Last week, I wrote about Pope Leo XIV stepping into the global leadership vacuum to confront the predatory rise of “technological feudalism.” That piece was part of a longer argument I’ve been trying to build in public these past few months: that AI is more than a technical story, a business story, or a future-of-work story. It is a power, governance and human dignity story. And if those of us who have spent years thinking about equity, institutions, culture, and structural harm do not enter the conversation with some fire and fury, then the terms will be left to the people most invested in narrowing them.
The scene at the Vatican was striking to say the least: the Pope delivering a withering moral warning against the unchecked AI race, while standing shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. We witnessed an industry insider admitting, in public, that frontier AI labs are operating inside a toxic matrix of commercial, political, and geopolitical incentives that "conflict with doing the right thing."
Olah’s quote should have been a headline across the globe. He was offering an unambiguous admission of structural defeat from inside the machine: We cannot be trusted to police ourselves. The man was telling the world that these growing neural networks are becoming so opaque and so massive that even their creators are losing confidence in their ability to govern them. He was saying that the private sector cannot trust itself or its competitors. He was in no uncertain terms pleading for an outside authority to step in and impose restraint.
Well, yesterday Washington delivered its answer.
The Stock Market Calculation
On June 2, the Trump Administration signed a new executive order on advanced AI innovation and security, bragging that it has replaced Biden-era safety mandates with a completely voluntary 30-day preview window for powerful new models.
We should not be fooled: this is a performance of non-intervention, a lifelong grifter’s sleight of hand meant to reassure a base that was promised economic abundance but is instead confronting higher gas prices, rising electric bills, and stubborn grocery costs, all while ensuring the order does absolutely nothing to spook Wall Street. The administration understands that its entire claim to domestic competence hinges on a booming stock market, especially since its confrontation with Iran has revealed that overwhelming military superiority does not necessarily translate into political success.
Following Anthropic’s Monday announcement of its IPO plans, the stock market responded with an explosive rally across tech giants like Nvidia and semiconductor trackers like the VanEck ETF (SMH). To threaten that momentum with heavy-handed regulations would destroy the one economic scorecard the President cares about and routinely takes credit for.
The 18-Month Blindspot
However it is spun in public, this partial retreat from the administration’s earlier hands-off posture amounts to an unintentional admission of eighteen months of lost time. Because this administration could never admit that the Biden administration was actually onto something with its 2023 AI directives, it reached for a regulatory wrecking ball upon taking office. It stripped away the safety architecture, turned legitimate concerns about algorithmic bias into culture-war catnip, knighted the market as sovereign, and cast oversight as weakness.
The consequences of that live-and-let-live approach are now visible in the mind-boggling balance sheets of Silicon Valley's AI darlings. Over this eighteen-month regulatory vacuum, the market share of OpenAI and Anthropic has consolidated into an unprecedented corporate duopoly. OpenAI entered 2025 valued at roughly $157 billion. By March 2026, investors had pushed its private valuation to $852 billion. Even more staggering is the trajectory of Anthropic. Valued at roughly $60 billion in March 2025, the company closed a massive $65 billion Series H round last week that catapulted its valuation to $965 billion, leapfrogging OpenAI to become the most valuable private AI company in the world. If you are counting, in a year and a half two private companies added more than $1.6 trillion in paper value while operating in a sector with remarkably little democratic oversight.
By treating this astronomical explosion of private wealth as the ultimate validation of its policies, the administration has effectively edited the human being out of the ledger. Biden’s original order at least tried to name the social harms: algorithmic bias, consumer fraud, worker displacement, and civil rights. Today’s order sheds the patina of human concern. There is no serious mention of jobs, no meaningful naming of social harm, and no moral reckoning. To this White House, the only harm that counts is a national security threat.
Purges and Procurement
After eighteen months spent dismantling and discrediting Biden’s regulatory architecture, the administration is now left governing through the side door of “voluntary” submission. A real mandate would spook the markets and invite yet another legal challenge for an administration leaking legal talent. (And once in court, the administration would likely have to reach for the same statutory playbook Biden used — the Defense Production Act — thus admitting that Biden was right all along.) But let’s be real: “voluntary” in this version of Washington merely means the performance of willing cooperation after the backroom shakedown. The federal government is the one customer large enough to feed the computing ambitions of top AI firms at scale. By routing this process through the national security apparatus, the administration is using multi-billion-dollar procurement as a bargaining chip. Forget what the order says, either play ball and hand over early access, or watch your competitor land the federal defense cloud contract. And the most chilling part is that the primary beneficiary of this shadow mandate is the Pentagon.
The timing of it all is truly obscene (I would have added astonishing, but I’m well past shock at this point). Just as headlines broke that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had blocked the promotions of several Navy officers—including highly qualified Black officers and women who had already been selected by senior Navy leaders—the same national security apparatus is being handed extraordinary proximity to the crown jewels of American technology.
It is the same pattern in another octave: remove the people deemed ideologically suspect, consolidate judgment in loyalist hands, and then call it merit, security, or innovation.
The Crumbling Facade
Ultimately, I think it would be a mistake to read this executive order at this particular moment as a sign of absolute administrative strength. It is a transactional truce with the tech feudalists, signed by an administration whose broader fantasy of total control is beginning to buckle under a cascade of legal, financial, and cultural farces on the domestic front over the last few days alone:
The Reflecting Pool Farce: The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which the President promised to coat in “American flag blue” for an initial $1.5 million, has seen its no-bid contract skyrocket to $13.1 million, turning into a leaking national punchline that fails to mirror the monument.
The Billion-Dollar Ballroom: The proposed White House East Wing ballroom, once sold as entirely privately funded, has ballooned into an ostentatious 90,000-square-foot project tethered to a $1 billion taxpayer-backed security request, drawing over 32,000 letters from Americans objecting to the project and questioning the use of public resources.
The Kennedy Center Reversal: A federal judge just ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center and blocked the planned shutdown of the venue. The person who forced that fight into court was Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a Black woman from Ohio who refused to let a public cultural institution be swallowed by one man's vanity.
The $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Retreat: The Justice Department was forced to completely walk back its “anti-weaponization” fund—a transparent payola scheme for January 6th participants—declaring the fund dead after intense legal and public scrutiny from civil rights organizations and law enforcement officers.
The Freedom 250 Collapse: The marquee 250th birthday spectacle on the National Mall, "The Great American State Fair," has devolved into an absolute circus. After discovering the event was a partisan production, a mass exodus of artists—including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Young MC, and The Commodores—withdrew from the lineup. The President furiously lashed out on Truth Social, calling to scrap the concert series entirely to replace it with a giant political rally. Meanwhile, Vanilla Ice remains aggressively committed to the gig.
This, I submit, is the real pattern. The administration performs inevitability, projects dominance, and speaks in the language of conquest. But underneath all the noise, contracts balloon, courts intervene, artists walk, and a Black congresswoman sues and wins.
Yesterday’s AI order should not be mistaken for global governance or moral leadership; nor, frankly, is it pretending to be. It is a localized, transactional truce. It is a hurried arrangement between a hollowed-out state and the tech barons it desperately needs to keep Wall Street afloat. It is an implicit acknowledgement that the genie is out of the bottle, and that only coercion, dressed up as partnership, might keep it from annihilating us all before the billionaires can burrow into their bunkers or decamp to Mars.
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