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Authored by Sasha Gong via American Greatness,

America's latest argument over artificial intelligence has suddenly become apocalyptic. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon accused AI companies of "gambling with our lives." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow the development of frontier models, an idea supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. At the same time, opposition to the data centers needed to power AI is spreading across the United States.

China has noticed. X recently uncovered a suspected Chinese influence network of roughly 200,000 fake accounts; about 200 of them were directly involved in amplifying claims that American data centers were raising electricity prices and overwhelming the power grid.

This does not mean that criticism of AI or data centers is manufactured in Beijing. Concerns about electricity costs, water use, pollution, cyberattacks, job losses, and mass surveillance are real. But China does not need to invent American divisions. It needs only to identify, amplify, and exploit them.

Modern democracies periodically succumb to predictions that a new technology will destroy humanity. The fear may be legitimate, but its political consequences are not evenly distributed. Democracies permit protest, litigation, regulation, and obstruction. They may even abandon a technology out of fear.

Dictatorships suppress debate, concentrate resources, and use their rivals' hesitation to catch up.

The first great technological apocalypse began with the atomic bomb.

As the Manhattan Project approached completion in 1945, scientists considered whether an atomic explosion might ignite nitrogen in the atmosphere or trigger an uncontrollable reaction in the oceans. Edward Teller raised the possibility; Hans Bethe and others calculated that the risk was physically negligible. The Trinity test proceeded.

The question nevertheless haunted Robert Oppenheimer. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he feared that scientists had opened a Pandora's box. When Washington decided to develop the hydrogen bomb after the Soviet atomic test, he opposed it on moral and strategic grounds.

Oppenheimer's Communist associations then turned a policy dispute into a political scandal. His wife and brother were members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and he had many pro-Soviet acquaintances. Meanwhile, actual Soviet spies inside the Manhattan Project - including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall - passed crucial nuclear information to Moscow.

The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and a thermonuclear device in 1953. China tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, shortly after emerging from a famine that killed 40 million people. Neither Communist regime permitted a genuine public debate over the wisdom of nuclear competition.

The West did. Scientists, churches, students, and citizens organized enormous anti-nuclear movements. Their pressure contributed to test-ban treaties and arms control negotiations. Yet Americans still understood that the danger came not only from nuclear weapons but also from the regimes possessing them. After Sputnik in 1957, few believed the United States could safely withdraw from technological competition while the Soviet Union continued advancing.

After the Cold War, climate change became the next vehicle for apocalyptic politics.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth turned complex climate models into images of approaching catastrophe. Greta Thunberg transformed policy disagreements into moral indictments. Claims that humanity had only "12 years" remaining circulated widely.

Fear of climate change converted a scientific problem into an ideological commandment. Energy restrictions, endless permitting, penalties on traditional industries, and costly transitions were presented as the only acceptable path. These policies greatly contributed to and accelerated Western deindustrialization.

China followed a different course. Unrestrained by voters, environmental groups, or local governments, Beijing concentrated subsidies, land, energy, and credit to build complete industrial supply chains. The West congratulated itself for reducing domestic emissions while transferring production to China. It then discovered that it depended on China for pharmaceuticals, rare earths, batteries, solar panels, and electronics.

The pattern is now repeating with AI.

While Americans debate moratoriums, China is treating artificial intelligence, robotics, and computing infrastructure as pillars of national power. Its "Eastern Data, Western Computing" strategy is creating an integrated national computing network, moving the eastern seaboard's data-processing demands to western provinces with abundant land and energy. Beijing intends to control not only AI models but also the electricity, chips, servers, communications systems, and data centers that sustain them.

China is also competing to write the rules. In 2026, 29 countries signed an agreement in Shanghai establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, which Beijing describes as the first intergovernmental organization devoted to AI. China does not plan to pause while America debates whether the future is too dangerous to build.

AI requires serious safeguards: independent testing, cybersecurity standards, protection against biological misuse, transparent energy pricing, and accountability for harms. But regulation should make development safer, not make development impossible. Data-center projects should bear their actual costs, but local objections cannot become a nationwide veto over the infrastructure of the next industrial age.

Open debate is one of democracy's moral strengths. The power to suppress debate is one of authoritarianism's strategic advantages. When democratic caution becomes paralysis, freedom itself becomes vulnerable to exploitation.

America can decide how it develops artificial intelligence. It cannot decide whether artificial intelligence will continue to develop. If the United States stops because it fears the future, China will not stop with it.

Authored by Kane McGukin via Bombthrower,

What the G20, Werner, and Warsh tell us about America's new monetary playbook

In every transition, there are road signs along the way. Matt Dines has been one of the more accurate minds of late on the monetary and geopolitical transition we are living through.

His and Camron Otsuka's commentary earlier this month on Mine Print Hash, post the G20 meeting in North Carolina, sheds a lot of light on major sticking points that will pave the way for both future policy and monetary frameworks. This will not happen overnight, but at the same time we'll likely look back and say, "man, the world changed fast."

A few highlights that matter:

1. The Financial Stability Board (FSB). Just as Great Depression meetings brought new entities for the next cycle, G20 meetings post-GFC brought the FSB for the same reason. New rules to pave the way for stability in a new economic era (2009 Pittsburgh summit). According to Dines FSB brings AI into the mix, plugging it into the Basel Accords, the last of which, Basel III, an update required because of the financial behaviors and shortcomings that caused the GFC.

As Dines points out, all we need now is a final agreement so all parties can play nice around the new rails, i.e. stablecoin/Bitcoin/SOFR rails. Global stablecoin arrangements will take final shape after the announcement of a Bretton Woods 2.0. Something I've discussed many times over, and something that feels nearer and nearer by the day. The most important point? Bessent has basically championed this from day one.

