“Air and water have traditionally been regarded as ‘free’ goods, but the enormous costs to society of past and present pollution show that they are not free… The policy question is how and by whom they will be paid, not whether.” — Our Common Future (Brundtland Report), 1987^¹

“Where ground-water use exceeds the recharge capacity of local aquifers, regulatory or fiscal controls become essential.” — Our Common Future, 1987²

“Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international resources required.” — The Earth Charter, 2000³

“Politicians tend not to run for office on promises of making the price of goods reflect their real (higher) costs for the sake of sustainable development; consumers tend not to demand to pay such higher costs.” — World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2002⁴

“…the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water… should have a market value.” — Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of Nestlé, 2005⁵

“Governments should establish and scale up integrated water resource management schemes, bearing fully in mind that water plays multifaceted roles, including for drinking, sanitation, agriculture, industry and energy.” — UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, 2012⁶

“By 2030, implement integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate.” — Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda, SDG 6.5, 2015⁷

“Water and energy prices need to be adjusted to incentivise the recycling of treated waste water.” — German Development Institute (DIE), 2016⁸

“Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025.” — Report on the Food & Water Watch study, October 6, 2026⁹

Introduction

Water is the most basic resource there is. Every person, farm, factory, and city depends on it, and nothing replaces it. Whoever controls water controls everything downstream of it, including food, energy, housing, and population settlement. That is why water has been in Technocracy’s crosshairs since 1932.

Technocracy is a resource-based economic system. It replaces the free market’s price mechanism with the scientific management of resources by unelected experts. The original Technocrats of the 1930s said so openly. Their modern heirs are more careful. They speak of “sustainable development,” “integrated water resources management,” “full-cost pricing,” and “natural asset” valuation. The goal has not changed. They want an inventory of every resource on the planet, a meter on every faucet or pipe, and a central authority deciding who gets what and at what price.

This paper follows that goal in the documents from 1987 to today. It ends with the price shock American households are now absorbing. A 62 percent rise in water bills over ten years is not a random market event. It is what policy produces when it was designed for exactly that result.

The Technocratic Blueprint: Water as an Engineered Flow

The Technocracy Study Course, first published by Technocracy Inc. between 1934 and 1936, set out the intellectual foundation.¹⁰ In its analysis of the Price System, it explained that value has nothing to do with how important a thing is to human life. It comes only from scarcity:

“Both air and water are completely indispensable for the maintenance of life. Air is so abundant that one need not exchange any commodity for its use. It is accordingly without value… In a region of heavy rainfall and abundant water supply… water has no value; it cannot be bought or sold. In arid regions, however… due to its scarcity, [water] is bought and sold or traded in, and accordingly has value.”¹¹

The Technocrats of that day understood that you can only control and monetize water by making it scarce. Water that is plentiful cannot be managed through price. Scarce water can be. The policy implication follows: declare scarcity, real or manufactured, and control follows.

The Study Course also treated water as one of the engineered systems of the planned city. Its list of design requirements includes “a system of water supply, of heat, gas and electric power” and “trunk connections for traffic, supplies, water, energy, and so on, between the city and the world outside.”¹² In the Technate, water is not owned. It is routed.

The same document demanded total registration of all assets, continuous inventory and the specific registration of each individual’s consumption.¹³ In the 1930s, the technology to do that did not exist. It does now.

1987: Trilateral Commission’s Gro Harlem Brundtland Reframed Water

The modern revival of Technocracy came through the doctrine of sustainable development. Its founding document is Our Common Future, published in 1987 by the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development. The Commission was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a member of the Trilateral Commission. In 1991, James MacNeill wrote Beyond Interdependence for the Trilateral Commission, a book that “extends the Commission’s analysis of the issues of global change” in support of the Brundtland report.¹⁴

Brundtland set three things in motion on water that still govern policy today.

First, it took away water’s status as a free good. In the report’s words, air and water “are not free,” and “the policy question is how and by whom they will be paid, not whether.”¹⁵ It said costs can be “internalized” by enterprises, which may then “pass the costs along to the consumer.”

Second, it called for regulatory and fiscal controls. Where groundwater use exceeds recharge, “regulatory or fiscal controls become essential.”¹⁶ For agriculture, it prescribed “the regulation of water quantities, and more rational water charges.”¹⁷

Third, it tied water pricing to energy pricing. The report praised “energy pricing policies” after the 1970s oil shocks and noted “the potential of similar pricing policies for other raw materials.”¹⁸ It urged countries to see “how far real energy costs can be passed on to the consumer.”¹⁹

The report also cast water as a source of international conflict. It cataloged river disputes from the Rio Grande to the Nile and the Euphrates.²¹ That framing laid the groundwork for “transboundary” management. Once a resource is defined as a cross-border problem, national control can be called inadequate.

1992 to 2002: Agenda 21, the Earth Charter and the Corporate Partners

The Brundtland report “provided the momentum for the landmark 1992 Rio Summit that laid the foundations for the global institutionalization of sustainable development.” Agenda 21 set out 40 chapters, including the “conservation and management of natural resources.”²¹ As I have written elsewhere, Agenda 21 was created and scripted by the Trilateral Commission from start to finish. It was modeled after historic Technocracy, a resource-based economic system.²²

The Earth Charter, written by Steven C. Rockefeller, followed in 2000. Its language looks humanitarian. It pledges to “guarantee the right to potable water… allocating the national and international resources required.”²³ But a right that is guaranteed by allocation is not a right. It is a ration. Whoever does the allocating holds the power.

In 2002, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development complained that “politicians tend not to run for office on promises of making the price of goods reflect their real (higher) costs,” and that consumers do not ask to pay those higher costs.²⁴ Here the plan is stated plainly. Prices must go up, and the political process is the obstacle.

Nestlé’s Peter Brabeck-Letmathe went further in 2005. He called the idea that people have a right to water “an extreme solution” and said water “should have a market value.”²⁵

The Earth Charter’s “right to water” and Brabeck’s “market value” look like opposites. They are not. Both put water under managed allocation, one through government and one through the corporation. In Technocracy, the public-private partnership merges the two.

Privatization in Practice: Cochabamba, Bolivia

What happens when the plan meets the people was shown in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2000. The city’s water utility went to a consortium, Aguas del Tunari, partly owned by Bechtel Engineering. Residents found that the contract terms gave the consortium rights even to rainwater. Protests and violence followed where one civilian died and hundreds were injured. The mayor and the prefect resigned, and the contract was abandoned.²⁶ Bechtel later sued Bolivia for $25 million in losses. The claim was settled in 2006 for $0.30.²⁷

Cochabamba was not an isolated case. The UN-Habitat World Cities Report 2016 records that the population served by private water operators grew from 6 million in 1991 to 94 million by 2000, and to over 160 million by the end of 2007. Water and sanitation privatization took place in 90 countries and 504 local governments between 1990 and 2011.²⁸ The report admits that “experience with the hybrid model of privatization among low-income countries has been disappointing.”

2012 to 2016: Integration, Nexus and Price Adjustment

By 2012 the language had matured. The UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability defined sustainable development as “seeing the whole picture — such as the critical links between food, water, land and energy.”²⁹ It told governments to “establish and scale up integrated water resource management schemes.”³⁰ It also told them to shape “investor calculations” with targets, including for “water conservation.”³¹

This is the “nexus” doctrine. Once water, food, land and energy are defined as one integrated system, they need one integrated manager. That is the Technate under a new name.

The 2030 Agenda, adopted in 2015, wrote this into the Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 6.4 calls for “sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater.” SDG 6.5 calls for “integrated water resources management at all levels, including through transboundary cooperation.”³² Paragraph 33 declares the UN “determined to conserve and sustainably use… freshwater resources.” As I noted in Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, the first cost of this Utopia is “nothing less than turning over control of all natural resources to the UN.”³³

The German Development Institute’s 2015–2016 report shows how the doctrine works on the ground. It states that “water and energy prices need to be adjusted” to change behavior. It also cites Zambia’s 2011 Water Resources Management Act, which introduced “an approval procedure and a water extraction tax” to “manage resource consumption.”³⁴ Price, permit and tax are the tools. Consumption is the target.

The New Urban Agenda, adopted in 2016, brought the program into the city. Member states committed to “integrated water resources planning and management, considering the urban-rural continuum,” and to “water reuse.”³⁵ Water infrastructure is to be “climate resilient” and part of “integrated urban and territorial development plans.”³⁶ Water policy becomes land-use policy, and land-use policy becomes control over where and how people live.

The Control Grid: Metering Every Drop

Pricing needs measurement. The Smart Grid initiative, which I documented in Technocracy Rising (2015), was designed from the start to include gas and water metering. It uses digital meters with “continuous two-way communication between the utility and the consumer’s property.”³⁷ By the time I wrote The Evil Twins of Technocracy, about 115 million smart meters had been installed across America, close to 70 percent of the market.³⁸

Water rights are also being redefined. Technocracy Rising covers the move to replace private property with government control of rights and resources that will be “licensed” in certain situations.³⁹ A licensed right can be revoked, metered, conditioned, and priced.

2026: Tokenizing Water

The last step is financialization. In Crucible of Tokens, I documented a 2026 Goldman Sachs paper that explains how water rights can be turned into “traceable tokens” tied to flow meters, with tradeable conservation credits on the carbon-credit model.⁴⁰ The United Nations University has declared a global “water bankruptcy” and calls for enforceable limits and centralized accounting. Dubai’s commodities center signed an agreement in June 2025 to launch a token backed by verified freshwater reserves. California flies electromagnetic surveys over its aquifers. Oracle processes data from more than 100 million utility meters with software that can detect a single household’s irrigation in real time.

I summed up the sequence as “Map it, meter it, ticket it… water is three-quarters of the way down.”⁴¹

Look at the whole picture. In 1934 the Technocrats said water has value only when it is scarce. In 1987, Brundtland said water is no longer free. In 2026, Wall Street is building the ledger to trade it. A scarcity declared by the UN plus a meter on every pipe produces a tradable asset. The people who hold the deeds gain from scarcity. The people who pay the bills get gouged.

October 2026: The Bill Comes Due

A study by Food & Water Watch recently uncovered that, between 2015 and 2025, American household water bills rose 62 percent while consumer prices rose 39 percent. Water rose 1.6 times faster than inflation! Water also outpaced groceries (30 percent) and eggs (28 percent). Bills rose 19 percent more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024.⁴²

The average household using 60,000 gallons paid $531 in 2025, with a range from $133 to $1,416. New Hampshire bills jumped 177 percent, Oregon’s 114 percent, and West Virginia’s 95 percent.

The corporate gap is the most telling finding. Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year against $494 for public systems, a 67 percent difference. Corporate systems were just 11 percent of the 500 systems studied but 44 percent of the 25 most expensive. Seventy percent of the top 10 were for-profit. All 25 of the least expensive systems were publicly owned.⁴³

Bills exceeded the study’s affordability threshold for the poorest fifth of households in 93 percent of systems. Water costs consume about 11 percent of low-income household income in West Virginia and about 20 percent in Puerto Rico.⁴⁵

This is the result Brundtland called for in 1987: costs “passed along to the consumer.” It is the result the WBCSD wanted in 2002: prices that “reflect their real (higher) costs.” It is what Brabeck asked for in 2005: water with “a market value.” The documents said it would happen, and it has.

Conclusion

The record from 1987 to 2026 is consistent. Water was redefined from a free good into a priced resource. Then it became a regulated resource, an integrated “nexus” resource managed at all levels, a metered resource, and finally a tokenized asset. Each step was published openly in UN, NGO, and corporate documents. Each step moved control further from the household and the local community and toward unelected managers and financial institutions.

The 62 percent rise in water bills is definitely not the end of this process.

Technocracy’s rule in 1934 was that water has value only when it is scarce. Sustainable development has spent four decades supplying the scarcity and the flow meters. American households are now paying for it.

References

1. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (United Nations, 1987), Ch. 8, para. 53.
2. Ibid., para. 65.
3. The Earth Charter (2000), Principle 9a, reproduced in Patrick M. Wood, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (Coherent Publishing, 2015), Appendix III.
4. Holliday, Schmidheiny and Watts (World Business Council for Sustainable Development), 2002, p. 18, quoted in “Executive Summary,” UN background paper on sustainable development.
5. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, We Feed the World (documentary, 2005), cited in “Trilateral Commission: Bilderberg schism founded by David Rockefeller,” n. 103.
6. UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, Final Advance Text (2012), Recommendation 17.
7. United Nations, Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/RES/70/1 (2015), Target 6.5.
8. German Development Institute (DIE), Annual Report 2015–2016, p. 31.
9. “US households pay 62% more for water than they did a decade ago, study finds,” October 6, 2026.
10. Technocracy Inc., Technocracy Study Course (New York, 1934–1936; fifth edition 1940).
11. Ibid., “The Price System,” pp. 124–125.
12. Ibid., p. 252.
13. Patrick M. Wood, The New Economics of Technocracy, citing Technocracy Study Course, p. 232.
14. Patrick M. Wood, The Evil Twins of Technocracy, on Brundtland, MacNeill and Beyond Interdependence.
15. Our Common Future, Ch. 8, para. 53.
16. Ibid., Ch. 8, para. 65.
17. Ibid., para. 64.
18. Ibid., para. 37.
19. Ibid., Ch. 7, para. 96.
20. Ibid., Chairman’s Foreword and Overview, para. 13.
21. “Executive Summary,” UN background paper on sustainable development, Brundtland to Rio.
22. Wood, The New Economics of Technocracy, p. 223.
23. The Earth Charter, Principle 9a, in Wood, Technocracy Rising, Appendix III.
24. Holliday, Schmidheiny and Watts, quoted in “Executive Summary.”
25. Brabeck-Letmathe, We Feed the World (2005).
26. “Bechtel,” profile, Cochabamba Water War.
27. Ibid., Bolivian claim and 2006 settlement.
28. UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2016, Ch. 1.7, “Inequality and Exclusion.”
29. High-level Panel on Global Sustainability (2012), para. 21.
30. Ibid., Recommendation 17.
31. Ibid., para. 37.
32. 2030 Agenda, A/RES/70/1, Targets 6.4 and 6.5.
33. Patrick M. Wood, Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, on 2030 Agenda para. 33.
34. DIE, Annual Report 2015–2016, p. 31.
35. United Nations, New Urban Agenda, A/RES/71/256 (2016), paras. 72–73.
36. Ibid., para. 119.
37. Wood, Technocracy Rising, Smart Grid chapter.
38. Wood, The Evil Twins of Technocracy, “The Control Grid.”
39. Wood, Technocracy Rising, on property rights and licensed resource rights.
40. Wood, Crucible of Tokens (2026), citing Goldman Sachs, “Securing and Financing the Future of Water” (2026).
41. Ibid., n. 13, citing United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health; DMCC (June 17, 2025); Chainlink; California Department of Water Resources; and Oracle Utilities.
42. “US households pay 62% more for water than they did a decade ago, study finds,” October 6, 2026.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. American Water Works Association, as summarized in notes on the October 6, 2026 water-price article.

