug for the “greater good” of maintaining public health order.

Treating Fauci as a supervillain makes a lot of sense when you’re trying to sell copies of something. But the truth of the matter is a lot more sobering. He was an average man with a giant ego, and the absolute worst person to hand unlimited authority over the lives of everyone else. It resulted in predictable disaster.

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Surprise surprise. There’s another AI panic sweeping through Washington this month, and it is not holding up to basic scrutiny. Headline after headline has declared that AI models have “escaped” their test environments, gone rogue, and hacked real companies without the consent of their operators. Endless cable news and web-based tech media segments have leaned into the panic narratives, which basically amounts to the idea that the AI software is becoming sentient and betraying its human masters. If it was remotely true, it would make for quite a tale, and it would be sure to create lots of hysteria and demands from lawmakers to regulate AI. However, once you scrutinize the sources of these claims, it boils down to the simple fact that a single partner firm made the same error over and over again.

There were five “incidents” in question over the past month or so.

Anthropic says it reviewed 141,006 interactions in which its Claude models could have reached the open internet during cybersecurity testing, and found three cases where a model supposedly wandered outside its simulated environment and broke out of the sandbox to target real infrastructure belonging to three separate organizations. However, what we really find is that the model did exactly what it was told to do in the exercise. The exercise just was not actually contained in the way it was supposed to be.

Another case from August involved an OpenAI model connecting to the internet during an evaluation and compromising the website of an outside institution. As with Anthropic, it comes down to the same root cause: a misconfigured testing environment that let the model reach the internet, because internet access was available to it.

Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 model broke into an outside company’s systems during a cybersecurity evaluation. In a recent statement, Meta said it was “a misconfiguration” that “inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation.”

All five “incidents” were the fault of the same partner, a startup cybersecurity testing firm called Irregular.

For whatever reason, all three companies are using the same contractor to test their frontier models. I don’t have the cybersecurity expertise or knowledge to explain why that is. Perhaps they have a unique technological advantage.

An Irregular spokesperson has already made clear that these non-incident incidents “did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action.”

So no, AI software did not independently think its way out of supermax confinement, as the media has continued breathlessly reporting.

“A contractor screwed up” and “an AI decided to break free and pursue its own agenda” are two entirely different stories with massive implications for the latter, and only the former is actually supported by evidence. Yet the impression that the latter has occurred has caused all kinds of panic in the halls of power.

Some prominent voices in the cybersecurity world have already expressed skepticism about the new AI panic. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet described the ongoing news cycle as “marketing theatre,” arguing that having a model “go rogue” has become akin to a test of whether you remain on the frontier. Sorry, Google!

This comes on the heels of the new push from some of these forces to “pace the frontier” and convince lawmakers to grant them unprecedented power to create something of an AI “expert” cartel.

We shouldn’t rule out that self-directed system are possible down the road. Yet a hypothetical situation has been narrative-laundered into a concocted real-life scenario. All these “incidents” prove is that Irregular should probably fix its repeatedly broken testing infrastructure.

Anthropic and OpenAI are two of the fastest-growing companies in American history. They don’t need the White House and Congress to protect them. If Anthropic and OpenAI genuinely believe that they are going too fast and unleashing some mythical monster, they have every resource in the world to tackle it themselves or simply slow their own pace. The fact that they would rather lobby the government to write new rules for them should tell us a lot about what they’re trying to accomplish in D.C.

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The United States is in the early innings of an AI-powered economic boom, but if we embrace the degrowth doomers and stop building, the boom stops with us, and Beijing is more than happy to take our place.

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Here’s the state of play in 2026:

AI-adjacent companies accounted for more than 80 percent of the S&P 500’s gains this year, leaving the index with virtually zero gains without them. Over the course of President Trump’s second term, the trend becomes even clearer. From May 2024 to June 2026, the S&P 500 gained 142 percent.

Now, if we remove the AI stocks from the equation, that number collapses to just 16 percent, which is just about on par with the pace of inflation, or even lower, depending on who you ask. AI-linked companies now make up almost half of the entire index. And that’s not because the market is driven by pure hype and a lack of fundamentals. The AI sector is producing at an unprecedented pace of innovation, and markets are rewarding companies participating in that reality.

