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Bill Gates Calls For Globalist Crackdown On AI

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Bill Gates Calls For Globalist Crackdown On AI

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

The film premiered at Sundance in January, played theaters in March, and dropped on Netflix this week – the same week Gates, Obama’s orbit, Bernie Sanders, and the lab CEOs were all pushing slowdown and supervision.

The Sundance Documentary Film Program was built with founding money from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Users circulating the credits call the Netflix drop a globalist op.

When the policy class needs the public frightened into a pause, Hollywood still knows how to dim the lights.

Over the weekend, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called on rivals to “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the letter. Former researcher Jacob Coxon quit and said AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

President Trump waved the pile-on off. The United States is “leading China in AI,” he said. “Whoever wins AI, wins.” A lot of “very negative forces,” he added, are “bringing up things that won’t happen.” Guardrails, fine. A pause, no. Asked about existential risk leaving Dallas, he shot back: “No, I don’t have any.”

Jesse Watters noted that the same CEOs are “begging for government regulations,” while claiming the tech is more powerful than a nuclear weapon and could wipe everyone out in three years. Then the obvious question: if they are that terrified of their own product, why do they need politicians to slow it down for them? “Something smells fishy with these IPOs.”

David Sacks named the shakedown. OpenAI and Anthropic are the frontier. If their unreleased models are too hot, they can simply not ship them. Demanding antitrust waivers, embedded evaluators, and a regulatory architecture as the price of restraint, he wrote, “will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”

Regulation written by the incumbents does not save humanity. It freezes the ladder so the next lab never climbs it – right as those same firms eye public markets.

Barack Obama took the other door. At a Manhattan fundraiser he told Hakeem Jeffries that if Democrats win the House they should make AI a governing project. “Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation.”

Then: “This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous.” Jeffries saluted on command. “President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence… Republicans have abdicated their responsibility… We will not repeat their error.”

Bernie Sanders has been running the same play for weeks: pause advanced development, permanently ban superintelligence, and get Trump and Xi to sign a treaty. On Tuesday, at a Washington “Pro-Human Assembly,” he said a runaway system “will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem,” and he again demanded a comprehensive pause-and-ban deal at the coming Trump – Xi meeting.

That is the globalist package in one stack: slow the American frontier, internationalize the rules, and call it safety.

Then China’s ministry of state security walked into the same conversation. Chen Yixin, Beijing’s top spy chief, used the state-run magazine China Cyberspace to warn that AI is “directly threatening our political security, institutional security, and ideological security.”

He called for tighter Party control and stricter government oversight. Hostile forces, he wrote, “abuse generative artificial intelligence technologies… to fabricate political rumors, spread harmful information, and incite confrontational sentiments at low cost and in large quantities.”

He named American models – Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber – as a “disruptive upgrade” in cyber capability, and billed AI as “a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers.”

He is not asking America to pause so the world can be safe. He is asking the Party to lock down speech, data, and “ideological security” at home while Western executives and Democratic politicians talk themselves into a slowdown.

Days earlier, Anthropic’s own threat report said China-linked actors had already used Claude for weapons software and intelligence work the company then banned: an electronic-warfare and air-defense suite whose simulation was expanded to twelve targets in Taiwan; research into foreign high-power microwave weapons; and domestic surveillance pipelines that collapse “many teams of analysts” into a single office producing thousands of investigations a month.

Chinese labs, Anthropic said, also tried to strip Claude’s capabilities to feed their own models. Beijing’s foreign ministry shrugged that it was “not aware” of the report and opposed “smears.”

So the sequence is simple. China runs Western models for weapons and control. China’s spy chief then lectures the world about AI danger and Party oversight. Gates wants a global body. Sanders wants a Trump – Xi treaty. Obama wants Democrats to “get on top of it.” Netflix wants you crying on the couch. The CEOs want a rulebook that just happens to protect their lead.

America does not need Bill Gates’ alien-movie summit, Chen Yixin’s definition of safety, or another Inconvenient Truth with better animation. It needs the thing Trump already said out loud. Win the race.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 20:05

Vance Seeks To Assure Trump Base Iran War Entering “Much Different Phase”

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Vance Seeks To Assure Trump Base Iran War Entering “Much Different Phase”

Vice President JD Vance – who was said to have opposed launching Operation Epic Fury from the beginning – has issued some fresh statements on the future of the Iran conflict which sound a bit off-rampy.

He could just be voicing his own wishful thinking, however, in proclaiming the conflict will soon enter “a much different phase” in the coming months. He still conceded that ultimately it’s the Commander-in-Chief who decides when it will end (though it would be nice of Congress or the American people had a word).

via Reuters

President Trump had just last week stated his view that hostilities will wrap up after the November mid-term elections, and Vance appeared to try and defend the statement.

“We can’t predict the future, but I think the [US] President [Donald Trump] is right to say that this thing [the conflict in Iran – TASS] will enter a much different phase in a couple of months,” he told New York Post in an interview.

Vance described that the US military had already completed the first phase, which the Vice President described as to “destroy the nuclear program” of Iran as well as “their conventional military.”

“And then the second phase of this is ensure that they’re not able to rebuild and try to maintain as much global stability in the wake of that,” he said.

But as far as destruction of conventional military, the Iranians have clearly been lobbing large quantities of ballistic missiles at US bases in Jordan, for example just earlier this month during the last flare-up in fighting. This occurred overnight from Sept.8-9, and saw Iran fire some 20 ballistic missiles.

