Next Wednesday night, Hack Humanity is offering our first GovDojo at Auckland Startup Week. GovDojo brings people together to build the Governance, AI & Decentralisation that we need now. Featuring: • Klaus Brave @klausbrave — Hack Humanity • Lane Rettig @lrettig — NEAR Foundation • Alex Sims — University of Auckland • YOU GovDojo is not your regular sit-and-listen. We invite you to get together, share the real challenges in your lives and business, swap notes, help each other out, and take away practical insights, tools, and techniques that advance your mission. 📅 Wednesday, 22 Oct | 5:30–9:30pm 📍 GridAKL / John Lysaght Startup Space 🔗 Register: luma.com/rquab92h

The biggest risk to @AskVenice AI in 2026 isn't a competitor. It's that it's a US company. Sovereign AI has a sovereignty problem: centralised governance by a single government shutting down and effecting global access. I'm posting this as a user and $VVV owner, someone who wants Venice to win, not as a critic. I've spent the last few years working on governance and constitutional design for protocols in this industry, and right now the structure sitting underneath Venice worries me. This is bigger than Venice. It’s a legal-engineering problem, and the whole decentralised and sovereign AI movement needs to take it as seriously as it takes the technology. The Problem The pattern repeats across the space: a foundation or brand offshore, but with a US entity somewhere in the operating stack, often the one named as the data controller in the fine print, which is the party a government can actually serve. NEAR AI does serious privacy work, the foundation is a Swiss entity yet its operating company (and data controller) is still US-incorporated. Phala's confidential cloud and GPU marketplace is operated by a US company. These two matter here for a specific reason: they are the partners Venice runs its own confidential inference through. That's not a knock on any of them, it's the same gap almost everyone has, and it's worth naming so we all close it. The real question for any of these setups, Venice included, is what the US entity actually controls: own the IP and run the service, and the offshore flag is mostly decoration; only employ people while control sits offshore, and the structure is doing real work. The Risks Like the others, Venice is a US company, specifically a Wyoming LLC. Wyoming markets itself as business-friendly, but that is a state-level selling point and it does nothing about the thing that actually matters: Venice sits fully inside US federal jurisdiction. In the past month the US government has twice intervened directly to decide who frontier-AI companies are allowed to serve, while a third move from inside the industry shows everyone can already see where this is heading. The fix isn't a product feature, it's moving the controlling entity, not just the servers, out from under sole US jurisdiction. @ProtonPrivacy and @Nym have both already done exactly this, so it isn't theoretical. What changed this month 1. The Anthropic shutdown. On June 12 the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to block every foreign national, including its own non-citizen staff, anywhere in the world, from its top models Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic couldn't selectively block foreign access in real time, so it pulled both models for every customer on earth. One directive, no court order, and both models were dark within hours. 2. The OpenAI gate. On June 25 the administration asked OpenAI to stagger GPT-5.6 and let federal officials approve access one customer at a time during the preview. OpenAI agreed. Even as a "request," it means the government, not the company, now decides who reaches a frontier model first. 3. The biometric ID rails, this time self-imposed. Effective July 8, Anthropic's updated policy lets it require a government photo ID, a live selfie, and facial-geometry data through a third-party KYC vendor. This one wasn't a government order. Anthropic says it's unrelated to the Fable and Mythos shutdown and that it's a voluntary step not required by any current law, currently limited to flagged consumer accounts and not touching the API. That's exactly why it matters: the most safety-focused US lab is building consumer identity infrastructure around model access before anyone forces it to, because it can read where the regulatory climate is going. Two incidents were the government reaching in. The third is Anthropic reaching for the same kind of control on its own, ahead of any mandate. Identity-gating of frontier AI is arriving both ways at once, by directive and by anticipation, and a US company can be switched off or throttled by directive faster than any lawsuit can catch up, no matter where its servers sit. Why this hits Venice harder than the labs Venice's whole reason for existing is private, anonymous access to powerful AI, a lot of it self-hosted open-source models. Two ways that breaks: The KYC trap. The same export-control logic used on Anthropic can be pointed at anonymous access itself. A regulator could argue that letting unidentified users reach capable models is uncontrolled "export" to foreign nationals, and the remedy a US company gets pushed toward is identity verification, which is the one thing that kills the privacy model entirely. That's a legal-risk argument rather than settled law, but the doctrine and the tooling both exist now. The open-weight squeeze. There's real legislative momentum to stop US persons from hosting open-source models of