Bill Friend

Sovereignty and the Kessler Ransom A continuation of “The High Ground” Introduction In February, this series argued that the SpaceX-xAI merger represented something larger than a corporate consolidation—that we were witnessing the construction of a sovereign-grade infrastructure platform in orbit, one that converges communications, compute, and surveillance under a single private entity. The response, both … Read more

How International Law Fails to Govern AI Part 2 of Israel’s AI Revolution Introduction: When Machines Decide Who Dies In the fall of 2023, the Israel Defense Forces began running a targeting operation in Gaza unlike anything in the history of modern warfare. At the center of it were two artificial intelligence systems. The first, … Read more

I have long admired Anthropic’s Claude — for various reasons, not least its principled stance on safety and its willingness to sit with hard questions rather than retreat into corporate boilerplate. So when the words “Claude’s Constitution” scrolled past on my morning news feed two days ago, I winced. I didn’t read the article. I … Read more

On Expertise, Blind Spots, and the Forest We Keep Missing I recently published an article titled “The High Ground: Sovereignty in the Age of Orbital Intelligence” about a structural shift already underway: a private actor vertically integrating launch, connectivity, compute, and AI — and the governance vacuum that allows architecture to hard-wire power before law … Read more

Sovereignty in the Age of Orbital Intelligence Introduction We are witnessing the construction of a new layer of planetary civilization, yet we are arguing about it as if it were merely a telecommunications upgrade. The public discourse remains fixated on the trees—latency metrics, debris mitigation protocols, and spectrum allocation. These are necessary technical conversations, but … Read more

How a Small Nation Became a Global Hub for Military Technology From Gaza to the world, Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in warfare is reshaping modern conflict—and raising urgent questions about ethics, accountability, and the future of war. Introduction: The AI Testbed On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing … Read more

Those who cannot remember the past, George Santayana warned, are condemned to repeat it—and in 2026, Washington appears bent on relearning an old lesson the hard way. The United States is trying to throttle China the way empires once strangled their rivals, by cutting off lifelines of cheap oil from Iran and Venezuela, seizing fields, … Read more

Or: “Before We Build Gods: A Case for Moral Readiness” Preface: The Ledger of Collective Negligence People of the World, this document is not a proposal for policy, nor a plea for humanitarian aid. It is a formal moral indictment issued against the fully functioning adult population of the globe—the author included. We are the … Read more

This open letter addresses leading AI developers and industry figures, emphasizing their unprecedented responsibility to form a unified, independent coalition to govern advanced AI technologies responsibly, establish shared development limits, and prevent reckless competition and misuse, as traditional regulatory and governmental mechanisms are too slow to manage the rapid evolution of AI systems that profoundly … Read more

Anthropic, the State, and the Soul of AI On Friday, February 27, 2026, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies and military contractors to discontinue using Anthropic’s AI systems. The Pentagon was given six months to phase out Claude. Defense Secretary Hegseth branded Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries. … Read more

The Irreversible Agency Standard Conditioning the Scaling of Frontier AI Across this series, the argument has unfolded in stages. We began by examining technological convergence and the possibility that advanced AI, potentially amplified by quantum acceleration, could steepen capability curves. We then turned to the physical layer—compute, hardware, and energy—as the last durable chokepoints for … Read more

Geopolitical Compression and the U.S.–China AI Race Why Strategic Competition Makes Governance Harder—and More Necessary Technological governance does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs inside rivalry. Advanced artificial intelligence is now explicitly embedded in national strategy for both the United States and China. The 2021 report of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial … Read more