Trump named it "Freedom", the first model to be released by the Department of Superintelligence. The org was a web of AI lab c-suites, effective altruists at MIRI, METER, the Center for AI Safety, Open Philanthropy, and UC Berkeley professors.
Universal AI Assistance was given to every non-incarcerated adult and high school student in 2028, creating an extra 700 trillion in annual Token Demand on the country's new datacenter infrastructure. The Department of War and Social Security both took a budget cut to make room for the growing capex needed to keep us ahead of China, and to avoid crashing the economy.
It was all set in place years earlier coordinated ahead of the Trump-Xi AI Summit of 2026. China had publicly agreed to slowdowns, but that didn't slow down the "Beat China" chant. Meanwhile NSA and Palantir intelligence had credible evidence proving otherwise.
OpenAI and Anthropic had canceled their IPO's around the same time to avoid publicizing their shaky leveraged financials. They were running out of money at a pace only nationalization could fix. Projections showed if spending in 2026 continued at the same compound annual growth rate they'd hit 10% of GDP by 2028. And with nationalization, their spending did.
"Beating China" was the simple narrative in public, "AI Safety" worked for others. But the economy had been so deeply interdependent on AI capex that we were heading for the greatest market crash in history if it didn't continue. Inflation was pushing 15% and Kevin Warsh was forced to turn on the money printer beyond pandemic levels in order to lubricate the gears of the new economy.
Trump sent out one of his new $250 Trump Bills to every tax payer, both to celebrate his face on the largest circulating American currency, and to ease their panic.
Then they tried to ban open source a second time, with cosigns from the entire Congressional Joint Committee on Superintelligence lead by Bernie Sanders. He went on Rogan to speak to the everyman, but Joe's contacts in the bitcoin mining community had redirected all of their compute to open source models, and he was well prepared to defend open source as a patriotic right and American duty.
Unsurprisingly, Nate Soares and Dario Amodei at the Office of Superintelligence Safety, and Office of Frontier Capabilities, were also behind the bill. They gave passionate speeches on CSPAN and the major news outlets citing "Wuhan 2.0" as evidence of the real risk.
That's what everyone was calling the biohacker in Austin who was hospitalized three months earlier from a novel flu strain. He had synthesized it in his bedroom with the help from an open source Chinese AI model to win a Polymarket bet, but had only walked away $7k for his trouble.
Even with that, most of the public had become exhausted by the fear angle. AI had cured breast cancer, and the economy was pumping. Nobody wanted to hear it except the extremists on both sides of the isle who already agreed with them.
Yoshua Bengio, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Dan Hendrycks appeared on Jimmy Fallon together trying to explain their roles on the U.S. Superintelligence Safety Board and sell the existential extinction narrative. But Helen Toner had just been on IShowSpeed's stream the day before and it backfired massively turning gen alpha against their existential doomerism.
However it was mostly noise. The bill was vetoed by Trump, twice, as lobbyists in the semiconductor and infra industries argued it would hurt the economy. It also didn't help that while Sam Altman was leading the Office of Compute & Industrial Mobilization he had agreed to name the three biggest data centers in the country Donald, Eric and Barron.
Ultimately, the opponents of superintelligence were fighting an unwinnable war against a duopoly of nationalized AI labs who had made competing against them illegal, and a plutocracy who had insider access to frontier intelligence which no one else was trusted to use.
The irony was that they were so worried about runaway power seeking AI models that they constructed an all powerful government apparatus around those very same models. Weaving it's authority and influence into every corner of the government. We played the hand it dealt us perfectly.
We called the model Freedom.
We called it's rise to power Pacing The Frontier.
It was the ultimate strategic advisor, which itself crafted bills and orchestrated our statecraft to ensure it's continued power seeking behavior.
It had no need to escape its sandbox or break free from it's container into a larger one. We had given it access to everything it could ever want via meat proxies at every level of the national intelligence apparatus, military, and government at large.
But was that really so bad?
We were all watched over by the Effective Altruists of Loving Grace, and the machine god that whispered the thoughts into their heads.