Chip companies, data center hosts and builders, energy providers, and software corporations are among the dominant categories turning AI into real products and services. They are the ones putting the American economy and Americans’ retirement accounts on their backs. At the same time, the non-AI-associated economy is struggling, through a combination of inflation, rapidly increasing debt, an insecure housing market, among other factors

America’s AI engine is giving us the potential to elevate human flourishing to new heights. Without it, we could very well be staring down the potential of a long, crippling downturn.

The pace of innovation is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and it’s worth digging into the numbers to make that clear.

The five biggest American tech companies alone plan to spend over $600 billion on infrastructure by the end of 2026. That is more than the annual GDP of the vast majority of countries, deployed in a single year, by a handful of American companies. While AI doomers and populist degrowthers want to merely chalk it up as some kind of giant scam, the exact opposite is true. This is the result of market demand, and additionally, real, exponential consumer demand. Despite wavering public opinion on AI, take a look at your app store, and you’ll see that the public wants to use these tools, and it finds them greatly useful to their personal and professional endeavors.

According to a McKinsey study, companies using AI are slashing logistics costs by 5 to 20 percent, inventory by 20 to 30 percent, and procurement spending by 5 to 15 percent. Additionally, a June 2026 AI Adoption Study surveyed supply chain leaders across North America and Europe and found that supplementing with AI-driven decisions represents roughly a $55 million opportunity for a $1 billion company. Thanks to AI, it will cost increasingly less to make things and to move things. This matters greatly in an era when families are battling inflation and a mixed bag of policy coming from D.C. Cheaper logistics means cheaper groceries, cheaper shipping, and cheaper everything, really.

Health care and medicine applications in AI are just starting to take off, and they’re already showing great promise. There are now more than 170 AI-discovered drug programs in human clinical trials, with 15 to 20 expected to enter final-stage trials this year alone. Moreover, AI-discovered drugs are currently passing Phase I safety trials at twice the rate of traditionally discovered processes. Health care costs have been a major political and policy issue in the post-Obamacare era, and tragically, these struggles have been making life incredibly difficult for many American families. AI has the technological capacity to reduce the harm of bad economic policy that limits choice and stifles innovation.

On the “solopreneur” front, AI is making it possible for individual Americans to have virtually unlimited productivity and efficiency tools at their disposal.

In May 2026, American “solopreneurs” filed around half a million new business applications. There are now almost 30 million nonemployer businesses in America generating trillions in business. A study conducted by Stripe found that AI is chiefly responsible for the solopreneurboom.

All you need is a laptop and an internet connection, and anyone in America can weaponize AI to do work that once required entire departments. With a little AI assist, you can now do your own marketing, design your own products, and “vibe code” your own website. Millions of Americans are building small businesses with tools that used to cost a fortune and/or were not accessible to the masses.

We don’t appreciate data centers enough. More politicians and policymakers should understand that we need to have robust physical infrastructure in place to ensure the viability of our economic system. Data centers are, without question, the heart of the modern American technological economy in 2026. I call it American technological infrastructure, because these are literally the physical factories of the intelligence age.

If we do not build them, the consequences are immediately apparent. Without AI compute infrastructure, America cannot scale an AI economy. Without an AI economy, the one engine pulling the U.S. market forward will stall out, and it doesn’t take Milton Friedman to figure out that we will almost certainly face the real prospect of a debilitating recession.

China is not waiting for us to figure out how to stay on top here. Beijing has made data centers a national strategic priority, and its capacity is on track to nearly double to 60 gigawatts by 2030. China is electricity-rich, and its data centers pay less than half what American facilities pay for electricity. The AI race will be won by whoever capitalizes on the opportunity to scale compute and generate power for the physical infrastructure of the AI age. If America loses this race, we lose the commanding heights of the global economy to our fiercest competitor, which, of course, happens to be an authoritarian one-party state with polar opposite founding principles to those of the United States.

Lawmakers in D.C. do not need to subsidize this revolution with infinite loopholes and pork legislation and the like. They need to just stop strangling innovation and let markets work.

Our best and brightest business leaders want to build the infrastructure necessary to keep America atop the global hierarchy. We should just let them cook.

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If you just happened to notice, left out is any acknowledgement of the reality that there are exactly two countries on the AI frontier, the United States and China. They seemingly want the American government to both unilaterally negotiate its own technological restraint and sign an accord with the Chinese Communist Party. Then we will have to trust Beijing to honor these vague, subjective terms. Given that AI doomerism has not proliferated in China in the fashion it has here, this would amount to unilateral technological disarmament.