As Werner's model suggests (see point four), Bessent opposes the state picking winners directly, but supports guiding private capital toward strategic ends. Video referenced in Samson's post.

2. Bringing forward the private sector as a way to grow our way out of this. What's critical to understand here is that during the GFC, entities and individuals were overleveraged. To combat this, the central bank expanded its balance sheet to take on all the underwater debt. Today, the script is flipped. The private sector is relatively unlevered, and the central bank is overlevered. This is important because the only way to grow an economy is to guide credit towards productive use cases. Regardless of opinion, this has been the underlying basis of the early-stage beginnings of all successful economies and empires for centuries (see Werner). For those keeping score at home, these are the breadcrumbs we've been given to better understand where monetary and fiscal policy are going (Office of Strategic Capital).

3. G20 is bringing in banks and private institutions, which is a paradigm shift in how credit allocation works. This is the announcement. We are going to run a different playbook for our monetary framework from now on. This is the only way out. The only way back to some state of "normal". This is exactly what Werner lays out in the Princes of the Yen. An in-depth study of Japan and other great banking empires. Our "new approach" will be one that has succeeded many times in the past. Including during the creation of America. Why? Because this style best achieves rebuilding the US' industrial capacity - think modernization of infrastructure. Today's infrastructure and infrastructure for the 21st-century is inherently digital. That's why capital formation is being directed and pointed at all things AI and digital. This is why all these related industries are points of "national security". This is what is meant by "Hamiltonian policy", a notion we've discussed before.

In short, exactly as Dines pointed out, you're going to have to pick sides - US or China. This is what is meant by the new multi-polar world. Believe it or not, for the first time in more than two decades, "we're actually trying to accomplish something".

4. Credit expansion is the only way to get growth (PofY), which is why Main Street over Wall Street matters. See the Foundry School to better understand the government's refocus on centralizing and deploying capital into productive use cases. Centralize the steering of credit, decentralize who receives it.

The key to the entire process is Matt's highlighting of Richard Werner's work. Richard wrote the Princes of the Yen, which outlines not only the rise and fall of the great Japanese financial system, but more importantly, the foundations of how dominant banking and financial systems work. A means by which the US economic system has drifted far away from over the last thirty to fifty years.

In simple terms, the keys are state-directed capital and credit allocation to productive uses. That's all that matters for a budding or dominant economic system. Without it, one dies. Without it, one meanders toward financial engineering practices that eventually kill the entire system. Proper credit allocation (capital formation) is representative of early-stage and highly successful/functioning economic systems. Financialization is the sign of an aging or failing financial system. If you strip out all the complexity and jargon, it's as simple as this.

As Werner points out, the Quantity Theory of Credit is the origin of all successful banking models that have worked for thousands of years. It started in early Asia before moving through Europe, Germany, Japan, the US, and now back to China. It was the basis of China's rise as they've built out the Belt and Road system over the last decade-plus. It has allowed them to pull economic power and global sway away from the US by way of state-directed capital aimed at globally and systemically important supply chains. By doing so, China created a vast decentralized product and manufacturing hub for the world; for anything and everything at a low price. On the contrary, the US chose the more deadly path. Centralization, consolidation, and a reduction in the number of banking entities. All the while increasing the amount of financialization, leverage, and risk in the fewer and fewer nodes within the system.

WOW. The # of banks in the US, by era, as presented by @MaxfieldOnBanks. I had never thought of it this way. Once you see it you can’t unsee it… pic.twitter.com/CJQJdIZEYv

— Caitlin Long ?????? (@CaitlinLong_) September 15, 2026

The core thesis, unlike what we've seen in the US over the last two decades, is decentralization. In short, you have the combination of centralized capital flows towards a decentralized private sector, which forms the basis of growth. You conquer, so to speak, in numbers.

This is a major paradigm shift from what we've become, but it is what we are finally seeing the US wake up to and begin to move back towards.

That's why it feels so chaotic and out of sync. It's different than anything we've seen in the last 70 to 100 years or more. It is what Hamilton implemented in the US to found our great and successful American experiment. It is what we reimplemented in the 30s to 50s to extend US dominance. But it is what we moved away from post-1971 with the creation of petrodollars and a heavy reliance on financialization and incentivization of lack of productivity (service). It is what stablecoin dollars, Bitcoin, and a SOFR based system are meant to hopefully replace. The brokenness of petrodollar and eurodollars. These steps are an attempt to revert back to something that works - productivity.

Instead of growth, for decades, we've implemented policies that promote fewer and fewer entities in industry and banking. The exact steps that choke off growth and kill economic systems. It also leads, as we've seen, to a vicious cycle of bad policy design that encourages less competition. All of which only exacerbate the problem.

Eventually, you end up right where we are. In an unproductive and overly financialized economy without the ability to provide because you've outsourced everything for the sake of profits, quarterly numbers, and inflated margins for analysts to bicker over. At some point, you wake up and realize the amount of power you've given away to others by centralizing your resources and profits into fewer and fewer hands. That's when you realize those providing to you have decentralized their resources, profits, and state-directed capital into real economic power that eventually unseats you from number one.

For a financial system to work, the entire system must depend on the quantity of credit, as Werner lays out, and if you follow the Japanese story, which I believe we are only 25-30 years behind, then Kevin Warsh is no different than the last Central Bank prince whose specific role was to change the regime. Unfortunately, if we choose to extend, the only option is to become the carry trade for others to piggyback off of. As we see, that game can unproductively go on for decades.

As Dines notes, the QE period is over. The only move to sustain is to provide credit to those who have capacity (Main Street) and guide it into productive use cases (21st-century infrastructure).

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