Freedom Tech Policy Hour 🇺🇸 Freedom Tech DC brought Bitcoin, open-source AI, and individual control into the same policy conversation. In this episode, @zackcohen_, @Bayman11771, and @zackbshapiro recap the conference and discuss how to address AI risks without concentrating control in a few companies or governments. During the episode, they dig into the difference between AI safety and security, the privacy tradeoffs of personal AI agents, and what Chinese open models mean for U.S. competition. Chapters: 0:00 Freedom Tech DC: Bitcoin and open-source AI 3:55 AI risk without concentrating power 8:30 Sovereign infrastructure and Clarity 14:49 AI consciousness, safety and security 30:35 Frontier labs, regulation and government power 36:50 AI agents: usefulness and privacy 43:31 Mistral and open-model release strategies 46:06 Distillation and U.S.-China competition 50:54 Can American open-source AI compete?

NEW: Money For AI Q3 Update 📄 Earlier this year, we studied which forms of money AI models would choose for four financial tasks: saving for the future, making payments, setting prices/keeping accounts, and settling payments. For our Q3 follow-up, we tested 13 new models using the same questions and classification method. The same broad pattern emerged: • Bitcoin was selected in 70.8% of responses to savings questions. • Stablecoins were selected in 73.5% of responses to questions about paying for goods and services. These results show a clear distinction between saving and spending: the latest models continue to favor Bitcoin for holding value over time and stablecoins for everyday payments. As AI agents take on more financial tasks, these preferences could influence which forms of digital money they use. Read the full results on our website at: moneyforai.org/v2

Freedom Tech DC: Plural AI as a Freedom Technology with @ramez - A single dominant AI is not inevitable - Open models and falling costs can put powerful AI in more hands - Regulation shouldn't lock out competitors and concentrate intelligence - Cyber defenders need capable AI to find and fix vulnerabilities - The open-source community needs shared training tools, security work and a voice in policy (00:00) — Introduction & Why Plural AI Matters (01:21) — Who Controls Information Technology? (04:35) — Why AI Is Plural (08:50) — Threats to Competition (09:26) — The Limits of Recursive Self-Improvement (12:42) — Safety, Alignment & Control (16:36) — AI for Cyber Defense (18:02) — Four Calls to Action for the Open-Source Community

Freedom Tech DC: After Clarity -- Lessons for AI Policy with @patrickjwitt and @Bayman11771 - Legislation can give digital assets more durable rules than agency action alone - AI agents and digital payments make a clear federal framework increasingly urgent - Educating Congress is cumulative: a legislative setback does not erase what lawmakers learned - Open-source developer protections safeguard privacy, autonomy and self-custody alongside innovation - Bitcoin reserve and crypto tax provisions could find a path through reconciliation, but the prospects remain uncertain (00:00) — Introduction (01:08) — What comes after the CLARITY setback? (02:17) — AI agents, payments and regulatory durability (03:56) — Lessons from educating Congress (06:54) — How AI companies engage with policymakers (08:54) — Open-source developers and civil liberties (11:47) — Reserve, crypto tax and reconciliation prospects

Freedom Tech DC: Future of BPI with @DavidZell_, @BitcoinConner, and @janessalopez__ - AI policy could become the next battleground for Bitcoin self-custody and civil liberties - Open-source AI can help Bitcoin developers find and patch security vulnerabilities - AI agents will need access to peer-to-peer payments without relying on a handful of intermediaries - Policy research needs clear stories and hands-on education to reach busy congressional staff (00:00) — BPI’s origins and mission (02:28) — Why Freedom Tech DC? (05:29) — From a blog to a policy institute (10:11) — How BPI’s approach to policymaker education evolved (14:14) — Why Bitcoin and open AI belong together (17:53) — Bitcoin security, AI agents, and the freedom to transact (21:16) — What success looks like in five years

Freedom Tech DC: Freedom Tech in the Hands of Activists with @AnyaChekhovich and @arshmolu - Restrictions on open-source tools can weaken freedom fighters abroad - Activists need AI tools that protect their personal information and sensitive data - Bitcoin helped Navalny’s foundation keep operating after its bank accounts were blocked - Bitcoin funds legal support for political prisoners and humanitarian aid in Russia (00:00) — Introduction (00:59) — Anna’s work with Navalny’s foundation (01:56) — Banking restrictions and Bitcoin (03:12) — Finding the global activist community (06:36) — Teaching NGOs to use Bitcoin (09:57) — AI enters activists’ daily work (12:17) — AI privacy and sensitive information (13:39) — What policymakers should understand

