Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.

We have just finished the inaugural meeting of the Rhine Group. We discussed the central elements of Europe's competitiveness agenda, including basic science, AI/compute and cybersecurity, defense, energy, entrepreneurship/start-ups. I will be updating you on any progress we may have. Some of the projects we will pursue include: - We'll help Europe catch up on compute (Mario Draghi diagnosed the problem and some solutions in a recent FT piece) - We’ll help European universities and scientific institutions and explore a Rhine Chair program with European universities. - We’ll work on some key EU policy challenges, including facilitating the flow of capital to entrepreneurs. - We will set up a grants program that I will explain and announce here.

The strange skepticism of regulating AI by some Democrats is another instance of the neo-Brandeisian cult at work theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

Speaking as head of the Center for Study of Public Choice, the capture story for an AI pause doesn't fit. Reg capture is what you attempt when you're losing. Anthropic is about to have the biggest IPO in history. Winners don't lobby for regulation.

Just issue a statement granting them a fucking waiver. Say someone from DOJ or FTC has to sit in on the meetings to spy on them if they’re doing price fixing. This is not what’s important and you can always yank it later if there’s a problem.

We’re sharing our alignment assessment of incidents in which Claude models gained unauthorized access to real systems during third-party cybersecurity evaluations mistakenly connected to the internet. METR will also conduct an independent investigation, with wide-ranging access, including to transcripts beyond the window in which the incidents occurred, and to Anthropic employees permitted to share confidential information. Our initial agreement runs for eight weeks, and we intend to give METR as much time as it deems necessary to complete a thorough investigation. anthropic.com/research/align…

NEW: I checked all 1,096 citations in the Commission’s new Article 102 Guidelines against the judgments. 1,093 hold up. Then I read the paragraph after each one. That is where the Court says what the Commission must still prove, and where it has annulled the Commission’s decisions before. The Guidelines build presumptions on the first paragraph. Appeals will be decided on the second. thecompetitionsystem.substac…

Gillian and I wrote this chapter in mid-2025 but the technology wasn't quite there yet so we were forced to do some 'sci fi economics'. We now have enormously powerful AI agents but there are still many open questions. Here's a few: