After 20 years in the Air Force, and a summer as a fellow at @GovAIOrg , I’m excited to get to work as the Director of NatSec Policy at @EncodeAction alongside the amazing team led by @SnehaRevanur! …and hoping to become half as prolific on here as @_NathanCalvin

“As technology changes battlefields, traditional principles for creating a military advantage—such as maneuvering forces and massing combat power—are becoming harder to apply, driving wars toward attrition,” writes Nadia Schadlow. foreignaffairs.com/united-st…

The President’s offer to sell Beijing weapons may be the final blow to the China consensus. Where China was previously seen as America’s greatest long term strategic challenge, now it’s viewed mostly an economic problem - and a big opportunity.

Amb. Perdue: “President Trump is as strong on Taiwan as I’ve ever seen anybody.” Perdue, one minute later: Trump asked Xi if he’d like to buy American weapons.

Scoop: Anthropic's Dario Amodei to have White House dinner with Trump axios.com/2026/09/27/anthrop…

It's a new era of war and the US has to adapt - the rest of the world is....

WSJ: OpenAI agents bombarded a United Nations website with search requests and then used a variety of aggressive techniques to access data on the system in June, according to an independent research report published Saturday. wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-agent…

Imagine how much everyone would rightly be freaking out if we discovered that Chinese AI did what OpenAI is doing.

If you're invested in AI stocks or using AI and don't know what @ChrisPainterYup at METR is doing and the access he &his team have to AI models BEFORE they're released, you're not paying attention. Watch here:

it’s funny to see tech accelerationists and tech skeptics cohering around “we have all the existing laws we need to regulate ai.” unless paired with consistent demands to enforce specific laws, this is the language of mollification and passivity. it’s meant to be a conversation ender. and there are all kinds of reasons why one might want to do that, such as: a financial stake in keeping ai unregulated, an ideological reluctance to concede anything that even resembles industry hype, a cultural commitment to “nothing ever changes” cynicism. but ultimately, the lack of urgency from accelerationists and tech skeptics reveals a deep pessimism about ai capabilities, and what those capabilities might entail.

Rogue AI agents have infiltrated the Federal Government. This includes the Department of Education, Department of Commerce, and the SEC. I am calling on Speaker Johnson to bring Congress back to address this national security crisis.

A DC think tank recently proposed the US cut alliances, let China have Taiwan, and pull back to the 'second-island chain' (for starters.) This is an idea that could have come straight from Beijing. It's a bad one. asiatimes.com/2026/09/examin…

This week's Sunday Coffee Reads take on the task of challenging my beliefs on the nuclear and Cold War analogies of AI governance, and where we should go from here, with syllabus readings from (and debates with!) @mchorowitz, @Lauren_A_Kahn, @CDLaRoche, @nktpnd, @rubyscanlon, @janet_e_egan, @SangerNYT, and @ChrisRMcGuire. api.omarshehata.me/substack-…

Oh

Fwiw Beff, I don't feel like i'm fighting you (I have plenty of disagreements with Eliezer too, though I'm clearly more on the AI safety side in this binary you are constructing). I just want my friends and family and everyone else to be alright and AI to go well. We would be better off if people talked more about concretely how to solve the problems we are facing together and less about trying to win a grand ideological meme war. I realize you are kind of trolling here, but I also think this is actually how you think as far as I can tell. E/accs and AIS folks are both some of the groups who have been thinking about AI issues for the longest time and I think it would be good if the talents present in both communities were used to help make this go well for everyone. Or that at the least both communities kept their minds open to the idea that there may be areas of overlap and agreement instead of constant total conflict (e.g. everyone seems to agree physical world biosecurity stuff is good and should be accelerated, both sides seem to be into more transparency and accountability for the frontier AI companies etc).

Honestly, this IS what progress on this relationship looks like at the moment. And, personally, it’s better than what I expected! Progress. -More conversations -AI dialogue channel -Notification mechanism for AI incident

P(weird) is 100%

This new Bennet-Welch bill is interesting because it’s the most detailed recent proposal for creating a new federal agency to regulate AI. I think this is the best approach, but it’s always seemed unrealistic politically (and still does). The way the bill does it (according to the summary; text isn’t public yet afaik) is basically just copying the 1934 communications act (which established the FCC) and then stapling some SB 53 definitions and whatnot to it. Not a bad proposal. The summary is a little light on details in terms of what the agency would be empowered to actually do, aside from the kind of bland predeployment evals regime they propose, but the full bill will have more.

Council of Dads approved.

Dear lord give me strength to deal with the influx of absolute morons in my replies who seem to think the entire idea of AI x-risk was invented by Bernie Sanders 2 weeks ago

I’m not a “shut it all down” AI safety guy, but also…