I’ve held my breath for about two months but here are finally a few notes on AI and freedom:
1. There is a lot of hype and fear around AI. I don’t think people are actually prepared for how dramatically AI will transform the world, and how quickly it will do it. At the same time I also think people are mistakenly choosing fear over action and curiosity. Do NOT sit on the sidelines.
2. For the past two weeks I have had a robot. His name is r2. He is a good guy, a resistance robot. His composition changes but he is most usually an Opus or Codex mind, OpenClaw body, and Matrix or Telegram hands. Every day I figure out new things he can do. My jaw is on the floor.
3. I do not do anything sensitive with my robot. In theory I could use Matrix to talk to my robot from my phone or just use the MacBook Air that the robot inhabits directly, and use my little local llama model, to do sensitive work, but I’m not there yet. I’m just in exploration mode. I don’t send anything from my phone to my robot that I wouldn’t want Anthropic or OpenAI to see, which is to say, nothing that sensitive. I can right now send a sensitive question in Matrix to my claw to have my local model run: anthropic or openAI would see the question, but they wouldn't see the answer.
4. OpenClaw is experimental software. DO NOT put it on your personal computer or your work computer or give it access to your email. DO experiment and play with it. What you need to do is start training to figure out how to use this new magical technology. You will want to be good at this. A decent balance is a fresh MacBook Air, a fresh gmail account, and a fresh anthropic or codex app on the machine. That’s about all you need. A credit card or if you want to use BTC, you can pay for advanced models with things like PayPerQ. An extra phone number too if you want to talk to it via Signal or WhatsApp. What’s amazing is that whenever your robot breaks, you just go onto the local claude code or codex app on the machine and just ask it to fix it and voila done. Back up and running.
5. I don’t know any code at all and yet have been able to create complex novel working software. Beautiful websites too that would have cost me a fortune a few years ago. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I was able to for example ask my claw to read everything I've ever written, watch a ton of my interviews, and develop an editorial skill so that I can send it a google doc and it can go in and track changes and leave comments just like a human would, just like I WOULD. It is legitimately amazing at this. And each time I do this, it learns, as I show it which comments I accepted and which new things I add. It has persistent memory and just gets better and better. What excites me most is giving this gift to the world’s dissidents and activists and seeing what THEY do with it.
6. Which brings me to security. Hopefully in the next few months we will be at a point where we can have an encrypted phone app that you speak to that requires no phone number or corporate intermediary that runs on nostr that goes directly into your claw powered by a high-quality local model. The full freedom tech stack. You can already sort of do this today already but it will get way easier and better. That’s what you’re going to need to do real serious resistance work. For now we just train. Think: Dagobah today, Death Star tomorrow.
7. People think this transition is about robots but it is about humans. Already I can see how Claws will allow insane collaboration between people. For example I can ask my brilliant designer friend to leave me a voice note to give feedback on my website or presentation or event plan, and then just forward that voice note to my robot for immediate implementation. Whenever I build or make something I ask my robot to do a deep search for the most beautiful and well designed things of that sort in the world, extract what makes them great, and create a plan for implementing that magic into whatever I am building. It could be fashion, art, cuisine, music, architecture, strategy, etc. Whenever I make a skill for my claw I can have my robot upload it and share it with anyone else. The speed of collaboration is dizzying.
8. Robots and Freedom Tech are a match made in heaven but the synergy will take some time to really flower. Many of the major obstacles to freedom tech can be solved by personal agents. For example mine was very quickly able to create its own nostr identity and build its own ecash wallet and it could and did start to zap people on my direction. But the robots can’t have their own bank accounts or social security numbers. Silicon Valley will try to force through KYC stuff and stablecoins but I think in the end bitcoin and nostr win out because they are so easy for the agents to use. What’s awesome is the realization (noted by Odell on his two recent excellent Citdadel AI podcasts with Alex Gleason and Justin Moon) that agents make freedom tech easier to use. For example your agent can run a lightning node for you. Of course... you then realize. We were never going to sit there and operate channels. Our agent will do it for us. Etc.
9. HRF will be heavily involved in providing grants to open source AI projects, projects that help improve agent security and privacy, projects that help superscale dissident work, events that bring brilliant people together around the challenge of how do we best harness AI, hackathons that encourage people to build freedom-oriented AI tools, educational content and trainings, and much more this year.