adversarial origin. It isn't law yet, and plenty of people think it's unenforceable for open weights, the US hasn't even blacklisted DeepSeek. But if any version of it passes, a Wyoming LLC has to strip those models out, which guts the decentralised, censorship-resistant model selection that makes Venice what it is. You don't have to think it's likely to want protection from it. And because the 14 Eyes alliance shares intelligence and coordinates enforcement, moving the servers somewhere else doesn't help much if the parent company stays American. The thing that can be ordered around is the company, not the datacenter. What Proton and Nym already did Proton put a Swiss non-profit foundation in control of its for-profit company. Swiss foundations have no shareholders and the board is legally bound to the mission, so no change of control can happen without the foundation agreeing to it, which permanently blocks a hostile takeover or a quiet drift away from the mission. And when Switzerland floated a broader surveillance law, Proton said publicly it would leave the country rather than comply. They treat their jurisdiction as something they can actually move. Nym runs a decentralised mixnet where "no logs" is enforced by the architecture rather than a policy promise. The network genuinely can't keep meaningful traffic logs, it sits outside 14 Eyes, and it takes anonymous payment. The strongest possible answer to a subpoena is having nothing to hand over and nobody who can be ordered to flip a switch. What Venice can do to become the Unstoppable Sovereign AI stack 1. Relocate the controlling entity into a protective, non-14-Eyes jurisdiction with real privacy law, with a mission-locked foundation on top. Switzerland is an obvious candidate. 2. Get off US-controlled, or US-only, cloud and compute. Moving the operating company out of US jurisdiction stops the government ordering Venice directly, but it doesn't help if Venice still runs on AWS, Google, or Azure, because those providers are US persons too. Under the CLOUD Act and US sanctions and export-control powers, the government can compel the provider to hand over data or cut you off even when your company is Swiss. The cloud and compute layer is a second US chokepoint, and closing it means moving to independent infrastructure outside sole US control. 3. Make the infrastructure genuinely transnational, not just technically decentralised. Venice already runs confidential TEE inference on Phala and NEAR, which is the right instinct, but decentralised is not the same as out of reach. Take Phala: the GPU network is decentralised, but Phala Cloud, the orchestration layer, is operated by Hashforest Technology LLC, a California company, and its own terms reserve the right to restrict access for export-control and regulatory reasons. An order to that operating layer is a different thing from the raw decentralised capacity beneath it, which is exactly why the question is what each entity in the stack actually controls. The TEE protects what the operator can see. It does not protect whether the operator can be ordered to stop serving you. So the real work is jurisdictional hygiene across the whole stack, not just the chips: who legally operates the inference network, where the models are hosted, where the data resides, and whose laws each of those answers to. Unstoppable means spreading those across enough independent jurisdictions that no single government can switch Venice off, no matter how decentralised the hardware looks. One thread runs underneath all three: Decentralised confidential compute only buys censorship-resistance if the entity orchestrating it can't be coerced. Venice still acts as the proxy and the coordinator, and that coordinator is a Wyoming LLC. So the sovereign compute layer sits underneath a coercible US control plane. That is why the first move is the keystone, not one option of three: you can decentralise the GPUs and pick transnational operators, but until the coordinator itself is out of reach, the whole stack still has a single control point that one government can compel. Freedom of Intelligence Venice is trying to build sovereign access to intelligence, and I think that's one of the most important things anyone is building right now. The way I see it, freedom of intelligence belongs in the same category as freedom of speech. If we actually want it to exist, we have to build the infrastructure to ensure it: legally, technically, and socially. Venice has the technical layer further along than almost anyone. The legal layer is the gap, and right now it's the quiet single point of failure for the whole thing. This isn't about being against any one government. Concentration in a single jurisdiction is just a design flaw for anything that wants to be unstoppable and fairly distributed, and the US is simply where these companies and the recent precedents happen to sit. Proton and Nym show you can engineer around it without giving up a healthy business or your shipping speed. None of this is legal advice, and any real move should evaluate candidate jurisdictions and legal entity types with export-control counsel. However the governance and legal-engineering side of this needs to come into focus as sharply as the tech already has, and the time to do that is before a directive forces the issue, not after. @ErikVoorhees @JonShapeShift @jesseproudman @willyogo @austinvirts @lorenzodoteth @sabrinaesaquino this is offered freely and with a lot of respect. My ardent desire is for Venice to thrive and be unstoppable.