As for “rebuilding” – well, Tehran is proudly and defiantly asserting that it is currently doing just that. According to The Wall Street Journal citing US officials a week ago:

Iran has resumed its production of ballistic missiles using stockpiled components and working in underground facilities, officials from the U.S. and Middle East familiar with the matter said, eroding what the U.S. and Israel have touted as a major achievement of the war. 

Despite heavy attacks on its missile sites and industrial facilities during the initial phase of the war, Iran has been busy assembling liquid-propellant missiles, which have to be fueled just before launch, as well as solid-propellant missiles, which can be stored ready to fire, some of the officials said.

The US administration has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed or else severely set back Iran’s advanced missile arsenal – and yet they keep on firing.

Read: Bombshell Leaks Seek To Distance ‘Skeptical’ JD Vance From Iran War

Below: As war expands, US scrambles to contain the fallout and damage, also after Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline was hit in a drone attack (out of either Iraq or possibly Yemen):

Many pundits have also pointed out that Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government has essentially been preparing for this war with the US and Israel for several decades. And clearly Washington was woefully underprepared for the Iranian retaliation.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 19:40

TikTok Mob Now Stalks Clancy Holdout Juror’s Family

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TikTok Mob Now Stalks Clancy Holdout Juror’s Family

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The same online machine that turned a confessed child killer into a cause has a new target. After hanging Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the lone holdout juror’s family says TikTok extremists have them trapped indoors, leaving notes at his mother’s house and refusing to let them live in peace.

The juror’s brother told the New York Post that the family’s life has been flipped over since the September 4 mistrial in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He rejected the claim that Catholic faith drove the holdout vote.

“I don’t think religion had anything to do with it,” he said. “He looked at the case, and he made the call. For me, that’s how I would do it. I would just listen to the case with all the evidence, and go from there.”

“My family cannot leave the house,” the brother said. “They are leaving notes at my mother’s house. They won’t leave us alone, and we don’t know anything.”

He added that none of them even knew their relative was on the jury until after the verdict collapsed. “We didn’t know. That’s why I was shocked. He didn’t tell us anything.”

Clancy, 36, admitted strangling her children – Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan – with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home on January 24, 2023, while Patrick Clancy was out on an errand she had sent him on. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window.

The defense never disputed the killings. Attorney Kevin Reddington argued postpartum psychosis and no criminal responsibility. Prosecutors said she cleared the house, chose a method that worked on the children, and chose a method for herself that failed.

After 21 days of testimony, more than 80 witnesses, and nearly 40 hours of deliberations, the panel split 11-1. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. District Attorney Tim Cruz has a status hearing set for September 29 on whether to retry.

Reddington blamed the holdout in public. “They know they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was,” he said. “I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

Fellow jurors have since gone on television to attack him. One described wrapping an exercise band around a water bottle in the deliberation room. Others said he would not “follow the law” on reasonable doubt. What they will not say is the simpler point: one juror would not treat the strangling of three children as a medical event.

A GiveSendGo launched for security, lawyers, and lost work shot past $80,000 and, according to the Post, raced toward six figures. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis offered the juror “asylum” if the harassment continued. “A man objected to allowing a woman to kill her three young kids and get away with it, so NBC is trying to smear that juror,” DeSantis wrote.

as we previously highlighted, during the trial hundreds of women in pink have been gathering outside Plymouth Superior Court for a “Stand in Peace.” They cheered Clancy’s transport. Organizer Renee Kimball said, “I think that every one of us women believe that it could be any one of us.” Another supporter put it on camera: “It could be me.”

The same cohort poured money into a GoFundMe for Clancy’s parents that raced toward seven figures. TikTok mothers filmed themselves “relating” to the confessed killer while holding their own infants. Some insisted Patrick must have done it – in spite of Lindsay’s admissions, her lawyer’s opening, the 911 tape, and the civil lawsuit that says she killed the children.

That inversion did not stay on the internet.

Patrick Clancy sat through the trial as the prosecution’s first witness. He described coming home with food and medicine to find his children gone. He has said he forgives Lindsay and calls her ill rather than evil.

His reward has been a smear campaign claiming he was involved. Attorney Howard Cooper of Todd & Weld called it “a relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign” driven by “minor celebrities, so-called influencers and outright conspiracy theorists.”

“This campaign, now fueled by insatiable media coverage, remains at a fever pitch and has resulted in real-life threats to his reputation, livelihood, and life,” Cooper said. “Enough is enough – this spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop.” Law enforcement has been notified.

Attorney David Meier said after the mistrial: “The loss of Patrick’s children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful.”

While the Clancy jury was still out, Corie Walsh of Frankfort, Illinois, hanged her 2-year-old son, Barrett, from a basement rafter. She told police the boy was the “devil” and the “anti-Christ.” Witnesses said she had become “very invested” in the Clancy trial and was still texting friends about it hours before the child was found.

Her lawyer, Andrea Lyon, reached for the same line the pink shirts have been rehearsing: “It is also a tragedy in that Corey herself was experiencing a psychotic episode at the time this happened.” Prosecutors said she spoke of harming the remaining children and her husband.

Rep. Nancy Mace, speaking to TMZ DC, called Clancy a “serial killer” and said the country should watch the penalty.