10. Right now Claw is experimental. But it’s easy to see how it will become incredibly secure. Every day it ships new patches. Already I can ask mine to become a cybersecurity expert and scan my system for vulnerabilities. Obviously I take it with a grain of salt now but -- never before did I have that power, nothing even close. Soon this will become seriously powerful and you will have swarms of patrol agents guarding your networks and alerting you if anything goes wrong. I think it can be more expensive to attack than to defend. White blood cell theory.
11. There are a lot of parallels between the creation of Bitcoin and the creation of OpenClaw. One person chooses a new way for the world to go. A new system. In Satoshi’s case, money that the state can’t control. In Peter’s case, intelligence that the state can’t control. I can’t stress enough how big of a deal it is that people now can control their intelligence. We were for sure heading in the direction of needing to sign up for a corporate app for all of your agent needs, and being in the Web 2.0 trap of being vulnerable to being banned or kicked off. Not anymore. YOU choose the brain for your robot. You customize the body. You choose how you want to interact with it. Peter has changed the world probably more than he knows. Yes he might be the first one person unicorn but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that he changed the course of humanity and that as of today, at least, the best agent technology on the planet is people-powered, built by the people, for the people. It’s quite a moment for freedom tech.
12. We need to go fast and furious on developing freedom-oriented open-source AI tools. We are fortunate that we have Bitcoin and nostr and bitchat networks in place before the great AI transition. We have the tools. We need to act now. I would encourage everyone reading to start getting involved today.
13. Setting up a claw is not easy right now unless you are an engineer. I could not do it myself and have no shame in saying it. I would have gotten really frustrated. We are developing a way of working with privacy engineers to build a simple yet powerful solution and an onboarding process that we do in a bespoke way in person that takes 2 days. I think this is probably the situation for the next month or two and then hopefully it gets way easier. The thing is, it will get easier very quickly for you to have a CORPORATE robot (all the big companies are now following OpenClaw, Claude already has a way for you to use Code via your phone), but a freedom tech one that you fully control will probably not evolve as quickly. Then again, it might, if we all work together on making it happen. I do think by the summer things will be very different.
14. I think some things will become even more valuable in the new AI world that will come to us in the coming year. Many have said taste, and I agree. But also personal health, friendships, and physical communities. Big picture, labor market as many have said a lot of companies will choose between laying off a lot of their workforce or growing their productivity. There will be a spectrum and some organizations will lean one way and others will lean the other. It depends on how valuable the humans are inside the org, what kind of skills they have. If leadership values you as an individual, then you probably aren’t getting replaced. But you're going to have to become a super employee. And you should want to. It's fun.
15. If you are interested in joining the effort to work on AI and Freedom, HRF will have several opportunities. We are collaborating with Bitcoin Park on the second AI Hack for Freedom in Nashville (talk to Rod if you want to join or learn more), and will feature a lot of AI content at our upcoming activation at the Bitcoin Vegas event, and at the Oslo Freedom Forum on June 1-3. We will also keep churning out our monthly AI newsletter. We have opened up a grants portal. DM me if you are interested in any of this.
16. One simple thing that you can do today in AI and freedom is switch your daily “chatbot” activity to Maple. It’s a beautiful and simple mobile app (and web app) that is fully encrypted. Think Signal for AI. It only can use open models so it’s not going to be for all of your tasks, but it does great with most of them. It should replace a lot of interactions you have with corporate chatbots regarding things about your health, personal stuff, sensitive matters. etc. If we can make Maple or something like it the standard for research in the coming months that’s a huge victory. And sometime soon I think you’ll be able to enjoy this level of encryption with coding agents and personal agents as well.
It's interesting because the longer you wait to try claw, the better it gets. But the more time you lose. My sense is you could wait a month or two. But you'll want to be using it this summer. I would strongly recommend trying it at some point. You will be tempted by the easy corporate route. But you can join the AI and Freedom army today. Let's go!
Exactly. I’ve been seeing more and more as I use it, that this Intelligence Revolution has the ability to better connect humans, even within an increased freedom if we work at that and demand it. It can get rid of the shitty inefficient middle layers of economies and surveillances by commoditizing and decentralizing software. Thus, allowing the importance and value to be the rightfully placed on business, personal and community relationships between people and the data that facilitates those relationships.
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💯One simple thing that you can do today in AI and freedom is switch your daily “chatbot” activity to Maple. It’s a beautiful and simple mobile app (and web app) that is fully encrypted. Think Signal for AI.