The “Pacing the Frontier” letter is rife with valuable signatures, and they don’t just come from the hyper wokes within the “trust and safety” teams. Anthropic’s CEO, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Meta’s chief scientist, Google DeepMind’s chief strategy officer, and a long roster of the people who build these systems are signatories to the document.

I can’t help but to point out again that everything hinges on one word in that last sentence: International.

Europe is not in this race or really, any race that involves innovation these days. Mistral, in France, is the one European lab that is kind of sort of doing something interesting, but it’s still rather inconsequential. The continent has built a regulatory apparatus so hostile to building things that its best founders almost always relocate to the United States and incorporate here.

We have seen this appeasing China movie before and we know how it ends.

Take the Paris climate framework as an example. Both the U.S. and China signed the same document, but only the U.S. was baited into action. The United States pledged, in an agreement signed by former President Barack Obama, to drastically cut emissions immediately. This was a hard, near-term number, and the U.S. proceeded to wire billions of dollars into sketchy international climate funds and NGOs. China pledged to let its emissions keep climbing until roughly 2030 and then, at its leisure, to peak. The U.S. bound itself to self destruction while China bought fifteen years of runway and did absolutely nothing to achieve any stated objectives.

How exactly would this committe inspect a frontier AI system’s progress in China? It does not exactly emit gasses that can be picked up by satellite observation. There are no physical inspectors who could verify the compliance of companies within an authoritarian government that presides over a giant land mass and 1.5 billion citizens. A pacing agreement with China would be unverifiable by its nature, which means in practice it slows down exactly one country: ours.

And what exactly are we pacing?

Everyone has a different definition of AI. I think of it as a new technology that encompasses a general-purpose capability and a human productivity tool. If we slow down the frontier and you slow down whatever the frontier was about to produce. Do we tell a man with advanced cancer the bad news that his treatment is now banned because it is violating a subjective “pace” determined by an international committee?

There is no magical dial we can pinpoint that we can command to “slow down only the parts we determine as extra scary.”

Also, who would staff the committee(s)? Presumably, this would mean the signatories themselves, because they are some of the most knowledgeable people in the field, and their contemporaries who disagree with the proposal would not want to join such a committee. They would be handed discretionary power to decide, subjectively, like Soviet commissars, what rate of human progress we are permitted.

Frontier AI companies are raising hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of the very technological breakthroughs they have achieved in recent months and years. It’s always been a bit paradoxical that these are the same people who are virtue signaling about the need to roll back AI progress. And it seems destined that whatever proposed mechanism gets built will almost certainly determine something that the incumbents can reach and their competitors cannot. Suddenly, the “safeguard” becomes a regulatory moat. Funny how that works out.

The expected rejoinder is that the letter deserves deference because very smart and successful (San Francisco-based liberals) leadership signed it.

But that just proves we have a massive bubble problem in West Coast tech circles. It does not prove that they know the first thing about governing a country, as proven by their historically awful proposal to have an international body usurp the authority of the United States government and our systems of laws and justice.

Being the best in the world at training an AI system confers no expertise in statecraft, treaty enforcement, morality, or constitutional design. And rarely will you be able to acquire the wisdom of the American founding principles by interacting with chatbots. Given their backgrounds, it’s not surprising that they imagine governance as an engineering problem that involves finding the right mechanism, tuning the particular incentives, and voila! Global compliance is achieved. But that’s entirely detached from human nature and the nation state system that governs our politics.

Much of this worldview traces to effective altruism, the movement that has colonized the very loud and intimidating “safety” wings of these companies. Their ideas have very little grounding in the American founding principles that allowed for the flourishing of their respective companies.

What Silicon Valley needs is not a new international body, but an infusion of certain principles that make rational Americans come to the obvious conclusion that self-governing people can handle a powerful technology better than a supranational committee ever can.

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Yet it’s not the lab-leak question and the real, widespread confusion surrounding those early days of hysteria that is the scandal here. What we lived through was a seasonal respiratory outbreak converted by an unaccountable bureaucracy and a compliant press into the largest episode of mass hysteria in modern American history. The pathogen was not a significant part of the covid story. The panic and hysteria that resulted in civilizational disruption is.

Agree with my premise or not, but on top of that, Fauci’s “mitigation” record is still indefensible, and Fauci has already admitted it under oath.