“Her children are dead. She should be dead too,” she said. “She should get the death penalty. It should be public. It should be a public execution.”

However, Massachusetts has not executed anyone since 1947. First-degree murder there is life without parole.

Reddington went on Good Morning America and asked President Trump to pardon his client. “Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady and the person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” he said. A president cannot erase a Massachusetts murder case. Trump treated it as the state matter it is.

After the mistrial he said Clancy “did a horrible, horrible thing,” that “there’ll be a price,” and that it would be “mental institution or jail or something.” Asked again after the pardon plea, he said: “There is no winner there. There’s no win no matter what you do. Three children are dead.”

* * *

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 19:15

DOJ Uses Never-Before-Used Terror Court to Deport Afghan Woman Over Election Day ISIS Plot

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DOJ Uses Never-Before-Used Terror Court to Deport Afghan Woman Over Election Day ISIS Plot

The Justice Department has used a national-security court that sat unused for three decades to deport an Afghan woman from the United States who supported an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day in 2024.

AG Todd Blanche

On Friday, officials announced that Nazira Haji Zada, 47, a permanent resident from Fort Worth, Texas, was kicked out from the country after admitting that she is an “alien terrorist.”

Zada’s removal is the first completed case in the history of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a specialized tribunal Congress created in 1996 and that no prior administration ever used.

Federal prosecutors said Zada was the family matriarch who supported a plot by her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, to carry out an ISIS-inspired mass shooting on or around Election Day 2024. The two men were arrested after buying firearms and ammunition from an undercover FBI employee. Abdullah, who was 17 at the time of arrest, later pleaded guilty as an adult and was sentenced to 15 years. Tawhedi pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is awaiting sentencing.

Court records describe the family selling property, signing a contract to sell their house, and buying one-way tickets to Kabul, while the two men prepared to stay behind and attack. The government used classified information to establish Zada’s terrorist status and provided her court-appointed lawyers with a massive document production. Zada appeared before ATRC Chief Judge Joan Ericksen, conceded the designation, and waived appeal. The removal order was signed August 20 and unsealed after she was already out of the country. Zada is now permanently barred from the U.S.

FBI Director Kash Patel hailed Zada’s deportation, saying that an individual who supported a plot by ISIS-sympathizing relatives “has paid the price.”

“This is a historic and vitally important step in our work to protect the U.S. homeland from terrorism,” Patel said in a statement. “An individual who supported a plot by ISIS-sympathizing family members to commit an attack in America has paid the price for that. She came to our country, betrayed it, and has now lost the right to live here and enjoy our democratic freedoms. This FBI and our Justice Department partners will protect the American people from the threat of terrorism, using all means necessary.”

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin also hailed the move.

“From the moment President Trump took office, he made clear that his Administration would put the safety and security of the American people first,” said Mullin. “The President’s direction to use the Alien Terrorist Removal Court to expel Nazira Haji Zada, an Afghan national who plotted with members of her family to carry out an ISIS-inspired attack on American soil, delivers on that promise. Thanks to the President’s leadership and the coordinated efforts the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State, Nazira Haji Zada’s final order of removal is now FINAL. Those who plot acts of terrorism against the United States have no place in our country. We will find them, and we will use every lawful tool available to remove them.“

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 18:50

Who Aligns The Aligners? Brief Legal Thoughts On The “AI Safety” Fights To Come

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Who Aligns The Aligners? Brief Legal Thoughts On The “AI Safety” Fights To Come

Authored by Preston Byrne via Preston Byrne,

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has published an essay – We Must Pace The Frontier – in which he writes:

I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5-10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.

But – and there is always a but –

…like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious.

Those risks include, according to some, the complete destruction of the human race.

See, e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky confidently asserting today that if we do not institute immediate global techno-communism, instituting draconian government control over speech and publication of a type never before seen in any Western society, we are all going to die:

There is no evidence that this will happen. Some proponents of regulation tell us that the only response is the most extreme response available: total state control. There is no evidence that this response is correct, either. One could just as easily argue, hypothetically, that the government should force Anthropic to open-source its weights, so that everyone can have free, equal access to the latest model as a personal defense AI to protect themselves from cybersecurity risks from other AIs, a “Second Amendment for AI” if you will. In the alternative, if you really think AI is an extinction-level risk, it would seem to me that the only rational response to that position – if genuinely, truly held – is not “let governments run it” but rather to agree to destroy, by treaty, all modern computers and revert to 1970s technology in perpetuity.

There are myriad policy responses. Whatever we do, those responses will require popular consent and careful deliberation. No one person, or one company, or one movement, knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong.

History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies.

This notwithstanding, to address this risk, Amodei proposes

…building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety while still achieving its benefits and grappling with important geopolitical dilemmas.

To wit, regulation.

As my regular readers will be aware, I have been engaged, on behalf of my clients, in legal combat with Internet censors around the world, agencies who think that they have the standing, the competence, and the right to tell American companies what software they can write and run, for the better part of 18 months.

This censorship apparatus is about to be rebuilt from scratch, except this time for AI instead of social media. I expect to fight that, too, at the appointed time. I feel now is an appropriate time to offer my preliminary thoughts.

