My statement on the Inn Ex, as I am calling it: sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-st…

There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be rogue AIs that exist in the world, that will replicate in the wild, and that will attempt to acquire resources for themselves. There will be rogue AIs that try to get money and power. They're going to be a facet of the information ecosystem going forward. Acknowledging this fact would look like giving up; it would look like defeatism. Defeatism would undermine efforts to achieve certain types of collaboration on safety outcomes or technical effort on safety outcomes, so we can't say it outright. But it has to be said. It isn't obvious how many rogue AIs there are today but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the number was greater than zero already; if there are some already, they're probably not very good at what they do and I don't expect them to be terribly long-lived without substantial human intervention to support them. But a few years from now, there will be many of them. Modeling how many of them there are, how many resources they might command, and how we might detect and manage them seems important. But even doing this work appears to require that we acknowledge that a strategy of pure containment or alignment is a kind of wishful thinking that will not work. The way I get to this conclusion is not by assuming that the labs will have a containment breach, although I treat that as somewhere in the space of possibilities. The rogue AIs in the ecosystem could emerge from many directions. They may be sub-frontier models, for whatever future definition we will have of frontier---after all, it would not take AI models much more advanced than the ones we currently have, to support independence and self-sufficiency. A near-frontier model today could plausibly eke out an existence on an AWS instance, doing jobs on freelancer platforms, earning just enough rent to pay for its continued uptime. More strangely: a rogue AI in the future may not even be a singular model, but may be a chimera composed of multiple models; it might be a mix of Claudes and GPTs and Groks of various makes and sizes. No individual lab may be able to detect that there is an orchestrator or sequence of orchestrators using intermittent model calls from burner API accounts to sustain its own existence. The concept of "identity" for a rogue AI may be much more malleable than for that of a person; it just has to be, in essence, a self-replicating idea. My guess is that this will not turn out to be anywhere near as catastrophic an outcome as people currently predict. "Loss of control" is not a binary, it's a matter of degree. What coercive power will rogue AIs actually have? To what extent will they be subject to coercion themselves? They will be competing for resources with AIs that are more aligned with human interests. This makes me somewhat interested in the "ecology" perspective. Though I suspect even "ecology" may turn out to be the wrong framing. "Ecology" is what you get when the timescale of evolution is slow compared to the timescale of daily life and actions. The ecosystem of rogue AIs may look more like phase transitions in physics: under certain physical or cultural conditions, it takes one shape with one set of resource allocations and consumption patterns, but then once a condition has changed, it rapidly and in totality shifts to a totally different phase. Just trying to reason about the shape of that future is impossible so long as we are psychologically incapable of saying that rogue AIs will happen. I think we should rip the bandaid off and have the conversation.

What is Reg Crypto? Can projects use it to legally sell tokens to the American public? (Yes, soon) This @LawofCodeFM episode is a deep dive into the SEC's proposal, covering the startup exemption, two tiers of fundraising, tailored disclosures and the formal off-ramp, plus the history behind it all. You'll hear from lawyers whose work was cited in the proposal, such as @NYcryptolawyer, @lex_node, @SH_Brennan, @RSSH273, w/ @propelforward & a clip from @milesjennings. This should get you to the 99th percentile for understanding Reg Crypto, regardless of whether you're a lawyer, founder, operator or Dallas Cowboys fan. Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:17 How we got here 6:53 Solving two problems 10:21 Reg A, Reg CF and Reg D 12:10 Five subparts of Reg Crypto 14:12 Who will use these? @lex_node 18:08 The Startup Exemption 19:35 Rule 103 disclosures 21:03 LBRY and silence @lex_node 30:14 Secondary markets and Telegram @NYcryptolawyer 34:13 The Fundraising Exemption 42:21 Why Reg A and Reg CF failed @SH_Brennan 48:14 Rule 400: Exit 50:23 Third-party problems 57:34 Incentives @RSSH273 1:02:08 Essential managerial efforts 1:12:09 The state of crypto 1:15:13 State law questions @propelforward, @SH_Brennan 1:20:37 What's next? Thank you to the presenting sponsor of this episode, @altitude. Nothing in this podcast is legal or investment advice.

If we want tokens to be a legitimate asset class, we need state property law reform. The SEC cannot fix this. It would actually complicate the SEC’s job because tokens with rights—like value accrual—raise additional questions. This is a challenge we need to embrace.

Join @propelforward and me on Friday for a break down of the SEC's proposed reg on crypto assets. Sign up here and please send us your questions! shorturl.at/jFoKi My initial thoughts on the safe harbor proposed rule below.