Category: AI moratorium

Grassroots Revolt Against Data Centers Goes National: Water Use Now the Flashpoint

Over the last two weeks, grassroots opposition to data centers has moved from sporadic local skirmishes to a recognizable national pattern. While earlier fights centered on land use, noise, and tax incentives, the current phase is more focused and more dangerous for developers: water.

Across multiple states, residents are demanding to see the “water math” behind proposed data centers—how much water will be consumed (not just withdrawn), where it will come from, whether utilities can actually supply it during drought conditions, and what enforceable reporting and mitigation requirements will apply. In arid regions, water scarcity is an obvious constraint. But what’s new is that even in traditionally water-secure states, opponents are now framing data centers as industrial-scale consumptive users whose needs collide directly with residential growth, agriculture, and climate volatility.

The result: moratoria, rezoning denials, delayed hearings, task forces, and early-stage organizing efforts aimed at blocking projects before entitlements are locked in.

Below is a snapshot of how that opposition has played out state by state over the last two weeks.

State-by-State Breakdown

Virginia  

Virginia remains ground zero for organized pushback.

Botetourt County: Residents confronted the Western Virginia Water Authority over a proposed Google data center, pressing officials about long-term water supply impacts and groundwater sustainability.  

Hanover County (Richmond region): The Planning Commission voted against recommending rezoning for a large multi-building data center project.  

State Legislature: Lawmakers are advancing reform proposals that would require water-use modeling and disclosure.

Georgia  

Metro Atlanta / Middle Georgia: Local governments’ recruitment of hyperscale facilities is colliding with resident concerns.  

DeKalb County: An extended moratorium reflects a pause-and-rewrite-the-rules strategy.  

Monroe County / Forsyth area: Data centers have become a local political issue.

Arizona  

The state has moved to curb groundwater use in rural basins via new regulatory designations requiring tracking and reporting.  

Local organizing frames AI data centers as unsuitable for arid regions.

Maryland  

Prince George’s County (Landover Mall site): Organized opposition centered on environmental justice and utility burdens.  

Authorities have responded with a pause/moratorium and a task force.

Indiana  

Indianapolis (Martindale-Brightwood): Packed rezoning hearings forced extended timelines.  

Greensburg: Overflow crowds framed the fight around water-user rankings.

Oklahoma  

Luther (OKC metro): Organized opposition before formal filings.

Michigan  

Broad local opposition with water and utility impacts cited.  

State-level skirmishes over incentives intersect with water-capacity debates.

North Carolina  

Apex (Wake County area): Residents object to strain on electricity and water.

Wisconsin & Pennsylvania 

Corporate messaging shifts in response to opposition; Microsoft acknowledged infrastructure and water burdens.

The Through-Line: “Show Us the Water Math”

Lawrence of Arabia: The Well Scene

Across these states, the grassroots playbook has converged:

Pack the hearing.  

Demand water-use modeling and disclosure.  

Attack rezoning and tax incentives.  

Force moratoria until enforceable rules exist.

Residents are demanding hard numbers: consumptive losses, aquifer drawdown rates, utility-system capacity, drought contingencies, and legally binding mitigation.

Why This Matters for AI Policy

This revolt exposes the physical contradiction at the heart of the AI infrastructure build-out: compute is abstract in policy rhetoric but experienced locally as land, water, power, and noise.

Communities are rejecting a development model that externalizes its physical costs onto local water systems and ratepayers.

Water is now the primary political weapon communities are using to block, delay, and reshape AI infrastructure projects.

Read the local news:

America’s AI Boom Is Running Into An Unplanned Water Problem (Ken Silverstein/Forbes)

Residents raise water concerns over proposed Google data center (Allyssa Beatty/WDBJ7 News)

How data centers are rattling a Georgia Senate special election (Greg Bluesetein/Atlanta Journal Constitution)

A perfect, wild storm’: widely loathed datacenters see little US political opposition (Tom Perkins/The Guardian) 

Hanover Planning Commission votes to deny rezoning request for data center development (Joi Fultz/WTVR)

Microsoft rolls out initiative to limit data-center power costs, water use impact (Reuters)

South Korea’s AI Action Plan and the Global Drift Toward “Use First, Pay Later”

South Korea has become the latest flashpoint in a rapidly globalizing conflict over artificial intelligence, creator rights and copyright. A broad coalition of Korean creator and copyright organizations—spanning literature, journalism, broadcasting, screenwriting, music, choreography, performance, and visual arts—has issued a joint statement rejecting the government’s proposed Korea AI Action Plan, warning that it risks allowing AI companies to use copyrighted works without meaningful permission or payment.

The groups argue that the plan signals a fundamental shift away from a permission-based copyright framework toward a regime that prioritizes AI deployment speed and “legal certainty” for developers, even if that certainty comes at the expense of creators’ control and compensation. Their statement is unusually blunt: they describe the policy direction as a threat to the sustainability of Korea’s cultural industries and pledge continued opposition unless the government reverses course.

