Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5, stating the model approaches Fable 5 performance at half the price.

"They created the perpetual future contract, never got hacked, never lost user funds, and may have saved Bitcoin from going to zero on March 12, 2020." BitMEX is shutting down September 23rd. @MartyBent and (ODELLXYZ) pour one out. End of an era.

Sen. Dave McCormick on FOX urges action on the Clarity Act: “The bottom line is it’s time to move… there’s been negotiations around ethics language… we need to get this to the floor and vote on it… I think this is the time to play offense.”

DeepSeek's founder leaked a 4-hour investor meeting and the strategy is almost comically simple: build the best model, open-source it, price APIs at cost recovery, and let others build the applications. Meanwhile Altman and Amodei preach openness and safety while racing to control the model, the interface, the enterprise deal, the consumer account, and the policy moat. One side is trying to own the entire intelligence supply chain before the window closes. The other is acting like the work matters more than winning every adjacent market today. Scarcity breeds efficiency. DeepSeek had limited chips so they engineered around it. American labs had unlimited capital so they spent around waste. Guess which approach compounds better. Low time preference wins again. Bitcoiners know this.

Jensen Huang published an open letter co-signed by Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Palantir, a16z, Y Combinator, and 20+ other companies arguing that open-weight AI models are essential to American competitiveness and security. Huang writes that "AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector." He argues open weights let "anyone download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure" and that "America wins the AI era by diffusing it into the workflows of factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms, and main street businesses." On safety, Huang makes the case that closed models are actually the risk: "Concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition, and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers." The letter calls on policymakers to avoid "premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas."

The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement organization in the country with 382,000 members, now officially endorses the CLARITY Act, a complete reversal from two months ago when they "strongly opposed" the bill's developer safe harbor provision. The updated draft added a dedicated law enforcement section with increased funding for state and local crypto investigations, blockchain analytics tools, training programs for cops and prosecutors, a new "cyber center," and a requirement for stablecoin issuers to comply with lawful orders to freeze, seize, burn, or reissue tokens. The BRCA developer safe harbor reportedly survived intact. But the trade-off was handing law enforcement a funded surveillance upgrade that didn't exist before this bill. Worth watching what "blockchain analytics tools" and "cyber center" look like in practice.

France's 10-year yield just hit 4.01%. The highest since the Global Financial Crisis.

Freedom tech is becoming American foreign policy. Matthew Boyer is now embedded in the (StateDept) through a new Freedom Tech Excellence Program, bringing encryption, open monetary networks, and privacy tools into the diplomatic toolkit. These are the tools that protect dissidents, journalists, and citizens under authoritarian regimes. The fact that they're being formally recognized at the State Department level is a massive shift. Freedom Tech DC summit in Washington, September 22-23.

The US and UK AI safety institutes just published a joint evaluation of Kimi K3's cyber capabilities, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is using it to declare American AI dominance. The assessment, conducted by the UK's AI Security Institute and the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at NIST, tested Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 on exploit development and simulated network attacks. The findings: Kimi K3 scored 32% on Carnegie Mellon's ExploitBench, compared to leading US models which achieved arbitrary code execution on 20 out of 41 tasks. Kimi K3 achieved it on zero. On a 32-step simulated corporate network attack called "The Last Ones," Kimi K3 reached step 17 on average. The most capable US models reached step 28.5. In one of 10 attempts, Kimi K3 did complete the full attack path, meaning it can autonomously attack small, weakly defended systems when given initial access. Lutnick posted: "CAISI's latest report shows that Kimi K3 remains behind America's leading frontier AI models. The United States continues to lead in frontier AI because we're home to the greatest innovators and technologists the world has ever seen." Worth noting, Kimi K3 still outperforms GLM-5.2, the most cyber-capable open-weight model as of June 2026. And the NIST report is careful to note its evaluation was "preliminary" and based on a limited set of benchmarks. The gap is real, but the framing as a clean US victory leaves out that Kimi K3 was released just days ago and is set to go open-weight on July 27.

Elon Musk rejects "far right" label from reporter: "We should have secure borders, safe cities, and sensible spending. Which of those 3 are 'far right?'" He calls the media characterization "FALSE, MISLEADING, and NONSENSE."