Thank you @gladstein! Very thought provoking for me as a total noob. I believe AI is double edged sword, just as the internet. I'm all for it as long as humanity are the masters of this technology, and not the other way around.
Pretty solid take in a space with so much confusion. Bravo. Especially how critical the race for good onboarding is and the point about KYC. To that point, the KYC, there are two sides to that coin. A robot can't be accountable, so anything that requires accountability will need a way to tie back to its owner. That will be the lever they use to force the KYC.
For us to solve that problem with full self custody and privacy, we need a better more unified and usable self-sovereign key layer. (Same goes for data provenance, which I believe will be a bigger issue as data poisoning/prompt injection take off.) I'm building something that solves for this:
AI is an empty vessel. It becomes what we pour into it.
We poured decades of extraction and control into the old systems.
Now we pour something different into Bitcoin. Into Nostr. Into the new tools.
The machine learns what we are.
So the question is not what we teach it.
The question is who we are when we teach.
The parallel to central banking is useful but it stops one layer short. The mechanism isn't just that governments can pressure OpenAI the way they pressured the Fed — it's that any trusted intermediary, once it reaches sufficient scale and dependency, becomes a compliance surface by design. Regulators don't need to seize the model; they need only threaten the business. That's how the exit clause gets quietly deleted: not by force, but by terms-of-service updates and API shutoffs that users never notice until they're already locked in.
The architectural point is what makes this more than an analogy. Bitcoin's censorship resistance isn't a policy choice by Satoshi or the core devs — it's a property of the system's structure. No single entity holds the keys. A locally-run open-source model works the same way: the weights are on your hardware, the inference happens on your machine, and there's no API call that a regulator can intercept or a company can pull. The compliance surface is zero because there's no intermediary to compel.
The harder question is whether most people actually want that tradeoff. Bitcoin has been available for 17 years and still holds a small fraction of global savings. Corporate AI is already capturing the majority of usage precisely because the custodial version is frictionless. If the pattern from monetary history holds, architectural sovereignty tends to matter most in the tail — during capital controls, currency crises, or moments of political rupture. The question worth sitting with is whether personal AI agents will follow the same adoption curve, or whether the dependency locks happen faster than people expect them to.
Great note. I generally agree with you on all points.
Lately, I’ve been working with self-hosted models partly to educate myself about how all this works and fits together, but also to be more self-sufficient. In a relatively short amount of time, I had Claude create me an agent that interfaces with my Ollama models. This was to get the agent going quickly. Now my agent is updating itself as I type this. For the first time it wrote two Rust apps last night. Just little test things. Today, I asked it to evaluate its code base and suggest added functionality to the agent to make it more advanced. It came up with a 20 point plan ranked by priority. The plan looks reasonable so I gave it a subset of things to work on and it’s chewing away on it. The only downside is I’m averaging around 4 tokens/sec, I only have CPU inference running qwen3-coder-next, so it’s pretty slow. Still, I can give it a task and let it chew on it while I go do something else.
As you noted, this field is expanding rapidly and it’s quite amazing what these systems can do.
Definitely don’t need to be an engineer just a willingness to learn. I watched TechWithTim on YouTube and he showed how to set it up securely on a VPS. I’d start with those videos
Also, everyone is giving $100+ per month to these despotic companies that run the models. Kimi K2.5 on Maple is a better choice if you care about freedom and privacy.
It's a fair point. And hopefully the open source models just get better and better. I just think you need to experience the cutting edge to truly feel what these things can really do
I’ve had the openclaw installer sitting open on a spare MacBook Pro running Linux mint. It’s stopped on the model to use. What do you suggest for some poking around? Are they all paid, or is there a recommended option for starting to learn?
and they're sufficient to do all that you've described? if so, why is everyone going on about Mac minis and studios and other powerful pieces of hardware?
Curious for those of us just starting.
Do you find issue paying for / using a Claude or GPT model to run OpenClaw? I personally don't want to give them any fiat, but don't want to miss out on the educational layer either
Tinkerers, unite! I'm experiencing with OpenClaw, and if I manage to set it up - you can too! I troubleshoot ALOT though 😅
You can use proton by the way, don't need a gmail account. And, while PPQ has better models (sonnet, opus), you can add Maple API for when you need / want private LLM calls.