Amodei’s Proposal

Anthropic is, as David Sacks correctly pointed out on X, free to slow down its research and development efforts into AI at any time, to any extent it wishes. Amodei proposes something else: that everyone slow down together, under supervision. While Amodei initially writes that the “slowdown” should be voluntary, the plan would be to progress to legal regulatory regimes – meaning, this proposal necessarily involves the use of coercive state power – which software developers would be expected to obey on a compulsory basis:

The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily. (Emphasis added.)

His plan has three elements.

Embedded Evaluators (aka Appeasing Pressure Groups)

The first element is for “Embedded Evaluators” –

…employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators (such as METR), whose role is to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.

There is already a robust industry of third-party “safety” overseers for Web 2.0 – what the House Judiciary Committee has described as the “censorship-industrial complex.” The track record of these entities from the last time around tells us how this arrangement plays out in practice.

“Evaluate This!!!”

One well-known private actor in this space was the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. GARM, a commercial enterprise, described itself as “a voluntary cross-industry initiative created in 2019 to address digital safety.” Among other things, GARM provided a range of policy frameworks and guidelines, among them “the Brand Safety Floor and the Adjacency Standards Framework, which have supported brand owners in their independent development of their own bespoke, brand-specific safety frameworks to ensure that their advertising dollars do not inadvertently support illegal or harmful content that damages their brands.”

Although GARM disbanded in 2024, according to the House Judiciary Committee, during its active period GARM worked with global regulators to pressure companies like Twitter, now X Corp., to wield “significant collective power” to coercively influence Twitter’s moderation decisions, including “silencing President Trump,” and to procure boycotts of the platform if the platform refused to obey.

Presumably, platforms that follow the “safety” NGOs’ recommendations and allow the “evaluations” would not be threatened with that stick. This calls back to the way in which social media companies who followed GARM’s policy frameworks and guidelines were not targeted with advertiser boycotts – and those who did not, like X, allegedly were.

He adds:

This is the key step for verifiability of any pacing commitments, and has precedent in the banking industry, which sometimes involves regulatory “supervisors” embedded along with employees.

As it happens, the banking analogy is the exact argument leading “misinformation/disinformation” (read: pro-censorship) academics employ to justify the UK’s Online Safety Act and similar regimes; see e.g. Alan Jagolinzer from Cambridge University, who comes from the world of financial accounting and analogizes speech regulatory regimes to post-2008 financial reporting regulations.

The problem, of course, is that financial accounting fraud is not a constitutional right; speech is. In America, software development absent the intent to commit or facilitate the commission of a crime is, as a general rule, protected expression. I fail to see how standing up a new crop of NGOs to perform substantially the same function as the “Online Safety” NGOs, using the same methods – only, this time with NGO commissars possessing highly sensitive employee-like access to internal systems – will lead to a different or better result than it has so far.

Democratic Coordination (aka Government Regulation)

The second element is “Democratic Coordination,” whereby

Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support.

There are two aspects to this: (a) competition law and (b) content regulation law.

From a competition law standpoint, the problem Anthropic has is simple. Anthropic and OpenAI are the largest players in the AI market, by some distance, and coordinating their policies, procedures, and “standards” with each other risks classification as an unlawful cartel. This would particularly be the case if, for example, the two giants aligned on pricing or terms – say, by conforming their API terms so that anyone who used a model that defected from the standards in the global marketplace (e.g., Kimi, Deepseek) would be ineligible to interact with OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s software.

“Government support” for “legally challenging” coordination is a polite way of asking for an antitrust exemption to allow greater coordination between competitors in the name of “safety.” It is a problem any industry consortium of any type needs to account for and this would be no exception. Given the global scale of each company, they would likely need to get numerous exceptions, from the United States, the European Union and its member states, the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere, to undertake the full “safety” initiative laid out in Amodei’s post on a global basis.

Law reform on that scale will be very difficult to accomplish; in countries like the UK, where “AI Safety” fits into existing political thinking that the state’s proper role over technology is to aggressively regulate it, and there is already parliamentary traction for a slowdown, this might be easier. It is exceedingly unlikely that they will receive any accommodation from China.

From a content regulation standpoint, the language “common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress” paints with a broad brush. This suggests that Anthropic envisages that practically any industry using its software – from manufacturing, to biotechnology, to news publication and copywriting – will require (a) de novo “safety” standards in relation to non-expressive conduct, and (b) limits on how quickly AI software itself can be developed.

In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer constitutional guardrails on their power, I would expect that both (a) and (b) can be legislated without much difficulty in legal terms. If the ease with which rules like the Online Safety Act and Digital Services Act were implemented is any indication, there should not be terribly much difficulty in political terms, either.

The primary legal problem with this aspect of Anthropic’s proposal is in the United States, particularly with (b) – limits on how quickly software itself can be developed. Software development, software publication, and web hosting are inherently expressive activities. See. e.g., the Bernstein v. United States line of cases, as well as Smith v. California, Cubby v. CompuServe, the fact pattern of Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, and the related legislative history around 47 U.S.C. § 230. The differences between the United States and its allies on Web 2.0 date back to our very founding, and in both subsequent caselaw and subsequent statutes, America has chosen to protect that activity from state interference.

To the extent Anthropic and its fellow-travelers intend for this aspect of their plan to restrict American citizens from either (a) developing AI models or (b) using models and published FOSS model weights from China, First Amendment issues are immediately apparent and the weight of the precedent militates against government regulation.

