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.”

Read full story here…

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.

Read full story here…

The UAE is redrawing its plans for a five-gigawatt artificial intelligence (AI) data center project, one of the largest anywhere outside the US, after Iranian retaliatory strikes on infrastructure across the Gulf forced the Emirates to rethink how and where critical facilities are built, Reuters reported on 11 September.

Speaking in anonymity, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters that Emirati authorities began reassessing where and how sensitive facilities should be built once the war reached the Gulf.

Four of those sources said the campus, first designed as a single 26-square-kilometer site in Abu Dhabi, is now expected to take shape as several data centers distributed across the country.

Authorities are weighing ways to shield the facilities from drone and missile strikes, the sources said, including installing air defenses and putting some of the centers underground.

Sources also said interceptors and electronic jamming equipment are being written into the redesign, with blast-resistant concrete and additional backup power and cooling systems also under consideration, and with the most sensitive material, including military data, possibly housed inside mountains.

Iran began striking Gulf states hosting US forces with missiles and drones in response to US and Israeli airstrikes on Iranian territory. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain were damaged in March, and the company’s regional cloud services remain disrupted.

In April, the Iranian armed forces released a video naming Stargate UAE, the $30 billion, one-gigawatt first phase of the campus, as a potential target for retaliatory strikes, showing a map of the site alongside the caption “Nothing stays hidden from our sight.”

Daniel Benaim, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for Arabian Peninsula affairs, called the war an “economic earthquake” for Gulf states that had spent years selling themselves as safe havens, adding that hardening critical infrastructure was now vitally necessary.

Data centers have moved from commercial facilities into the category of critical infrastructure, processing financial flows, sustaining public services, and feeding into military communications and intelligence work.

Read full story here…

More than 800,000 people are hoping to move to a self-proclaimed crypto micronation called ‘Liberland’ that is on a patch of muddy floodplain along the Danube River.

The uninhabited seven-square-kilometre land on the border of Serbia and Croatia was founded by Czech libertarian politician Vit Jedlicka who claimed the territory in 2015.

There, Mr Jedlicka said he founded a new country with the aim of creating a libertarian state founded on the blockchain technology underpinning cryptocurrencies – or, as a haven for crypto billionaires.

According to the self-declared president, the small ‘nation’ has received 804,000 citizenship applications – enticed by the eradication of tax and government regulation. Its motto is: To Live and Let Live.

It comes as the UK faces an exodus in the tech sector after nearly 6,000 entrepreneurs fled the UK in the past two years, with many fleeing to destinations with more forgiving tax regimes, such as Dubai.

The group of 30 tech billionaires are using blockchain – effectively a secure digital ledger – to construct the first decentralised autonomous government and also the world’s ‘freest country’.

The micronation of around 1,200 citizens has its own official language of ‘Liberlandish’, will be holding a congressional election later this month, has its own passports as well as its own navy, known as the ‘Liberty’.

Meanwhile, its ‘administration’ has appointed three ‘legal professionals’ to form a Supreme Court to oversee applications. It added an app will soon be used to fast track applications from those without a criminal record.

In lieu of tax, a voluntary monthly contribution system was created that is claimed ‘inherently superior to forced tax’ which allows one to ‘become a true co-owner’ of the ‘nation’.

Liberland citizens use cryptocurrency to pay voluntary taxes for the upkeep of the heavily-forested island and its navy. The tokens are the Liberland Dollar, which handles money and network fees; and Liberland Merit, which handles voting and laws. Both can be bought with bitcoin.

One’s ‘dedication’ will be ‘recognised’ through the Liberland app and a rating ‘badge’ system based on monthly contributions – spanning from Bronze (one to ten Merits) to Diamond (more than 10,000 Merits). The chart will be published publicly monthly, justified as a way to maintain ‘radical transparency’.

‘Liberland,’ officially known as the Free Republic of Liberland, joins a movement by the ultra-wealthy of creating micro-states and special economic zones.

These ‘bubbles of capitalism’ have popped up in Honduras, where Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, financially supported the founding of the private city of Prospera. Elsewhere, a ‘Crypto City’ is being built in Venezuela, while ‘Liberstad’, a private member-based city, is being created in Norway.

Liberland is yet to be recognised by other nations, with a lack of proper infrastructure and 200 registered companies. Those behind the project have set up a permanent outpost across the river called ‘Ark Village’ which has shared rooms, kitchenettes and a meeting room.

The territory had been long contested between Croatia and Serbia since the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the 1990s Balkan wars. Mr Jedlicka claimed the land on the principle of ‘terra nullius’, effectively that unclaimed land belongs to the first person to occupy it.

Croatia deployed border police units and patrol boats to prevent repeated attempts by Liberland organisers to reach the area when it was first set up in 2015. Serbian police prevented them from crossing the border from their side.