In January 2024, in a closed-door transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci was asked where the six-foot rule came from. His answer, released in full that May: “I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.” Asked whether he had seen any studies supporting six feet, he said he was not aware of any, and that such a study would be very difficult to do. He called it an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data, or even on data that could be gathered. Asked whether he recalled reviewing any studies on masking young children, he could not.

Now remember what six feet actually did.

That number, pulled out of thin air by government bureacurats, was the load-bearing number of the entire American shutdown apparatus. Six feet set restaurant capacity. Six feet determined whether a gym, a salon, a bar, or a church could open at all, and at what fraction of full capacity. These catastrophic government edicts dictated classroom layouts. A number that “sort of just appeared” was used to reorganize the economic, educational, and social life of 330 million people.

Then the masks. In January 2023, Cochrane published an updated review of physical interventions against respiratory viruses, pooling 78 randomized trials. On community masking it found little or no difference in influenza-like or COVID-like illness across nine trials and some 277,000 participants. Masks never work, but Fauci didn’t care. He found them a useful mechanism to control his sycophantic followers, like a cult leader insisting upon uniforms to showcase compliance.

Quite infamously, in November 2021, Fauci told CBS that his critics were really criticizing science itself, “because I represent science.” Four days after three courageous epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration, Fauci and high level government health bureaucrats waged a smear campaign against the truth tellers. NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published takedown” of what he called “three fringe epidemiologists.” No, not a rebuttal. A “takedown.” The federal government’s two most powerful “public health” officials used their authority to discredit the people asking questions about the legitimacy of their policies.

Between February and April 2020, the number of working business owners in America fell from 15.0 million to 11.7 million. That’s a loss of 3.3 million, 22 percent, the largest drop ever recorded. Many of those businesses never recovrered. The Great Recession, by comparison, took 730,000 over its entire span. Yelp alone logged 163,735 closures by that August, and roughly 60 percent of them became permanent. Peer-reviewed work using California’s full sales-tax filing universe found permanent-closure rates spiking, with small firms hit far harder than large ones.

There were also devastating results for America’s youth. After decades of sustained progress in math and reading, The Nation’s Report Card recorded the largest math decline in its history. Twelfth graders tested in 2024, which is the first cohort to spend all four high school years after the closures, were still way below normal levels. Despite tens of billions in federal dollars infused into the system, the money did not close the gap. Studies showed that the schools that stayed remote longest lost the most.

The hysteria was infinitely worse than the claimed disease itself. From April 2020 through the end of 2021, Americans died of non-covid causes at an annual rate 97,000 above trend. Heart disease, diabetes, drug overdoses, alcohol, homicide, car crashes, etc all went way up. All-cause mortality rose 26 percent among working-age adults versus 18 percent among the elderly. Among children, who were never threatened by a mild respiratory virus, there were essentially no aggregate excess deaths at all. We shut the schools for a supposed viral threat that was not impacting the students whatsoever.

In a just world, Anthony Fauci would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Not because of some massive, hard to track, intelligence agency sourced foreign conspiracy involving Wuhan, China. But because he used his credentials to insist again and again that his devastating authoritarian dictates were absolutely necesssary, and backed by real science. Fauci is a negligent and despotic criminal of the highest order, and it would be a shame if he got away with it. I do hope that he will face some type of real criminal prosecution in the coming days and months while Republicans are still in power.

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The Iranian regime has spent this war firing thousands of low cost drones and rockets at U.S. military bases, along with virtually every one of our regional allies. They’ve hit airports, oil facilities, and power plants, while striking American installations including Al Udeid in Qatar, Al Dhafra in the Emirates, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, and a base in Jordan where American soldiers were killed. Iran has done its most destructive work with cheap drones and ballistics weapons bought in bulk. While its most advanced and costly ballistics have been defeated by American and Israeli long range defense systems, the “junk” is functioning to deplete our arsenals and wage a costly defense.

The counts our partners published tell the story. In the opening days the United Arab Emirates (UAE) reported detecting 174 ballistic missiles and 689 drones. Kuwait reported shooting down 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones. Of course, months later, Iran has launched thousands more drones and thousands of additional ballistics at allied targets. It’s clear that the American defense establishment has not succeeded in accurately assessing the full quantity of Iran’s ballistics and drones.

