We believe that this document is fully AI-generated pangram.com/history/6a2c3083…

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

Notable how much less intelligent Opus 4.8 feels after even a few days using Fable

Water and energy are already in public control! And energy in particular is in an abject state because of it. Meanwhile, AI…

In the morning, European citizens will wake up and find their access to Claude Mythos/ Fable gone. Nobody asked us. Nobody had to. We wrote Europe 2031 precisely for this moment.

Beyond the obvious reasons why this is mad, citizen / noncitizen is a particularly odd axis to split this on. Plenty of nasty hackers with US passports, and surely foreign evil-doers wouldn’t find it that hard to spoof citizenship.

I wrote a feature on what went wrong with Britain over the last 20 years, economically and politically: - Almost zero wage growth since '08 - GDP per person on par with Mississippi - 6 PM's since 2016; 7th expected soon - The ascendancy of Nigel Farage

An Idrees longread on the state of Britain is, of course, self-recommending. theatlantic.com/magazine/202…

🧵I spent 9 months building a detailed new global model of AI data center finances along with @alasdairpr and @SamWinterLevy. It shows which factors are driving $10 billion investment decisions, who will control a key strategic asset of this century, and what policymakers can do to steer results while minimizing harms to the public. It’s part of a new @CarnegieEndow & @CEIPTechProgram report. Here are five key findings:

There is a simple reason why European government officials underestimate AI progress: They don't have access to the best systems. - The EU Commission still used GPT-4o when Claude Opus 4.5 was out. - For confidential things, staff use open-source models. But not good Chinese models, instead the completely outdated Llama-70b. If you never see GPT-5.5 or Fable doing research or coding, disbelief is a lot easier. simongrimm.substack.com/p/ge…

The returns to having a dynamic economy are going to sharply rise. (From europe2031.ai/)

Gets at an important point for Britain's energy conversation, beyond the obvious "aaaaaahhhh". People talk about an energy price problem—and, yes, Britain has built lots of expensive wind (more specifically, low-marginal-cost high-fixed-and-system-cost). Yes, Britain is exposed to a Europe-wide gas shortage and pays through the nose for American and Gulf LNG. None of that is great. But as this chart illustrates: the even bigger problem is energy availability. There is simply not much to go around. New projects languish in grid queues; growth suffers when one of its most important inputs is absent. (And the explicit goal of successive govts' policy has been to make it expensive to build most kinds of energy, so unlike in the rest of the economy, those high prices don't cure themselves by incentivising new construction.)

This should be a wake-up call for the UK… (Note that this is a per-capita chart)

People overrate the importance of energy costs for data centres, and underrate flexible regulations and grid access. Great report from @SamWinterLevy, @alasdairpr and co: carnegieendowment.org/resear…

A pitch for central-banking nihilism from me in this week's @TheEconomist Money Talks newsletter. (Subscribe here: economist.com/newsletters/mo…)

Tariff revenues down appreciably from their peak