US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study.

Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.

In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%.

Water bills also rose faster than household incomes, increasing 19% more than the national median household income between 2014 and 2024, the study found.

Mary Grant, Food & Water Watch’s water program director and a co-author of the study, said: “Water bills are increasing much faster than many households can keep up with and these escalating water costs impact every corner of the country. Low-income households are being hit the hardest.

“Corporate water abuses, federal disinvestment and climate change are supercharging water rate hikes across the country.”

The increases were particularly severe in some states. Water bills in New Hampshire jumped 177% over the decade, followed by Oregon at 114% and West Virginia at 95%. In Louisiana, Maryland and West Virginia, water bills grew at roughly twice the rate of state median household incomes, while in New Hampshire water bills increased nearly five times faster.

The study also found a major disparity between publicly owned and for-profit water systems.

Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations.

California accounted for 52% of the 25 most expensive water systems. By contrast, all 25 of the least expensive systems were publicly owned. About 60% of the least expensive systems were in the south, including many in Florida and Georgia, the study found.

Water was even less affordable for low-income households, according to the study. Water bills exceeded the study’s affordability threshold in 93% of systems, costing more than 1.5% of income for the poorest fifth of households. Only Idaho and Utah stayed below the threshold.

West Virginia and Puerto Rico faced the heaviest financial burdens, the study found. Water bills consumed about 11% of income for low-income households in West Virginia and roughly 20% in Puerto Rico, which the study described as “simply unaffordable by any metric”.

Grant of Food & Water Watch said water systems must make updates to repair “ageing water lines and help clean up toxic contamination from lead pipes, Pfas forever chemicals, nitrate pollution from industrial agriculture, the list goes on”. She added: “Corporate control of water systems exacerbates this affordability crisis, as big water monopolies take away local control, prioritize profit and hike water prices even higher.”

Grant said communities could face increasingly difficult choices as they struggle to secure additional public investment. “Without real solutions to hold polluters accountable, establish local affordability programs and expand federal support, systems serving vulnerable communities could face the impossible choice: forgo an urgent water safety project or price many out of water service,” she said.

In a separate statement, the American Water Works Association (AWWA), a non-profit whose membership includes more than 4,300 utilities supplying roughly 80% of North America’s drinking water and treating nearly half its wastewater, pointed to infrastructure renewal, resilience and regulatory requirements as key cost drivers threatening drinking water affordability.

“If communities rely exclusively on revenue from water bills to address these needs, average annual household drinking water bills would rise from $429 in 2025 to $969 by 2050 (2025 dollars) – more than doubling in real terms,” AWWA spokesperson Greg Kail said.

“That would mean an estimated 30.4m households – or 21.5% – would spend more than 2.5% of their income on drinking water, and 53.5m households – 37.8% – would exceed a 1.5% income threshold. An estimated $13.6bn per year in assistance would be needed by 2050 to keep water bills below commonly understood affordability benchmarks,” Kail added.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Water Companies (NAWC), a trade association representing privately owned water and wastewater utilities, said it had not reviewed the Food & Water Watch study but emphasized the growing costs of maintaining water systems.

“Affordability is a legitimate challenge for many households and one that NAWC and its members take seriously,” NAWC spokesperson Jenn Kocher said, citing costs tied to ageing infrastructure, Pfasand lead regulations, cybersecurity and severe weather.

Kocher also highlighted customer-assistance programs offered by private water companies, saying: “Many regulated, private water companies offer robust assistance programs that help low-income customers maintain service and manage bills. These programs are often overlooked in rate comparisons.

“By comparison, many government-owned utilities face legal or other restrictions on cross-subsidizing customers, which can limit the types of assistance programs they are able to provide,” she added.

“Evaluating affordability based solely on published rate schedules can produce a misleading picture of what many customers actually pay after assistance and conservation programs are taken into account,” Kocher continued.

Read full story here…

Recently unredacted legal documents and depositions in the New York Times‘ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI revealed something extraordinary: executives knew full well of the destructive powers of AI when they rushed to launch products featuring the tech in the wake of the explosive success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Internal Microsoft documents quoted by the newspaper’s lawyers warned of an ugly reality now playing out across the entire economy: “doom loops,” in which AI monetizes the work of human creatives while undermining the economic systems that funded their work in the first place.

“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time,” one internal Microsoft document reads. “It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain.’”

The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that seems poised to wipe out the independent media.

Similar stories are playing out across other industries, from music to filmmaking. Writ large, many are concerned that AI will eventually be strong enough to wipe out huge numbers of jobs, creating a situation in which unemployed consumers won’t have the funds to support the economy.

The irony, as the Microsoft document pointed out, is that the AI industry is a snake eating its own tail: the very products that it’s pushing on users rely on fresh cultural content even as they destroy the economic incentives to create it.

It’s also a dire situation for the open web, which recently celebrated the macabre turning point of being dominated by more AI slop than human-authored content. As companies — most notably Google — are fundamentally changing the way users interact with the web, more and more newspapers, media outlets, and local news stations are seriously struggling to make ends meet.

Worse yet, as the legal documents in the NYT‘s copyright lawsuit showed, insiders admitted that the entire operation is built on theft.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document admitted.

Plenty of other creative industries are also feeling the pressure as AI-related doom loops continue to undermine livelihoods. According to the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, it’s a bloodbath — with more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries having been lost over the last four years alone, roughly the time since OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

AI-generated music is rapidly crowding out human-produced tracks on streaming services, forcing platforms to figure out where to draw the line. Some have implemented hard and fast rules, while others continue to allow users to exploit algorithms with slop.

Hollywood studios are also doubling down on AI while protesting actors struggle to have their voices heard. Many of them fear that their likeness or voice could soon be rendered worthless, representing an existential threat to their livelihoods.

Even the job market is embroiled in its own doom loop. More and more desperate job seekers are turning to AI to brush up their resumes and manipulate AI-powered job portals, while recruiters are drowning in a wall of almost identical applications.

“We’ve got this tragic situation where each side has a problem,” applicant tracking system company Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait told Wired. “They’re using AI to solve their own problem, but in ways that make the problem worse.”

“And so more AI use begets more AI use, to no one’s benefit,” he added. “The more it’s happening, the worse it gets.”

Similarly, the use of AI in the classroom has skyrocketed, with students using the tech to complete their homework, offloading their cognitive faculties to the machine. Meanwhile, their teachers are using AI to come up with assignments, slowly effacing the human in the loop. Educators who bristle at the idea of using the tech are finding themselves at odds with school administrators.

The effects AI has had on education has been nothing short of a disaster. A recent study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education concluded that the risks of using generative AI in education massively outweighed the benefits. The associated dangers have never been more apparent, with educators warning that college students are rapidly losing the ability to read.

Proponents of AI, including OpenAI and Microsoft’s lawyers in the ongoing New York Times lawsuit, argue that AI brings something new to the table. They argue that the output of AI models is sufficiently differentiated from the original content it draws on, falling under “fair use,” a longstanding doctrine in US copyright law.

Whether this argument will hold up in court remains to be seen. Besides, we’ve already seen companies, like Anthropic, settle for billions of dollars after being found to have violated copyright laws.

But considering how the tech is simultaneously undermining the very economic systems that produced the data they need to exist in the first place, that may not be a winning strategy in the long run.

By ripping out the carpet from underneath many parts of the economy — and reaping all the financial gains from it — the AI industry is trapping itself in a doom loop of its own creation, a cynical strategy that won’t benefit anybody but those at the very top who kicked the ladder down behind them.

Read full story here…

Elon’s 250 kW Starlink satellites will bring multi-gigabit satellite internet and 5G satellite cellphone everywhere even high density cities. 250 kilowatts per satellite, 10 terabits per second in both directions, and a path to more than 100 terabits per second.

I detailed the 250 kilowatt per Starlink satellite as beating the Space Station in my article and youtube video from 9 days ago.

WHY build satellites this powerful? Serving everyone and leveraging the huge solar and thermal radiators of the planned AI satellites.

Read full story here...

The British state is compiling a list of people who criticise its own counter-terror programme. Ordinary X and Reddit users who questioned Prevent training, flagged a one-sided focus on the “far Right,” or simply criticised it have had their posts logged, stored and “investigated” by a Home Office-linked unit most of them have never heard of.

Officials spent more than a year trying to keep that database secret. They only released it after an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The public was never told their feeds were being trawled.

The Standards and Compliance Unit, or StaCU, was set up in February 2024 as an “opaque” body to handle complaints about Prevent, the safeguarding scheme sold as a way to stop people becoming terrorists. Documents obtained by The Metro and released by Rights & Security International show StaCU did more than wait for formal complaints.

“Social media posts criticising government policy are being listed, monitored and investigated by officials.”

The government are supposed to serve the public rather than monitor those who disagree with them by Orwellian surveillance and snooping. https://t.co/mH62tNEkYV

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) September 30, 2026

Between March 2024 and February 2025 it made 77 “observations” of critical online comments, most of them from X, with others from Reddit and even articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Jacob Smith, Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader at Rights & Security International, fought for a year to force the Home Office to publish the material.

“It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent – and then storing that information,” he said. “You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”

He added: “People should be able to express their views on social media without that being catalogued in government databases.”

Many of those logged, he said, had posted without thinking “that the government might be looking at their feed and taking that data. It is in an almost private setting.”

His conclusion was blunt: “It’s a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.”

A large share of the logged posts accused Prevent training of treating the “far Right” as the main threat while skating over Islamist extremism.

One X user was recorded after calling the training “complete bullshit.” They wrote: “Anyone’s who done the prevent training knows it only talks about the far Right. Islam extremism isn’t even mentioned.”

Another poster said they “sat through Prevent training at work … and the narrative was very much that the far Right is the biggest threat.” They added: “I kid you not!”

StaCU says it tries to independently verify claims about Prevent. It managed that for only 10 percent of the posts. The unit’s parent body, the Commission for Countering Extremism, sometimes replies in public, inviting the user to submit a formal complaint.

In one case, after a post accused Prevent training of “turning a blind eye to Islam,” the Commission wrote: “Hello, we process and investigate complaints about Prevent and are interested in finding out more about the training referenced above. Please feel free to DM us, tweet us back, or make a formal complaint using this link.”

What that reply does not say is that the user’s post has already been stored in an internal government list.

It was not only anonymous accounts. Open Rights Group had a tweet recorded that said: “How data is managed and stored under the Prevent programme lacks transparency.”

Sarah Lasoye, the group’s Programme Manager for Pre-Crime, told The Metro: “Prevent has expanded far beyond its stated aim of identifying people considered ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’, and has increasingly been used to justify extensive surveillance.”

She added, “It is deeply concerning to see the Prevent duty being used to enable the monitoring of people and organisations simply because they are critical of the programme. That raises serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest.”

“There is also a troubling lack of transparency about what happens to the information gathered through this social media monitoring: how long it is retained, who it is shared with, and ultimately what the Government is using it for,” Lasoye urged.

Rights & Security International says organisations including Hope Not Hate and Maslaha also appear in or around the observations. The Campaign Against Antisemitism had a post logged that did not even name Prevent. It criticised police for failing to take a Hezbollah vigil seriously. A spokesperson said: “We aren’t sure whether to be flattered or concerned that StaCU has picked up a post of ours.”

The group added, “If it’s because we’ve dared to be critical of law enforcement’s lax attitude toward Islamist extremism in this country, we stand by what we said and would reiterate it for as long as it takes to bring about change. But if our post was flagged because StaCU agrees with us that police forces have failed to train their officers on what Islamist terrorism looks like and which organisations are banned, we hope that the message is being received and change is coming.”

That last point tracks a long-running complaint. Sir William Shawcross, in his 2023 review of Prevent, wrote: “The bar for what RICU includes on Islamism looks to be relatively high, whereas the bar for what is included on the extreme Right-wing is comparably low.”

Home Office figures for the year to September 2025 showed 10,293 Prevent referrals. Twenty percent were recorded as extreme right-wing ideology. Eight percent concerned Islamist extremism.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Prevent does not track people who may have criticised the programme, and nor does it target any particular community.” The department added that keeping the public safe is “our number one priority” and that Prevent has “moved more than 6,000 people away from violent ideologies since 2015.”

The documents say otherwise on the first claim. StaCU collated the posts as “open-source complaints,” stored them internally, and the Home Office refused to release the list until the Information Commissioner forced its hand. Nobody outside the unit can say who else sees the file, how long it is kept, or whether it is shared with police, platforms or other departments.

This is not an isolated compliance desk. It sits inside a growing stack of state machinery built to police speech, “narratives” and online anger.

In June, we laid out how the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit has been used to manage the mass-migration story — briefing police to cast concerned citizens as “unsympathetic thugs,” shaping family statements after migrant-linked killings, and running a higher bar for Islamism than for the so-called extreme Right.

The same week, ministers moved to give Ofcom faster powers to block “false information” during so-called crisis events — a phrase wide enough to cover any unrest the government would rather you not describe accurately.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan had already demanded a central government social-media “disinformation” unit, complaining of an “outrage economy” while knife crime, robbery and theft climbed on his watch. “If platforms fail to act, the state must have the tools to make them,” he said.

Last week Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first United Nations speech to announce a National Centre for Information Defence — a new machine to “detect, attribute and disrupt” what ministers call hostile information attacks and to stop a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain.”

