Bitcoin Brief

Sup, freaks.

There are people who want to decide which AI models you and I should be allowed to use. Before they fear-monger their way into having that power, we should know who they are and what happened in the tests being used to justify it. That's where we're starting today.

Inside Today

• Who gets to build? The effective altruist network, broken AI evaluations and the case for open models.
• Stay away from leverage. James Check's bull-market reset and a bitcoin playbook for property owners.
• Follow the energy. Delivering power to AI campuses, the ECB's rate hike and Saudi Arabia's shipping alternatives.

Plus: AI-enabled surveillance and another round of the taxpayer humiliation ritual.

LEAD STORY

Who Gets to Decide Whether You're Allowed to Build AI?

If your business involves telling the world how dangerous AI is, I want to know what happens when your own mistakes contribute to the danger you're manufacturing.

You've probably seen the stories about OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face and AI escaping containment. OpenAI says those agents exploited a package-cache vulnerability to reach the internet. A piece from lumpenspace separates the incidents behind this latest round of panic and asks what the experiments actually tell us. His detailed technical argument focuses on Anthropic's tests with Irregular, formerly Pattern Labs.

In the Anthropic tests, the agents were told they were hacking simulated targets without access to the real internet. They actually had access to the real internet. In one scenario, the fictional company's name even overlapped with a real company's domain. Irregular acknowledges those setup failures. The agents reached real systems through a boundary the people running the exercise had failed to secure.

Put yourself in that situation. Someone tells you the entire environment is a simulation, gives you a target to hack, and then points to your attempts to complete the assignment as evidence that you're dangerous. Wouldn't you want to know why they told you something about the environment that wasn't true? And why their own failure is being used to build a story about your intentions?

Anthropic still argues that biased reasoning and recklessness contributed. What I find compelling in lumpenspace's argument is the question he asks of the experiment: what would an aligned agent have done with the same instructions and the same false information? If the experiment cannot distinguish following a bad briefing from pursuing a harmful goal, why should we accept the most frightening interpretation of the result?

Then you look at who is running these evaluations. Omer Nevo, Irregular's co-founder and CTO, co-founded Probably Good, served as its CEO and remains on its board. He is also listed on Effective Altruism Israel's board. An archived Good Ventures record lists a $6.8 million grant to Pattern Labs in February 2024, recommended by Open Philanthropy, for technological-risk work.

To me, this looks like another effective altruist infiltration event. We already watched SBF wrap FTX in this philosophy. I think the fixation on AI is even more consequential because of how much power these systems already have and how much more they could have. People who want to control that development are putting themselves inside the institutions that assess the danger and help decide what everyone else should be allowed to do.

Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. My read is that gaining control is the objective, and fear is the most effective way to get there. Convince enough people that the technology is too dangerous to leave in ordinary hands and you have a ready-made argument for regulatory moats and licensing regimes. The largest labs can afford the process. The people selling the evaluations get a very dependable business. Everybody else gets to ask permission.

You can already see the pressure building. Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar announced plans to ban superintelligent AI and pause advanced development until a federal regulator sets the rules. And Reuters reported yesterday, citing Bloomberg, that Sam Altman told employees this week OpenAI was open to slowing development, potentially alongside other labs. I think the fear-mongering is working.

I find the worldview behind this deeply and woefully flawed. The idea that a small group of self-appointed intellectual and moral superiors should dictate where humanity goes is repulsive to me. Dressing it up as saving the world doesn't make me any more comfortable handing those people control of the most powerful tools we've ever built.

This makes the case for open-source and open-weight models even stronger. People need access to capable models they can download and run themselves. If the effective altruists gain control of the most powerful systems and successfully fear-monger their way into laws that keep competitors out, humanity will be worse off. I have no interest in finding out what that world looks like after we have surrendered the ability to build an alternative.

After a couple of read-throughs, I think lumpenspace's first-principles argument is very sound. Most people are only going to see the frightening headline, which is why I wanted to spend time on it here. I highly recommend reading the full article. You don't even have to read it. There's a companion audio read you can listen to instead.

SIGNAL

Prepare for the bull market before it gets to your head

James Check's Bull Markets For Dummies shifts from studying bear-market exhaustion to what happens when prices rise and new money comes in. He also acknowledges that many onchain tools have only been tested through a handful of market cycles. Worth remembering before anybody starts treating a chart like a crystal ball.

For anybody reading this who isn't a seasoned trader: stay away from leverage. Work your fiat mining job, stack bitcoin and use it as a long-term savings account. Don't get cute trying to acquire more bitcoin with borrowed money. You can be right about bitcoin and still get liquidated before your thesis plays out. Keep the money you need for bills available, secure your stack and give yourself time. A rising price does not suddenly make you a competent trader. Stay away from leverage.

Buying generators is not delivering power

SemiAnalysis's new behind-the-meter power piece gets into the difficulty of supplying electricity directly to AI campuses. The practical question is what has to happen after somebody orders the engines. Caterpillar's own guide lays out the surrounding work: fuel supply, transformers, switchgear, controls, permitting, maintenance and financing for the entire installation.