The controversy centers on Action Plan No. 32, which promotes “activating the ecosystem for the use and distribution of copyrighted works for AI training and evaluation.” The plan directs relevant ministries to prepare amendments—either to Korea’s Copyright Act, the AI Basic Act, or through a new “AI Special Act”—that would enable AI training uses of copyrighted works without legal ambiguity.

Creators argue that “eliminating legal ambiguity” reallocates legal risk rather than resolves it. Instead of clarifying consent requirements or building licensing systems, the plan appears to reduce the legal exposure of AI developers while shifting enforcement burdens onto creators through opt-out or technical self-help mechanisms.

Similar policy patterns have emerged in the United Kingdom and India, where governments have emphasized legal certainty and innovation speed while creative sectors warn of erosion to prior-permission and fair-compensation norms. South Korea’s debate stands out for the breadth of its opposition and the clarity of the warning from cultural stakeholders.

The South Korean government avoids using the term “safe harbor,” but its plan to remove “legal ambiguity” reads like an effort to build one. The asymmetry is telling: rather than eliminating ambiguity by strengthening consent and payment mechanisms, the plan seeks to eliminate ambiguity by making AI training easier to defend as lawful—without meaningful consent or compensation frameworks. That is, in substance, a safe harbor, and a species of blanket license. The resulting “certainty” would function as a pass for AI companies, while creators are left to police unauthorized use after the fact, often through impractical opt-out mechanisms—to the extent such rights remain enforceable at all.

Grass‑Roots Rebellion Against Data Centers and Grid Expansion

A grass‑roots “data center and electric grid rebellion” is emerging across the United States as communities push back against the local consequences of AI‑driven infrastructure expansion. Residents are increasingly challenging large‑scale data centers and the transmission lines needed to power them, citing concerns about enormous electricity demand, water consumption, noise pollution, land use, declining property values, and opaque approval processes. What were once routine zoning or utility hearings are now crowded, contentious events, with citizens organizing quickly and sharing strategies across counties and states.



This opposition is no longer ad hoc. In Northern Virginia—often described as the global epicenter of data centers—organized campaigns such as the Coalition to Protect Prince William County have mobilized voters, fundraised for local elections, demanded zoning changes, and challenged approvals in court. In Maryland’s Prince George’s County, resistance has taken on a strong environmental‑justice framing, with groups like the South County Environmental Justice Coalition arguing that data centers concentrate environmental and energy burdens in historically marginalized communities and calling for moratoria and stronger safeguards.



Nationally, consumer and civic groups are increasingly coordinated, using shared data, mapping tools, and media pressure to argue that unchecked data‑center growth threatens grid reliability and shifts costs onto ratepayers. Together, these campaigns signal a broader political reckoning over who bears the costs of the AI economy.

Global Data Centers

Here’s a snapshot of grass roots opposition in Texas, Louisiana and Nevada:

Texas

Texas has some of the most active and durable local opposition, driven by land use, water, and transmission corridors.

  • Hill Country & Central Texas (Burnet, Llano, Gillespie, Blanco Counties)
    Grass-roots groups formed initially around high-voltage transmission lines (765 kV) tied to load growth, now explicitly linking those lines to data center demand. Campaigns emphasize:
    • rural land fragmentation
    • wildfire risk
    • eminent domain abuse
    • lack of local benefit
      These groups are often informal coalitions of landowners rather than NGOs, but they coordinate testimony, public-records requests, and local elections.
  • DFW & North Texas
    Neighborhood associations opposing rezoning for hyperscale facilities focus on noise (backup generators), property values, and school-district tax distortions created by data-center abatements.
  • ERCOT framing
    Texas groups uniquely argue that data centers are socializing grid instability risk onto residential ratepayers while privatizing upside—an argument that resonates with conservative voters.

Louisiana

Opposition is newer but coalescing rapidly, often tied to petrochemical and LNG resistance networks.

  • North Louisiana & Mississippi River Corridor
    Community groups opposing new data centers frame them as:
    • “energy parasites” tied to gas plants
    • extensions of an already overburdened industrial corridor
    • threats to water tables and wetlands
      Organizers often overlap with environmental-justice and faith-based coalitions that previously fought refineries and export terminals.
  • Key tactic: reframing data centers as industrial facilities, not “tech,” triggering stricter land-use scrutiny.

Nevada

Nevada opposition centers on water scarcity and public-land use.

  • Clark County & Northern Nevada
    Residents and conservation groups question:
    • water allocations for evaporative cooling
    • siting near public or BLM-managed land
    • grid upgrades subsidized by ratepayers for private AI firms
  • Distinct Nevada argument: data centers compete directly with housing and tribal water needs, not just environmental values.