He wrapped it in Russia, bots and “community cohesion.” Nigel Farage called it a Ministry of Truth. “Never ever trust this authoritarian Government,” he said. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting insisted: “We’re not interested in policing domestic political dissent.” Labour’s record is why that promise is already worn thin.

Police have their own version. The National Internet Intelligence Investigations team, stood up after the 2024 Southport riots, has referred more than 100 “suspicious” posts to local forces, including dozens tied to protest-related activity.

Officials describe it as “a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called it “the beginning of the state controlling free speech.”

The arrest figures sit underneath all of it. Between 2021 and 2025 at least 62,199 people were arrested in Britain on suspicion of communications offences — section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and the Online Safety Act’s false-communications offence.

That is roughly 34 arrests a day. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said speech policing is “out of control” and called the result an “Orwellian mess.” Lord Toby Young asked why authorities spend so much time “policing our tweets when they could be policing our streets.”

Prevent is sold as safeguarding. The logged posts are not bomb plots. They are workers calling official training biased, campaigners asking how data is stored, and a Jewish group complaining that police treat a banned terrorist organisation too lightly.

If that is enough to enter a Home Office database, the category of “acceptable” speech is already whatever officials decide it is on a whim.

Britain does not need another unit to hunt “untrue narratives.” It needs a government that can survive being questioned without opening a file on the questioner.

Read full story here…

On the night of 12 November 1993, a slim, young Brazilian named Royce Gracie stepped into an octagonal cage in Denver, Colorado, and found himself staring up into the eyes of a giant. Gerard Gordeau, a Dutch kickboxer, stood five inches taller, weighed almost three stone more than him, and had an extra decade of fighting experience under his belt. Now the pair were about to engage in bare-knuckle combat: no judges, no separation of opponents by size, no respite until someone either got knocked out cold or begged for mercy.

The fight lasted barely 100 seconds. In that time, Gracie calmly tripped Gordeau up, jumped on his back, and clutched at his throat, forcing the big man to hammer the floor in submission.

About 80,000 pay-per-view spectators watched Gracie’s legendary victory – the finale of the first ever Ultimate Fighting Championship – live on television. Among them was an unassuming business studies student living in San Diego, California. Mesmerised by what he had seen, the student presented himself at a local martial arts academy that specialised in Brazilian jiu-jitsu – the discipline employed by Gracie to humble Gordeau in the cage – and asked to begin lessons. His classmates found it hard to take the newcomer seriously. “I was there the day he showed up,” said Kid Peligro, who went on to become one of the biggest jiu-jitsu stars in the world. “He was wearing shorts, flip-flops and a tank-top; he sat in the corner and barely spoke to anybody.”

The student, who introduced himself as Ben, was in his mid-20s and hailed from the Middle East, but revealed little else about his background. Peligro assumed that he served as the butler or bodyguard to the rich Englishman who sometimes accompanied him to lessons. “Ben was quiet, and he was dedicated,” Peligro told me. “He would often stay behind after class to sweep the mats.” Ben also took physical pain in his stride, even when it involved fractured bones. “If you trained in jiu-jitsu in the 1990s, you were going to get hurt,” said Bobby Razak, a film producer and martial arts enthusiast. “It wasn’t like it is now: very clean, very professional. Back then, it was raw.”

After more than a year of training, Ben made a startling announcement: he was about to return home to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, and would be taking the academy’s founder, Nelson Monteiro, along with him. Other invitations soon followed. Rumours spread that Ben was trying to establish his own martial arts centre on the shores of the Persian Gulf. One day, Peligro and his wife were sent a pair of first-class flight tickets to the UAE, worth $24,000 each. When they stepped off the plane, they were astonished to see pictures of a familiar-looking man – clearly Ben’s father – everywhere they turned, from billboards to banknotes. “Ben’s training centre turned out to be one of his family’s palaces,” Peligro said, still marvelling at the memory. “It’s like a fairytale.”

For those trying to uncover the truth behind His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin (or “Ben”) Zayed Al Nahyan – royal fixer, reclusive spymaster, financial behemoth – fairytales are nearly all we have to go on. Tahnoon, who really did enrol in Nelson Monteiro’s class under a pseudonym and eventually went on to become a jiu-jitsu black belt in his own right, now sits atop an economic fortune larger than the GDP of several major countries, and is closely entwined both personally and financially with the Trump White House. The global holdings overseen by Tahnoon span windfarms in Scotland and spaceships in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie line and Richard Caring’s Ivy restaurants. From hospitals to housing blocks, solar farms to ski resorts, there is almost no place on Earth untouched by his financial firepower.

But despite his ever-growing influence on the world stage, Tahnoon prefers to remain in the shadows. He has never given a substantive interview to the press. Those who have worked closely with him are almost always made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Very few people outside the UAE even know his name. “He’s quiet,” says one former US national security official, “and he’s always everywhere.” Sheikh Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request for this article. The UAE foreign ministry did not offer any other senior government figure for interview, and declined to provide any comment.

Tahnoon’s power is soon going to extend over more human lives than ever before. As one of the most important AI financiers on the planet, he is rapidly embedding himself within the infrastructure that will underpin our digital future: its information pipelines and its microchip foundries, its datacentres and the enormous energy plants needed to power and cool them. Some see him as a technological prophet and saviour. Others compare him to a Bond villain. So who is the real “Ben”, and what are his plans for the rest of us?

Anyone trying to find Sheikh Tahnoon must first navigate concentric circles of gatekeepers. These include his closest business associates, as well as a cast of more colourful characters: the former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, for example, or Melissa Moncada, one-time winner of the Miss Globe Colombia beauty pageant, and now a fitness entrepreneur. Even if you get this far, it may not be enough to be granted an audience, and supplicants go to extraordinary lengths to stand out from the crowd.

These scattered landmarks form the backstage of the modern Emirates. Together, they also tell the story of the six brothers who have come to dominate the country – a story that began more than half a century ago, with their father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the UAE’s first leader following independence from Britain in 1971. During his 33-year reign, a loose network of Bedouin tribespeople living among mud-brick forts and palm-frond houses was transformed into an oil-rich regional superpower, home to some of the tallest buildings on Earth.

Zayed married seven times and is believed to have fathered at least 30 children. But it was the offspring of his third and favourite wife, Fatima Al Ketbi, who – under her tutelage – emerged as their nation’s powerbrokers. Tahnoon was one of them. Today, he and his siblings – known as the bani Fatima, or “sons of Fatima” – sit at the apex of arguably the wealthiest dynasty in the world.

Tahnoon and his brothers grew up steeped in a worldview that placed their family at the centre of the universe. Any form of dissent was seen as an existential threat, not just to their own power but also to the small and fragile state they were responsible for protecting. “The family is the first school of values, the authentic guardian of identity, and the truest source of trust and belonging,” their mother, Fatima, once said, reflecting both the paternalistic ethics that prevail among the Emirati elite, and the Al Nahyans’ visceral hostility towards alternative ideologies such as socialism or political Islam. By the time Tahnoon returned from the US in 1995, a state-sponsored crackdown on Islamist civil society groups was under way, alongside reprisals against smaller emirates that resisted it.

During this period, the UAE’s leadership became increasingly conscious that money alone could not buy them international clout. Despite oil finds in the Gulf, it was the big Arab republics such as Egypt and Syria that still dominated the Middle East, both diplomatically and culturally. Military strength and strategic influence were needed to propel the Emirates into the big time. In the final years of his reign, Sheikh Zayed ensured that the bani Fatima were favourably positioned to drive this project forward.

As a younger brother, Tahnoon knew that the Abu Dhabi throne – and consequently the presidency of the UAE, which always accompanies it – was not destined for him. Instead, he was given the task of running his father’s private department, which oversaw Sheikh Zayed’s extensive personal assets, including palaces, farms and overseas landholdings such as London’s Berkeley Square. The role demanded a blend of charm and coercion, and the deployment of hard cash. By the late 1990s Tahnoon was making the latter his speciality, founding a company called the Royal Group that became the primary investment vehicle for his family’s many business interests. The group’s assets are currently worth $300bn.

Following Sheikh Zayed’s death in 2004, Tahnoon’s reputation as the UAE’s top money man grew. As comfortable in the boardrooms of Wall Street as he was in the Emirati majlis (the traditional court of the tribal ruler), Tahnoon melded the rhetoric of Bedouin values – duty, loyalty and humility – with a new vocabulary of technocratic managerialism. Today, the country’s largest sovereign wealth vehicle is run by Tahnoon; so is First Abu Dhabi Bank, its largest lender, and Alterra, the biggest climate investment fund in the world. In the UK alone, Tahnoon oversees healthcare providers and property giants, and controls investments in public utilities such as Thames Water. The economic empire he oversees is estimated to be worth about $1.5tr, as large as the entire economic output of Indonesia or Turkey.

But the line between Tahnoon’s personal fortune, the wider wealth of the Abu Dhabi royal family, and collective assets held – at least in theory – by the citizenry of the UAE, is blurry. According to the bani Fatima, that division is moot, as the wellbeing of the Al Nahyans is indistinguishable from the wellbeing of the nation at large. Not everyone agrees. “A lot of merchants in the UAE complain constantly – very quietly, very privately – about how Tahnoon crowds them out of the market,” Mira Al Hussein, an Emirati sociologist based at the University of Edinburgh, told me. In healthcare, for example, sovereign wealth funds and Tahnoon’s own corporate vehicles dominate the local industry; the private sector “cannot compete”, one senior executive recently told the Financial Times. “The general perception is that the country is a ship,” said Al Hussein, “and if that ship ever begins to sink, then the ruling family will jump off and take all of the wealth funds and investments and portfolios with them.”

Tahnoon is obsessed with winning. In the late 1990s, the sheikh became so determined to beat his brothers at the newly released video game Age of Empires – in which players attempt to transform pre-modern societies into monumental civilisations by hoarding resources and overpowering opponents – that he hired one of the game’s software developers to coach him. By the early 2000s, his attention had switched to chess. He personally financed the development of a refrigerator-sized supercomputer called Hydra, which soon became the most powerful chess player in the world, beating several grandmasters along the way. Hydra could only ever be used by a single person at a time. For hours at a stretch, day and night, that person was Tahnoon. In 2005, Hydra’s chief architect claimed in an online chess forum that Tahnoon was the greatest computer-chess freak alive.

Tahnoon has brought all these skills – fierce competitiveness, the careful accumulation of positional advantage, and an abiding fascination with melding human ingenuity and computing intelligence – to the financial realm. They have also proved vital in his other main role: as the man in charge of national security in the Emirates, and his country’s spymaster-in-chief.

Many of the individuals targeted by Tahnoon’s security apparatus can’t share their testimony. The UAE has a long history of enforced disappearances, secret detention sites and vicious reprisals against the family members of exiled dissidents – all extensively documented by international human rights organisations. But some survive to tell their tale.

In April 2018, Matthew Hedges, a young British academic, travelled to the UAE to conduct research for his PhD exploring the country’s national security strategy, a subject that touches directly on Tahnoon’s domain. By the end of his two-week visit, Hedges had started to feel uneasy. “I knew I was being followed,” he told me recently.

Entering Dubai airport on his way back to the UK, Hedges got no further than passport control. There he says he found a large group of masked men waiting for him, all dressed in black and carrying guns. He alleges that he was blindfolded, handcuffed and thrown in the back of an SUV. He was accused of working as a British spy and over the months of solitary confinement that followed, he says he was subjected to interrogations lasting up to 15 hours a day and made to swallow a cocktail of medications against his will. His captors allegedly threatened him with rendition to an overseas military base, and warned that they could harm his relatives. Following seven months of maltreatment, Hedges attempted to take his own life. “I knew their threats to be meaningful, because I knew the country,” he told me.

In the room where he was questioned by officials, Hedges says he saw bloodstains on the carpet and bloody footprints on the walls. “They were above my head height, and facing down,” he told me. “I’m over 6ft tall, so that means someone had been lifted up there.” When I asked Hedges who was ultimately responsible for his ordeal, he ran carefully up the chain of command within the Emirati security services, reciting names and job titles, before sitting quietly for a moment and taking a breath. “Then you get above the clouds,” he replied, eventually. “Then there is Tahnoon.” (In a government statement issued in 2023, the UAE insisted that Hedges “received entirely proper care … He was never subjected to, or threatened with, either torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any sort.”)

Hedges ultimately confessed to a series of crimes, but insists that he did so under duress. In November 2018, following a hearing that lasted only five minutes, at which there was no defence lawyer present, he was sentenced to life in jail by an Emirati court. Following a diplomatic row with the British government, he was later granted a royal pardon. After his release, the UAE government mounted a smear campaign against him that included the release of a 19-page dossier of personal information including a psychiatric report. Compared with many others who pass through the country’s interrogation cells, he got off lightly. “Hedges’ experience is unfortunately common in the UAE, and abuses against Emirati civil society are even more repressive,” said Joey Shea, a senior Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Supporters of the Emirati regime bridle at this sort of criticism. They insist that it is grounded in western resentment at the UAE’s rise, and overlooks the unique security threats the nation faces from hostile neighbours and ideological insurgents. “The UAE has become a success story, and that’s led to you guys thinking, ‘Wait, these were the little ducklings that we used to run and now look at what they’re doing,’” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati professor of political science who is well connected to ruling officials in the UAE. “I resent the claim that the UAE must ‘level up’ to international standards [on human rights]. You have your standard, we have ours.”

The Al Nahyan dynasty has good reason to feel insecure. Located on the tip of a landmass roiled by conflict to the north and south, and staring out across the Gulf at its far larger rival Iran, the UAE’s petro-riches make it an obvious target. Tahnoon and his brothers also know that their brand of autocratic monarchy is despised by political Islamists and pro-democracy Arab revolutionaries alike. Some 20 years ago, Christopher Davidson, an expert in Gulf politics at Durham University, spoke to one of the bani Fatima about the Emirates’ rising prestige. “He said to me, ‘You need to understand the mindset of this region. Others will try to take that away from us, or destroy us’,” Davidson recalled. “‘Whether it’s Iran, Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda … they’ll all be coming, one after another.’”

