There is an unseen hand pushing AI safety as a political ideology. Effective Altruists believe a tiny group of technocrats should decide how much technological progress the rest of us are allowed to have…. and how many shrimp your life is worth. You are witnessing their attempted coup.

EA AI safetyism increasingly looks like Marxism-Leninism for the algorithmic age. The old vanguard claimed privileged knowledge of the inevitable course of History. The new one claims privileged knowledge of the probabilistic course of Humanity. Both use an elaborate intellectual framework to reach the same political conclusion: a small group of enlightened people must constrain everyone else for their own good. That has never lead to anything except monumental human suffering.

The DepSec is the best of us. Feinberg has been grinding everyday against the forces of inertia and whipping the industrial base into fighting shape. There is no one more qualified and capable. He knows M-Day was yesterday! Mobilizing! Also rumors wrt me are completely false.

The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations: We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense. We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.

On August 5, Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg lit a fire under industry to solve America's munitions production problem. He sent a memo to industry leaders giving them 21 days to submit plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities. . . " We put the question to some of our favorite doers in the industry: If you had free reign to fix America’s munitions bottleneck, what would you propose? It's been three weeks, so we’re sharing the best—and hottest—takes we received. 👇

One common theme of conversation over the last month has been: how do we get more technical people to work in DC or do a tour of duty. There are many many parts of USG where there’s technical expertise needed, especially with anything involving the AI stack. If you are an engineer or researcher, consider a stint working in any part of the USG or DoW or anywhere where the public sector of the country needs more technical help. Also if you are reading this and interested, DM me and I am happy to make some connections.

Applications for the fall cohort of the American Tech Fellowship are live NOW! We started the American Tech Fellowship to respond to an urgent need: America needs builders. Brilliant minds who can learn to wield AI like a weapon and discover its highest-leverage uses in the industries that matter most for America. Washington can’t do this. Silicon Valley isn’t doing it. The alpha is going to be discovered on the front lines of American health care, defense, manufacturing, and more. It is going to be discovered by the workers in contact with real problems. That was the thesis of the American Tech Fellowship when we started it a little more than one year ago. The thesis has been vindicated—and like so many success stories, it has generated outcomes we couldn’t have guessed in advance. Elite talent with 12 weeks of hands-on training and a license to build can do remarkable and unexpected things. Last month we brought our alumni together at the American Builder Summit in Washington to show off what they’ve accomplished and to prove the point that AI is a tool whose value is defined by its users. In the hands of an artisan and master builder, it’s a tool of incredible power. In our first year, over 1,000 builders have graduated from ATF—and we’re just getting started. 12 weeks. That’s all it takes to learn the tools and learn how to effect outcomes in the real world. If you’re up for the challenge—if you have a background as a builder and a hunger to learn with like-minded peers—click the link to learn more. Apply now. Join the Fellowship. New cohort launches mid-September:

Analysts and appropriators in the Beltway measure military strength by counting platforms: fighter jets, submarines, aircraft carriers. But a fighter jet without a steady supply of munitions is a liability more than a capability. A submarine stuck in dry dock waiting on spare parts isn’t deterring anyone. As appropriators in Congress consider a historic defense budget, a fundamental mindset shift is needed: Start thinking about manufacturing capacity itself as the strategic asset. Today on First Breakfast, @HudsonInstitute’s Nadia Schadlow and @MarlinspikeVC’s Mislav Tolusic argue that Congress and the Pentagon should adopt a "Capacity-as-a-Service" (CaaS) model to prioritize dynamic production capability over static hardware buys. Borrowing the logic of SaaS, DoW could pay manufacturers ongoing retainers or subscriptions to keep flexible, scalable production capacity on standby—much the same way it already pays commercial shipping companies to guarantee capacity during emergencies. As Congress debates next year's defense budget, the question isn't just what weapons to buy, but what manufacturing capacity to own, fund, or incentivize so industry can produce at whatever scale a future conflict demands. Defense acquisition needs an update to reflect that reality. Read the full argument on our website below 🔗👇

"The thing I learned from my dad, that he learned from his, that Poppy learned from his dad, and his dad learned in a trench... What you keep can only ever be as good as what you give. We call that service." A story about fathers and sons, service, family, and the things we choose to carry into the next generation.

.@ssankar says Palantir was able to make Nvidia's Nemotron Ultra model "better than frontier": "I literally almost felt gaslit when, within 24 hours of getting Nemotron up with no post-training, this is vanilla Nemotron Ultra, it did better than frontier." "If you just looked at the numbers, you would say, 'It's nowhere near the Frontier. That shouldn't even be possible.'" "But of course, the benchmarks are wrong. I mean, the benchmarks are right for what the benchmark's measuring, but that's not my business. Those are not the tasks my customers had that they were trying to solve."

China treats AI as industrial policy. Our labs treat it as theology, a race to birth a machine god. Beijing's play: commoditize the complement. All that frontier lab market cap gets transmuted into demand signal to scale the stack below the models: power, chips, minerals, etc. American can and must win the full stack.

America didn't forget how to build. We got buried in bureaucracy and paperwork. AI is the tool that cuts the red tape and unleashes the American worker to outbuild China. Grateful @ssankar made this case at our Defense Summit in Pennsylvania.