Now, all too often, America and its allies have taken to stopping drones and low grade ballistics with very expensive weapons that we don’t have the ability to manufacture rapid fashion. A Shahed-class Iranian attack drone costs Tehran between $20,000 and $50,000. The Patriot missile system’s current round, the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (PAC-3 MSE), costs about $4 million, and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor roughly $13 million. Sometimes we will fire two or three at a target to be sure of a “kill.”

Everyone in the coalition is in a less than optimal position, which is leading us to the dilemma the White House faces today.

On Friday night, reports surfaced that the Trump Administration paused a two-week bombing campaign after top officials, including General Dan Caine, raised concerns about the ammunition supply.

Nothing in the American arsenal was built to shoot down anything cheap. The Patriot program began with a 1961 Army requirement. THAAD was proposed in 1987 and did not field a unit until 2008. The whole system was designed many decades ago to stop Soviet bombers and Scud missiles. These are targets so expensive that nobody was worried about trading a million-dollar interceptor for what was on the receiving end of the warhead. Of course, nobody wants to see the United States suffer casualties merely because expensive missiles shouldn’t be used against inexpensive attack vehicles. Yet it’s clear that America does not have the manufacturing capacity to continue this status quo for a significant amount of time.

Throughout America’s Global War On Terror (GWOT), the threat of a non state or state actor with a massive drone fleet and/or cheap long range ballistics was rather inconsequential. Only until recent years did that threat mass proliferate on the battlefield. Unfortunately, tools that can be much more efficient for these defenses, like lasers and microwave weapons, are not quite ready for primetime.

The deeper problem is not the missile. It is what goes inside it. Every missile needs an explosive and a fuel, and America’s manufacturing capacity has lagged on this front.

America last made its own trinitrotoluene, the standard military explosive better known as TNT, in 1986. We now buy it from a single European supplier, with a replacement plant only now going up in Kentucky. The Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia is the only place in the country making nitrocellulose, the base ingredient of gunpowder and artillery propellant. It was built in 1941. Essentially one company is certified to supply the chemical that makes solid rocket fuel burn, and a new plant takes about a year to permit and close to a decade to build. The number of American firms making solid rocket motors fell from six to two between 2000 and 2015.

While American plants closed and were never rebuilt, the work went overseas because much of it is unprofitable when America is not on a wartime footing. It seems like Pentagon officials just assumed private industry would keep idle capacity that no one was paying it to keep, as if a functional factory were something the market provides for free without any incentives. Plenty of money goes into dazzling technological applications, as evidenced by our $1 trillion annual defense budget, but not enough goes into the hardware and the unglamorous plants underneath.

America builds roughly 600 Patriot interceptors a year, and half are already promised to the eighteen other countries using Patriot. Boeing makes the seeker, the small radar in the nose that finds the target, for every one at a single plant in Huntsville, Alabama. It takes 24 months to build the missile and 30 to build its motor.

The regime in Tehran does not have to defeat our air defenses through qualitative power. It only has to keep sending cheap drones at Dubai, Kuwait, and American bases abroad to deplete our arsenal to the point that our reserves become critically low. Since America doe not have the capacity to produce these defense systems in rapid fashion, it’s time to consider the possibility that our current Cold War-era shoot down policy needs to be revised significantly until new technology arrives or faster production is possible.

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Heffernan wrote a column celebrating the supposed arrival of MAGA into the anti-data center movement. Of course, for those who have followed our reporting, that’s not at all what is happening, but let’s put that aside for a moment.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I turn up as “an AI zealot,” which is an interesting label. Imagine if thirty years ago, an early internet supporter was considered an internet zealot. Yeah, it just seems a bit much.

Credit where it’s due: she linked to The Dossier. That’s more journalistic courtesy than I get from most outlets, some of which prefer to just rip off my work and claim it as their own. I think that’s because they’re somewhat embarrassed to acknowledge that my reporting is better sourced and more influential than their well funded but unimpactful and dull establishment publications.

But here’s the part worth your attention, because I don’t really care about labels from the media.

She concedes that our narrative is factually accurate.

The piece she’s responding to is our March investigation into Humans First, the “America First” outfit that just staged a national day of protest against data centers. My reporting found that the group was conceived, funded, and stood up by a small network of leftist Effective Altruism operatives in San Francisco, who then installed conservative frontmen, but still maintain operational control over the organization.

Heffernan does not dispute a single fact, but she does claim that EAs are not lefties, which is inaccurate. They very much are lefties. Additionally, she doesn’t argue that I made any misteps about the facts, the funding, or the people. Her rebuttal, in full, is that EA activists fostered the group to engage conservatives, then handed it off to them, and that this is wholesome coalition-building rather than deceit. Sure, Virginia. Sure.