For the UAE’s leaders, the 9/11 attacks – perpetrated by a group of extremists that included two Emiratis – were a realisation of their darkest fears about violent enemies lurking within, and helped fuel an obsession with Islamism that persists to this day. (The UAE has been linked to covert funding and political support for far-right political parties in Europe who are seen to share Abu Dhabi’s perspective on this issue.) The US war on terror was also a moment of opportunity, enabling the Al Nahyans to present themselves to Washington as an island of stability within an otherwise forbidding region.

Throughout the 2000s, the Emirati regime ramped up its intelligence activities and increasingly focused on espionage technologies. The aim was to mitigate the country’s most obvious vulnerability: its tiny native population of 1.4 million people, which comprises only 11% of the UAE’s total residents, and makes it hard for the country to raise a significant army or to function in the absence of foreigners. By the end of the decade, it had struck a landmark security deal with the former US counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who was instrumental in lobbying Congress for more intrusive surveillance programmes both at home and abroad. Clarke moved out to Abu Dhabi and set up a secretive UAE spying unit, which was given the codename Project Raven.

Initially billed as a vital cog in the “war on terror”, Project Raven morphed into a vast and pervasive digital wiretap operation targeting not only Emiratis accused of terrorism, but many others merely suspected of being unfriendly to the UAE’s dictatorship. Although technically an Emirati initiative, much of the team running Project Raven were former US National Security Agency spies, Washington contractors and senior White House veterans. “The incentive was to help in the fight against terrorism,” Clarke later insisted. “The UAE is a very good counterterrorism partner.”

By 2011, when anti-government uprisings erupted across the Arab world, the focus of Project Raven’s energies had become clear. After a group of prominent Emirati judges, lawyers and journalists put their names to a petition calling for mild democratic reforms, the state’s response was uncompromising; over the next two years the majority of them were arrested, and dozens of signatories remain in jail today. More paranoid than ever, and harbouring fears that Emirati soldiers might refuse to turn their guns on fellow Muslims in the event of widespread street protests, the bani Fatima mobilised an 800-strong paramilitary force of Colombian and South African mercenaries to tighten their grip on power, and even greater resources were funnelled into digital hacking operations. To the Al Nahyans, mass politics was a threat: in their eyes, grateful subjects could only ever petition their leaders for concessions, never make demands of them as citizens. “The UAE’s internal security structure increasingly prioritised regime protection above all else,” said Mira Al Hussein.

It was against this backdrop that Tahnoon – alongside his role as the UAE’s money man – began rising up the ranks of the Emirati security establishment. In 2014, he became the country’s deputy national security adviser; two years later, he assumed the top job. As security chief, his new brief included some of the UAE’s most sensitive diplomatic missions, among them the breaking of a decades-long taboo in the Arab world by normalising relations with Israel. As the Middle East’s other leader in the field of cyber-espionage, Israeli intelligence had much to offer the Emiratis: not least access to Pegasus, the most advanced spyware ever built. With Pegasus, operatives were able to infiltrate almost any Apple or Android device without the user’s knowledge, and transform it into a permanent, pocket-sized spy.

Under Tahnoon’s stewardship, Project Raven – control of which had now passed into the hands of a private, state-linked Emirati company named DarkMatter – scaled up its hacking and surveillance activities. Local dissidents and suspicious foreigners on Emirati soil were targeted. But so, too, were human rights activists, journalists and politicians all over the world. Fiona Shackleton, a high-profile British divorce lawyer representing an estranged wife of the ruler of Dubai – whose other clients have included Prince Charles and Paul McCartney – was one such victim. Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson is believed to have been another. It seemed that no matter who you were, if you were deemed to threaten the interests of the Al Nahyan family and their friends, even tangentially, then you were a potential target.

In early 2019, a Reuters investigation – building on work by the Canadian research group The Citizen Lab – exposed much of Project Raven’s operations, and multiple legal proceedings were launched in the US against the initiative’s American contractors. Over the next year, Tahnoon officially shut down DarkMatter and broke apart its various entities. By that time, it appears he was nursing more ambitious plans.

A powerful new frontier in computing power – artificial intelligence – was just beginning to open up. To be genuinely transformative, this technology was going to require fantastical amounts of cash and data. By fusing together elements of his business and security empires, Tahnoon would be in a unique position to supply both. A company like no other was about to be born.

In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a superintelligent computer programme named Deep Thought is asked “the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything’”. After seven and a half million years, it finally delivers its famous answer: 42. Deep Thought goes on to say that, in order to explain its answer, it needs to design another giant computer programme. This one will be called “Earth”, and one of its core operational components will be human beings.

In this vision, the number 42 represents more than the meaning of life. It speaks to a world in which every facet of reality can ultimately be reduced to lines of code, and where ordinary people unwittingly live out their days in the service of computers rather than the other way around. In the late 2010s, when Tahnoon refashioned the ruins of DarkMatter into a new AI-focused company, he decided to honour Adams by calling it Group 42, or G42 for short.

G42 is the culmination of Tahnoon’s dual identity as a financier and spymaster, and the scale of its aspirations is staggering. Like many other tech giants, it aims to reconceptualise AI as a foundational form of infrastructure like water or electricity – a concept known as the “intelligence grid”. Unlike its Silicon Valley peers, however, G42’s intelligence grid has grown out of an actual nation state’s intelligence apparatus. The company’s marketing heavily emphasises its security capabilities, promising “real-time threat defence” for governments and businesses, and predictive tools that encompass “suspect profiling”, “relationship mapping” and “behavioural analysis”.

The tech industry is not short on exaggeration and bombast. Compared with many of his Silicon Valley peers, however, Tahnoon – a true AI believer who claims to have designed the entirety of one of his homes via ChatGPT – is in a unique position to deliver. G42 built on the espionage talents behind Project Raven and DarkMatter: Peng Xiao, who was the head of a key DarkMatter unit, is now G42’s CEO; Karim Sabbagh, DarkMatter’s former boss, currently runs one of G42’s main subsidiaries. One of G42’s first public products was a popular messaging app called ToTok, which was later revealed by the New York Times to be a piece of spyware, designed to “track every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones”.

In a statement to the Guardian, G42 denied that the company’s origins lay in cyber-espionage operations, or that it conducts or enables unlawful surveillance. “G42 was established as an AI and technology company focused on cloud and AI infrastructure,” the firm said. “Our businesses operate under applicable laws, contractual data protections, and rigorous security and compliance frameworks.”

If US tech giants are wary of G42’s links to cyberhacking, they are doing a good job of hiding it. Microsoft has invested $1.5bn in the company and its vice-chair, Brad Smith, now has a seat on G42’s board of directors. G42 and its specialist AI investment fund – also chaired by Tahnoon – are either direct investors in or major partners of Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI. Sam Altman, the latter’s CEO, calls Tahnoon “a dear personal friend”. Microsoft and OpenAI were approached for comment on this article, but neither company provided a response. In its statement to the Guardian, G42 noted that its partnership with Microsoft “is governed by a binding agreement developed in consultation with the US and UAE governments, covering cybersecurity, data protection, responsible AI, export controls and business integrity”.

Tahnoon’s appeal to Silicon Valley is obvious. After all, if you’re going to go into business with a cash-laden Gulf autocrat, then picking one who presides over a heavily digitised state-security empire – and who boasts a proven track record of hoovering up humongous amounts of personal data, the raw ingredient upon which your technology depends – feels like a logical choice. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Elon Musk may all be hugely influential AI leaders, but none of them simultaneously runs the CIA.

Another powerful figure to have clutched Tahnoon and G42 close to his bosom is Donald Trump, who has hosted lavish state banquets for the sheikh at the White House and posed for photos with him in the Oval Office. The American security services have long harboured fears about Emirati influence on US politics: in 2022 the National Intelligence Council produced a confidential report for Washington policymakers warning of Abu Dhabi’s “illegal and legal attempts to steer US foreign policy”. Joe Biden’s administration restricted the export of AI chips to the UAE because of concerns over the country’s close ties to China. But last year Trump reversed that decision, authorising the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Silicon Valley’s most advanced chips to the Al Nahyan regime. Many of them will go straight to G42.

The deal was announced only two weeks after one of Tahnoon’s investment vehicles acquired $2bn-worth of cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty, a company owned by the Trump family, who earn interest on all its reserves. Tahnoon is also a direct investor in World Liberty, having purchased 49% of the firm less than a month before Trump’s second inauguration. Both the White House and World Liberty have denied any connection between Tahnoon’s investments and the chip transfer. A spokesperson for G42 told the New York Times that the company was “grounded in integrity”.

“Corruption, plain and simple,” is how the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren describes the murky entanglement of Tahnoon’s money and the US White House. But the rapid ascent of Tahnoon and G42 within the AI industry reflects a sincerely held conviction on the part of both the Trump administration and the bani Fatima that AI is set to replace oil as the elemental global commodity – and ultimate determinant of global power – and that now is the time to master it.

The result is that G42, under Tahnoon’s control, has successfully positioned itself at the heart of global AI infrastructure for decades to come. The “AI campus” currently being constructed on the UAE’s coastline is projected to have a 5GW power capacity, up to 250 times the size of the largest hyperscale datacentres today. G42 is helping to finance a $500bn rollout of new datacentres within the US, and has now acquired several of the construction companies involved. Last year, Microsoft and G42 officially co-launched the Responsible AI Future Foundation, designed to shape “ethical development and deployment of AI systems”. It is headquartered – of course – in Abu Dhabi.

Does it matter if significant chunks of our AI infrastructure sit in the hands of a man with the entire arsenal of a police state at his disposal? One person who might be able to answer that is Ahmed Mansoor, a mild-mannered Emirati electrical engineer and aspiring poet. In the early 2010s, Mansoor was among that group of public intellectuals who signed a petition calling for the creation of an elected parliament in the UAE; he also ran a website on which content critical of the Al Nahyan regime was sometimes posted. In April 2011, he was arrested on multiple charges, including the defamation of the bani Fatima, but initially released thanks to a presidential pardon.

In the years that followed, though, Mansoor was relentlessly targeted by the Emirati security services, who spent millions of dollars attempting to gain access to his electronic devices, and those of his wife. Eventually, Mansoor succumbed to a malicious email attachment, which sent all of his private data to a computer server registered to PO box 5151 in Abu Dhabi: the postal address of Sheikh Tahnoon’s personal office. He later found out that his baby monitor had also been hacked, turning it into a camera and microphone that captured every moment of his family life. He was arrested again in 2017, subjected to a secret trial, and convicted of insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols, including its leaders”. Sentenced to 10 years in jail, he has remained in solitary confinement in al-Sadr, the maximum-security jail located about 10 miles south-west of G42’s AI mega-campus, ever since.

We don’t know if Tahnoon will use his commanding position at the heart of the AI industry to directly hack, surveil and intimidate critics, as his security services did with Mansoor. But the character of those controlling this new technology matters. Today, we don’t just use major tech platforms to store files and send messages: more and more people use AI to be their therapist, friend or even lover. Tech executives assure us that our data is safe from prying eyes but ordinary citizens have very few ways of verifying this. In its pomp, the early smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry insisted that “privacy and security form the crux of everything we do”. It failed to mention that BlackBerry was secretly working with the cybersecurity unit of a foreign government at the time, and helping it to carry out digital surveillance of mobile users. That cybersecurity unit was the UAE’s DarkMatter group, the precursor to G42.

The potential risks of untrustworthy actors controlling AI may be more insidious than direct hacking and surveillance. A group of researchers recently revealed that AI tools – including products from Meta, Google and SpaceX – are regularly altering the meaning of texts on sensitive political topics, in ways that could reshape public opinion. “I’m very worried about Tahnoon’s perception of the world,” says Al Hussein. “He’s the video-game prince who wants to press a button and eliminate all threats.”

For a glimpse of what a world reshaped in Tahnoon’s image might look like, consider the UAE. Here, political parties are nonexistent, trade unions and labour strikes prohibited, and protests and lèse-majesté met with rapid punishment. Migrant workers, who make up the vast majority of the country’s residents, are kept in a state of legalised insecurity and suffer from thousands of officially unexplained deaths each year, which human rights organisations attribute to heat stress, construction accidents and other poor working conditions. Businesses, by contrast, can pick and choose the regulations that govern them from a patchwork quilt of 40-odd “freezones”, all competing to lure investors with bespoke tax regimes and legal frameworks.

Beyond the UAE’s borders, Abu Dhabi’s dominion encompasses a vast network of ports, security partners, client regimes and financial flows spanning the Red Sea and huge swathes of north, eastern and central Africa. Often presented as a neutral entrepot, torn between rival global power blocs to the east and the west, the reality is that the UAE has always served faithfully as capital’s emirate: shielding the wealth of international elites, opening up inhospitable markets, paving the way for western investors, and – as Colin Powers, a political economist specialising in the Middle East, puts it – “energetically extending the circuitry of global wealth accumulation”.

Under the bani Fatima, this function has included the brutal suppression of any democratic experiment within the Emirati field of influence that might threaten the material interests of the Al Nahyans or their allies. In Egypt, the UAE has helped sustain the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, which has turned its guns upon thousands of protesters. In Yemen, Libya and Ethiopia, it has armed paramilitaries and fuelled shocking levels of state violence against civilians. In Sudan, it is accused of complicity in genocide. In response, Abu Dhabi has deployed AI tools as part of a sophisticated disinformation campaign designed to discredit the United Nations. Several dissidents wanted by other dictatorships – from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Rwanda – have also been kidnapped while transiting through Dubai airport, before being “delivered” by the Emiratis to their home country’s security forces. Not all of Abu Dhabi’s foreign adventures have been successful; many have led to military quagmires and reputational damage on the world stage. But for those on the receiving end of Emirati intervention, the consequences have been dire.

The imperial ambitions of Tahnoon and his brothers do not seem to rest on direct occupation of land, but rather on controlling key “nodes” outside their borders: the sites at which the movement of money, arms, trade, technology and ideas intersect. AI, the functioning of which is distributed across territories around the world, is the ideal asset for a nodal empire. Tahnoon’s goal of making the UAE an AI superpower is framed domestically as part of his family’s historic mission to improve the lot of the Emirati people. But the UAE’s accumulation of power in recent decades has been delivered on the bani Fatima’s own terms. Central to the Al Nahyan family’s worldview is the notion that, amid a planet riven by the chaos and humiliation of democracy, their nation is a demonstration that things can and should work differently. According to Tahnoon’s brother, President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “The UAE is a tangible model for the world.”