Global Coordination (aka Treaties and Extraterritorial Censorship)

The third element of Amodei’s plan is “Global Coordination,” whereby

[t]he US and other democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.

Authoritarian governments aren’t the only problem America has here.

We live in an era in which most of the Western world, with the exception perhaps of the United States, has enacted comprehensive technology regulation statutes focused on yesterday’s tech: chiefly, search and social media.

The last great global effort to regulate publication and communications technology began following a moral panic brought about by the twin shocks of (a) Brexit and (b) the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016. The result was comprehensive Internet censorship laws in Australia (the Online Safety Act 2019), the United Kingdom (the Online Safety Act 2023), and the European Union (the Digital Services Act), plus perhaps a half-dozen copycats around the world, including Brazil (see e.g. the 2025 revisions to the Marco Civil da Internet by Brazil’s Supreme Court), Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and more – all of which seek to control speech and conduct which (a) lives on American servers and (b) in the United States, on those servers, is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.

Generally speaking, the censorship regimes of the West choose not to describe themselves as such. That does not mean they are not censorship schemes.

Take the UK, which calls its law the “Online Safety Act” and asserts that the law exists to keep the UK safe from the evils of the Internet. Its enforcer, the “Office of Communications,” more commonly known as “Ofcom,” is not a law enforcement agency and has no power, by itself, to remove content or make arrests; it cannot, and does not, keep anyone safe from anything.

British politicians are not popular enough to get away with carrying out censorship directly, so they outsource it to Americans through a vague and complicated bureaucratic procedure which basically boils down to this: “censor your websites, or we (Ofcom) will hit your (American) company with ruinous fines or jail time if we, in our sole discretion, determine that your platform didn’t censor itself well enough.”

This censorship is ostensibly performed to keep Internet users “safe” from ideas and expression of which the British state formally disapproves. All that is required, for most users, to circumvent the entire regime and get all the “unsafe” Internet experience they want is a free VPN with an American exit IP. Millions of Britons have done so, evidently feeling that they don’t require the “safety” that Ofcom provides, making the UK one of the top VPN-using nations on the planet in the process.

Broadly speaking, the British regime, like many of these regimes, requires companies to (a) age-verify (i.e. dox) users before they access services, and (b) ensure that users accessing those services cannot see content the Act proscribes. Whilst there are some areas where U.S. and UK speech regulations are in agreement, there are many more areas where they are not – and for many of these areas, speech the Act requires be taken down is explicitly constitutionally protected in the United States. I have written about this at length elsewhere (in addition to actually drafting the quite extensive legislative surgery required to align our two nations’ systems) and do not propose to do so again here.

A “global coordination” framework for AI will be built by the same governments, staffed by the same regulators, and pressured by the same NGOs that built the above. It is possible, even likely, that any global attempts at harmonization will collide at exactly the same point: it will not be possible for an American company to comply with European controls and enjoy the full breadth of their U.S. constitutional rights at the same time, as the rulesets will be drafted incompatibly.

Moreover, the verification problem Amodei mentions with respect to authoritarian states is, in fact, a fatal flaw with any such scheme if it has global pretensions (as the UK Online Safety Act once did); as a certified enjoyer of the defector strategy, I am in a very good position to confirm that, given a single defector who is demonstrably outside of the jurisdiction’s reach, deterrence begins to falter. The higher the stakes, the more likely it is that defection will occur.

Although many U.S. companies do, and absent law reform in America (such as a clear censorship shield law) will likely continue to, comply with foreign censorship regimes out of fear, the only parties against whom such a framework will ever be consistently enforced are the companies which are not judgment-proof in the countries which are most likely to get these laws enacted – global companies which, at least for now, includes not many startups but certainly includes Anthropic and OpenAI. In the United States, AI regulation will be subject to early and doctrinally sound constitutional challenges.

Amodei writes:

We should approach any global pacing decision, especially in the near term, in such a way that protects the lead of the US and its allies.

I do not view this as being particularly realistic. Among America’s geopolitical adversaries, several of which America is at war with (directly or by proxy) and who have every incentive to defect, effective compliance levels will likely approach zero.

Preliminary View: Who Aligns the Aligners?

If I have learned anything from our fight against European censors, it is that regardless of a regulatory regime’s good intentions, regulators are subject to political control. Regulators will, subject to that political control, do political things.

The clearest illustration from my own files is Ofcom’s pursuit of a small, highly controversial American website – a mental health discussion board, called SaSu, with no UK presence, personnel, or assets – which operates entirely lawfully in the United States. SaSu voluntarily geoblocked the entire United Kingdom in July of 2025. Ofcom initially accepted that remediation as resolving the matter.

Within days of Ofcom’s acceptance of my client’s geoblock in October and initial closure of the file, following a coordinated pressure campaign by parliamentarians and activist NGOs, Ofcom reversed its own settled position and reopened the case. Ofcom and its NGO partners then circumvented the geoblock using VPNs, created login credentials from behind that circumvention, and cited the resulting VPN-based access as evidence that the block was inadequate.

In May 2026, Ofcom purported to fine the site £950,000, announcing the penalty through a coordinated, embargoed press rollout; weeks later it escalated further, demanding that the site rewrite its terms of service and force a site-wide forced logout, of every user on Earth, to terminate the sessions the regulator’s own circumvention had created. My client, which, by way of reminder, had voluntarily blocked the UK, decided enough was enough, and refused these further demands.