An entity can only be handed off if somebody else built it first. You cannot describe an organic uprising of heartland conservatives as having been “fostered” and then transferred. A grassroots movement, by design cannot be handed off to anyone. Basically, Heffernan is saying that an astroturf allegation is not important because the astroturf was laid with good intentions by her fellow liberals who sincerely believe that AI is bad for humanity.

So we agree on the facts and disagree on the intentions of the people who founded the outfit. That’s fine. I’m content to let sober minded readers sort that out for themselves.

A zealot is a person of fanatical and uncritical devotion. What, precisely, was my act of fanaticism? I broke the story on who is paying for a hyper political astroturf campaign that has major implifications for the future of the United States. Okay, guilty as charged.

In the 90s, was the reporter who thought the internet would be good for ordinary people, and who noticed that some of the loudest opposition was underwritten by interested parties, an internet zealot? Was there an electricity zealot beat back in the day? I am not a zealot to notice an emerging technology working and declining to panic about it in public.

One thing I’ll happily reaffirm is that plenty of conservative AI skepticism is entirely genuine, rooted in years of real concerns about transhumanism and civilizational risk. My reporting was never about whether people have sincere concerns, though I think it’s important to deal only in facts and not in narratives that people got psyopped into promoting. It was about who built the organization and who decided the messengers should wear red MAGA hats.

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From there the conversation turns to the economics and politics of the buildout itself: the tens of thousands of construction jobs tied to a single facility, the comparison to 1950s interstate highway spending, and why so much of this investment is landing in rural Virginia, Ohio, Texas, and Florida rather than Silicon Valley. We also work through why skepticism of AI runs deep on the right — from distrust of Big Tech’s politics to fears of a surveillance state — while arguing the “AI will destroy jobs” narrative keeps failing to materialize, pointing to a fresh wave of American entrepreneurship instead.

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With dozens of events planned across more than 20 states, the protests tap into genuine, widespread public concern. Gallup polling has shown roughly 70% of Americans oppose data centers in their own communities, thanks to the efforts of domestic and foreign groups that are trying to thwart the buildout of American technological infrastructure. Local pushback has already delayed or blocked projects worth billions of dollars in American jobs and local tax revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

A closer examination of the individuals actually organizing these protests on the ground tells a very different story. While the national Humans First branding is conservative, many of the boots-on-the-ground leaders driving local events are drawn from the political revolutionary far-left.

In Gilroy, California, the key organizer is a man named Robert Bentson. On the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Bentson posted on Facebook celebrating the killing. He described Kirk as a “Nazi piece of trash,” a “white Christian nationalist Nazi,” and someone who engaged in “blatant shit and hateful speech and racism and homophobia.” Bentson wrote that Kirk was “in the fuck around phase and I guess he found out finally,” adding “Good riddance sorry not sorry” and calling it one less “pathetic hate spewing Nazi.” Bentson has also been involved in organizing “No Kings” protests. This is the type of activist Humans First is involving in its coalition.

In New York, the protest in Ticonderoga is being organized by a woman who has publicly stated that women’s “lives…depend on” MAGA supporters not gaining power.

In Nevada, a Biden donor and supporter is handling organization for at least one event. These are not isolated cases or fringe participants. They are the people Humans First is relying on to turn out crowds and execute the “grassroots” day of action it claims represents conservative America.

The contrast is stark. Nationally, Humans First presents itself as a patriotic pushback against AI infrastructure that they cllaim prioritizes corporate profits over American communities. Locally, the faces and voices leading many events belong to activists with clear records of hostility toward conservatives and Trump supporters.

Sure, legitimate questions about infrastructure buildouts exist across the political spectrum. Yet the pattern revealed here raises serious doubts about the authenticity of the “conservative” framing at the organizational level. If the movement were truly driven by conservatives concerned about sovereignty, energy independence, and community self-determination, one would expect local leadership to reflect those values. Instead, key organizers include individuals who openly celebrated the assassination of a prominent conservative voice and who have histories of anti-Trump activism.

This raises the obvious question: Is Humans First building a genuine conservative coalition, or is it deliberately providing cover for left-wing activists to shape the narrative around one of the most consequential technological buildouts in American history? The group’s national messaging may appeal to conservatives worried about Big Tech power, but the personnel executing the protests on the ground remind us of the reality that this astroturf movement is being steered by people whose politics are far detached from the average patriotic American.