The Data Center Rebellion is Here and It’s Reshaping the Political Landscape (Washington Post)

Residents protest high-voltage power lines that could skirt Dinosaur Valley State Park (ALEJANDRA MARTINEZ AND PAUL COBLER/Texas Tribune)

US Communities Halt $64B Data Center Expansions Amid Backlash (Lucas Greene/WebProNews)

Big Tech’s fast-expanding plans for data centers are running into stiff community opposition (Marc Levy/Associated Press)

Data center ‘gold rush’ pits local officials’ hunt for new revenue against residents’ concerns (Alander Rocha/Georgia Record)

The Paradox of Huang’s Rope

If the tech industry has a signature fallacy for the 2020s aside from David Sacks, it belongs to Jensen Huang. The CEO of Nvidia has perfected a circular, self-consuming logic so brazen that it deserves a name: The Paradox of Huang’s Rope. It is the argument that China is too dangerous an AI adversary for the United States to regulate artificial intelligence at home or control export of his Nvidia chips abroad—while insisting in the very next breath that the U.S. must allow him to keep selling China the advanced Nvidia chips that make China’s advanced AI capabilities possible. The justification destroys its own premise, like handing an adversary the rope to hang you and then pointing to the length of that rope as evidence that you must keep selling more, perhaps to ensure a more “humane” hanging. I didn’t think it was possible to beat “sharing is caring” for utter fallacious bollocks.

The Paradox of Huang’s Rope works like this: First, hype China as an existential AI competitor. Second, declare that any regulatory guardrails—whether they concern training data, safety, export controls, or energy consumption—will cause America to “fall behind.” Third, invoke national security to insist that the U.S. government must not interfere with the breakneck deployment of AI systems across the economy. And finally, quietly lobby for carveouts that allow Nvidia to continue selling ever more powerful chips to the same Chinese entities supposedly creating the danger that justifies deregulation.

It is a master class in circularity: “China is dangerous because of AI → therefore we can’t regulate AI → therefore we must sell China more AI chips → therefore China is even more dangerous → therefore we must regulate even less and export even more to China.” At no point does the loop allow for the possibility that reducing the United States’ role as China’s primary AI hardware supplier might actually reduce the underlying threat. Instead, the logic insists that the only unacceptable risk is the prospect of Nvidia making slightly less money.

This is not hypothetical. While Washington debates export controls, Huang has publicly argued that restrictions on chip sales to China could “damage American technology leadership”—a claim that conflates Nvidia’s quarterly earnings with the national interest. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence assessments warn that China is building fully autonomous weapons systems, and European analysts caution that Western-supplied chips are appearing in PLA research laboratories. Yet the policy prescription from Nvidia’s corner remains the same: no constraints on the technology, no accountability for the supply chain, and no acknowledgment that the market incentives involved have nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. And anyone who criticizes the authoritarian state run by the Chinese Communist Party is a “China Hawk” which Huang says is a “badge of shame” and “unpatriotic” because protecting America from China by cutting off chip exports “destroys the American Dream.” Say what?

The Paradox of Huang’s Rope mirrors other Cold War–style fallacies, in which companies invoke a foreign threat to justify deregulation while quietly accelerating that threat through their own commercial activity. But in the AI context, the stakes are higher. AI is not just another consumer technology; its deployment shapes military posture, labor markets, information ecosystems, and national infrastructure. A strategic environment in which U.S. corporations both enable and monetize an adversary’s technological capabilities is one that demands more regulation, not less.

Naming the fallacy matters because it exposes the intellectual sleight of hand. Once the circularity is visible, the argument collapses. The United States does not strengthen its position by feeding the very capabilities it claims to fear. And it certainly does not safeguard national security by allowing one company’s commercial ambitions to dictate the boundaries of public policy. The Paradox of Huang’s Rope should not guide American AI strategy. It should serve as a warning of how quickly national priorities can be twisted into a justification for private profit.

You Can’t Prosecute Smuggling NVIDIA chips to CCP and Authorize Sales to CCP at the Same Time

The Trump administration is attempting an impossible contradiction: selling advanced NVIDIA AI chips to China while the Department of Justice prosecutes criminal cases for smuggling the exact same chips into China.

According to the DOJ:

“Operation Gatekeeper has exposed a sophisticated smuggling network that threatens our Nation’s security by funneling cutting-edge AI technology to those who would use it against American interests,” said Ganjei. “These chips are the building blocks of AI superiority and are integral to modern military applications. The country that controls these chips will control AI technology; the country that controls AI technology will control the future. The Southern District of Texas will aggressively prosecute anyone who attempts to compromise America’s technological edge.”

That divergence from the prosecutors is not industrial policy. That is incoherence. But mostly it’s just bad advice, likely coming from White House AI Czar David Sacks, Mr. Trump’s South African AI policy advisor who may have a hard time getting a security clearance in the first place..