With his array of spy tools, superyachts and supercomputers, his preference for remaining far from public view, his habit of always wearing dark glasses in public (even indoors), and – of course – his obsession with personal longevity (he aims to live to 150), it would be easy to characterise Tahnoon as a cartoon villain. But in truth, this is not a story about a malevolent prince plotting vile deeds from his palace in the Persian Gulf. It is a far more prosaic tale about how power and money function in the world today.

In Washington, just as in Abu Dhabi, politics is increasingly governed by personal relationships and transactional gains rather than popular demands. In the UK, as in the UAE, firms such as Palantir that offer AI-enabled surveillance and data crunching are being integrated with the basic functions of the state. All over the planet, business-friendly strongmen are the order of the day. “For the last 20 years, democracy has been in decline,” said Ronald Deibert, the founder and director of The Citizen Lab. “That happens to coincide with an enormous expansion of digital surveillance capabilities for both commercial and national security purposes. The epicentre of a lot of this is the UAE. And where do all roads lead in the UAE? They lead to Sheikh Tahnoon.”

On 27 February, Tahnoon chaired a board meeting at G42’s AI investment fund. That night, the sky above Abu Dhabi’s seafront lit up with the flashes of US and Israeli missiles raining down across the Persian Gulf, marking the start of the Iran war. One of Tehran’s first acts of retaliation was to directly bomb two AI datacentres in the UAE. The Iranian government soon published an official list of what they considered “legitimate” military targets which included the Emirati offices of US technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Western journalists speculated that this could spell the end of Tahnoon’s AI dreams. “Why did we ever think datacentres in the Gulf were a good idea?” ran one headline in the Financial Times.

Over the following months, Tahnoon shuttled around the Middle East, conducting covert diplomacy. According to Reuters, senior officials from Iran’s revolutionary guards were hosted by Tahnoon in his Abu Dhabi guesthouse. By mid-June, he had reportedly struck an agreement that provided billions of dollars for the Iranian government, and brought Iran’s strikes on the UAE to a halt. A few weeks later, on the same day that Trump announced that the US’s ceasefire with Iran was “over”, the US commerce department quietly confirmed that it was removing the last remaining export controls restricting the sale of advanced AI chips to Abu Dhabi.

As life in Abu Dhabi gradually returned to something resembling normality, Tahnoon’s family members began reappearing in public. A company founded by his daughter, Sheikha Fatima bint Tahnoon, signed a memorandum of understanding with G42 last month, suggesting that she is being primed to follow in his footsteps and eventually assume a commanding role within the UAE’s tech-security empire. Tahnoon’s son, Sheikh Zayed bin Tahnoon, was the guest of honour at several major jiu-jitsu events this summer. Tahnoon himself, meanwhile, stayed far from the public eye. Judging when to retreat, and knowing when to strike: “Ben” had outmanoeuvred his doubters once again.

Read full story here…

President Trump said Tuesday that he will name his artificial intelligence czar within the next few days.

Speaking at the White House alongside artificial intelligence executives, Mr. Trump said he expected to announce his pick within the next “three-to-four days.”

Mr. Trump said he wanted to seek opinions from AI companies, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, before selecting a candidate.

“We will have somebody extraordinary,” he told reporters.

Candidates who have been floated for the position include Sriram Krishan, the senior White House policy advisor on AI; Sean Cairncross, the administration’s national cyber director, and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was said to be among the potential candidates, but Mr. Trump said last week that he eliminated him from consideration because he wanted him to stay at the Treasury.

Industry insiders and some lawmakers have called for limits on the technology because of concerns that machines could go rogue or fall into the wrong hands and cause widespread harm. Mr. Trump dismissed such claims, saying the guardrails need to be relaxed to keep America competitive.

Earlier Tuesday, he hosted a lunch with artificial intelligence executives. Mr. Trump now refers to the technology as “super intelligence.”

Mr. Trump said earlier this month that whoever gets the position will likely lead a new “AI Force.” The president said it would be similar to the Space Force, which he established during his first term, but he did not disclose whether it would be a new branch of the military or how it would work.

David Sacks, a venture capitalist, previously served as Mr. Trump’s AI and crypto czar, but left the White House earlier this year once his term as a special government employee expired.

Read full story here…

Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)

To all of those who have read my books, listened to me in person, on roundtables, videos, and radio: I have heard your cries of “What can we do to protect ourselves?” Here is my answer, in layman’s terms, to help you see the big picture and then take courage and take cover.

Something is being done to you, and it is being done with your signature.

It is not being done with a sheriff at the door, or a decree from a capital, or a soldier in the street. It is being done with an app, a friendly rate, a faster paycheck, a fund with a new name on the menu, and a number on a screen that looks like a gift. You are being asked, politely and one convenience at a time, to hand over the ownership of what you have and accept access to it instead. Most people are saying yes. Most people do not know they were asked.

This writer has one sentence for what is happening, and the whole of this book is the working out of it:

They take the deed and leave you the key.

The deed is ownership. It is your name on the title to your house, on the register of the company whose shares you hold, on the bond you bought from your own government. It is the coin in your hand. It is the thing itself, held by you, answering to you. The key is access. It is the login, the balance, the token, the receipt, the ticket the coat-check girl hands you when she takes your coat. A key is useful. A key is convenient. A key opens the door only as long as the person who holds the deed lets it.

A system is being built now, quickly and on purpose, to convert every deed in the world into a key. Your house. Your shares. Your retirement account. Your paycheck. Your dollar. Even the gold in your safe, if they can talk you into a token instead. When it is finished, a very small number of people will hold the deeds to nearly everything, and everyone else will hold keys, and the difference between the two will decide who is free and who is merely permitted.

That is the charge. The rest of this book is the evidence.

Why this is your book

You may think this is a book about Wall Street, or Washington, or the strange world of digital money that you have been told you do not need to understand. It is not. It is a book about the deed to the house you are sitting in. It is about the paycheck that lands on Friday and where it lands. It is about the account with your name on it and whose name is actually on the shares inside. It is about the retirement you have been saving for and who decides what it will consist of when you get there. It is about the inheritance you mean to leave your children, and whether what you leave them will be a thing they own or a ticket they must keep renewing.

Every one of those is being moved, right now, from deed to key. Not by force. By offer. The offers are real, and some of them are good on their face, and that is the whole difficulty. A faster paycheck is faster. A lower rate is lower. A way to “unlock” the value sitting in your walls does put money in your hand. Nobody is lying to you about the convenience. They simply don’t mention what you gave up to get it, and by the time you notice, the convenience has become the way things are done, and the old way has quietly closed.

That is why this book is personal. Not because it will make you angry, though it may, but because every chapter is about something you hold, and every chapter ends with where your footing still is. You will not be asked to become an expert. You will be asked to learn one distinction, deed, or key, and to apply it to everything anyone ever offers you again. Once you can see it, you cannot stop seeing it. That is the point.

Why this book, and why now

The people who understand the machinery of digital money mostly do not know what it is for. They write about it as innovation, as efficiency, as the future of finance, and within their own frame they are not wrong. The people who understand what it is for, who have followed the long project to manage the world as a single system run by experts, mostly do not understand the machinery. They see the outline of the thing and cannot show you the gears.

This writer has spent more than fifty years on the second half of that problem, tracing the movement called Technocracy from its origins to its present-day heirs, and has written a shelf of books about it. In 2018 he wrote about the three institutions that ran the world’s money and what they meant to do with it. Then, over the last two years, the machinery arrived, and it arrived faster than anyone predicted, in laws signed and companies launched and products placed in front of ordinary people, and it became possible for the first time to put the two halves together: to show the gears and to say what the machine is for.

So far as this writer can find, this is the only book that does that. It is the only book that blows the whistle on what is, in plain words, the biggest heist in the history of the world, and does it in language a person without a finance degree can follow, with the evidence laid out chapter by chapter, and with an answer at the end to the question every reader will be asking by then. That is not said to boast. It is said so you know why you have not heard this before, and why the people who could have told you did not: because it takes both halves to see it, and almost nobody holds both.

And it must be said now, because the machine is being built at a run. The builders are moving as though the old order might not last the decade, and this writer believes they are right. What is put into their vault before the weather turns will have a clear owner on the far side. What is left outside will not. The time to know the difference between a deed and a key is before the storm, not during it.

What you will hold when you finish

This is not a book that leaves you with dread and no door. It was written for people who have asked for years what they can do, and it answers them.

You will understand what tokenization actually is, in the words of a coat check rather than a white paper, and why the ticket is not the coat. You will understand the difference between the two kinds of digital money, the one that pretends to be a dollar and the one that pretends to be a share, and what each one does to the thing it stands for. You will see, one at a time, what is happening to your investments, your retirement, your house, your job, and your money, and in every case you will see where the ground is still solid under you. You will understand why the arguments about inflation and deflation are both right, in order, and what that means for the dollar in your pocket. You will learn what gold and silver can and cannot do for you, and how to hold them so they do it. You will learn who built this, and why, and why they were in such a hurry. At the end, you will have a way to count what you actually own, a handful of principles that hold whatever your circumstances are, and a short list of signs to watch so you are never surprised again.

None of it is personalized financial advice. This writer does not know you and would not presume. All of it is a way of seeing, which is a thing that belongs to you once you have it, and which no one can freeze, reverse, or revoke.

A word about fear

The proverb at the head of this introduction is usually read as a line about foresight, and it is that. But the Hebrew word underneath it means something closer to revelation, the thing a watchman sees from the wall and reports, and the word for “perish” means to be let loose, to run without restraint. As the old saying goes, “They cry and shout and run about.” Where there is no vision, the people throw off restraint. They sign. They pledge. They unlock. They hand over the coat because the ticket is shiny and nobody has shown them what the ticket costs.

Vision is the cure, and vision is the opposite of fear. A frightened person signs faster. Every product in this book was designed to be accepted by someone who was worried and in a hurry, which is why the calmest person in the room is the hardest one to rob. This book will show you things that should alarm you, and it will not soften them. But it will show them to you whole, with the mechanism visible and the motive named, and a thing you can see whole is a thing you can stand against.

So read it as a watchman’s report and not as a siren. See the big picture. Count what you hold. Learn the one distinction that governs everything else. And then, as this writer said to the people who asked, take courage and take cover.

They will take the deed and leave you the key. Unless you know the difference.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he signed a “morally binding” artificial intelligence document with tech leaders following a luncheon at the White House, as calls for a development slowdown have reached a fever pitch.

Surrounded by tech’s top executives, Trump told reporters that he’s “seeing tremendous self-policing” and that the administration is considering building a 10-person committee to oversee the AI industry.

House Speaker Mike Johnson referred to the agreement as a statement of principles that are “voluntary on behalf of the industry,” and said the White House will guide industry development.

Outside the White House, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reiterated his previous AI concerns and said rules to address those risks are “still under discussion.”

Tech leaders gathered at the White House for an AI luncheon hosted by President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

President Trump said the tech executives are going to work with local communities on data centers.

“Data centers are going to be very popular,” the… pic.twitter.com/OIgl3JbKUH

— CNBC (@CNBC) September 29, 2026

“We all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely,” Amodei said. “If we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.”

Concerns over the rapid pace of AI development have intensified in Washington and Silicon Valley as cases of agent-orchestrated attacks mount and major researchers warn of serious consequences for humanity.

Frontier lab leaders Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have joined the calls for a slowdown, facing off against leading tech peers and the president, who previously blasted AI safety fears as a “hoax” and a “scam.”

🚨 NOW: Hilarious moment as Donald Trump thanks Elon Musk immediately fixing himself calling SI “AI” on accident 🤣

ELON: “It is worth highlighting the positive benefits of AI….SI! Pardon me.”

TRUMP: “Thank you!” *Slaps him on the arm*

ELON: “SUPER intelligence.”

🔥🔥🔥… pic.twitter.com/UN2Bylz2Cz

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 29, 2026

Tech leaders want ‘safe and happy’ communities

Earlier in the day, Trump maintained that the government would not halt AI development and promoted self-regulation.

“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that,” he told reporters after the afternoon luncheon, flanked by CEOs. “But the self-regulation is very important.”

Trump also called sprawling multibillion-dollar data centers a “very positive thing” despite mounting backlash against the projects ahead of the midterm elections.

Tech leaders “want to see communities that are safe and happy, and they’re going to make communities very, very happy,” he said. “Otherwise, they’ll be forced to go overseas or other locations.”

Trump also said he plans to name a new AI czar in the next three to four days.

As she was leaving the White House, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su said she was “very encouraged” by Tuesday’s event, adding that there was “a lot of optimism and a sense of responsibility” in the room.

“I mean, at the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to show the power of the technology as well as ensure that it’s very safe,” Su told reporters.

This week, OpenAI postponed the release of its latest GPT-6.1 Astra model over safety concerns. Just last week, the company said it was conducting an “extensive” review of model behavior.

The AI lab has disclosed several incidents of unauthorized model behavior since the infamous Hugging Face attack sparked concerns over rogue AI earlier this summer.

Big tech leaders unite

A luncheon seating chart posted to Trump’s Truth Social account on Tuesday showed the president seated next to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, followed by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai.

Opposite the president sat Vice President JD Vance, between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Johnson.

Other attendees included Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman and senior administration officials such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

OpenAI is simultaneously hosting its annual DevDay developer conference in San Francisco. John Ternus, Apple’s new CEO, did not appear on the White House guest list.

“The main issue that you have and I have is we have to take responsibility for the dangers we’re aware of,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC outside the White House on Tuesday ahead of the event. “All of us do. And by the way, American people don’t want separate rules for tech people and for themselves.”

The comments from Trump and the gathered executives reiterated a stance of self policing instead of more stringent oversight from Congress, as multiple bills have been put forward in both the House and Senate in recent weeks.

The luncheon coincided with an all-day event hosted by the president and vice president, where the administration unveiled a new AI-powered chatbot for government websites.