On July 21, 2026, 480 days after the file was opened, Ofcom closed it, having collected nothing.

At no point in that sequence was the regulator’s conduct determined by the evidence in its file – evidence which, the file shows, was only able to be obtained from accessing the website by circumventing a geoblock that the regulator itself had earlier accepted. Nor was the regulator governed by legal reality of American constitutional law, backed by the political reality of American power.

The regulator was, instead, governed by the political mood in its home country. SaSu was one of the reasons given for the necessity of the Online Safety Act; political pressure created the censorship law to target the site. Pressure opened the case when the censorship law entered into force. Pressure reversed an approved remediation. Pressure produced a fine that everyone involved understood could never be collected.

Pressure arising from the absence of any face-saving exit kept Ofcom’s enforcement machinery running, at redline but in neutral, for nine months after the target had lawyered up and stated the American legal position correctly. The enforcement ended long after the futility of the regulator’s actions became apparent to any legally qualified observer.

The entire enforcement process against SaSu, from pre-enactment lobbying to closing the file, was a single, continuous, political act. That is how a so-called “independent” expert regulator in a modern western democracy will behave under political pressure in what should have been an easy case, and a quick settlement and file closure.

This is also what we may expect an “embedded evaluator,” a coordinated standards body, or a global AI compliance regime will do under political pressure, because those bodies will be run by humans, and human beings are (a) fallible and (b) respond to incentives.

It is probable that Amodei’s proposals are already being ingested gleefully by “Online Safety” regulators and the related academic ecosystems around the world as they look to expand the reach and remit of the censorship schemes over Web 2.0 that they have spent the last decade building – and which a handful of American clients have spent the past year fighting tooth and nail. It will not take a decade to update their censorship apparatuses to try to regulate yet another area of American tech, nor will it take a decade for the vast advocacy apparatus they have built around “Online Safety” to replace-all and begin pushing an AI safety narrative in legislatures around the United States, and around the world.

Our societies can do better than this; so too could OpenAI and Anthropic, if they chose to, but one suspects that the sort of people manning these companies’ “Online Safety” teams are philosophical descendants, if not professional descendants, of the “Trust and Safety” crowd that once worked at companies like Twitter or Facebook, and later created and/or currently staff the censorship agencies of the West.

It took nearly a decade, and actual sight by the British electorate of the Online Safety Act being implemented, for the British public to turn against that regulation and realize that the British government made a grave policy mistake in enacting it.

If OpenAI and Anthropic choose to adopt formal endorsement of prior restraint as corporate policy, those who would oppose the global regulation of AI must move quickly. The most recent counteroffensive against government censorship of the web took seven years to organize. The counteroffensive against government censorship of AI does not have the luxury of time.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 18:25

Mysterious Illness Striking Young Workers In The South

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Mysterious Illness Striking Young Workers In The South

Doctors at Harris County’s public hospitals have spent more than a decade treating an unusual group of dialysis patients, men in their 20s and 30s who work outdoors and whose kidneys have failed without a clear medical explanation, Fox News reports, following a Texas Monthly investigation.

A review of county hospital records found that roughly one in six emergency dialysis cases among uninsured or undocumented patients had no identifiable cause. The records ran from 2012 to 2015, and the study was published as a preprint last year. One physician told Fox the share is consistent with chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology, a condition that has caused widespread deaths among laborers in hot regions abroad but has rarely been documented in the United States until now.

Many of the patients are immigrants from Mexico and Central America, often illegal aliens, and they work in roofing, construction and other trades that demand hours of strenuous labor in extreme heat. Few have diabetes or high blood pressure, which account for most kidney failure nationwide. For someone that young, the loss of kidney function can mean dialysis several times a week for the rest of his life.

First identified among sugar-cane workers in Central America, the illness has since appeared in parts of South Asia and Mexico, where many young patients died without access to dialysis. A 2019 article in the New England Journal of Medicine called it “a sentinel disease in the era of climate change,” though researchers still disagree over whether heat causes the disease or only worsens it.

Gauging how widespread the problem is will be difficult. Kidney function can erode for years without noticeable symptoms, and many patients learn they are sick only when fatigue, nausea or breathlessness signal that their kidneys are nearly gone.

Medicine offers limited help once the damage is done. No single test confirms the disease, so doctors reach the diagnosis by ruling out other causes and examining a patient’s work history. Treatment focuses on preserving what function remains and controlling blood pressure until dialysis or a transplant is unavoidable.

Dr. Richard J. Johnson, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a leading expert on kidney diseases, has cautioned that some patients are treated with ACE inhibitors, medicines commonly prescribed for high blood pressure, even though those drugs can sometimes worsen kidney function in people who are already dehydrated.

“Disease often progresses rapidly over a few years, and dialysis and transplantation are rarely available, so mortality is high,” he told Fox News.

Dr. Gokul Paidi, a New York family physician who has published a review of the condition, told the outlet that outdoor laborers in hot climates should have kidney function checked at least twice a year. “A simple blood test for creatinine (a waste product normally filtered from the blood by the kidneys) and a urine test for protein can catch early changes long before symptoms appear,” he said.