Since being declared independent by Mr Jedlicka, there are now more than 1,262 registered citizens and 804,000 applications for citizenship.

A settlement on the island – which is about the size of Gibraltar – has been up and running since August 2023, with a core group of people maintaining a continuous physical presence.

They have been developing the land, having already constructed the first house, set up basic infrastructure and marina facilities.

Liberland’s website states that non-EU visitors who cross into the area from the Croatian side are usually issued a notice requiring them to leave Croatian territory within seven days, accompanied by a temporary re-entry ban.

However, it also says those seven days are ‘more than enough to earn full Liberland citizenship’, by helping with construction, clearing land, building infrastructure or other community projects.

Other individuals in Europe have previously declared the formation of a micronation state – including the Principality of Sealand, an abandoned North Sea oil rig off the coast of Suffolk which declared independence in 1967.

An exodus of the wealthy from the UK has been fuelled from changes to Capital Gains Tax, the mansion tax on properties worth more than £2million, Inheritance Tax changes and VAT on private schools.

The figures showed that 5,940 business owners left the UK between January 2024 and January 2026. The analysis showed that 10 per cent of those leaving were from the software sector, more than three times higher than the next most affected, property development.

The United Arab Emirates – which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi – as well as Spain and the US were among popular destinations for business owners, according to wealth managers Rathbones.

Michelle White, head of Rathbones’ private client office, said: ‘We are talking to more individuals and families – particularly younger business owners – considering relocation.’

Read full story here…

“I won’t lie to you – there are real dangers,” said Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei about the development of artificial intelligence. “And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”

And the biggest risk could be the end of humanity, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned on social media this past Tuesday, saying Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” with the development of self-improving superintelligence.

“It doesn’t look that different from, say, ‘Terminator’ or from science fiction films,” Coxon told CBS News Thursday. “It will be smart enough to kill us.”

In response, Amodei told “Sunday Morning” yesterday, at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, “I don’t think I fully just appreciated what it would actually be like when the progress was as fast as it was.”

He said the development of AI has been on an exponential curve, which is starting to get steeper. Asked what that means, Amodei said, “It doesn’t mean we need to panic today. It doesn’t mean we need to shut it all down. But I would say it’s a warning sign. It’s a warning sign that we need to slow down.”

In an essay published Saturday, Amodei wrote that the entire tech industry must work together to “slow the pace” of AI capabilities.

Asked if Anthropic is going to stop releasing more advanced models, Amodei replied, “It doesn’t mean that. What it means is that we need to make sure that every generation of models that we release is properly tested.”

To attempt that, Amodei says Anthropic will now give independent evaluators permanent “employee-like” access to their models. “Whenever anyone builds an AI model, there’s a third-party evaluator who can verify whether that company is following the safety practices that they’re committed to – it’s like a food inspector,” he said.

But AI experts say this is hardly enough, and Amodei agrees, claiming he supports federal regulation. So far, proposed legislation ranges from an outright ban on superintelligence, to a mandatory “kill switch” that could shut down risky AI.

“The AI kill switch could be a good idea,” Amodei said. “But I don’t think banning it, completely banning it, is the right approach. One, the idea that we would never get the incredible benefits, never get the medical cures, that doesn’t sit right with me. Second, this technology will be built in other countries, including authoritarian countries.”

Asked if the U.S. should slow down AI development if China would not, Amodei replied, “This is the toughest dilemma. This is the toughest aspect of our situation.”

He looks to the nuclear arms agreements with the former Soviet Union as a potential model, but cautions even his expectations are low. “The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” he said. “I think that’s going to be very difficult, because the incentives to pull ahead in the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should try.”

With the fate of humanity seemingly at risk, how much personal responsibility does Amodei feel about where we are going? “My view here is, it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company,” he said. “People ask me that question all the time: Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable.”

Asked if he is willing to give up the technology to the government, Amodei responded, “To the right combination of governments. The worry I have – I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically-elected governments, I don’t know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance.”

The question is no longer whether AI will become powerful enough to require constraint, but who in power will take action.

“If we build in the right way, I think the probability of something bad happening is very low,” he said. “If we build in the wrong way, the probability of something bad happening is very high.”

Read full story here…

Swedish freight company Einride’s announcement last month that it plans to deploy 500 Tesla Semis on US roads, the largest publicly announced commitment to electric Class 8 trucks, suggests a shift toward fleet electrification. It also brings the next phase of trucking technology into focus: the gradual commercialization of autonomous freight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has targeted late 2026 or early 2027 for self-driving capabilities to begin working on the Semi. That remains a Musk target, not a confirmed commercial rollout. Any version requiring a human operator would be supervised automation, like FSD on Tesla sedans, SUVs, and the Cybertruck.