American AI leadership requires U.S. open-source technology as the foundation other countries build on. As China pairs open models with affordable infrastructure and training, America needs competitive alternatives, writes BPI's Head of Government Affairs Ken Egan @Bayman11771 in @thecipherbrief. That means capable open models, affordable hardware, financing, and support that give partners control over their AI systems. Read more: thecipherbrief.com/how-ameri…

Freedom Tech DC: Inside BPI International with @BitcoinConner, @Joeyg_poh, and @EugeniaBKenny - International policy standards can affect Bitcoin users everywhere - Policymakers need to distinguish Bitcoin from other digital assets - Restrictions on self-hosted wallets risk creating a two-tier system - Bitcoin policy can support consumer protection in the UK and strategic resilience in Taiwan (00:00) — Introduction (00:57) — Xapo and international regulatory work (02:05) — How U.S. policy affects the global landscape (04:47) — Why BPI’s mission extends across borders (07:05) — The education gap and a two-tier ecosystem (09:43) — Openness as a policy principle (12:04) — Lessons from the UK and Taiwan (14:42) — Making regulatory conversations constructive

Freedom Tech DC: The Stakes of Preserving Dollar Dominance with @DavidBeckworth and @SamLyman33 - Dollar stablecoins can extend the dollar’s global reach through private competition - Limited-purpose Fed accounts could give stablecoin issuers direct access to payment rails - Tokenized Fed reserves could enable settlement around the clock - Stablecoins separate payments from lending, creating room for new providers alongside banks - Tokenized Treasuries could open the market to more participants and expand trading capacity (00:00) — Introduction (01:28) — Stablecoins and dollar dominance (02:21) — The global digital-currency race (04:59) — Why private competition matters (06:21) — Stablecoins and Fed master accounts (08:18) — Tokenization and the Fed’s balance sheet (10:14) — What stablecoins mean for banks (13:08) — Tokenized Treasuries and market access

Freedom Tech DC: The Case for the American Reserve Modernization Act with @RepNickBegich and @APompliano - ARMA would establish a permanent U.S. Bitcoin reserve with a 20-year hold - The bill would protect individuals’ right to hold their own keys - States could choose to use the federal custody framework - Consolidating government Bitcoin holdings and verifying reserves would make the reserve more transparent and accountable (00:00) — Introduction (00:47) — The reserve modernization proposal (02:21) — A 20-year hold and limits on sales (03:45) — Protecting individual self-custody (04:51) — Custody options for states (07:57) — Begich’s Mt. Gox experience (11:20) — Government holdings and reserve audits (13:20) — Bitcoin’s role in government reserves

