Republicans lost the midterms because of the war and its economic consequences. The good news is that job growth and GDP growth are still strong, and inflation will drop quickly if the war is ended now.

POD UP! 🚨 -- AI Cyber Panic w/ @nikesharora -- Ken Griffin’s Bubble Warning -- The Fall of France? (0:00) Bestie intros! (0:11) Ken Griffin's AI bubble warning (8:19) Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora joins (14:24) AI Cyber panic: PHP exploits and the tumultuous year ahead (44:17) France on the brink: Riots, immigration referendum, debt crisis (1:31:49) Trump's second half strategy, Press Secretary J-Cal?

NEW: Ken Griffin on Paris riots, Chicago and JB Pritzker I think Paris should be a real wake up call to every single young American. France is the dream the left talks about. That dream is the nightmare I left from Chicago. That dream doesn’t belong in our country. A society that comes down to how much you can take from others. Do you see candidates that you’re actually fearful that’s the path they’re going down: J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois. Yes, 100%. 100%

What’s actually going on in Ukraine is that there is a massive incentive difference between the elites and the people. The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches.

There’s a world of difference between user-authorized agents (Muse, Instinct, Grokbot, etc.) and true unauthorized/rogue agents that could constitute cyberattacks. Most of the activity described in the Axios story appears to be the former: customers sharing credentials with agents so they can take actions on their behalf. This may violate bank terms requiring humans to log in themselves, but these are in no way cyberattacks. The direction banks should go is to support user-directed agents. For example, Amex is an authorized connection in Muse, making it easy for users to grant, limit, and revoke access. Read-only permission levels are a sensible interim step. Several banks already support or are moving toward them. Full write access (with user credentials) is a different risk category and should be approached carefully. Frightening the public by blurring the line between user-authorized agentic behavior and cyberattacks is irresponsible.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) just gave an interview where she said the quiet part out loud. She intends to unleash a slew of investigations to deter young people from even considering supporting the Administration … if they know what is good for them.

David Sacks on All In: payback period as the Northstar metric for AI infrastructure. CoreWeave says typical five year deals deliver about 2.5 years payback. SpaceX pays back in roughly one year because it monetizes around $50B per gigawatt while CoreWeave sits near $20B per gigawatt. SpaceX gets effectively spot pricing on 90 day cancelable deals, while CoreWeave locked five year contracts at older prices and spot compute moved way up on scarcity and demand. As long as payback stays short, the economics are nearly unlosable and debt rolls fast. The warning signal is payback stretching out, which implies demand softening, spot falling, or execution delays.

This illustrates the point I’ve been making about the limits of centralized approaches to SI safety in cyber. OpenCode (and earlier Hugging Face) hit the same wall mid-attack: frontier models refused to analyze the very exploits needed for defense because the payloads tripped safety filters. The guardrails backfired. Meanwhile, the attackers found a way around restrictions to access advanced capabilities. This is not surprising. Chinese models are only about 6–9 months behind the American frontier in cyber. Obviously the U.S. has no jurisdiction over them. The only durable response is decentralized: make powerful models available so defenders can build and run their own cyber defenses. The only solution to SI-powered cyberattacks is SI-powered cyber defense.

David Sacks pushes back against the prevailing narratives, arguing that CoreWeave’s sharp spike in bond yields and stock selloff reflect market volatility driven by bets on multi-trillion-dollar AI outcomes and exponential growth, rather than a fundamental collapse in demand. He breaks down these narratives one by one. The key to understanding CoreWeave’s credit risk is that the creditworthiness of its long-term contract customers matters far more.

🚨 David Sacks Says the Timing of Anthropic’s Small Model ‘Scare Campaign’ is ‘Very Suspicious’ “This is where the enterprise is headed right now … You're starting to see this trend where small models are taking share, and lo and behold, coincidentally Anthropic is now starting a scare campaign against small models.”