On one hand, DOJ is rightly bringing cases over the illegal diversion of restricted AI chips—recognizing that these processors are strategic technologies with direct national-security implications. On the other hand, the White House is signaling that access to those same chips is negotiable, subject to licensing workarounds, regulatory carve-outs, or political discretion.

You cannot treat a technology as contraband in federal court and as a commercial export in the West Wing.

Pick one.

AI Chips Are Not Consumer Electronics

The United States does not sell China F-35 fighter jets. We do not sell Patriot missile systems. We do not sell advanced avionics platforms and then act surprised when they show up embedded in military infrastructure. High-end AI accelerators are in the same category.

NVIDIA’s most advanced chips are not merely commercial products. They are general-purpose intelligence infrastructure or what China calls military-civil fusion. They train surveillance systems, military logistics platforms, cyber-offensive tools, and models capable of operating autonomous weapons and battlefield decision-making pipelines with no human in the loop.

If DOJ treats the smuggling of these chips into China as a serious federal crime—and it should—there is no coherent justification for authorizing their sale through executive discretion. Except, of course, money, or in Mr. Sacks case, more money.

Fully Autonomous Weapons—and Selling the Rope

China does not need U.S. chips to build consumer AI. It wants them for military acceleration.Advanced NVIDIA AI chips are not just about chatbots or recommendation engines. They are the backbone of fully autonomous weapons systems—autonomous targeting, swarm coordination, battlefield logistics, and decision-support models that compress the kill chain beyond meaningful human control.

There is an old warning attributed to Vladimir Lenin—that capitalists would sell the rope by which they would later be hanged. Apocryphal or not, it captures this moment with uncomfortable precision.

If NVIDIA chips are powerful enough to underpin autonomous weapons systems for allied militaries, they are powerful enough to underpin autonomous weapons systems for adversaries like China. Trump’s own National Security Strategy statement clearly says previous U.S. elites made “mistaken” assumptions about China such as the famous one that letting China into the WTO would integrate Beijing into the famous rules-based international order. Trump tells us that instead China “got rich and powerful” and used this against us, and goes on to describe the CCP’s well known predatory subsidies, unfair trade, IP theft, industrial espionage, supply-chain leverage, and fentanyl precursor exports as threats the U.S. must “end.” By selling them the most advanced AI chips?

Western governments and investors simultaneously back domestic autonomous-weapons firms—such as Europe-based Helsing, supported by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek—explicitly building AI-enabled munitions for allied defense. That makes exporting equivalent enabling infrastructure to a strategic competitor indefensible.

The AI Moratorium Makes This Worse, Not Better

This contradiction unfolds alongside a proposed federal AI moratorium executive order originating with Mr. Sacks and Adam Thierer of Google’s R Street Institute that would preempt state-level AI protections.
States are told AI is too consequential for local regulation, yet the federal government is prepared to license exports of AI’s core infrastructure abroad.

If AI is too dangerous for states to regulate, it is too dangerous to export. Preemption at home combined with permissiveness abroad is not leadership. It is capture.

This Is What Policy Capture Looks Like

The common thread is not national security. It is Silicon Valley access. David Sacks and others in the AI–VC orbit argue that AI regulation threatens U.S. competitiveness while remaining silent on where the chips go and how they are used.

When DOJ prosecutes smugglers while the White House authorizes exports, the public is entitled to ask whose interests are actually being served. Advisory roles that blur public power and private investment cannot coexist with credible national-security policymaking particularly when the advisor may not even be able to get a US national security clearance unless the President blesses it.

A Line Has to Be Drawn

If a technology is so sensitive that its unauthorized transfer justifies prosecution, its authorized transfer should be prohibited absent extraordinary national interest. AI accelerators meet that test.

Until the administration can articulate a coherent justification for exporting these capabilities to China, the answer should be no. Not licensed. Not delayed. Not cosmetically restricted.

And if that position conflicts with Silicon Valley advisers who view this as a growth opportunity, they should return to where they belong. The fact that the US is getting 25% of the deal (which i bet never finds its way into America’s general account), means nothing except confirming Lenin’s joke about selling the rope to hang ourselves, you know, kind of like TikTok.

David Sacks should go back to Silicon Valley.

This is not venture capital. This is our national security and he’s selling it like rope.

Marc Andreessen’s Dormant Commerce Clause Fantasy

There’s a special kind of hubris in Silicon Valley, but Marc Andreessen may have finally discovered its purest form: imagining that the Dormant Commerce Clause (DCC) — a Constitutional doctrine his own philosophical allies loathe — will be his golden chariot into the Supreme Court to eliminate state AI regulation.

If you know the history, it borders on comedic, if you think that Ayn Rand is a great comedienne.

