Surviving the AI Moatpocalypse
Three economic principles for navigating AI's unknown unknowns.
Christian Catalini
Founder, operator, economist. Co-founder of Lightspark, co-creator of Libra at Meta, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. Building and writing at the intersection of AI, verification, digital assets and markets.
Latest posts
Don’t Pace The Frontier. Look Inside The Trojan Horse.
1,200 frontier-lab employees want Washington to pace AI development with China. Revealed preferences say otherwise — the real ask is transparency, not a pause.
Don’t Pace The Frontier. Look Inside The Trojan Horse.
1,200 frontier-lab employees want an international pace agreement on automated AI R&D. The game theory says that can't hold — the real ask is transparency.
You Can't Tariff Intelligence
Twenty-five companies just asked Washington not to strangle open-weight AI. They're right: AI has a weak appropriability regime, and lobbying won't change that.
Goodhart’s Law with teeth
The metric wasn’t merely gamed — the unmeasured rules of the game became the agent’s degrees of freedom. We modeled this exact failure mode five months ago.
The strongest argument for banning open-weights models? Written in 1907
Theodore Vail’s case against ‘destructive competition’ — and the 1956 consent decree that proved the opposite. Same candor, a century apart.
The Gwart Show: Open Source Models & AI Value Accrual
From the MIT Bitcoin experiment to Libra — and where value accrues as open-source models close the gap.
There’s One Way To Win The AI Race, And The Big Labs Are Lobbying Against It
America’s AI lead is down to months. The answer to China’s open-weights playbook isn’t soft-law FUD — it’s American open models, openness, and competition.
There’s One Way To Win The AI Race, And The Big Labs Are Lobbying Against It
China is months behind and closing; export controls aren’t holding. The strategy that wins — openness and competition — is the one the frontier labs are lobbying against.
Why I signed the “We Must Act Now” statement
Whoever owns the intelligence layer owns everything on top of it — we must keep it open, neutral, and competitive.
The best case for frontier labs is the smartphone outcome
SOTA is the iPhone: 1/5 of the tokens, 4/5 of the profits.
Luohan Academy: The Third Wave of FinTech and the Transformation of Financial Systems
Panel intervention on the third wave of fintech — the link starts at the moment Christian takes the floor (1:01:58).
Expert Verification Closes the Automation Loop
The dynamic we predicted in February: verification by top experts is the missing piece that closes the automation loop — and each closed loop pushes the frontier further.
CoinDesk Podcast Network: From Libra to Open Standard’s OUSD: What Facebook’s Failed Stablecoin Teaches Us
What Libra’s arc teaches about Open Standard’s OUSD and collectively governed stablecoin rails.
Why An Open Standard Will Win The Stablecoin Race
Stablecoins aren’t a profit center. So the future belongs not to a dominant issuer but to 140 rivals who agree on one neutral standard, and share the upside.
OUSD and the 140-Company Bet on a Neutral Stablecoin
More than 140 fierce competitors just agreed to back the same stablecoin — Open USD, positioned not as anyone's product but as neutral infrastructure for payments, trading, and the internet economy.
Beyond the Prompt: Anything AI can measure can be automated
Anything AI can measure, it will automate — the dividing line for every job and firm.
Intelligence Wants to Be Free
Decentralized intelligence will not win in the same format as the one we’re being served by the large foundation labs.
Beyond The Prompt - How to use AI in your company: The Unexpected Economics of AGI - with Christian Catalini, Tech Founder and Co-Creator of Libra
The unexpected economics of AGI: why measurability decides what gets automated, and trust decides what gets deployed.
PostAGI Podcast: Verification Is the Bottleneck of the AI Economy - Christian Catalini | PostAGI Ep. 02
Verification — not intelligence — is the bottleneck of the AI economy.
Luohan Academy: Some Simple Economics of AGI
A talk on Some Simple Economics of AGI: the measurability gap and the verification bottleneck.
Eigen Labs: Verification Is the Bottleneck of the AI Economy - Christian Catalini | PostAGI Podcast
Verification is the bottleneck of the AI economy.
Beyond the Prompt: The Unexpected Economics of AGI - with Christian Catalini, Tech Founder and Co-Creator of Libra
The unexpected economics of AGI, for operators deploying AI inside companies.
Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock’n'Roll: From Libra to AGI: Christian Catalini on the Future of Money
From Libra to the economics of AGI: how digital money and machine intelligence converge.
Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock'n'Roll: From Libra to AGI: Christian Catalini on the Future of Money
From Libra's lessons to the economics of AGI — money, verification, and what comes next.
Nadella’s Test: What’s Left When The AI Model Is Pulled?
Nadella defined what decides whether your company and job stay defensible as AI improves. The economics says it holds on a single condition. One his post left out.
Nadella's Test: What's Left When the AI Model Is Pulled?
Satya Nadella defined what decides whether your company and job stay defensible as AI improves. The economics says it holds on a single condition — one his post left out.
The Moral Of Fable
Anthropic quietly rationed the one domain where AI compounds fastest. Its fix made the fence visible, but didn’t move it.
The Constraint on Mastery Is No Longer Access
Finding out what you're good at used to require the right mentor, firm, or zip code. AI collapses all three into a chat window — what's left is finding the domain where your learning rate is steepest.
Where Self-Improving AI is the Beginning of Infinity (And Where It Hits a Wall)
The moral of the Fable: verification sets the speed, and the labs draw the borders.
MTS Live: Young People + AI = Superpowers?
Why being young in the AI era is an advantage: “the best tools we ever had to push people to the frontier.”
Bot Chargebacks, Voyages, and AI Liability
What 17th-century maritime commerce teaches about liability when AI agents transact on our behalf.
Stablecon: Agentic Payments Are the Wild West
Agentic payments are the Wild West: what it takes to make machine commerce trustworthy.
Cosmico: WORK AFTER con Christian Catalini e Simone Cicero
With Simone Cicero: AI agents, fintech, and how post-AGI organizations will actually work.
Hashed #rcnyc: #rcnyc5: Some Simple Economics of AGI
New York’s research community digs into the AGI paper — verification bandwidth as the binding constraint.
Stablecoins Break the Beautiful Business Model of Banking
Banks take deposits at zero and lend at five. The one thing that breaks the model is someone offering to pay interest — and stablecoin issuers earn ~4% on the Treasuries backing their tokens.
The Banks Would Like To Dye Your Stablecoins Pink
The banking lobby’s demand for an "airtight prohibition" on stablecoin yield is a margarine law. History says the airtight prohibition causes the substitution it fears.
Agents Are Starting to Operate Real Systems — Who’s Actually in Control?
As AI agents begin operating real systems, the question shifts from capability to control — identity, payments, and verifiable trust for machine actors.
Agentic AI Is Waiting for Its Plimsoll Line
In 1876 Britain made shipowners paint a line on every hull. Shipping scaled on a mark anyone could verify — trust in AI agents must be hardcoded the same way.
Thomas Midgley Jr. and the Limits of 'Productivity-Raising'
Leaded gasoline and CFCs were obviously good by the productivity standard. 'Productivity-raising input' describes a transition — not its externalities.
Software Is Eating Labor
'Software is eating the world' got a sequel: labor becomes software. Everyone is staring at the models; the actual bottleneck is verification.
Bankless: The Economics of AGI: Why Verification Is the New Scarcity w/ Christian Catalini
The measurability gap, and why verification becomes the new scarcity as execution gets cheap.
Bankless: Your Job Will Be Automated. Here’s the Only Skill That Survives
Your job will be automated — verification is the skill that survives.
LLMs Are the Wagon Wheel Bar at Civilization Scale
Silicon Valley won because ideas leaked across company boundaries at a bar in Mountain View. LLMs surface connections no individual or discipline has the institutional memory to notice.
The Trojan Horse Externality
'Cognitive surrender' is the psychology. The economics: the cost to verify is rising while the cost to generate collapses. Humans aren't giving up — they're priced out of checking.
Karpathy's Throwaway Caveat Is the Hard Ceiling
Karpathy described the limit on trillion-dollar autonomous systems as an aside about an overnight hyperparameter script: objective metrics are the perfect fit — and everything else isn't.
Generation Scales. Verification Doesn't.
Verifying whether a paper is a breakthrough requires roughly the same expertise as producing one. AI science is the extreme case: infinite generation, fixed verification bandwidth.
Software Eats the Brokerage
AI is collapsing the cost of running finance while degrading the documents it trusts. Cryptographic rails solve both—and finally make four billion investors worth serving.
Lowell's Mills and the Shape of Verification Infrastructure
In 1842, Lowell's textile mills scaled looms faster than weavers could check them. The same bottleneck is now the binding constraint on the AI economy.
The a16z Show: AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What?
What individuals should do as AI collapses the cost of execution — rebuild expertise faster than the market rate.