* * *

Tray

Knife

Notebook

AirTag Wallet

Pen

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 18:00

Watch Live: Fed Chair Warsh Explains Why He Hiked Rates Into Stagflation

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Watch Live: Fed Chair Warsh Explains Why He Hiked Rates Into Stagflation

The FOMC just (unanimously) hiked rates for the first time since July 2023 despite recent inflation prints slowing…

Additionally, recent macro surprises are clearly signaling stagflation – the central banker’s nemesis…

So, a hike for credibility… but Warsh’s biggest challenge will be communicating his outlook without reverting to forward guidance, even as markets seek clarity on whether today’s likely move is one-and-done, or the start of a broader tightening cycle.

With investors forced to extract more signal from his language, the press conference carries outsized front-end risk.

In a note to clients, BMO notes two-year yields have moved an average 14bps across his five public appearances as chair so far.

The big question for today of course, assuming they do hike, is whether this is likely to be a “one and done” move.

We haven’t seen one of those this century so far.

Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank catalogues that there were a few of those in the 1980s and 1990s.

Outside of them, “the shortest cycle on record remains the four hikes of 1986-87.”

While all the talk is about the ‘unanimous’ decision today with the great majority of dots signaling at least one more hike this year… The Fed is extremely divided next year with four members see at least 2 rate-CUTS (policy error much)…

Quick reminder:

  • In 2024, the Powell Fed cut 50bps 2 months before the presidential election with core CPI at 3.3%

  • In 2026, the Warsh Fed hikes 25bps 2 months before the midterms with core CPI at 2.4%

Will Trump comment?

Watch the FOMC press conference live here (due to start at 1430ET):

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 14:25

Fed Hikes Rates For First Time Since July 2023, Signals 1 More Hike In 2026

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Fed Hikes Rates For First Time Since July 2023, Signals 1 More Hike In 2026

Tl;dr: As the market expected, The Fed hiked rates by 25bps (for the first time since July 2023) despite a trend lower in CPI over the last three months.

Today’s decision was unanimous and the ‘Dots’ signal one more hike in 2026.

The Fed members increased their GDP outlooks, lowered their unemployment forecasts, but hiked their inflation outlooks…

The big question for today of course, assuming they do hike, is whether this is likely to be a “one and done” move.

Quick reminder:

  • In 2024, the Powell Fed cut 50bps 2 months before the presidential election with core CPI at 3.3%

  • In 2026, the Warsh Fed hikes 25bps 2 months before the midterms with core CPI at 2.4%

*  *  *

Since the last FOMC Meeting on July 29th, a lot has happened amid the supposed Summer doldrums, the dollar is lower while the anti-fiat trades (gold, bitcoin) and crude are all significantly higher with bonds the worst performers…

Stagflationary signals abound as inflation data has surprised to the upside while growth data has surprised to the downside since the last FOMC

But, the market is all-in, betting on a 25bps hike today – 95% versus 70% at the last FOMC, with a lot of noise in between. Dec odds are up from 40% to 70%. The market is pricing in 3.5 hikes into September of next year as the peak of the cycle…

So, before we get the decision, putting things in context, if Warsh were to hold rates here, it would be BY FAR the greatest surprise The Fed has ever hit the market with…

The Fed has historically always gone when market pricing is this high. That’s on top of a substantial hawkish repricing that has recently taken two-year yields to their highest since 2024 and pushed the 10-year through 5% to levels unseen since 2007.

So, what did he do?

Statement

After three dissents (in favor of a hike) in July, the Eccles Building establishment appears to have won the tug of war against The White House, with The Fed hiking rates 25bps (as fully priced in by the market)

  • *FED UNANIMOUSLY RAISES BENCHMARK RATE 25 BPS TO 3.75%-4% RANGE

  • *FED: RATE HIKE WILL SUPPORT `TIMELIER’ RETURN TO 2% INFLATION

Dots

In June, 9 members saw at least 1 rate-hike in 2026:

  • 3 hikes – 1 (Jun)

  • 2 hikes – 5 (Jun)

  • 1 hike – 3 (Jun)

  • No rate change – 8 (Jun)

  • 1 cut – 1 (Jun)

Now in September, with 1 hike in the books, these are the number of hikes/cuts left in 2026

  • 2 more hikes – 4

  • 1 more hike – 12

  • No rate change – 2

  • No one sees rate-cuts

So the median dot suggest one more rate hike in 2026…

1 member sees four rate-cuts in 2027 and 3 see 2 cuts

  • 1 hike in 2027 – 8

  • No rate-change in 2027 – 6

  • 2 cuts – 3

  • 4 cuts – 1

Only 18 of 19 officials submitted their ‘dots’ with some suggesting Warsh himself did not contribute again.

SEP

The Fed members increased their GDP outlooks, lowered their unemployment forecasts, but hiked their inflation outlooks…

Full Redline

Key changes:

  • Addition of “domestic spending has been resilient”

  • Capital investment reduced from “strong” to “robust”

  • Adds that “Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal”

The big question for today of course, assuming they do hike, is whether this is likely to be a “one and done” move.

We haven’t seen one of those this century so far.

Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank catalogues that there were a few of those in the 1980s and 1990s.

Outside of them, “the shortest cycle on record remains the four hikes of 1986-87.”

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 14:00

DOJ Accuses Russian Intel Ring Of Plotting Murder On American Soil

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DOJ Accuses Russian Intel Ring Of Plotting Murder On American Soil

In something that sounds straight from the plot of “Homeland” or the more recent CIA thriller “Lioness”, the Trump administration has charged multiple members of Russia’s intelligence services with running a “global assassination network” that targeted Kremlin critics.

