Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:

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Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!

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Off Switch

Last week the US Commerce Department issued an export control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend access to two of its most advanced models, Fable and Mythos, for any foreign national. Anthropic said complying required disabling both models for all customers. 

The decision exposed a quiet danger: centralised oversight and control over artificial intelligence.

And the market noticed. Since the shutdown, the price of TAO, the token behind Bittensor, rose by roughly 25% WoW. Bittensor lets developers build and run AI models across a distributed network rather than on one company's servers, so no regulator can pull the plug. 

For years, the case for decentralised AI has sounded like an article of faith: networks that no company owns, and no government can halt. The argument was philosophical, and easy to ignore. Last week's directive, however, made it practical. A lawful order, issued for national security reasons, removed a working product from the entire world in an afternoon. The off switch is real, and it's sitting in Washington.

This matters most for the businesses building on top of these models. A company that wires a frontier model into its operations is not just buying software. It is accepting that its supplier can now be told to stop serving it, with no notice and no appeal. That is a supply risk.

So the question facing customers of frontier labs is now changing. Until now, the priorities were capability, cost, and safety. A fourth is arriving: durability. Can the system keep running if one jurisdiction objects? For most customers of Anthropic, OpenAI & Co. the honest answer is no.

Having said that, decentralised AI platforms are not ready for prime time. They remain slower, harder to govern, and unproven at scale. But the conversation has moved. “Permissionless” is no longer only an ideological slogan. For some buyers it is becoming a procurement requirement, and a reasonable one, because anything that can be switched off will, one day, be switched off.

Private Markets: Citigroup is preparing to offer tokenised shares in privately held companies, and says it is already in talks with some of the world's largest. The initiative aims to widen access at a time when companies are staying private for longer and investor appetite for exposure to names such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, and Revolut continues to grow.

Onchain Lending: Morpho has raised $175mn at a $2bn valuation as it seeks to expand the business of onchain lending, with Apollo among the backers. As part of the transaction, investors acquired the MORPHO token rather than equity. At its core, the deal is a gamble that the mechanics of lending are about to be remade from the ground up.

AI Agents: Mastercard is betting on a future in which businesses build services designed to be bought and used by AI agents. To underpin that commerce, the company has launched Agent Pay for Machines in partnership with e.g. Coinbase, MoonPay, and Solana. The service is intended to permission, orchestrate, and settle agent-initiated transactions at machine speed across Mastercard's global payments network.

Agentic Commerce: Similarly, Visa has unveiled a strategic collaboration with OpenAI. Under the arrangement, Visa's payment capabilities will be embedded within OpenAI's products. The integration is meant to give developers and merchants a streamlined route to accepting Visa payments initiated by AI agents.

Prediction Markets: The CFTC has proposed rules to define which trades prediction markets may offer under federal law. The framework preserves broad latitude for sports trading while curbing contracts tied to terrorism, assassinations, and war.

And that's a wrap!

You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏 or drop me a line.

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.}