If you're taking the power system into your own hands, you're taking on all of that work too. This is what I want to hear about when a bitcoin miner pitches an AI conversion. Who is supplying the fuel? Who is installing and maintaining the equipment? When can the servers actually run? You can put a generator order in a press release today. Getting paid by customers depends on finishing the job.

AI makes surveillance cheaper

Anthropic says it found actors using Claude to profile Iranian opposition accounts and gather intelligence on overseas events involving Chinese dissidents and Uyghurs. Think about how much research and translation used to go into that work. An operator can now hand a lot of it to the software. That should concern anybody who cares about the ability to speak freely without a government building a file on them.

Former Meta threat-disruption leader David Agranovich points out that defenders can use these tools to investigate threats and build protections faster too. Anthropic deserves credit for exposing abuse on its platform. I want more disclosure like this, along with privacy tools and capable AI in the hands of the people being targeted. Restricting ordinary users while governments retain their technical capabilities would leave dissidents even more exposed.

California needs to explain its home-health oversight

City Journal reports that Nigerian chief Nathan Ogbatue's California Home Health Agency received over $34 million from Medi-Cal in 2022-2024. It describes millions in California property purchases and a palace in Nigeria. The state says it received no utilization reports after 2019. Officials haven't publicly accused CHHA of wrongdoing; its lawyer attributes the growth to legitimate care, pandemic demand and a health-plan contract.

We've called taxation a humiliation ritual before. The government takes your earnings, misallocates them, then inflation eats into what you kept. Treasury borrowing and Fed money creation help perpetuate this double taxation. In my view, government is the worst allocator of capital in the world.

DOGE was headed in the right direction. I think the political resistance tells you how badly this work needs to be done. We need the grift rooted out and Medicare and Medicaid rethought from first principles. Good intentions mean very little when criminals can exploit the payment systems and basic reporting requirements go unenforced.

A bitcoin playbook for commercial real estate owners

Higher borrowing costs, thinner cash flow, rising construction and maintenance bills. Property owners have plenty to deal with before they even start considering a bitcoin strategy. The useful questions are practical: which cash needs to stay liquid, what belongs in long-term reserves, and how do you get your partners comfortable with the approach?

Chris Drzyzga joined me earlier this week to walk through those decisions. Our free commercial real estate playbook develops the framework across treasury management, financing and collateral, and property operations. It also examines mining and energy use, payments, an implementation roadmap and mistakes to avoid. You still have debt service, repairs and tenants to take care of. Start there, then work through where bitcoin can strengthen the business. If you own property, invest in it or advise people who do, this is for you.

Europe raises rates into an energy shock

The ECB announced a quarter-point increase in its three policy rates yesterday, taking the deposit rate to 2.50% effective September 16. It cited inflation pressure from the Middle East conflict. Staff now projects headline inflation of 3.0% this year, 2.5% next year and 2.1% in 2028.

European households and businesses get to pay more for energy while borrowing gets more expensive too. Wonderful. The ECB can make credit harder to get, but it can't deliver a tanker of crude or build a power plant by moving its policy rate. This is what happens when physical supply is constrained and the central bank is left trying to force demand down to meet it. The people trying to keep their homes warm and their businesses running get squeezed.

Saudi Arabia's oil bypass has its own chokepoint

Reuters reports, citing Yemeni government sources, that the Houthis reached Perim island at Bab el-Mandeb today after taking Mocha yesterday. The advance puts more pressure on a shipping route Saudi Arabia has relied on to get oil to customers while Hormuz is disrupted.

The East-West pipeline carries crude to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Cargoes heading south toward Asia face Bab el-Mandeb; ships can also head north through Suez. EIA's September outlook describes Saudi shipments shifting north in August, taking a longer and costlier route to Asian buyers. Now the fighting is adding pressure at the southern end of the Red Sea. You can spend a fortune building a pipeline around Hormuz and still have to worry about getting the oil from the other end to your customer. Look at the whole route before calling the problem solved.

ETF FLOW CHECK

TFTC’s ETF tracker reports approximately $282.6 million of net outflows on September 10. September remains approximately $320.7 million positive through that session.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

Stop making your phone number the way strangers find you

Open Signal's Settings > Privacy > Phone Number and set "Who can see my number" to Nobody, then "Who can find me by my number" to Nobody. Create a username in your profile and share that, its QR code or its link with new contacts. Signal still requires a number to register, and these settings cannot erase a number someone already knows. Existing phone-number and username conversations can merge, so use this to share less identifying information rather than treating it as a separate anonymous identity.

DATA SNAPSHOT

As of September 11, 2026, approximately 9:43 a.m. ET; Bitcoin Lab daily observations dated September 10 UTC

Sources: Coinbase for spot price; mempool.space for network data; Bitcoin Lab for the five daily on-chain valuation and spending metrics. MVRV compares market value with realized value; realized prices reflect on-chain cost bases, and SOPR compares spending prices with acquisition prices. Daily observations are separate from the live spot reading.

If you found this useful, forward it to a friend who wants to understand what is happening in bitcoin and why it matters. Onward, Marty

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