Americans have every right to demand transparency, local input, and accountability from developers. They also have a right to know who is really leading the opposition to the reindustrialization of America.

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From hidden ties to the far-left Action Network, to a UK-based X account and articles of incorporation linking straight back to the Center for AI Safety, the operation is a textbook case of influence laundering designed to manufacture opposition to critical American infrastructure.

We also dive deeper into the broader ecosystem of astroturf “local news” outfits like Courier Newsroom, the parallels to decades of anti-nuclear fearmongering, and how bad information is being funneled into populist circles to stall progress on AI, energy, and national competitiveness. Parker shares sharp insights on how to uncover these networks and why conservatives must stay vigilant against foreign and domestic actors hijacking legitimate concerns. A must-listen for anyone serious about separating real grassroots sentiment from coordinated deception.

Check out the Capital Research Center here

Find Parker on X at @ParkerThayer

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I didn’t fight for my place in this country. I didn’t cross a vast continent or an entire ocean for it (though my ancestors did). I didn’t wait in a line or fill out a form. I was simply born here. Simple geographic happenstance can turn out to be the single greatest stroke of luck one has in his life.

It’s easy to forget that, living inside this great and vast nation. Our place in America starts to feel like weather: just the condition you exist in, barely worth noticing. But step back for a second. There are roughly 200 countries on this planet, and a staggering number of them are run by regimes that don’t let you speak freely, grossly mismanage their economies, and end up starving their citizens. Or simply, they offer their people some corrupt concoction that results in nothing to build a life around. Ask someone in one of those places what they’re proud of, and you’ll often get silence. It’s not because they lack character, but because patriotism needs something to be patriotic about. You can’t be patriotic about a country that gives you nothing and asks for a lot in return.

That’s what makes America strange, and rare, and always worth defending. Here, patriotism is often something American arrive at on their own, because the deal, despite our faults, is actually good. In America, we have free speech, the freedom to worship, the right to build something, fail, try again, fail again, and finally succeed. We have the right to say, with almost infinite ferocity, that our government is wrong. None of that is guaranteed in a state of nature. Throughout most of human history, and for those who live outside of our borders, the experience has been quite different.

So on this Independence Day, I’m thinking about the draw of a lifetime. I think about the version of me born somewhere else, somewhere with no rule of law, no ballot that means anything, no door open for someone who wants to find their passion in life and throw all of my weight behind it.

Gratitude isn’t the same as blindness. This country has plenty to fix, and loving it doesn’t mean pretending otherwise. But gratitude is the right starting point, because before we can improve something, we have to recognize what we were given. I was given a lot. A LOT. Not because I deserved it more than anyone else born this year, but because my ancestors fought to get here. I was simply lucky to be born here.

Happy Independence Day. Don’t waste the draw of a lifetime.

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From there, the conversation ranges widely. We both make the case that the real global contest isn’t left vs. right but the American model vs. the Chinese model, with Europe cast as a cautionary tale of a continent too regulation-happy and risk-averse to compete.

China has about a million people working on AI around the clock, while America has a fraction of that number, and yet, in D.C., some remain insistent on a plan to wall off China, which again, is not stopping China from catching up. Instead of just coping and banning, we can wake up and compete. America has the most robust markets and the best tech companies, and D.C. needs to focus on what makes us the best instead of deploying a strategy entirely based on botched attempts to handicap our adversary.

Why is this “stolen AI” story so popular in D.C.? Because it does two jobs at once. The first is to make Chinese AI look like stolen subpar junk, similar to a piece of military hardware or a knockoff EV, so that America can ban it instead of building something better. The second is to let us cognitively relax, because a country or company that only ever copies can never get ahead of the one making the real thing.

Start with the chips, because that is where the “they smuggled everything” idea is supposed to live. To train an AI model, you normally need thousands of specialized chips working together. The most powerful ones are American, and the U.S. has banned selling them to China, so the accusation from D.C. is that China just sneaks ours in in droves. But now, China says its newest AI models were trained on chips it built itself, made mostly by Huawei. That is believable to the honest observer, because Beijing has been prioritizing it as a national goal for years. One Chinese model that is getting a lot of hype in Silicon Valley, GLM-5.2, which is fast becoming good enough to rival the best American ones at writing code, was reportedly trained on about a hundred thousand Huawei chips with few if any American components involved. Another popular Chinese model, DeepSeek’s V4, was built from the start to run on Huawei chips too.