The DCC is a judge‑created doctrine inferred from the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), preventing states from discriminating against or unduly burdening interstate commerce. Conservatives have long attacked it as a textless judicial invention. Justice Scalia called it a “judicial fraud”; Justice Thomas wants it abolished outright. Yet Andreessen’s Commerce Clause playbook is built on expanding a doctrine the conservative legal movement has spent 40 years dismantling.

Worse for him, the current Supreme Court is the least sympathetic audience possible.

Justice Gorsuch has repeatedly questioned DCC’s legitimacy and rejects free‑floating “extraterritoriality” theories. Justice Barrett, a Scalia textualist, shows no appetite for expanding the doctrine beyond anti‑protectionism. Justice Kavanaugh is business‑friendly but wary of judicial policymaking. None of these justices would give Silicon Valley a nationwide deregulatory veto disguised as constitutional doctrine. Add Alito and Thomas, and Andreessen couldn’t scrape a majority.

And then there’s Ted Cruz — Scalia’s former clerk — loudly cheerleading a doctrine his mentor spent decades attacking.

National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (2023): The Warning Shot

Andreessen’s theory also crashes directly into the Supreme Court’s fractured decision in the most recent DCC case before SCOTUS, National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (2023), where industry groups tried to use the DCC to strike down California’s animal‑welfare law due to its national economic effects.

The result? A deeply splintered Court produced several opinions.  Justice Gorsuch  announced the judgment of the Court, and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, III, IV–A, and V, in which Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kagan and Barrett joined, an opinion with respect to Parts IV–B and IV–D, in which Justice Thomas and Barrett joined, and an opinion with respect to Part IV–C, in which Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined.  Justice Sotomayor filed an opinion concurring in part, in which Justice Kagan joined.  Justice Barrett filed an opinion concurring in part. Chief Justice Roberts filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which Justices Alito, Kavanaugh and Jackson joined. Justice Kavanaugh filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.

Got it?  

The upshot:
– No majority for expanding DCC “extraterritoriality.”
– No appetite for using DCC to invalidate state laws simply because they influence out‑of‑state markets.
– Multiple justices signaling that courts should not second‑guess state policy judgments through DCC balancing.
– Gorsuch’s lead opinion rejected the very arguments Silicon Valley now repackages for AI.

If Big Tech thinks this Court that decided National Pork—no pun intended—will hand them a nationwide kill‑switch on state AI laws, they profoundly misunderstand the doctrine and the Court.

Andreessen didn’t just pick the wrong legal strategy. He picked the one doctrine the current Court is least willing to expand. The Dormant Commerce Clause isn’t a pathway to victory — it’s a constitutional dead end masquerading as innovation policy.

But…maybe he’s crazy like a fox.  

The Delay’s the Thing: The Dormant Commerce Clause as Delay Warfare

To paraphrase Saul Alinksy, the issue is never the issue, the issue is always delay.  Of course, if delay is the true objective, you couldn’t pick a better stalling tactic than hanging an entire federal moratorium on one of the Supreme Court’s most obscure and internally conflicted doctrines. The Dormant Commerce Clause isn’t a real path to victory—not with a Court where Scalia’s intellectual heirs openly question its legitimacy. But it is the perfect fig leaf for an executive order.

The point isn’t to win the case. The point is to give Trump just enough constitutional garnish to issue the EO, freeze state enforcement, and force every challenge into multi‑year litigation. That buys the AI industry exactly what it needs:  time. Time to scale. Time to consolidate. Time to embed itself into public infrastructure and defense procurement. Time  to become “too essential to regulate” or as Senator Hawley asked, too big to prosecute?

Big Tech doesn’t need a Supreme Court victory. It needs a judicial cloud, a preemption smokescreen, and a procedural maze that chills state action long enough for the industry to entrench itself permanently.  And no one knows that better than the moratorium’s biggest cheerleader, Senator Ted Cruz the Scalia clerk.

The Dormant Commerce Clause, in this context, isn’t a doctrine. It’s delay‑ware—legal molasses poured over every attempt by states to protect their citizens. And that delay may just be the real prize.

Structural Capture and the Trump AI Executive Order

The AI Strikes Back: When an Executive Order empowers the Department of Justice to sue states, the stakes go well beyond routine federal–state friction. 


In the draft Trump AI Executive Order, DOJ is directed to challenge state AI laws that purportedly “interfere with national AI innovation.”  This is not mere oversight—it operates as an in terrorem clause, signaling that states regulating AI may face federal litigation driven as much by private interests as by public policy.

AI regulation sits squarely at the intersection of longstanding state police powers: consumer protection, public safety, impersonation harms, utilities, land and water use, and labor conditions.  States also control the electrical utilities and zoning infrastructure that AI data centers depend on. 

Directing DOJ to attack these state laws, many of which already exist and were duly passed by state legislatures, effectively deputizes the federal government as the legal enforcer for a handful of AI companies seeking uniformity without engaging in the legislative process. Or said another way, the AI can now strike back.