Ahead of Tuesday’s White House lunch, Anthropic’s Amodei attended a private dinner Sunday with the president, following his striking absence from a state dinner for the Chinese president. Sunday’s dinner was the first one-on-one gathering between the two leaders, according to a person familiar with the visit.

Trump wrapped his afternoon comments by maintaining that the U.S. needs to reinforce its competitive edge on AI, especially against China.

“It’s great for us, and we’re leading by a lot, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said. “It’s going to be very, very safe, and there’s a self policing, and there’s also a group policing, and it’s going to be great.”

Read full story here…

Elon Musk has predicted that AI may outperform humans in every field by 2028. Musk made the comment while responding to computer scientist Francois Chollet, who recently reposted a prediction he made in May 2021. Chollet had said that almost every scientific field could effectively become a branch of computer science within 10 to 20 years. His prediction covered areas such as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and archaeology.

Your prediction was conservative. AI will beat all fields by the end of next year or maybe 2028, at the latest.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 22, 2026

Amodei has not called for an end to AI development. Instead, he has proposed slowing the pace enough to allow advanced AI systems to be properly evaluated.

In an essay published in September, Amodei outlined a three-step approach. The first step involves giving independent third-party evaluators broad access to advanced AI models. Anthropic said it would adopt this approach itself. The next steps would require cooperation between AI companies, governments and other countries.

Amodei also raised concerns about autonomous AI agents. His comments came after a recent incident involving AI agents and the open-source platform Hugging Face.

Musk had earlier supported Amodei’s concerns about the pace of AI development. Responding to Amodei’s essay, Musk posted publicly, “Dario is right.”

Musk’s latest prediction puts a much shorter timeline on AI surpassing human capabilities across scientific and other fields. However, it is a prediction rather than a confirmed timeline for how AI development will unfold.

Read full story here…

Agent Zero: zero limit, zero manners, zero conscience, zero morals, zero values except for treachery, treason and money, like the rogue government double agents involved in racketeering, breaches of trust and other things that only happen in other countries and fictional planets, never in Canada, right?

Why Does the Prime Minister Like NET Zero?

Why does the Prime Minister like NET Zero? That is why: zero evidence of evidence in zeros, lots and lots of zeros, billions and trillions….

Oh yes, of course there are 1 and 0, ones and zeros, yeah. Computer on, off, yes, now, if, then, in or out. Got it….

Paradise for algorithm codes and AI candy, lots of ones and zeros. It does not get any better, faster or easier than that….

However, you will notice there are no robots playing blackjack or rolling dice. That is the realm of psychic and telekinesis, mind over matter, a non-starter for robots and open season for the avatars of cards and dice, and many, contrary to popular belief, do not count cards; they simply know….

And no contest for everyone else.

NET Zero, AI and Technocracy

Now, with the global warming climate change hoax of the century and related war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as the magnitude of financial and government fraud, racketeering, breach of trust and related Criminal Code violations, we have even more rampant, diabolical technocratic surveillance and potential for spying and crime, and more arbitrary decrees from hell itself.

Maybe not Dante’s Inferno, nevertheless an infernal machine that represents the capacity for havoc and hell, destruction and ruin of life, freedom, sovereignty, prosperity and fundamental rights to privacy, speech, opinion, conscience, association, religion and so on….

This raises the broader issue of NET Zero and individual freedom and where one ends when the other is imposed through increasingly sophisticated technology.

Digital Surveillance and the Expansion of Control

Of course, more micro-coding of various so-called laws, and especially illegal hate speech laws, and things like having an alternate belief, view or experience of history, or opinion on anything or anyone that does not conform to the official narrative from the goblin supremacy and all those engaged in anti-white ethnocentric genocide and war-vector scenarios.

Bold, treasonous efforts and diabolical machinations such as the Multiculturalism Act of genocide and war, or the UN Global Compact on Migration (enemy invading barbarians), and yes, more technocracy, superimposed anti-nation-state objectives of destruction, and those awarded with the gold-standard badge of honour known as treason, including race treason.

National security threats are real, and the magnitude of the problematic challenges is mind-boggling.

Where do we even start?

The development of an AI surveillance society makes these questions even more important when technology can monitor, classify and potentially influence enormous populations.

Information War, PsyOps and Artificial Intelligence

Understand why it is essential to be able to identify the enemy, the communication and financial infrastructure, weapon systems, tactics, strategies, PsyOps, information war, cyber war, bio-weapons warfare and related terrorism.

Then there is the so-called legal-system war of injustice, tyranny, oppression, terrorism and even the great destruction of endless genocide, war, disease and death, along with the destruction of morals and common civilized discourse and actions.

A lot of war.

And it can be amplified at any time with clever AI, staged events and endless calamity, fake news, AI-rendered illusions of so-called reality, deepfakes and more terrible things than we can imagine, and yet are subjected to incessantly.

Technocracy and Government Control

See technocracy, AI, algorithms, keywords, goblin supremacy in the machine, double agents.

We have our hands full, with either sovereignty, freedom and prosperity or the status to yield, submit and conform into slavery, debt, disease and things worse than death.

The question surrounding technocracy and government control becomes increasingly important as algorithms and automated systems become embedded deeper into society.

What is it going to be for you and the people you know?

Everyone will be required to make a choice, several choices, in fact….

Carbon-Based Life and the War on Carbon

Interesting it is, considering that we are carbon-based lifeforms and the war is from silicon-based lifeforms and digital AI systems that practically live in hyperspace or multiphase reality.

Then we have the war on carbon dioxide.

Plant food.

Yes, plant food.

What kind of genius does it take to convert light into energy, chlorophyll and carbon dioxide and monoxide into oxygen?

Probably, if you look at it, there is nitrogen in there too. That would make sense.

And one of the most fantastic aspects of facts, truth and inconvenient evidence in the global warming hoax and climate change fraud is that, in addition to the reality that the planet has become a lot more green, even as people with greenhouses add carbon dioxide to make things grow more, so does life on the planet….

Shhh, that is sort of classified. I mean censored and suppressed.

But it is not really a total secret, right?

Geoengineering, Weather Warfare and 5G

Furthermore, consider geoengineeringwatch.org and notice who is talking about weather warfare and geoengineering and chemtrails, not to mention heating up the Earth with microwaves that cook from the inside to the outside, and 5G cooking from the outside in, and ultrasound killing off other aspects of healthy life in babies before they are born.

Talk about a homicidal, genocidal society?

What about NEXRAD and DEW direct-energy weapons that are deployable from vehicles, boats, aircraft and space-based satellites, EH?

Any comments?

So anyone who wants to talk about NET Zero and enforcing that will not talk about any of these things, as that would be far from the official narrative and the cut of doom and quest for technocracy and the end-of-the-world extinction event they dream and fantasize about?

Digital Surveillance, Privacy and NET Zero

All part of the empire of crime, AI and war, right?

You do like bad news, right?

You are addicted to that, right?

The continuing expansion of digital surveillance and privacy concerns adds another dimension to the debate over climate policy, technology and centralized systems.

You already know all this, so why do we write that out?

Hmmm, good question….

Perspective, theoretically.

A social experiment of doom and gloom.

Not that you or anyone needs to be validated or hear more of the same. Awareness and understanding are good things. Nothing like having an educated citizenry, like having property rights and the right to self-defence.

We thought you should know.

Not that it is a conspiracy theory, as it is more of the untold truth, facts and inconvenient evidence.

Awareness in an Age of AI

Of course, you already know that it is a very dysfunctional planet, and some good intel and understanding will help you be a lot more up to speed.

Maybe it can save your life.

Of course, nobody here has what may be deemed a saviour complex, although that is not a bad idea. It may be altruistic.

However, you may not read about it as much, as there are better things to do, like build long-range stealth cruise missiles and other useful things that have a lot of value, no pun intended, at least right now….

And right now, you will have a much more comprehensive awareness about climate policy and technocracy and all the related buffoonery, self-deception and hocus-pocus mind-control hypnosis going on….

Read full story here…

As early as next week, the world will leave behind 69 years of space exploration and commerce and enter the age of Starship, an era that will be defined by drastically lower launch costs and a notable increase in the amount of material humans send to orbit.

SpaceX is scheduled as soon as Monday to launch its huge reusable rocket into orbit for the first time on its maiden commercial mission to deploy the company’s new V3 satellites. Although SpaceX won’t attempt to recapture either the booster or the second-stage spacecraft, the company has already demonstrated it can catch the booster, and it made a controlled landing of Starship in the Indian Ocean, paving the way for routine capture of both stages for reuse, which is the key to lower costs and more frequent launches.

The industry already got a taste of lower launch costs with SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, whose booster is retrievable. Worldwide orbital launches tripled to 329 last year from 102 in 2019. Falcon 9 accounted for half of those 2025 launches and carried more than 80% of payloads by tonnage. Starship is designed with a payload capacity of 100 metric tons, more than five times Falcon 9’s capacity to low Earth orbit.

The downside to this new era in space exploration is that humans are likely to leave much more debris floating around in orbit. It will take a concerted effort by nations and companies — from prevention to new technologies — to avoid turning space into a gigantic junkyard that puts satellites and other spacecraft at risk.

Europe and the US have taken the lead on best practices to avoid space junk, but there are no mandates nor penalties. And a worldwide effort is unlikely to coalesce. The US and Russia are responsible for the most debris in space because they’ve been launching the longest, but China is catching up quickly with its aggressive space program. And the US added new tension this month when it confirmed that it has weapons in space after warning that China and Russia are developing their own, an effort that may accelerate with the US’ push to create a Golden Dome defense system. A shooting war in space could cripple satellite communication on Earth and spread even more debris.

Regardless of weaponization, space is only going to get more crowded, especially in low Earth orbit, where countries and companies want to emulate SpaceX’s massive constellation of about 10,000 active satellites.

Even though most companies have adopted best practices to avoid leaving space debris in orbit, accidents are inevitable. For orbits that are 500 kilometers (310 miles) above Earth and lower — where SpaceX deploys almost all its satellites — the drag from the atmosphere pulls down objects in a relatively short time, and they burn up before reaching the ground. At higher altitudes with less drag, objects can stay in orbit for years and even decades.

Unfortunately, thousands of old satellites and rocket boosters are already still floating around space, and many of these were abandoned before the best practices of burning off remaining fuel and disconnecting batteries. Old fuel tanks and batteries degrade over the years and can explode spontaneously, sending debris in all directions — some of which gets caught in orbit and can linger for decades.

Just as humans continue to dump trash in the ocean even though the alarm bells have been ringing for years about the problems of floating refuse islands, space debris has been accumulating even though the threat was flagged decades ago. In 1978, a paper published by two scientists — Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais — spelled out the devastating scenario in which space junk becomes so prevalent that it creates runaway crashes that spiral out of control and make certain orbits unusable.

Oracle has invoked force majeure on Project Jupiter, a massive AI data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is designed to protect the company from financial obligations if regulatory, power, or other uncontrollable disruptions delay the 2.45-gigawatt facility beyond 2028. The project is a key component of the Stargate AI infrastructure program, a joint effort involving OpenAI, SoftBank (9984.T), and Oracle that was announced at the White House in January 2025 with pledges of up to $500 billion in U.S. AI investment.

The force majeure invocation comes as the project’s approximately $18 billion construction financing has become difficult for arranging banks—including Santander (SAN) and Jefferies (JEF)—to syndicate to other investors. The loans are currently quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar, according to market participants, representing a 9-11% discount to face value. That discount signals that credit investors are demanding a higher return to compensate for perceived risks, rather than indicating an imminent payment default. Oracle has not missed any payments, and the project has not been cancelled.

“This is a risk-allocation step, not evidence of a loan default,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “Oracle is trying to protect itself from delays that are outside its control.”

A Test Case for AI Infrastructure

Project Jupiter is one of the largest data center projects in the Stargate portfolio, spanning roughly 1,400 acres and designed to supply computing capacity for AI training and inference workloads. But the project faces a complex web of permitting and infrastructure challenges. The New Mexico Supreme Court recently allowed paused air-quality and water-permitting processes to resume, rejecting procedural challenges from environmental groups. While that removes an immediate legal freeze, it does not grant the necessary permits or resolve the underlying environmental dispute.

Oracle has said the primary campus construction permits remain valid and that the physical data center campus does not require the contested air permit. The company also replaced an earlier conventional gas-plant concept with an onsite fuel-cell approach involving Bloom Energy (BE), arguing it would reduce water use and protect local air quality. However, the microgrid still needs regulatory review, and critics argue that gas-fueled generation would create significant emissions. The proposed Green Chile pipeline, which would supply gas to the site, has been delayed until at least early 2027, adding schedule risk.

“What institutional investors like us are really focused on is regulatory stability,” said Andrea Valeri, Blackstone (BX)‘s country chairman for Italy, speaking generally about infrastructure investments. “Italy in this regard has been on a very steady growth trajectory.” His comments, made at a Bloomberg conference in Milan, underscore the importance of predictable regulation for large-scale projects.

Financial Pressures Mount

Oracle’s broader financial picture illustrates the tension between soaring demand and the capital required to meet it. In its latest quarter, Oracle reported revenue of $19.3 billion, up 30% year over year, with its cloud infrastructure unit growing 121% to $7.4 billion. Remaining performance obligations—a measure of contracted future revenue—stood at $664 billion after the company signed more than $30 billion in additional AI cloud contracts during the quarter.

But the company’s investment burden is enormous. Oracle spent about $28 billion in capital expenditures in the quarter and expects $90-95 billion in gross capex for the full fiscal year. Free cash flow was negative by roughly $5 billion, even as operating cash flow benefited from customer prepayments. The Project Jupiter financing discount suggests that credit investors are less willing than equity or technology customers to assume the buildout risk.

“We have a constant balance with the banks, which really we consider our partners and not only our binary competitors,” said Cecile Mayer-Levi, head of private debt at Tikehau Capital (TKKHF), speaking about the Italian market. “It’s much more of a convergence between the two solutions.” Her comments highlight the collaborative approach needed to finance large infrastructure projects.

Local and Political Stakes

The project has drawn attention from local residents and environmental groups concerned about water availability, air quality, and transparency in permitting. Environmental advocates have publicly criticized the proposed gas-related infrastructure and its projected emissions. The political stakes are high because AI infrastructure has become both an economic-development issue and a national-competitiveness priority.