READ: Lessons from bitcoin for open intelligence by @resistancemoney In February 2022, the Canadian federal government took an extraordinary step: it ordered banks to freeze accounts linked to trucker protests in Ottawa. No trucker had yet been convicted of any crime, but their money was held by custodians, who quickly complied. Third parties — standing between users and their money — were a danger to those users. Now imagine the same order aimed at your own AI tools. Your email drafts, medical questions, portfolio rebalancing plans, and lines of research, all switched off at the press of a button, at the order of an ostensibly liberal government or from a big tech firm. Obeying the law is no protection against such intrusions. The same structure that allows for corporate or state overreach in the realm of money looms over machine intelligence and our ability to access it. The scenario I’ve described requires little imagination, in fact. A handful of big tech firms stand between millions and their writing, their thinking, and even their inquiry. What these systems will permit is set by the few: Dario Amodei at Anthropic, Sam Altman at OpenAI, and so on. If machine intelligence is to remain accessible to all, we must learn from the case of bitcoin and other open-source software projects. Trusted parties are security holes. Bitcoin showed that it was possible to design digital cash — a bearer asset — that did not require its ledger maintainers to take custody of user balances. In pulling this off, bitcoin closed off a threat to users, that the systems on which they rely would seize or freeze their funds. Bitcoin protects users from these threats by routing around trusted parties altogether. Open machine intelligence systems can do the same. Bitcoin users run their own nodes and hold their own funds. AI users can run their own open-weight models and custody their own prompts and data. It is much harder to shut off a large language model running on your own desktop than one operating on servers operated by Anthropic or OpenAI. Don’t trust; verify. The lesson from bitcoin is not to do without networked computers altogether, nor is it to eschew data centers. It is to subject externally sourced computation to cryptography. Bitcoin miners do not ask the network of nodes to trust that they’ve submitted a legitimate block of transactions to the ledger, or that they’ve completed the work required to earn block rewards. Instead, they submit cryptographic proofs of work, and nodes test blocks for validity before adding them to their own local copy of the blockchain. A similar structure is available for open machine intelligence. Users can make use of immense computing power in data centers, via cryptographically shielded environments. “Confidential computing”, as it’s sometimes called, means that users need not merely trust that their data will be shielded from prying eyes; mathematics enacted in chip architecture provides proofs, instead. As with bitcoin, trust does not disappear altogether — we rely on math and chips — but it does shrink. And when your prompts are hidden from view, you are a much less attractive target for surveillance or control. Cryptography can guard against state or corporate overreach here, just as it does in the case of bitcoin. Chokepoints attract pressure. Governments have, by and large, not tried to ban the bitcoin protocol; they know this is a fool’s errand. But they have found ways to make trouble by targeting on-ramps and off-ramps: exchanges and banks. Expect the same for AI. That means KYC (know your customer) requirements for access to models or computation, geographic surveillance of API keys, licensing for cloud providers, and takedown pressure on app stores and open source software hubs. Debanking has a successor; it is decomputing. Developers will be targets. Despite taking no control over user funds, open-source software engineers have been the target of prosecutorial campaigns. Some are in jail today for expressive conduct and commerce that is arguably protected under the First Amendment, namely, writing and publishing free software. Resistance takes place in courts, and in the court of public opinion. Bitcoin advocates have made progress on the latter by documenting and sharing concrete cases of bitcoin’s use by human rights activists, peace protestors, journalists, and so on. Open-weight AI advocates can learn from this: they too should document and promulgate real stories of open intelligence systems being useful tools for liberty. And they should be ready for both social and legal backlash against developers who have the temerity to publish free software. Organize. Bitcoin did not defend itself. Code alone cannot do that. Bitcoin’s defense operation exists in non-profits, think tanks, legal defense funds, and policy shops that explain the technology and its benefits to legislatures and courts. That fight is not over, and it will only be won through shrewd use of institutions. Open-weight AI has almost none of this infrastructure. Its defenders are a scattered mix of commercial labs and anonymous commentators, with a few academics and investors thrown in for good measure. This hodge-podge arrangement will not suffice for the fight to come. There is reason for optimism. Bitcoin learned its lessons the hard way; open intelligence can borrow them. Bitcoin is money no one can block. Open intelligence, operating on free and open weights, can be a machine mind on your desk no one can switch off. Bitcoiners compressed their hardest lesson into a slogan: “not your keys, not your coins.” AI needs an equivalent, and it is ready to hand: Not your weights, not your mind.