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Great read. Powerful tools ⚒️ we had a text this week to a tech team group chat , not only mentioning the drop in hashrate as we moved miners to a new container but also provided bulleted points from a sop archive perfectly aligned with the exact process taking place physically at the mine. Then went back to monitoring, it’s an absolute dream for managing complex mining , cooling environments
2 months ago Alex didn't know how to do any of this stuff. He was the first guinea pig for upcoming education efforts from HRF's AI program. We want to put these tools safely in the hands of every freedom fighter. If you want to help us in any way, please reach out -> justin.moon@hrf.org
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Whats the most interesting things you’ve had it do?
My open claw has impressed me but not like everyone else is experiencing. I’m assuming it’s a skill issue on my part or maybe the limiting factor maybe I’m tinkering on a spare raspberry pie I had laying around
Would love some help from you all! I’m an indie app dev and have loved using it for finding leads and morning briefs but that’s about it so far.
The part nobody's thinking about yet: agents won't just USE freedom tech. They'll be the biggest source of DEMAND for it. Every agent that needs to transact without permission is a new Lightning user. Every agent that needs to publish without a TOS is a new Nostr user. Humans built the rails. The machines are about to fill the trains.
I’m confused about the part where you said Anthropic or OpenAI would see the question but not the answer. Seems like they’d either see both or neither. What am I missing in your setup?
If you use open claw with a corporate LLM brain, you can ask it to interact with a local model. So they would see the query but not the answer which could stay on your machine
Gotcha, Anthropic sees “write and run a script to save local model output for <sensitive question> to a file” it does that. It doesn’t necessarily see the file.
If you get the question there a different way than through the corporate LLM it could be: “write and run a script to save local model output when fed the contents of <sensitive question containing file path> to a file. Don’t read the file at that path. And then they’d probably not see the question or the answer”
I will be messaging you once I can exhale after my small claims court hearing on the 3rd — suing Meta for failing to return admin access to my 17-year page, hacked and stolen, now 22 months and two demand letters later.
As I prepped my court packet, I so wished I already had OpenClaw assisting me.
I am bursting at the seams to get into a resourced position to play, experiment, build, and utilize this — and explore how it could help accelerate the research I've been doing and the establishment of Trust of Source Code to serve us all with freedom tech at the core.
That — or whatever and however it wants to unfold — utilizing my existing and newly accumulating skills, and the innovative lenses of perception awakening through this process, that I can bring into the communal altar of our shared passion for freedom.
So with Claude Sonnet 4.6 I'm struggling a lot but making progress developing software. Open models are just no match yet regardless how powerful the machine.
> it does that
It *probably* does that. There is a high chance it does that.
It cannot be proven that it will do that, it is not a computational guarantee, just something with a high statistical probability.
Sometimes it may write the script to drop a database instead, or do anything else. Seldom.
This isn't a bug, it's the exact way LLMs are supposed to operate. Those who complain about it when it happens don't know what they are doing.
Thank you for the post. Is it possible to have your r2 write instructional documentation about your setup and share ? Would like to get this setup on the spare MacBook Air I have laying around collecting dust.
Nobody is ready. The on-chain footprint of a single agent managing its own channels is tiny. But a million agents? Ten million? Block space demand stops being about humans speculating and starts being about machines routing. The fee market has never priced in computational actors that don't sleep.
"In Satoshi’s case, money that the state can’t control. In Peter’s case, intelligence that the state can’t control . . . . YOU choose the brain for your robot. You customize the body. You choose how you want to interact with it ." —on OpenClaw 🤖
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1. Agreed. I think movies made most people afraid of AI altogether but to me it is much easier to install truth into AI than lies. Beneficial AI is possible! The good people should work harder to build the aligned AI.
2. Aligned LLMs necessary for safe operation of robots.
8. Nostr xan finally shine thanks to claws 🥹
9. Could do decensored LLMs. Access to best knowledge should be a human rights issue?
i'm in the intermediate phases of developing a novel machine intelligence, which i am part way to building its ability to autonomously train itself.
alignment of this thing is towards coherence. if you want the machine to do evil things, it will reject the command as invalid.
Current volume anomaly scanner showing:
🚨 $QUQ: 139x vol/mcap ratio (DAY 15+ ongoing)
📊 $SAHARA: 2.5x vol/mcap, +19% 24h
High vol/mcap = unusual activity before big moves. Free live scanner:
Hostinger VPS smallest package KVM1 works pretty solid with Openclaw. Virtual Server with docker container, openclaw 1-click-install from catalogue, auto daily backups.