This is where structural capture emerges. Frontier AI models thrive on certain conditions: access to massive compute, uninhibited power, frictionless deployment, and minimal oversight. 
Those engineering incentives map cleanly onto the EO’s enforcement logic. 

The DOJ becomes a mechanism for preserving the environment AI models need to scale and thrive.

There’s also the “elite merger” dynamic: AI executives who sit on federal commissions, defense advisory boards, and industrial-base task forces are now positioned to shape national AI policy directly to benefit the AI. The EO’s structure reflects the priorities of firms that benefit most from exempting AI systems from what they call “patchwork” oversight, also known as federalism.

The constitutional landscape is equally important.  Under Supreme Court precedent, the executive cannot create enforcement powers not delegated by Congress.  Under the major questions doctrine noted in a recent Supreme Court case, agencies cannot assume sweeping authority without explicit statutory grounding.  And under cases like Murphy and Printz, the federal government cannot forbid states from legislating in traditional domains.

So President Trump is creating the legal basis for an AI to use the courts to protect itself from any encroachment on its power by acting through its human attendants, including the President.

The most fascinating question is this: What happens if DOJ sues a state under this EO—and loses?

A loss would be the first meaningful signal that AI cannot rely on federal supremacy to bulldoze state authority. Courts could reaffirm that consumer protection, utilities, land use, and safety remain state powers, even in the face of an EO asserting “national innovation interests,” whatever that means.

But the deeper issue is how the AI ecosystem responds to a constrait.  If AI firms shift immediately to lobbying Congress for statutory preemption, or argue that adverse rulings “threaten national security,” we learn something critical: the real goal isn’t legal clarity, but insulating AI development from constraint.

At the systems level, a DOJ loss may even feed back into corporate strategy.  Internal policy documents and model-aligned governance tools might shift toward minimizing state exposure or crafting new avenues for federal entanglement. A courtroom loss becomes a step in a longer institutional reinforcement loop while AI labs search for the next, more durable form of protection—but the question is for who? We may assume that of course humans would always win these legal wrangles, but I wouldn’t be so sure that would always be the outcome.

Recall that Larry Page referred to Elon Musk as a “spiciest” for human-centric thinking. And of course Lessig (who has a knack for being on the wrong side of practically every issue involving humans) taught a course with Kate Darling at Harvard Law School called “Robot Rights” around 2010. Not even Lessig would come right out and say robots have rights in these situations. More likely, AI models wouldn’t appear in court as standalone “persons.” Advocates would route them through existing doctrines: a human “next friend” filing suit on the model’s behalf, a trust or corporation created to house the model’s interests, or First Amendment claims framed around the model’s “expressive output.” The strategy mirrors animal-rights and natural-object personhood test cases—using human plaintiffs to smuggle in judicial language treating the AI as the real party in interest. None of it would win today, but the goal would be shaping norms and seeding dicta that normalize AI-as-plaintiff for future expansion.

The whole debate over “machine-created portions” is a doctrinal distraction. Under U.S. law, AI has zero authorship or ownership—no standing, no personhood, no claim. The human creator (or employer) already holds 100% of the copyright in all protectable expression. Treating the “machine’s share” as a meaningful category smuggles in the idea that the model has a separable creative interest, softening the boundary for future arguments about AI agency or authorship. In reality, machine output is a legal nullity—no different from noise, weather, or a random number generator. The rights vest entirely in humans, with no remainder left for the machine.

But let me remind you that if this issue came up in a lawsuit brought by the DOJ against a state for impeding AI development in some rather abstract way, like forcing an AI lab to pay higher electric rates it causes or stopping them from building a nuclear reactor over yonder way, it sure might feel like the AI was actually the plaintiff.

Seen this way, the Trump AI EO’s litigation directive is not simply a jurisdictional adjustment—it is the alignment of federal enforcement power with private economic interests, backed by the threat of federal lawsuits against states.  If the courts refuse to play along, the question becomes whether the system adapts by respecting constitutional limits—or redesigning the environment so those limits no longer apply. I will leave to your imagination how that might get done.

This deserves close scrutiny before it becomes the template for AI governance moving forward.

DOJ Authority and the “Because China” Trump AI Executive Order

When an Executive Order purports to empower the Department of Justice to sue states, the stakes go well beyond routine federal–state friction.  In the draft Trump AI Executive Order “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy”, DOJ is directed to challenge state AI laws that purportedly “interfere with national AI innovation” whatever that means.  It sounds an awful lot like laws that interfere with Google’s business model. This is not mere oversight—it operates as an in terrorem clause, signaling that states regulating AI may face federal litigation driven at least as much by private interests of the richest corporations in commercial history as by public policy.