POD UP! 🚨 Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg! -- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV -- AI Deflation and the Future of Software -- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise? -- Psyop Corner with Sacks -- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings? (0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg! (2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop? (31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software (45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions (1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices (1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer

Patrick is one of the sharpest people I’ve worked with in government. No one knows crypto policy better or worked harder to get market structure done. He negotiated the compromises needed to get Clarity out of committee and onto the Senate floor — without him it wouldn’t have gotten that far. The country owes him a debt of gratitude for his service at the White House, the Pentagon, and in uniform. Looking forward to seeing what he does next in the private sector. 🇺🇸

@DavidSacks The whole thing was fake. Not only was the “hacking” trivial it was done by a GLM but then when it’s “self-replicating” they swap out the model to a small Llama because the GLM is too big 😂

Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS. Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.

Are Small Models Really a Threat? The Anthropic Fear Factory just released a new report warning that small models may be only months away from self-replicating across cheap IoT devices like off-brand Android TV boxes and smart ovens. They say such an AI worm would be hard to shut down since there’s no central kill switch. We’ve gone from “The Terminator is coming” to “your toaster might kill you.” But the experiments don’t support the dramatic headlines. They ran a 26B model across 15 $55 TV boxes at 0.39 tokens per second. The end-to-end test used emulated devices with deliberately open ADB ports, so the “hacking” step was trivial. The capable model often ran on a separate server. Agents were harnessed and told to propagate. This is not proof of autonomous rogue AI worms in the wild. Nor is the threat even novel. Worms that do this without AI already exist. Mirai in 2016 scanned for default credentials and built massive DDoS botnets. Kimwolf has infected over two million devices, mostly cheap Android TV boxes, by hitting open ADB ports. Small models don’t currently add much that matters on these targets. The bottleneck has never been figuring out the device. It’s the huge number of devices that ship with open ports, default passwords, and no patching. Traditional worms already exploit that at scale. A practical attacker would use the best models available offline to design a better traditional worm, then ship the lean binary. You get the intelligence benefit at design time without dragging a slow, heavy model along with every infection. Embedding a weak model in the payload is the worse option for anyone who actually wants the largest, fastest botnet. The timing of Anthropic’s latest scare campaign is hard to ignore. The day before, Brian Armstrong posted that Coinbase fine-tuned an open-weight small model (Qwen-3.5-9B) on proprietary fraud data. It beat frontier models, including Anthropic’s own Opus 4.5, while being faster and much cheaper. In testing it cut fraudulent transactions by about 30%. This is the emerging pattern. For narrow enterprise workloads you don’t need a general superintelligence. You need a small specialist model trained on your own data. Cheaper to run, especially as compute gets tighter, and often better on the metric that matters. That is a direct threat to the frontier-company model of selling access to ever-larger general models. Safety advocates should be welcoming this development. If the real concern is existential risk from ever-larger frontier systems — the ones that could theoretically do sustained autonomous R&D or become hard to control — then a shift toward smaller specialized models is the safer outcome. Small models specialized on fraud detection or support tickets are not pushing the frontier. They are not in the category of systems that could become a new species. The theoretical loss-of-control risk is created by models getting bigger and more generally capable. Safety advocates focused on those risks should welcome companies having a cheaper alternative to constantly scaling general models. Instead we get dramatic warnings about small models at the exact moment they are starting to take real enterprise share from closed-model companies like Anthropic.

David Sacks Calls Out the “Rotating Hoaxes” Fueling Superintelligence Fears “Let's just get back to first principles here. What is the problem that we're trying to solve? The affordability of goods like housing and education and healthcare. How do we bring those prices down? Through abundance. What creates abundance? Technology in general, and specifically superintelligence will be the driver over the next decade. Now, what is the most hated thing in society right now? Superintelligence. If you judge it by its fruits as opposed to a bunch of fake narratives, then I think that people would be in favor of this thing. What does superintelligence create? First of all, people's 401ks are going up. It’s a 3% tailwind to GDP. A million new jobs created, according to The Economist, already. Productivity goes up, which means that wages and living standards go up. This is a driver right now of nothing but positive economic trends. But what do we hear about? ‘AI's going to put everyone out of work.’ Total fake narrative. That was last year's hoax. Data centers using up everyone's water. Now there's a new hoax about human extinction. So we have a series of, I call them rotating hoaxes, where every six months there's a new one to try and convince us to sabotage the thing that's going to solve so many of our problems, especially the ones around affordability.”