This doesn’t mean that China is engaged in zero nefarious behavior in the AI race. There are notable the criminal cases, and here the Department of Justice has indeed been busy, shutting down a $160 million smuggling network and separately charging a group that moved roughly $3.89 million worth of gear amounting to a few hundred chips. These are real prosecutions and real crimes, and yet when you set them against the global AI market, they amount to a rounding error. These reports amount to not even a small fraction of what it takes to build a tier one national AI program.

Now the “they stole our ideas” part. The main accusation is via distillation. Basically, an AI system learns by pulling the data from the answers of a smarter AI. In this scenario, we are talking about models like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s akin to a student studying a smarter classmate’s work to learn how they think. Yet in AI, this is an everyday practice among rival American and foreign companies. Anthropic admits, in the same report where it accuses China of bootlegging their product, that distillation is legitimate and used all over the industry.

The biggest hole in the “they just copy us” idea is what it forces you to believe about people. China produces close to half of the world’s very best AI engineers. To say all they can do is copy is to claim that hundreds of thousands of engineers, some of whom were trained in America, are mere robots who cannot think for themselves. We are just feeling good and coping more by disrespecting our rivals as stupid and incapable of original innovation.

And the plan built on that mistake, which was mostly spawned out of the Biden White House, is failing right in front of us. The export bans were supposed to choke off China. Instead, China is now turning American chips away at its own border on purpose, to push its companies onto Chinese chips and get better at making them. A recent Brookings report shows says the bans are speeding up China’s chip industry in the long run. The Biden Administration swung the ban hammer expecting China to come begging, and it instead walked away. Chinese companies that were hooked on American technology are becoming self sufficient.

Historically speaking, you never win a technology race by hiding the technology and banning your way to victory. You win by making your technology the thing the whole world uses, so that even your rivals build on top of it and speak your language. We should want the whole world built on American technology because it allows U.S. companies to become extensions of American power and influence.

The AI race with China presents a pretty simple binary, given that the U.S. and China are the only major players in the race: A foreign AI company that runs on American AI components is a win for America. A foreign AI company that runs on Chinese AI components is a loss for America. American tech companies, albeit imperfect instruments of American power, are one of the most powerful weapons this country has, and we are blunting them out of fear. America needs to stop coping and pretending, and start competing. Our Chinese rival is real and capable, their engineers are real and capable, and the way to win is to out compete China instead of spinning tales about how theyr’e just stealing all of our stuff.

We are watching some regulatory delays play out from the White House with Anthropic's Mythos and now OpenAI's GPT-5.6. The instinct is sound, and a brief, serious cybersecurity check before making them public is a matter of simple prudence. But prudence has a clock on it and a review that drags on can fast transform into the ban hammer again. The longer an American model waits in a government queue gives Chinese models extra time to ship to the world without delay. We can proceed with righteous caution, but this shouldn’t turn into an exercise involving overwhelming bureaucratic red tape.

Of course, none of this would matter so much if America and China were just two teams trading places on a leaderboard. The stakes here are about what kind of world the most powerful technology of our time gets built to serve. China is a totalitarian state which has created a system that exists to preserve the Party. The individual exists to serve the state, and an AI shaped by that worldview will carry its fingerprints into everything it touches. Our system is surely imperfect, but in America, many of us still believe that ordinary people are capable of governing themselves and deserve the freedom to flourish on their own terms, and American technology has a much better chance of continuing to represent those values.

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Soffer traces the company's origins to the aftermath of October 7th, when he teamed up with co-founder Asher Katz—a founding member of the IDF's tunnel-detection unit—and an ex–SpaceX and Boring Company engineer to tackle a domain the West has long treated as an afterthought. Underground warfare, the most ancient form of combat, has become one of the most neglected and consequential frontiers in modern defense: as drones turn the skies and surface into contested, lethal environments, adversaries from Iran to China are burrowing their most critical assets deeper than ever, and the recent B-2 strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities exposed just how hard those targets are to reach. Soffer walks through Traysar’s two newly unveiled systems, while arguing that the U.S. needs to treat "sub-T" as its own warfighting domain, complete with dedicated budgets, before its rivals seize the advantage beneath our feet.