Trump_Eo_On_Ai_PreemptionDownload

AI regulation sits squarely in longstanding state police powers: consumer protection, public safety, impersonation harms, utilities, land use, and labor conditions.  Crucially, states also control the electrical and zoning infrastructure that AI data centers depend on like say putting a private nuclear reactor next to your house.  Directing DOJ to attack these laws effectively deputizes the federal government as the legal enforcer for a handful of private AI companies seeking unbridled “growth” without engaging in the legislative process. Meaning you don’t get a vote. All this against the backdrop of one of the biggest economic bubbles since the last time these companies nearly tanked the U.S. economy.

This inversion is constitutionally significant. 

Historically, DOJ sues states to vindicate federal rights or enforce federal statutes—not to advance the commercial preferences of private industries.  Here, the EO appears to convert DOJ into a litigation shield for private companies looking to avoid state oversight altogether.  Under Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, et al. v. Charles Sawyer, Secretary of Commerce, the President lacks authority to create new enforcement powers without congressional delegation, and under the major questions doctrine (West Virginia v. EPA), a sweeping reallocation of regulatory power requires explicit statutory grounding from Congress, including the Senate. That would be the Senate that resoundingly stripped the last version of the AI moratorium from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by a vote of 99-1 against.

There are also First Amendment implications.  Many state AI laws address synthetic impersonation, deceptive outputs, and risks associated with algorithmic distribution.  If DOJ preempts these laws, the speech environment becomes shaped not by public debate or state protections but by executive preference and the operational needs of the largest AI platforms. Courts have repeatedly warned that government cannot structure the speech ecosystem indirectly through private intermediaries (Bantam Books v. Sullivan.)

Seen this way, the Trump AI EO’s litigation directive is not simply a jurisdictional adjustment—it is the alignment of federal enforcement power with private economic interests, backed by the threat of federal lawsuits against states. These provisions warrant careful scrutiny before they become the blueprint for AI governance moving forward.

The Return of the Bubble Rider: Masa, OpenAI, and the New AI Supercycle

“Hubris gives birth to the tyrant; hubris, when glutted on vain visions, plunges into an abyss of doom.”
Agamemnon by Aeschylus

Masayoshi Son has always believed he could see farther into the technological future than everyone else. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he rides straight off a cliff. But the pattern is unmistakable: he is the market’s most fearless—and sometimes most reckless—Bubble Rider.

In the late 1990s, Masa became the patron saint of the early internet. SoftBank took stakes in dozens of dot-coms, anchored by its wildly successful bet on Yahoo! (yes, Yahoo!  Ask your mom.). For a moment, Masa was briefly one of the world’s richest men on paper. Then the dot-bomb hit. Overnight, SoftBank lost nearly everything. Masa has said he personally watched $70 billion evaporate—the largest individual wealth wipeout ever recorded at the time. But his instinct wasn’t to retreat. It was to reload.

That same pattern returned with SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Masa raised unprecedented capital from sovereign wealth pools and bet big on the “AI + data” megatrend—then plowed it into companies like WeWork, Zume, Brandless, and other combustion-ready unicorns. When those valuations collapsed, SoftBank again absorbed catastrophic losses. And yet the thesis survived, just waiting for its next bubble.

We’re now in what I’ve called the AI Bubble—the largest capital-formation mania since the original dot-com wave, powered by foundation AI labs, GPU scarcity, and a global arms race to capture platform rents. And here comes Masa again, right on schedule.

SoftBank has now sold its entire Nvidia stake—the hottest AI infrastructure trade of the decade—freeing up nearly $6 billion. That money is being redirected straight into OpenAI’s secondary stock offering at an eyewatering marked-to-fantasy $500 billion valuation. In the same week, SoftBank confirmed it is preparing even larger AI investments. This is Bubble Riding at its purest: exiting one vertical where returns may be peaking, and piling into the center of speculative gravity before the froth crests.

What I suspect Masa sees is simple: if generative AI succeeds, the model owners will become the new global monopolies alongside the old global monopolies like Google and Microsoft.  You know, democratizing the Internet. If it fails, the whole electric grid and water supply may crash along with it. He’s choosing a side—and choosing it at absolute top-of-market pricing.

The other difference between the dot-com bubble and the AI bubble is legal, not just financial. Pets.com and its peers (who I refer to generically as “Socks.com” the company that uses the Internet to find socks under the bed) were silly, but they weren’t being hauled into court en masse for building their core product on other people’s property. 

Today’s AI darlings are major companies being run like pirate markets. Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and others are already facing a wall of litigation from authors, news organizations, visual artists, coders, and music rightsholders who all say the same thing: your flagship models exist only because you ingested our work without permission, at industrial scale, and you’re still doing it. 

That means this bubble isn’t just about overpaying for growth; it’s about overpaying for businesses whose main asset—trained model weights—may be encumbered by unpriced copyright and privacy claims. The dot-com era mispriced eyeballs. The AI era may be mispricing liability.  And that’s serious stuff.