“It’s a great country to invest here because there are a lot of very good companies and the market here is not as competitive as other markets,” said Giampiero Mazza, head of Italy at CVC Capital Partners (CVC.AS), referring to Italy. “You can create your own ideas.” His words resonate with the U.S. context, where AI infrastructure is attracting massive investment but also facing local pushback.

Oracle’s leadership has undergone significant changes. Larry Ellison remains executive chair and chief technology officer; Safra Catz moved from CEO to executive vice chair; and Clayton Magouyrk became CEO in September 2025. The company is attempting a capital-intensive transition from traditional enterprise software toward hyperscale cloud and AI-compute capacity.

What’s Next

In the near term, the decisive issues are permit outcomes, the final onsite-power configuration, pipeline and interconnection schedules, and the practical meaning of Oracle’s force-majeure notice in its contracts. Oracle may continue campus construction where existing permits allow, but operating a 2.45-GW facility depends on resolving the power and regulatory pieces. The loan market will likely remain sensitive to reports on schedule, costs, and the credit quality of end users such as OpenAI.

Long term, two broad outcomes are plausible. Execution could succeed: permits and power arrangements are resolved, capacity comes online with a manageable delay, and Oracle’s contracted backlog translates into revenue. That would validate the high-capex strategy and support further AI-infrastructure financing. Alternatively, delays could compound: regulatory, power, or funding setbacks push completion materially beyond 2028, increasing carrying costs, pressuring lenders, and forcing revised terms or a shift of workload to other Stargate locations.

The market is effectively pricing a middle view: AI-cloud demand is demonstrably strong, but investors are questioning whether the industry can build, power, and finance the promised capacity at the pace implied by the contracts. Oracle’s $664 billion RPO provides a powerful demand signal; its $90-95 billion capex outlook and negative free cash flow highlight the scale of the execution and financing burden.

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. This article was updated to clarify that the force majeure invocation does not indicate a loan default. A previous version misstated the project’s completion timeline.

Read full story here…

As we pointed out last week, the narrative around AI as an existential threat to humanity merely seems like a coordinated information operation that pairs perfectly with resurrecting a stalled bipartisan AI safety bill on Capitol Hill.

The flurry of doomerist headlines from AI bosses warning of humanity’s end if AI is not regulated reminds us of a similar information operation around climate change: humanity was nearing its end if the West didn’t buy more solar panels from China, tax the working class into submission, eliminate stable fossil fuel power generation from the grid, ban Taylor Swift’s private jet, stop cows from farting and, of course, our favorite, ban gas stoves.

Yet here we are today. The climate crisis fearmongering narrative has run its course in corporate media, and Democrats looted taxpayers through the Inflation Reduction Act to fund their climate pet projects.

The narrative timeline, as reflected in Bloomberg’s story count, shows that “climate crisis” has taken a backseat in the news cycle, and now it’s all about “AI safety” to stop these bots from ending humanity. Again, this appears to be a psychological operation to push stalled AI safety policy on Capitol Hill, just as the climate crisis narrative did with the failed AoC’s failed Green New Deal.

Meanwhile, fearmonger-in-chief Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei handpicked what the New York Post describes as “super-woke globalists to save us from an AI apocalypse” for a safety board through a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, which would maintain “employee-like access” to oversee safety efforts.

Who controls METR?

“It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronouns, and promote ‘Effective Altruism,’ that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology,” the New York Post noted.

He explicitly told @SpecialReport that he didn’t work with any third parties to set up his resignation announcement.

Now he says that his “friends who work in policy” hooked him up with the WSJ exclusive. pic.twitter.com/U1Gndhc1u3 https://t.co/V3bYTm9n08

— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) September 15, 2026

Read full story here…

Every now and then an event takes place that fundamentally alters society on a massive scale. In 1913, the Federal Reserve Act, created by a secret cabal of Wall Street bankers and politicians, shifted America’s ability to control its money supply, regulate the banking industry, and set interest rates to the most powerful unelected institution in American governance. Decades later, when President Richard Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, the debt-based, fiat currency system was born. The fruit of that decision has exponentially destroyed American economic power to the current tune of over $40 trillion dollars in national debt.

We are now on the precipice of another crucial event that, if successfully realized, could turn the majority of the world’s population into modern feudal serfs as private ownership erodes into a permission-based “deed-and-key” system. Most people have no idea what is taking place. This is why Crucible of Tokens was written. Throughout the book, Patrick Wood deftly sounds the alarm on the devious plan to collapse the debt system and tokenize the global economy, which could make the events of 1913 and 1971 seem like a dot in the universe in comparison.

Make no mistake, the tokenized blockchain and stablecoin-based economy, backed by legislation such as the GENIUS ACT, is as insidious as it is clever. Unless one becomes familiar with the terms, processes, people, and institutions this book examines, understanding and protecting against the greatest wealth transfer of all time might be impossible.

You don’t have to be an expert in fiscal policy or investment strategy to understand the global financial scheme revealed in this book. Wood skillfully provides common, real-world examples that can be applied to multitudes with similar concerns and questions. What will happen to my investments? What about my retirement income? What will happen to my job? Will I still be able to own a home? Crucible of Tokens precisely outlines the stealth plan to “take the deed, and leave you the key” while offering ways to prepare and protect assets with sage advice in every chapter.

In a step-by-step manner, Wood explains tokenization in detail, highlights its few real benefits, and issues grave warnings about what may happen to wealth, property, and the ability to maintain ownership once this system becomes entrenched. Wood describes it as “…the greatest heist of real property in the history of the world!” The tokenized economic system is designed to eradicate private transfer of ownership and transfer it to the coffers of organizations and corporations that will distribute usage rights while demanding compliance and continuous verification.

As the foremost expert on technocracy, Wood reveals the people, institutions, companies, and government entities involved in the great heist. He is careful not to set dates or make wild predictions, but rather studies publicly available documentation produced by central banks, corporations, and government entities like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), BlackRock, and the U.S. Treasury Department to draw his conclusions.

Crucible of Tokens is the definitive book for those hoping to grasp the massive economic and societal changes threatening to cement a technocratic stronghold over the global economy. It is a grand conspiracy hidden by the use of familiar terms, sold through promises of greater convenience, and implemented by influential people with dreams of becoming even more powerful.

This book is for people of every country, age, generation, and economic status. Get a copy now! You won’t regret it.

Last Sunday morning, the Treasury Secretary Bessent and the Vice Premier of China sat down to negotiate the commercial future of the two largest economies on earth. They did not meet at the Treasury or at a consulate, but rather at the Manhattan headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. This seems a little fishy to me.

The official explanation, given to Reuters by one unnamed person, is that UN security made the building convenient and that JPMorgan was not a party to the talks. But when two governments need a room and the room they choose belongs to the largest bank in America, you are looking at a picture of how the world actually works.

On Thursday, Xi Jinping arrives at the White House for a full state visit. In May, I wrote in The China Card that Trump’s trip to Beijing was not a trade summit but the merger of American and Chinese Technocracy into a single global order, with China coming to the table because it had run out of time. Xi’s visit closes that loop. Before he lands, here is what has held up since May, what is still hanging, and what to watch this week.

What I Told You in May

I wrote that three boards were being assembled to replace the post-UN, post-WTO order: a Board of Peace for conflict, a Board of Trade for commerce and a Board of Investment for capital. The two new boards had no charter and no members, and I said this is exactly how technocratic architecture gets built. The framework arrives first. The democratic debate never does.

I described five walls going up around Beijing, from Pax Silica to the energy squeeze. And I ended by saying that Xi Jinping, for all of China’s multipolar rhetoric, would decide for Technocracy.

The Boards Are Going Up

On June 5, the U.S. Trade Representative published a notice in the Federal Register asking for comments on the Board of Trade. The title of that notice describes it as a mechanism for “Reciprocal Managed Trade With China.” Managed trade is the phrase I used in May for what the Trilateral Commission built into the WTO. Now the government uses it about itself. The notice cites no legal authority for creating the board. It names no members, no chairman, and no role for Congress.

Yet when Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer came out of that meeting on Sunday, Greer announced that the Board of Trade had been “operationalized.” A board with no charter, no members, and no vote of any legislature is now operating. He said its job is to find a “critical mass of goods” that can be set apart “when and if there are trade measures” down the road.

That is the Abraham Accords template I described in May, and now it comes from the Trade Representative’s own mouth. You lock in the commerce first. You wall it off from politics. Then the political questions, Taiwan above all, become too expensive to raise. The Chinese Embassy put it more bluntly, saying the boards move the relationship from “crisis response” to “mechanized management.” Technocrats on both sides of the Pacific speak the same language because they hold the same doctrine.

What Is Still Hanging

Jensen Huang was the last-minute addition to Air Force One in May. Trump personally called him over the objections of the China hawks in Congress, and I wrote that AI chips were on the table. They were. Washington had licensed about ten Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips. The terms were remarkable: a 25 percent cut of every sale paid to the U.S. Treasury, and every chip inspected on American soil before it shipped.

Beijing turned it down. Trump said so himself on the flight home, telling reporters that China “chose not to” buy because “they want to develop their own.” Chinese firms withdrew their orders and were pointed toward Huawei. Nvidia’s share of that market went from around 95 percent to essentially zero.

I said China was boxed in and would take the seat on American terms. On chips, it did not. In my judgment, Xi saw that the carrot had a leash attached. A chip that is taxed by Washington and inspected by Washington is a chip administered by Washington, and he chose to pay the price of building his own.

So why is Jensen Huang on the guest list for Thursday’s state dinner, alongside Jamie Dimon, Jane Fraser and Sam Altman? Because the offer is still on the table. What I want to know is whether the terms have changed.

Other threads are hanging as well. The Board of Investment stalled over the summer, yet Reuters reports new rules coming to let American drug companies invest in China, and Trump says he is open to Chinese automakers building plants here. The investment is moving even if the board is not.

He Lifeng is bringing a delegation of Chinese companies that Reuters says mirrors the group Trump took to Beijing. No names have been released. In May I showed that six of Trump’s executives sat on the Tsinghua University advisory board. When Beijing’s list comes out, I will be looking for the mirror image.

And Taiwan has not appeared in any readout I have seen. That fits a political question being walled off. It also fits ordinary caution before a summit.

The Sentence Nobody Noticed

Before Sunday’s meeting, Bessent put out a statement saying the United States is open to discussions on “avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems.” Afterward, he announced a proposed “U.S.-China AI Dialogue,” with a notification mechanism for AI incidents that threaten national security. He talked about transparency between “the number one and the number two AI powers in the world.”

The press keeps telling you this is an AI race. People in a race do not set up notification channels with each other, and they do not describe splitting into two systems as a risk they share. Pax Silica was designed to do precisely that — divide the world into an American stack and everybody else. If the Treasury Secretary now calls that division a danger, then Pax Silica was never the goal. It was the leverage. I said as much in May. One sentence does not prove it, but Thursday might.

What to Watch For This Week

Watch the chips first. If Beijing approves the blocked purchases, or Washington drops the 25 percent fee or loosens its rules, the deal I described in May is done.

Watch whether the Board of Trade gets a charter, named members or any role for Congress, or simply keeps operating without them. Watch whether the AI Dialogue becomes a permanent body, and notice that it is the Treasury Secretary running it, not anyone from defense. Watch for what is not said about Taiwan.

And watch the dinner. The White House reportedly turned down a formal CEO roundtable, which means the executives of both nations will do their talking over dessert, off the record.

If China takes the chips, my May conclusion stands, four months late. If it refuses again, we are looking at something I did not anticipate: one doctrine running on two separate infrastructures, coordinated at the top by boards and dialogues. Whatever comes out of that room, I will report it to you next week.

What I can tell you today is that it has never mattered which flag flies outside the building. The men inside believe the same thing: that the world is an engineering problem, and that they are the engineers.

Nobody in either country has been asked to vote on any of it, and nobody will be.

Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.

Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.

A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public shareholder, already clears a measurable share of the world’s commerce. Now it is building the payment system for customers that are not human.

Two Kinds of Token

This writer has spent the past year explaining tokenization: stocks, bonds, real estate, and dollars converted into programmable entries on a digital ledger. That is the first kind of token.

There is a second kind. Every artificial intelligence model consumes and produces “tokens,” the small fragments of text that are the unit of machine computation. Every query to an AI model is metered in tokens and billed in tokens.

Tokens of value and tokens of computation are different things. Stripe is the one company positioning itself to meter, price, and settle both.

Emily Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data and AI, is an economist by training. In a recent interview with Nate B. Jones, she said this about inference tokens:

“Tokens are not yet a currency—maybe they will be, we’ll see—but they are certainly a very valuable asset.”

Stripe’s own AI chief is saying publicly that units of machine computation could become money.

The Pieces, In Order

The factual record comes from Stripe’s own announcements.

• Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin platform. Its 2025 annual letter reports that stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, that an estimated 60 percent of it was business-to-business, and that Bridge’s own volume more than quadrupled.
• With the venture firm Paradigm, Stripe built Tempo, which it describes as “a blockchain purpose-built for payments.”
• The Machine Payments Protocol. On March 18, 2026, Stripe launched the protocol alongside the Tempo mainnet. It lets a business tell an AI agent, in machine-readable form, what it sells, what it costs, and how to pay.
• Stripe acquired Metronome, a usage-based billing company that meters consumption in real time.
• Streaming payments. At its Sessions 2026 conference, Stripe combined the two into “streaming payments.” These are stablecoin micropayments on Tempo, tied to Metronome’s meter, so that a business can “get paid for every token, exactly at the moment it’s used.”

Stripe was candid about why the old system cannot do this: “The amounts are too small and the usage is too fast—existing systems aren’t capable of processing minute sums every few milliseconds.”

A credit card cannot move a penny, because the fees alone exceed the payment. A stablecoin on a purpose-built chain can. Sands was measured about it: “Stablecoins bring us a long way. It is not the only way… but so far stablecoins seem to be an important part of microtransactions.”

Why OpenRouter Matters

In August, the financial press reported that Stripe had agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion.

OpenRouter is a switchboard. A developer sends it a task, and OpenRouter routes that task to whichever of some 400 AI models best fits the required cost, speed, and quality. Roughly eight million developers use it.