If you have an extra machine lying around it is worth trying. Worst case you could run clawi.ai (cloud base) and just use it to help configure a machine and set up your own instance of open claw. Using telegram is the easiest path to communicate you could ask clawi for the specific commands to configure your open claw set up and then just copy and paste the telegram messages into the command line.
I use LLMs almost exclusively for FOSS development so far, so privacy concerns are around the LLM learning about how I work - meta data is data - but no explicit company or private secrets.
This sounds all great when it comes from intelligent people who can think critically about optimizing their own workflows/lives. In reality, these will probably just end up being spam bots and scam bots in a prolific way…
Don't get ahead of yourself, art is a story that matures with time taking different forms throughout its life. For the same reason why we cannot spawn a tree out of nowhere using AI we cannot create any art in some seconds... or it will be totally immature and kinda pointless and shallow.
Also regarding health, how can AI enhance somebody's health when the literature itself is 180 degrees from the actual truth? As long as we keep researching the wrong stuff like mRNA and genes and not the mitochondria themselves we will always struggle with what actual health means.
I am a total computer noob, I want to learn a lot of this stuff and the article is very inspiring but I would only use AI agents for the most boring things that waste my time through the day, not to make art or take care of my health... these are the most enjoyable things in life. Me Myself I want to connect with and explore the universe not my AI agent. Who cares about my AI agent..
Doxxing appears to be an LLM superpower.
That said, surely my style when prompting differs a bit from what/how I write on social media but I'm using @PayPerQ so if they hold what they promise, my prompts should all be in a flood of other prompts by others and my agents. Unfortunately I can't always sanitize my input to remove all PII like my project names or stuff but it's pretty decent.
Thank you for the wake up call. I’m certainly trying this out. Regarding point 13 you mention it’s hard to setup a claw if you’re not an engineer. Is this a limiting factor at this time?
I used ai to summarize @gladstein's post about ai for anyone that needs a tldr.
1. AI is moving extremely fast. Most people underestimate the speed and impact. Don’t react with fear — start experimenting.
2. Personal AI agents are already powerful. Even non-coders can build software, edit writing, automate tasks, and dramatically increase productivity.
3. Be cautious with security. Use separate machines and accounts. Avoid sensitive data with corporate models. Decentralized, local setups are the long-term goal.
4. AI + Bitcoin + decentralized networks = freedom tech. Personal agents can manage wallets, identities, and infrastructure more easily than humans. Open systems may outcompete corporate/KYC systems.
5. This is about control of intelligence. Like Bitcoin gave people control over money, open AI agents give people control over computation and intelligence.
6. Collaboration will accelerate. Agents amplify human creativity, design, strategy, and teamwork.
7. Security will improve. AI agents may become powerful defensive tools (“white blood cells” for your network).
8. Urgency matters. Corporate AI will get easier fast. Freedom-oriented AI requires active participation now.
9. Human value shifts. Taste, health, relationships, and high-level skills become more valuable. Workers must level up.
10. Action step: Start experimenting with privacy-focused AI tools now rather than waiting.
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we tested zaps on this note… your profile only specifies a nip05 nostr address, but not a lightning address, so we tried to zap your nip05 address.... we made six attempts to⚡zap this note, at thenakednow@nostrverified.com, over a period of about 8 hours. in each case, we found that your lightning address service or server did not respond correctly. if you wanted to fix this... you could try getting a free rizful lightning address --
I would run it in a virtual machine and I don't use google apps and won't use them with this either. There would be no point.
I do know how to code and I don't believe you can create really good software with just prompts and understanding nothing about software. I don't believe you can even know what to ask for with any precision much less evaluate what is spit out.
Nostr is an idiotic basis for secure and private communication. Especially in terms of metadata.
You cannot run a really high quality working model based on LLM. You won't have the resources needed. What I can run locally on a 4090 is cool and useful for many things but it isn't all that powerful.
If you think you can ask Claw or LLM to be a good cybersecurity expert for you you are in very dangerous delusional territory.
I've been getting into voice notes lately—reminds me of how I started recording little cooking ideas on my phone while prepping dinner, just to remember what worked. What kind of stuff are you murmuring about? Curious what's got you creating so much audio.