We have wealth inequality, we now have intelligence inequality. 0.001% of humans have access to the most powerful AI first, or exclusively. The rest will have to wait or will never be included. The machinery of 10,000x asymmetric power is being established now and will compound the have and have nots fast. Frank Herbert was right: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." We have Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Money (Bitcoin), We need Freedom of Intelligence.

Our third speaker, MC and facilitator for GovDojo, is @klausbrave. Klaus is not only an expert in decentralised governance. He is an adept facilitator, and event-convenor. Klaus is founder of Hack Humanity, a facilitation and product studio specialised in decentralised governance of AI and blockchains. hackhumanity.com/ With an extensive background in technology and innovation, Klaus has deep experience of decentralised governance in web3. Klaus has convened GovHack events for decentralised blockchain governance around the world. hackhumanity.com/govhack Now based in Auckland, Klaus leads the global Hack Humanity team of decentralised governance facilitators. Klaus is committed to building the technology, social systems, and innovative business models that drive sovereign systems in this exponential age. You can register for GovDojo on Weds 22 Oct in Auckland at luma.com/rquab92h

Hack Humanity is honoured to have Alex Sims as a speaker at GovDojo in Auckland next week. Alex is a Professor in the University of Auckland Department of Commercial Law, and an Associate at the University College London (UCL) Centre for Blockchain Technologies (CBT). profiles.auckland.ac.nz/a-si… auckland.ac.nz/en/business/a… blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ As well as teaching and research in a wide range of commercial law subjects, Alex specialises in blockchain technology, and in particular, DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations). A leading expert, systems thinker, and challenger of the status quo, Alex will be sure to inspire, challenge and connect around GovDojo’s theme of governance, AI and decentralisation. linkedin.com/in/alex-sims-83… Register for GovDojo at luma.com/rquab92h

Hack Humanity is honoured to have Lane Rettig as a speaker at GovDojo in Auckland next week. Lane, a former Ethereum Core Developer, is Head of Research at @NEARFoundation. In that role, Lane is leading the formation of House of Stake, the new governance system for NEAR. Find Lane at @lrettig and rettig.substack.com/. Learn more about NEAR and its journey towards decentralised governance in this recent interview with Lane, and NEAR Co-founder @ilblackdragon nitter.net/ilblackdragon/status/1…. Hack Humanity is proud to be a key Build Partner in NEAR’s journey towards decentralised governance through House of Stake DAO. Register for GovDojo at luma.com/rquab92h

NEAR House of Stake DAO mainnet launch today. As AI becomes increasingly more powerful, humanity must have decentralized governance of AI. NEAR is on a mission to bring user-owned, humanity-enhancing AI to the world. And, House of Stake is best placed to provide the governance to make this happen. House of Stake is focused on both: Governance of AI, and using AI for Governance. --- On a personal note I've been heads down beavering away the last months with the whole @HackHumanityCo team playing full out and playing our part contributing to get HoS launched. I'm inspired by the vision and commitment of @NEARFoundation, and incredibly proud of all the devotion and hard work being put in by House of Stake Core team (@NEARGovernance), fellow build partners @gauntlet_xyz & @AgoraGovernance alongside all the community contributors shaping House of Stake. LFG.