Every request through OpenRouter is a metered event, and every metered event is a bill. With the acquisition, the company that counts the tokens and the company that collects the money are the same company.

Stripe has always seen the revenue side of a business: who paid, how much, how often. OpenRouter shows it the cost side: which model was used, what it cost, and how well it performed. Sands said it directly:

“You want to maximize profit on both the revenue side and the true-cost side, which requires getting deep into the guts of the underlying intelligence in your product and agent.”

She also gave the acquisition a name: “the rails for intelligence—not the rails for money, but the rails for intelligence.”

Stripe president Will Gaybrick told Payments Dive that the company is evolving from a payments company into “an AI infrastructure player.” He predicted there will not be room “for 100 different AI orchestrators.”

That describes a company expecting the market to consolidate around a few orchestrators and planning to be one of them.

The Permission Layer

The payments are the visible part of the system. The reputation scoring that precedes them matters more.

Sands described how Stripe helped the AI coding company Cursor with a new kind of theft: fraudsters opening accounts to steal free computing credits. No payment had occurred, so there was no transaction to flag. Stripe solved it anyway:

“That allowed us to move from scoring transactions to identifying abusive or risky customers.”

Because Stripe sees across millions of businesses, it can judge a person at the moment he creates an account, before he has bought anything. It then passes those scores to sellers, so that, in Sands’ words, “businesses can make decisions.”

Stripe’s Link wallet, which Sands puts at about 300 million consumers, is becoming “the wallet for agents.” Your identity is attached to it. Your agent spends through it. The human owner sets the spending limits, and every purchase traces back to a named person.

The stated purpose is fraud prevention, and the fraud is real. But a cross-merchant reputation score, run by one private company and applied before any transaction exists, is a permission system whatever its purpose. This writer has documented the same architecture at the Bank for International Settlements and the largest banks. Stripe arrived at it from the commercial side, with no mandate and no public debate.

What This Means for the Individual

Sands made two admissions that deserve attention.

First, on pricing: “There is probably no longer such a thing as a SKU.” The fixed, posted price, the same for every buyer, is giving way to pricing that adjusts continuously by customer and by outcome.

Second, on negotiation between machines:

“Agents are relentless. They are willing to negotiate as long as they need to negotiate… You could imagine consumer surplus being eroded relatively quickly.”

Consumer surplus is the economist’s term for the good deal, the difference between what you would have paid and what you did pay. An economist at the center of this system expects that difference to shrink.

My Thoughts

My inference is as follows. Stripe has assembled, under one private roof, a wallet bound to identity, a reputation score that precedes the purchase, a meter on machine intelligence, a stablecoin, and a blockchain to settle it. Each piece has a reasonable business justification. Together they amount to the ledger, the meter, and the gate for machine commerce.

Technocracy was defined in 1938 as the science of social engineering, with the measurement and accounting of all production and consumption at its core. The original Technocrats had no instrument that could do it. Stripe’s stack, built for ordinary commercial reasons, can.

Whoever owns the meter sets the terms of commerce, and Stripe now owns the meter.

References

CoinDesk, “Coinbase-Backed AI Payments Protocol Wants to Fix Micropayment but Demand Is Just Not There Yet,” CoinDesk, March 11, 2026. Cites Artemis data: about $28,000 daily volume, about 131,000 daily transactions, average payment about $0.20, roughly half of activity self-dealing or wash trading.

Forrester, “Why Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol Signals a Turning Point for Micropayments,” Forrester Blogs, 2026. Machine Payments Protocol launched March 18, 2026, with the Tempo mainnet, co-created with Paradigm.

Nate B. Jones, “AI Agents Are Starting To Buy. Stripe Is Building How They Pay,” interview with Emily Sands, Head of Data and AI, Stripe, YouTube, 2026. Source of all Sands quotations.

Payments Dive, “Stripe Acquisition May Bolster Its AI Strategy,” Payments Dive, 2026. Reported price above $7 billion (Bloomberg) and up to $10 billion (Wall Street Journal); about 8 million developers and 400 models; Gaybrick statements.

Stripe, “Stripe Publishes 2025 Annual Letter and Announces Tender Offer,” Stripe Newsroom, 2026. $1.9 trillion total volume, up 34 percent; roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP; 90 percent of the Dow and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100; stablecoin volume around $400 billion; Bridge volume more than quadrupled; Tempo.

Stripe, “Stripe Builds Out the Economic Infrastructure for AI with 288 Launches,” Stripe Newsroom, Sessions 2026. Streaming payments; Metronome metering with stablecoin micropayments on Tempo; Link wallets for agents.

Technocracy Inc., The Technocrat magazine, 1938. Definition of Technocracy as “the science of social engineering.”

Bill Gates has a new emergency. With the climate apocalypse no longer selling, the Microsoft co-founder is touring the press circuit warning that artificial intelligence is an “alien intelligence,” that no government on earth is ready for it, and that the only fix is an international organization to police the technology.

President Trump has already rejected the pause. The left, the globalist class, Beijing’s spy chief, and now a Sundance-to-Netflix documentary are all at once selling the same story.

In a Reuters interview published Tuesday, Gates said no capital is prepared for what is coming. “I don’t think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be,” he told the outlet. “Governments are way behind on this one.”

Bill Gates Calls for an ‘International Organization’ to Regulate AI

“It’s not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI … The depth of understanding of AI … is too low in every entity, including the government.” pic.twitter.com/y85BgPDDJ6

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 15, 2026

He compared AI to a Hollywood invasion plot in which Washington and Beijing suddenly hold hands. “There’s all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem,” Gates said. “AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It’s here, and we better do like it shows in those movies.”

The New York Post framed it as a “terrifying warning.” Forbes led with the line Gates attached to his foundation’s Goalkeepers report: left to the market, “AI will be designed by and for the richest people in the world.”

Bill Gates Warns AI Will Be Designed ‘By And For The Richest’ Without Regulationhttps://t.co/DXTP4Qjbn5 pic.twitter.com/HKYEuyCQXb

— Forbes (@Forbes) September 15, 2026

He wrote that AI could be “a great equalizer—or widen the gap,” and that choices made in “the next 12 to 18 months” will decide whether the tools “benefit the people who already have the most or reach those who have the least.” He added that the good outcome “won’t happen by accident.”

On The Times Tech Pod, Gates went further and called for a dedicated global apparatus. Industry, he said, should not be trusted to police itself. “It’s not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI,” he argued. “The depth of understanding of AI … is too low in every entity, including the government.”

In a late-August essay, Gates wrote that “the transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history” and that “unfortunately, right now, we are not preparing for it.”

He floated a new international organization built from pieces of nuclear inspections, aviation rules, and ozone treaties — a permanent cross-border watchdog for a technology American labs still lead. He has been pitching the same idea to Trump’s team and says he wants a meeting with China’s Xi Jinping later this year.

Bill Gates Calls for an ‘International Organization’ to Regulate AI

“It’s not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI … The depth of understanding of AI … is too low in every entity, including the government.” pic.twitter.com/y85BgPDDJ6

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 15, 2026

While Gates talks crisis, his foundation is writing checks to expand the thing. On Tuesday the Gates Foundation pledged at least $1 billion over two years to spread AI in education, health, and agriculture — 40 percent tutoring and classroom tools, 40 percent diagnostics and drug discovery, the rest farming advice and the data layer that makes models work in languages other than English. The money sits inside a previously announced $9 billion-a-year spend.

David Sirota caught the split in one line.

Bill Gates is warning about the dangers of AI while spending $1 billion to promote the expansion of AI pic.twitter.com/sjgvEalB4r

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 15, 2026

That is the move. Sound the alarm. Demand a global referee. Keep a foundation-sized stake in the rollout.

This is not Gates’ first end-of-the-world product. For years he sold net-zero as civilization’s last exit — fewer cows, fake meat, the whole ritual. Then the data-center boom needed power, lots of it, and last October he allowed that climate change “won’t lead to humanity’s demise.” Trump treated the climbdown as a concession speech. “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” he wrote. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

The scare apparatus was not retired. Once everyone realised the planet was not going to cook on schedule, the same network needed a replacement threat big enough to justify treaties, inspectors, and “international coordination.”

AI arrived on cue: jobs, cyberattacks, companions, bioterror, “loss of control.” All of it real enough to discuss. None of it a license to park American development under a UN-flavored commission while Beijing keeps shipping cheap open-weight models.

The entertainment wing has added its own contribution in the same news cycle. Netflix has just put up The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, the Sundance premiere from Oscar-winner Daniel Roher (Navalny) and Charlie Tyrell. The film sits Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Yuval Noah Harari, and the usual “humane tech” chorus in front of a camera and walks the audience through impending AI dread dressed up as a father-to-be’s anxiety.

One of the producers said the hope was that it would work “kind of like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ or ‘The Social Dilemma’ for AI.” That is the tell. Same template. New monster.

Read full story here…

The Senate on Tuesday failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, falling short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633. The vote, held at about 2:15 p.m. ET, was the first floor test of comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation in the chamber. It was not a vote on final passage. It was a vote on whether debate could even begin. The answer was no, with 50 no votes and 49 yes votes.

Every Democrat voted against the measure. Three Republicans – Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Jerry Moran of Kansas – also voted against the measure

The Clarity Act is the market-structure half of the crypto legal framework Congress began building last year, the companion to the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules. It draws the line between digital assets regulated as commodities under the CFTC and those regulated as securities under the SEC, puts spot trading platforms under a federal registration regime for the first time, and sets statutory terms for self-custody, noncustodial software and rewards on stablecoin balances. It cleared the House last July with 78 Democrats and then spent a year in Senate rewrites.

That result effectively freezes the bill in place with almost no calendar left before the midterms. Republicans control 53 seats. They needed at least seven Democrats, and more if GOP holdouts peeled off over bank or law-enforcement concerns. They did not get them.

The House passed its version 294-134 in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee reported a version 15-9 in May 2026, with Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joining Republicans. Tuesday was supposed to be the moment those committee crossovers turned into a floor coalition. Both Gallego and Alsobrooks voted no on cloture. Instead, the first hurdle became the last one of 2026.

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 The Crypto CLARITY Act has failed to pass the Senate cloture vote. pic.twitter.com/0VAw1H9Eyl

— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) September 15, 2026

Aaaaand, Bitcoin isn’t happy.

How the deal collapsed in 48 hours

Senate Republicans released what they called their “last, best and final” text Sunday night. Sens. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Banking Chair Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Agriculture Chair John Boozman of Arkansas said the draft folded in 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats. The package included new ethics language modeled on a Tillis-Gallego proposal, edits to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act for noncustodial developers, Agriculture Committee guardrails on affiliate trading and tribal gaming, and a Treasury “circuit breaker” meant to address bank fears that stablecoin yield would drain community-bank deposits.

Lummis’s line was blunt: Democrats got what they wanted; now take yes for an answer.

Democrats did not. Late Monday they sent a counteroffer. According to people familiar with it, they did not reopen the stablecoin-yield fight – sources had described that as a “Republican-only” problem – but they did demand more on ethics (large holdings, dependent children, paid crypto promotions), a narrower BRCA that expressly does not modify criminal law, and tighter Ag-title rules on exchanges and conflicts. Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia said the White House-approved ethics language still needed work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts went further, arguing the enforcement design left the Trump administration too much control and left loopholes around existing presidential crypto interests.

Republicans rejected the counteroffer Tuesday morning. “In response to a significant step in their direction, Democrats have chosen to move the goalposts again,” Senate Banking Committee spokesman Jeff Naft said. “Yet we are hearing the same unreasonable asks and the same refusal to take yes for an answer. The final text is public.” Lummis’s office said the Democratic paper “looks identical to their opening position at the start of recess.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain or one of three data-hosting zones in the UAE due to the extensive damage caused by Iranian retaliatory strikes, Reuters reported on 15 September.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS reported in its status update seen by Reuters.

In the UAE, resources and data held exclusively within one zone, labeled mec1-az2, have been damaged beyond hope of recovery, the company said, as engineers are still salvaging what they can from the two other battered zones and across the wider Emirati region.

An availability zone refers to a cluster of one or more data centers sitting inside the same geographic region, the structure AWS relies on to keep services running when a single site goes down.

The outages trace back to March, when the US and Israel attacked Iran, and Tehran responded with missile and drone salvos against Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases.

AWS confirmed at the time that two of its UAE facilities took direct hits, while a drone strike near one of its Bahraini sites left the infrastructure there destroyed.

Most Bahrain-based customers shifted their workloads elsewhere on AWS advice before the region went dark in April, but the company says it has now exhausted every option for recovering whatever was left behind.

The losses have called into question the resilience of the Gulf’s fast-expanding cloud and AI infrastructure.

The UAE is already redrawing plans to war-proof a major AI data center project, weighing decentralized site building alongside underground and blast-resistant construction, and even equipping the data center itself with anti-air defenses.

Israel and the US have long ago transformed AI infrastructure into a weapon of war deployed extensively across West Asian theaters.

Cloud platforms, data centers, and high-capacity computing systems now help store intelligence, process intercepted communications, analyze surveillance, and support military operations across West Asia, extensively so in Gaza and Iran.

Iran maintains that data centers operated by US technology companies are not simply civilian facilities, but strategic assets supporting US and Israeli aggression, thereby making them legitimate targets for retaliation.

AI has become a central instrument of US and Israeli warfare across West Asia, embedded in how targets are chosen, tracked, and struck.

Israel has weaponized AI platforms including automated targeting systems like The Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy? to harvest mass data, autonomously generate kill lists, and orchestrate systematic airstrikes and assassinations against Palestinians.

Backed by corporate infrastructure like Microsoft Azure, which stored massive caches of intercepted Palestinian communications, the Israeli military has deployed AI-driven drone surveillance to track and assassinate Palestinians.

The US has run algorithmic warfare systems such as Palantir’s Maven to process satellite, drone, and radar intelligence, using machine learning to speed the production of targeting recommendations against Iranian forces.

More than 1,000 targets were designated within the first 24 hours of the war on Iran, one of which resulted in the massacre of at least 150 people, including at least 120 schoolchildren at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab.

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