NEWS: Google announced a major electric trucking project in Texas featuring Tesla Semi.

Google, Nevoya and Center for Green Market Activation will deploy:

• 25 electric semi trucks.
• Dedicated charging infrastructure
• An all-electric freight route between Houston & Dallas. pic.twitter.com/ZxSbFIJk5C

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 9, 2026

Needham analysts Chris Pierce and Mackenzie Holleran see a broader industry inflection point approaching in 2027, as factory-integrated autonomous trucks begin reaching fleets in greater numbers. Their note to clients says automation in trucking will lower operating costs, while longer operating hours could accelerate deliveries and shift market share toward larger carriers.

The analysts said that driverless trucking is already moving beyond technical demonstrations as developers expand routes, remove onboard safety observers and secure carrier commitments. The next test is whether carriers enter a mass-adoption supercycle to automate their fleets and drive down labor costs.

“We believe the debate has shifted from ‘can autonomous trucking work?’ to ‘how quickly can it scale?'” the analysts said.

They continued, “We see compelling benefits for early adopters and eventual trucking industry consolidation, underwritten by the increasing rate of adoption as industry participants see autonomy as a driver of share gain tilting the capacity playing field to lower cost providers capable of driving longer routes in shorter timeframes better satisfying customer demand.”

The analysts identified Aurora as the industry leader, citing expanded routes and operating conditions, customer contracts and the removal of safety observers from certain trucks in July. Kodiak targets observer removal by year-end, with Plus AI targeting driverless operations in 2027.

They noted that long-haul freight “represents the earliest commercial opportunity for autonomous trucking.”

Read full story here…

On Monday, the President of the United States told the people of Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, and every other state now fighting hyperscale data centers exactly what he thinks of them. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” And then the warning: “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

The context is not subtle. Polling now shows a large majority of Americans oppose new data centers, with complaints centering on rising electricity bills, excessive water usage and industrial noise. Candidates in at least 21 races across 18 states have run television ads on the issue, split almost evenly between the parties. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has warned that data-center opposition in Ohio is, in its own words, the anchor hanging around Senator Jon Husted’s neck in his race against Sherrod Brown.¹

A rational political actor facing that landscape might listen. Trump instead did what Technocrats have always done when the public gets in the way of the engineering plan: he redefined the objection as a moral defect. And to seal it, he tied every county commissioner voting against a 500-megawatt campus to Beijing. “China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement,” he wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”²

If that rhetorical move sounds familiar, it should. It is the secular translation of a sermon Peter Thiel has been preaching for two years.

The Antichrist as Safety Regulator

Beginning in the fall of 2024 and culminating in a four-part lecture series delivered to the ACTS 17 Collective in San Francisco in 2025, Thiel laid out a theological-political thesis that has since become the operating theology of the AI buildout. The Antichrist, Thiel argues, will not arrive as a reckless technologist. He will arrive as a safety-minded administrator, exploiting fears of nuclear war, climate collapse and artificial intelligence to install a one-world governance system. His slogan, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, is “peace and safety.”³

Thiel named names. In the twenty-first century, he told his audience, the Antichrist is “a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky.” Climate activists and AI safety researchers are, in his phrase, “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” not because they are consciously evil but because they are building the institutional architecture a future world-state would need. And on the technologies themselves, Thiel was candid: “Maybe these things are good or bad. Stopping them seems far, far worse.”⁴

Set that beside the Truth Social post and the structure is identical. In Thiel’s register, the person who wants to slow AI is doing the Antichrist’s work. In Trump’s register, the person who wants to slow the data center is “backwards,” “poor,” and objectively serving China. Neither framing permits the position that most of those Ohio voters actually hold, which is not “stop AI” but “do not make my family pay for your grid load.” Economic objections invite cost-benefit analysis and compromise. Apocalyptic and treasonous framings do not. You cannot negotiate with the Antichrist, and you cannot negotiate with a Chinese asset.

Technocrat-in-Chief

Courtenay Turner and I documented in The Final Betrayal (November 2025) how the second Trump Administration became the vehicle by which a cohort of billionaire arch-Technocrats, Thiel foremost among them, moved from the periphery of American power to its center. Thiel financed J.D. Vance’s political career from the ground up. His Palantir alumni and Founders Fund network populate the national-security and technology apparatus. The Dark Enlightenment’s contempt for democratic consent, which we traced through Thiel’s own writings and those of his intellectual circle, is no longer a fringe philosophy. It is staffing policy.

What we argued then, and what Monday’s outburst confirms, is that Trump has not merely hosted these men. He has become the Technocrat-in-Chief. The populist who promised to return power to forgotten communities is now instructing those same communities that their objection to a hyperscale facility next to their children’s school is evidence of backwardness.

Sorry, that is not populism. That is the voice of Howard Scott and Technocracy, Inc. in 1934, telling Americans that their opinions were irrelevant to the requirements of the energy system and that the Technate would allocate resources according to engineering necessity, not democratic preference.

The MAGA movement was told it was getting America First. What it is getting is a federal executive using the full weight of the presidency to override local self-government on behalf of the single most capital-intensive industry in human history.

Energy Is the Currency

The historical Technocracy movement made one claim that has never been refuted: the fundamental unit of value in an industrial society is the kilowatt-hour and not the dollar. Scott and his engineers proposed replacing money with energy certificates and allocating energy to every man,  woman, and child by expert decree. Thankfully, they failed to seize power in the 1930s. They did not fail to describe the twenty-first century.

Hyperscale data centers are the first industrial class whose product is literally computation purchased with electricity. When a facility draws hundreds of megawatts, the question is not abstract. It is whether the household or the hyperscaler has priority claim on the grid, and who pays for the transmission and generation built to serve the newcomer. Every rate case now pending before a state utility commission is a contest over exactly that. Trump’s post resolves the contest by fiat: the data center wins, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to prosperity.

This is resource control transferring from individuals to consolidated institutional actors, which is the definition of Technocracy I have used for two decades. It does not require a world government. It requires only that the people who own the compute also control the political apparatus that decides who gets the power.

The Inversion

Here is the irony Thiel’s disciples never confront. His stated nightmare is a distant regulator overriding local self-government in the name of safety. Yet the actual mechanism now in use is a national executive overriding local self-government in the name of the AI buildout. The tool he warns against is the tool being wielded, pointed the other way. The county that votes no is not the world-state. It is the last unwatched place in the system, and it is being told to shut up and sit down.

And the China card is doing double duty. Trump invokes Beijing as the beneficiary of American resistance in the very month he prepares to host Xi Jinping, the Technocrat-in-Chief of China, at the White House. A congressional committee has demanded an investigation into whether China is stoking the anti-data-center movement; Trump declined to repeat that charge, but said the Chinese “can’t believe it is happening.”⁵

China is the rhetorical enemy for domestic consumption and the strategic partner in the architecture. Readers who followed my analysis of the Beijing summit in May will recognize the pattern. American and Chinese Technocracy are not at war with each other. They are converging, and the American public is being disciplined to accept the merger.

Speak Up While You Can

I have repeated that Free Speech and the First Amendment are on the guillotine in 2026. This may be the last battle that decides our fate.

Certainly, the people of Ohio did not ask for this. They were not consulted. They are being told that their electric bills, their water tables, and their quiet nights are the acceptable price of a race with China whose terms they were never shown. And when they object, the most powerful man in the world calls them backward, foolish, and prone to self-harm.

They should say no anyway. Not because AI is evil, and not because the Antichrist is coming, but because the right of a community to decide what gets built inside its borders is the last practical check on Technocracy that ordinary Americans still hold.

Every local vote against a data center is a vote for the proposition that the people, not the engineers, decide. Thiel calls that heresy. Trump calls it treason. I call it self-government, and it is worth defending precisely because they want it gone.

References

1. Kevin Breuninger, “Trump says U.S. communities opposing AI data centers could end up ‘backwards and poor’,” CNBC, August 31, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/trump-data-centers-backlash-elections-congress.html. The NRSC memo language and the 21-races-in-18-states figure are reported there and in AFP coverage of the same day.
2. Agence France-Presse, “Trump blasts US backlash against data centers,” August 31, 2026, syndicated at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-blasts-us-backlash-against-161603675.html. All Trump quotations are from his Truth Social post as reproduced by AFP.
3. “Thiel’s Framing of Proponents of an AI Treaty as ‘Antichrist’ Collides with 60 Years of Catholic Doctrine,” Center for Bioethics and Public Affairs in AI (CBPAI), April 8, 2026, https://www.cbpai.org/blog-1/thiels-framing-of-proponents-of-an-ai-treaty-as-antichrist-collides-with-60-years-of-catholic-doctrine; and Fortune, “Peter Thiel just gave the public its closest look yet at his ‘Antichrist’ theory,” July 18, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/07/18/what-is-antichrist-peter-thiel-pope-leo-ai-regulation/.
4. Leaked recordings of the ACTS 17 Collective lectures, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (September–October 2025) and analyzed in “The Eschatology of Deregulation: On Peter Thiel’s Antichrist,” OILab, https://oilab.eu/the-eschatology-of-deregulation-on-peter-thiels-antichrist/. The Thunberg/Yudkowsky remark is quoted in multiple contemporaneous accounts of the lectures.
5. AFP, op. cit.; CNBC, op. cit. Trump’s upcoming White House meeting with Xi Jinping is noted in the AFP report.