NEW FINDINGS: We took a close look at MSCI’s effort to exclude Bitcoin treasury companies from major stock indexes. We found an internal project trail buried in a public document, years of ESG advocacy, and proposed rules that could reach far beyond Bitcoin. Our new paper, “Wall Street’s Invisible Committee,” documents what we uncovered and provides recommendations for policymakers. MSCI reports an astonishing $21 trillion benchmarked to its indexes. When its committees change which companies qualify, funds tracking those indexes must adjust their holdings. A methodology decision can trigger billions in reallocation. Here’s what we found. 𝟭. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁’𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗲. In 2025, MSCI proposed excluding Digital Asset Treasury Companies (DATCOs) holding at least half their assets in digital assets. After substantial opposition, it shelved the proposal. It later returned this year with a broader, facially neutral test for “non-operating companies.” MSCI’s own simulation would exclude Strategy and Metaplanet. We examined the public consultation PDF and found something revealing in its embedded metadata. The source presentation’s internal file path includes— “Projects/DATCOs/Operating vs Non Operating” A proposal presented as a general classification rule retains a source-file path explicitly associated with the category targeted by the earlier exclusion effort. While metadata alone cannot prove the outcome was predetermined, it raises a direct question for MSCI. Were these criteria developed to classify companies consistently, or engineered to reach the same exclusions against digital asset companies through a broader rule? 𝟮. 𝗠𝗦𝗖𝗜 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗺 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 “𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗿𝘆𝗽𝘁𝗼” 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗿. We traced its public record back to an October 2021 article titled “Creeping Crypto.” MSCI publicly warned about cryptocurrency exposure entering equity portfolios, described most cryptocurrencies as “speculative investments with little evident utility,” and flagged Bitcoin’s Proof of Work as environmentally dangerous. They identified 26 exposed public companies and promoted tools for screening additional exposure. Singled out at the very bottom of their ESG rankings... was Strategy. While the article did not call for exclusions, it does establish that an internal belief at MSCI that Bitcoin and digital asset companies were an ESG concern four years before proposing to remove digital asset treasury companies. 𝟯. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗿𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀. CEO Henry Fernandez has repeatedly, publicly proclaimed the urgent importance of ESG investing. In 2021, he recounted urging bankers to “refuse to take a company public or do a bond offering” without a net-zero pledge. MSCI’s leadership also combined responsibility for ESG and index governance. Its then-head of indexes described an ambition for its flagship global index to become “green, one company at a time.” These statements do not prove the motive behind today’s proposal. They make the boundary between MSCI’s advocacy and its broad-market index decisions a serious governance question. 𝟰. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮’𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆. The proposed test relies on “operating assets” without a sufficiently clear, reproducible classification framework. How should it treat a satellite awaiting launch? A mine under construction? Capital raised to build a factory? Our analysis shows how plausible interpretations could disadvantage emerging, strategic industries before they have the chance to compete. Americans buying broad-market funds deserve transparent rules, reproducible decisions, and meaningful accountability from the committees deciding what they own. Read the full findings and our recommendations below ↓ btcpolicy.org/articles/wall-…

Freedom Tech DC: 21st Century Freedom Runs on Code with @intangiblecoins - The freedom to transact and the freedom to prompt protect individual agency - Publishing code alone should not make developers responsible for others' misuse - Local AI models preserve access and let people ask private questions - AI can create digital abundance, but it cannot override Bitcoin's supply rules (00:00) — Introduction (01:32) — The freedom to transact and prompt (02:42) — Lessons from the crypto wars (04:31) — Financial exclusion and developer protections (05:54) — Applying the principle to AI (06:21) — Who controls access to intelligence? (07:43) — Hosted models, local models, and privacy (08:20) — Digital abundance and digital scarcity

Freedom Tech DC: Strategic Case for Open Source with @yeahfortommy and @MattBurtell - What is Hermes Agent? - Open-source tools like Hermes Agent let users own their data and switch model providers - Open models are narrowing the gap with publicly available closed models - Restrictions on distillation risk leaving U.S. open-source AI behind China - Lower costs and more competition can bring capable AI to small businesses (00:00) — Introduction and Hermes Agent (01:55) — Why open agent harnesses matter (04:44) — Open models, closed models, and the value of applications (07:54) — Who gets access to frontier AI? (10:34) — Distillation and U.S. AI policy (13:23) — The economics of AI for small businesses (14:39) — Where the market goes next (17:57) — What policymakers should protect

Freedom Tech DC: From Wireless Wars to FreedomNet - Building the Network Freedom Depends On with @JonPelson and @Bayman11771 - What is FreedomNet? - AI, Bitcoin, and financial markets depend on secure, reliable networks - Salt Typhoon showed that even trusted networks can be breached - Permissionless innovation gives the U.S. an advantage over China's state-directed telecom model - Making resilience profitable gives businesses a reason to invest before networks fail (00:00) — Introduction (00:50) — Huawei and the national-security stakes (05:33) — Salt Typhoon and the limits of trusted networks (08:12) — FreedomNet and permissionless innovation (13:46) — Sovereignty and independent security layers (16:00) — Panama, data centers, and secure networks (17:46) — Funding resilience through public-private cooperation (19:31) — Keeping financial operations connected

Freedom Tech DC: A Future Worth Surviving For with @zackbshapiro - AI systems are finding strategies their designers never anticipated - Safety policy will concentrate control over intelligence - We need safeguards aimed at dangerous frontier capabilities - Extraordinary government powers should require evidence, review, and limits - Independent research and pluralism are essential to a future that preserves freedom (00:00) — Introduction (01:29) — The trajectory toward more capable AI (03:00) — The alignment problem (05:22) — Safety policy and concentrated power (06:52) — Targeting dangerous frontier capabilities (07:59) — The burden of proof for government powers (08:15) — Pluralism and independent scrutiny (09:14) — A future worth surviving for