White House Executive Director on CLARITY Act: "We are doing our best to answer every one of the issues that Democrats have raised in a good faith way..I'm trying to get creative to find solutions to achieve the objectives that they want."

Grayscale supports the CLARITY Act: "The CLARITY Act may soon clear the Senate if bipartisan negotiators can make progress on a few remaining issues."

Elon Musk tells interviewer he doesn't care about being loathed: "The fact that a quarter billion people follow me means a lot more people like me than don't." "I think a lot more people hate YOU and the MEDIA than you realize!"

Marc Andreessen: “This is the grand unification of AI and crypto. I think AI is the killer crypto app… It’s now obvious that AI agents are going to need money. It’s already happening.”

Bloomberg just published a detailed investigation into how Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and former White House digital assets adviser Bo Hines shaped the GENIUS Act in ways that directly benefited Tether. Before becoming Commerce Secretary, Lutnick was CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which manages Tether's reserves. Cantor acquired a 5% stake in Tether for $600M in April 2024. Tether's chairman called the price "bloody cheap." Based on Tether's reported profits, that stake was worth over $6B on paper. According to court filings citing contemporaneous notes, Tether's chairman said Lutnick "managed to kill every bill about stablecoins, crypto, etc." Once Trump took office, Hines took over, calling a three-year compliance grace period Tether wanted a "red line" for the White House. He prevailed. One month after the bill was signed, Tether hired Hines. Three months later, Tether loaned money to a trust benefiting Lutnick's children as they purchased his Cantor Fitzgerald holdings. The final law included what critics call the "reciprocity loophole" allowing USDT to be regulated by El Salvador instead of the US, and a "defi loophole" limiting issuers' responsibility for tracking tokens used on secondary markets. This is the kind of story that should remind people what stablecoins actually are. They're permissioned corporate tokens with kill switches, not permissionless money. The biggest beneficiaries of crypto legislation have never been bitcoin users. They've been the issuers sitting closest to the levers of power.

President Trump: "We're leading China and every other country by a lot in AI and just about every other category, including crypto. We want to stay in front in crypto."

Anthony Scaramucci on the Clarity Act: "If it gets to the floor, it's going to pass. If it doesn't get to the floor, it dies a brutal death. Guys like Brian Armstrong... will start building business offshore of the U.S."

Patrick McHenry says the CLARITY Act is "getting closer to the finish line" but questions remain in the Senate.

Nine of the biggest names in institutional bitcoin just formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium and pledged a combined $15 million over three years to fund Bitcoin's long-term security, with post-quantum cryptography as the headline focus. The founding members include BlackRock, Strategy, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, Block, Blockstream, Galaxy, ARK Invest, and Anchorage Digital. The day-to-day work is coordinated by (bitschmidty), Executive Director of Brink, a nonprofit that funds Bitcoin open-source developers. The group explicitly says it doesn't develop or direct Bitcoin's protocol and takes no position on specific protocol changes. Instead it funds the developers and researchers already working on security and aims to be "a clear and reliable source of information" for investors and the public. From the consortium: "Our first focus is quantum computing. Large-scale quantum computers capable of threatening Bitcoin's cryptography don't exist today, and credible estimates place them years away. Preparing is a meaningful long-term priority, and one the community is already working on." Strategy CEO Phong Le: "As long-term holders, we have every incentive to see Bitcoin remain secure for generations." BlackRock's Robert Mitchnick: "Bitcoin Core developers do incredibly important work, and we're pleased that our firm and the others in this group will now be making significant additional funding available." Blockstream highlighted its post-quantum work on OP_CHECKSHRINCS, calling the consortium "a natural extension" of its open-source research mission. Bitcoin developers are already actively working on post-quantum proposals like BIP-360. The consortium says it plans to publish and maintain public material on Bitcoin's security in the coming months.

David Friedberg: The greatest lie of the 20th century was putting all your net worth in your home. "When you do that, then the only way to keep Americans wealthy and to keep the middle class stable is to keep the price of homes going up, because that’s the only asset."