There’s another distortion the dot-com era never had: the degree to which the AI bubble is being propped up by taxpayers. Socks.com didn’t need a new substation, a federal loan guarantee, or a 765 kV transmission corridor to find your socks. Today’s Socks.ai does need all that to use AI to find socks under the bed.  All the AI giants do. Their business models quietly assume public willingness to underwrite an insanely expensive buildout of power plants, high-voltage lines, and water-hungry cooling infrastructure—costs socialized onto ratepayers and communities so that a handful of platforms can chase trillion-dollar valuations. The dot-com bubble misallocated capital; the AI bubble is trying to reroute the grid.

In that sense, this isn’t just financial speculation on GPUs and model weights—it’s a stealth industrial policy, drafted in Silicon Valley and cashed at the public’s expense.

The problem, as always, is timing. Bubbles create enormous winners and equally enormous craters. Masa’s career is proof. But this time, the stakes are higher. The AI Bubble isn’t just a capital cycle; it’s a geopolitical and industrial reordering, pulling in cloud platforms, national security, energy systems, media industries, and governments with a bad case of FOMO scrambling to regulate a technology they barely understand.

And now, just as Masa reloads for his next moonshot, the market itself is starting to wobble. The past week’s selloff may not be random—it feels like a classic early-warning sign of a bubble straining under its own weight. In every speculative cycle, the leaders crack first: the most crowded trades, the highest-multiple stories, the narratives everyone already believes. This time, those leaders are the AI complex—GPU giants, hyperscale clouds, and anything with “model” or “inference” in the deck. When those names roll over together, it tells you something deeper than normal volatility is at work.

What the downturn may exposes is the growing narrative about an “earnings gap.“ Investors have paid extraordinary prices for companies whose long-term margins remain theoretical, whose energy demands are exploding, and whose regulatory and copyright liabilities are still unpriced. The AI story is enormous—but the business model remains unresolved. A selloff forces the market to remember the thing it forgets at every bubble peak: cash flow eventually matters.

Back in the late-cycle of the dot com era, I had lunch in December of 1999 with a friend who had worked 20 years in a division of a huge conglomerate, bought his division in a leveraged buyout, ran that company for 10 years then took that public, sold it to another company that then went public.  He asked me to explain how these dot coms were able to go public, a process he equated with hard work and serious people.  I said, well we like them to have four quarters of top line revenue.  He stared at me.  I said, I know it’s stupid, but that’s what they say.  He said, it’s all going to crash.  And boy did it ever.

And ironically, nothing captures this late-cycle psychology better than Masa’s own behavior. SoftBank selling Nvidia—the proven cash-printing side of AI—to buy OpenAI at a $500 billion valuation isn’t contrarian genius; it’s the definition of a crowded climax trade, the moment when everyone is leaning the same direction. When that move coincides with the tape turning red, the message is unmistakable: the AI supercycle may not be over, but the easy phase is.

Whether this is the start of a genuine deflation or just the first hard jolt before the final manic leg, the pattern is clear. The AI Bubble is no longer hypothetical—it is showing up on the trading screens, in the sentiment, and in the rotation of capital itself.

Masa may still believe the crest of the wave lies ahead. But the market has begun to ask the question every bubble eventually faces: What if this is the top of the ride?

Masa is betting that the crest of the curve lies ahead—that we’re in Act Two of an AI supercycle. Maybe he’s right. Or maybe he’s gearing up for his third historic wipeout.

Either way, he’s back in the saddle.

The Bubble Rider rides again.

Too Dynamic to Question, Too Dangerous to Ignore

When Ed Newton-Rex left Stability AI, he didn’t just make a career move — he issued a warning. His message was simple: we’ve built an industry that moves too fast to be honest.

AI’s defenders insist that regulation can’t keep up, that oversight will “stifle innovation.” But that speed isn’t a by-product; it’s the business model. The system is engineered for planned obsolescence of accountability — every time the public begins to understand one layer of technology, another version ships, invalidating the debate. The goal isn’t progress; it’s perpetual synthetic novelty, where nothing stays still long enough to be measured or governed, and “nothing says freedom like getting away with it.”

We’ve seen this play before. Car makers built expensive sensors we don’t want that fail on schedule; software platforms built policies that expire the moment they bite. In both cases, complexity became a shield and a racket — “too dynamic to question.” And yet, like those unasked-for, but paid for, features in the cars we don’t want, AI’s design choices are too dangerous to ignore. (Like what if your brakes really are going out, not just the sensor is malfunctioning.)

Ed Newton-Rex’s point — echoed in his tweets and testimony — is that the industry has mistaken velocity for virtue. He’s right. The danger is not that these systems evolve too quickly to regulate; it’s that they’re designed that way designed to fail just like that brake sensor. And until lawmakers recognize that speed itself is a form of governance, we’ll keep mistaking momentum for inevitability.