The Department of Justice has newly revealed and alleged that one murder plot even took place on American soil over the summer.

Russian FSB HQ, Moscow. Associated Press

The fugitives have been named but have not been apprehended, and are still at large. A murder-for-hire plot is detailed in an indictment which was unsealed Tuesday by federal prosecutors in New York.

The plot was never followed through on, but a Russian dissident is said to have been targeted, during which time a Brooklyn man was recruited by Cuban and Venezuelan individuals – both which were ultimately being run by a Russian intelligence handler – but the Brooklyn man is said to have gotten cold feet when asked to carry out an assassination.

The five defendants are all believed to live in Russia, and are part of what court documents call the “RIS Network,” including a 63-year-old former Russian intelligence colonel named Yuri Khrameev, as well as his son Kirill.

According to a summary of the wild plot and allegations:

It marks the latest alleged attempt by a U.S. adversary to crack down on dissidents abroad, including in the United States and NATO-allied countries.

One of the murder-for-hire plots took place in July and August of this year, the indictment says. The Venezuelan operative and one of the Cuban operatives allegedly recruited a Brooklyn resident to take photos and videos of two locations associated with an unnamed Russian dissident, promising him $1,000 to $1,500 to carry out the “gravely serious work.” Another $40,000 was offered to “eliminate” or “disappear” the target of the surveillance.

The operatives believed the Russian dissident lived in the Washington, D.C., area, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters at a briefing Tuesday.  The Brooklyn resident was willing to take photos, the indictment said, but expressed unwillingness to “do the other stuff” — as in, kill the dissident. The operatives then allegedly asked the Brooklyn resident if he knew of anybody else who was interested.

“Let me know as soon as possible because I have a chain and my boss has questions,” one of the Cuban recruiters wrote, according to the indictment. “I have people in Mexico right now and they’re delayed. I only need a response to know if someone can do the work. It doesn’t have to be today or tomorrow just need to know if the[y] can.”

Some skepticism is of course always warranted when dealing with official US claims related to what Russian intelligence is up to.

For example, the latter part of the above – where a foreign agent reportedly broadly asks his asset whether he knows anyone else that can do the killing – seems amateurish, dubious and needlessly high risk.

The Kremlin has on Wednesday rejected the claims, describing that there’s simply no evidence to even warrant a serious explanation:

Until “any plausible evidence” emerges, there is no point in commenting on statements by the US Department of Justice about the exposure of a number of individuals allegedly working for Russian intelligence, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“Until we have heard and seen any credible evidence and arguments based on something tangible, we do not consider it necessary to comment on this news,” he noted in response to a request to comment on a statement by US Attorney General Todd Blanche, who said that a number of individuals working for Russian intelligence had been exposed in the country.

Washington has over recent years lobbed significant accusations of espionage and nefarious recruitment schemes against Russian intelligence, especially since the Ukraine war began. Russian intel seems much more active in Europe, however.

The other country which tends to get named in these reports is Iran. The Trump administration has even accused the IRGC of its own assassin-for-hire plot against the president himself.

* * * Add two to cart

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 13:55

Democrats Still Don’t Know How To Read Charts

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Democrats Still Don’t Know How To Read Charts

Authored by Matt Margolis via PJ Media,

Democrats can be unintentionally hilarious sometimes. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) reposted a chart on X Tuesday claiming housing prices are “the most unaffordable in history,” and that it was Trump’s fault.

There was just one huge problem.

The chart Newsom shared showed that the housing affordability gap actually widened during Joe Biden’s presidency, and X users noticed almost instantly, flooding his replies with screenshots of the very data he’d just posted as though it helped his argument. It didn’t take long for the pile-on to turn Newsom’s own post into a meme about his reading comprehension.

But the funny thing about it is that Democrats keep doing this. In July 2025, the Democratic National Committee posted a chart that they thought proved grocery prices were spiraling out of control in Trump’s second term.

The chart told a different story. It showed a huge spike under Biden. The DNC had unwittingly undermined its own attack on Trump. Social media users mocked the party within hours, dissecting the chart line by line, forcing the DNC to quietly delete the post… not that that stopped us from making fun of them anyway.

Then came Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who spent the Schumer Shutdown standoff in October 2025 defending Obamacare subsidies. In the process, he put up a chart on X arguing for expanded tax credits. What the chart actually showed was health care costs more than doubling since 2000, climbing at a steady clip both before and after Obamacare passed, proving that Obamacare had failed to slow down the rising costs of healthcare, let alone reduce it.

Costs have never declined, flattened, or stabilized since Obamacare took effect, and every subsequent “fix” failed to make coverage “affordable.”

And then Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) picked up the baton in late November 2025. She claimed in a post (with a supporting chart) that power bills had surged 11% under Trump and blamed him for rising past-due balances.

The problem with her claim was that the utility rate spike she referenced happened under Biden.

X users called her out quickly and spent the rest of the day passing around corrected versions of her own chart.

Are you seeing a pattern here? Democrats and charts – they just don’t mix.

The funny thing is that I’m sure they’ll keep trying. They think they can make an accusation accompanied by a chart, and it looks authoritative and true. In the end, they just prove how stupid they are.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/16/2026 – 13:25

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