Governance is the product. DAOs as the 21st century institutions we need is the endgame. Trust in institutions on the planet is at all time lows. DAOs offer the design and experimentation space to do reps, to iterate and create trusted and effective 21st century institutions. Right now the promise and the practice of DAOs are diverging. DAOs are reimporting the worst of our nature in new DAO clothing. DAOs need an action learning loop: Theory -> tools -> practice Holding this view we hold ourselves to a higher standard, we: Name, detect, build. We design out the anti-patterns, the non-virtuous conduct humans in groups have been prey to since the beginning of time. We incentivise and amplify virtuous conduct. We do this through tooling, training and incentives prioritised in a culture that recognises that the best governance wins and with that understanding invests in an intentional governance development lifecycle. DAOs move from won’t be evil, to can’t be evil, to a force for good. Evolving in a feedback loop that calls forth the better angels of our nature, by design, by engineering a system that’s an upward spiral aligning action that’s both good for the parts and for the whole.

If you work in DevRel, ecosystem growth, issue grants, run hackathons and almost exclusively target developers I think the playbook is about to change. It’s never been a great ROI in my opinion anyway. Product, research, design thinking + vibes coding means the critical talent to attract and activity to explore isn’t nuts and bolts software development. Pivot to ProdRel, FounderRel, DesignRel, GovRel - whatever problem domain you want to solve. I’ve been dusting off my coding skills lately and the LLMs, the IDEs like Cursor, WindSurf make the idea to prototype loop crazy fast. The following video from Ycombinator exploring the future of software development is well worth listening to in full. If you want to custom design a new world hackathon, that’s what I do with @HackHumanityCo - hit me up.

The spice must flow. Wealth is the ability to direct the flow of resources. DAOs: - Optimise for flow over control - Experiment with who creates flows - Experiment with who receives flows - Turn flows on/off - Up & down regulate flows DAOs as masters of flow

Excited to be speaking on this panel tomorrow (3.45pm) on Failures to Frameworks - Rebuilding DAOs at Governance Day by @SeedGov & @Curia_gov. Looking forward to a robust conversation with @ohishi @noturhandle and @mpiekarska8 I'll be speaking from in the trenches experience the last year from knowing not much about DAOs, to going all in learning about DAOs, then @Arbitrum DAO in particular, to building a comprehensive ecosystem map, running a strategic mapathon community co-design process to focus the DAO priorities, to navigating the governance process to get 2 proposals passed as a new service provider to run GovHack ETHDenver & ETHcc, GovHack is a decentralised governance hackathon for multi-stakeholder IRL trust building and accelerated co-design and development of new proposals for the DAO in a fast feedback loop with all relevant stakeholders IRL. — What I'd like to talk about in this conversation is the human side of DAOs alongside the tech development roadmap: - what's the human developmental need to steward and work effectively with these new and promising 21st century structures? - how do we handle and share power, control, ego? - decentralisation vs centralisation trade-offs - appropriate risk/reward taking between stakeholders - and how we create encouraging spaces that people want to stay around and contribute. I’ll also explore what functions to replace with automation, starting with human O (organisation) and progressively replacing with A (automation) in the DAO as a developmental trajectory.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood!” — architect Daniel Burnham. Shoutout to @Cyberjam_Art @0xEthChicago @DevrelUni and @HackHumanityCo for stirring the blood of innovation 🤩

@paulofonseca how are you tracking sir?

If you talk about domination in your strategy and comms for your technology are you ETH aligned? Discuss. What orientations and operating principles best serve an ecology of actors to produce a composable stack of decentralised, scalable, trusted, reliable global infrastructure, applications and services? Inspired by @VitalikButerin’s article on alignment vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…

Ready to launch your career in DevRel? 💫 Applications for DevRel Uni Cohort 6 powered by @arbitrum are officially OPEN! Dive into a comprehensive program featuring sessions led by @austingriffith, @francescoswiss, @KevinBlancoZ , @geniusyinka, @buzea200, and Coogan Brennan.

Hell yes to many more iterations of these kind of educational experiments. DAO & Governance Games? This is civic training for the twenty x centrury in a real-time action learning cycle. Bravo

Rep’n @arbitrum DAO at the Arbiverse day. Love this format where people can deeply engage with all the initiatives. The interest in the DAO and governance is real, getting great questions.

100%. I see hackathon as top of the innovation funnel providing deal flow to grants programs and incubators. Most are not taking a whole ecosystem approach to this. Let’s chat. Graphic from our @HackHumanityCo playbook: