Bill Friend

Greenland, Davos, and the Alliance After the Blow When Donald Trump first floated the idea of buying Greenland in 2019, most observers treated it as an eccentric aside. Trump returned to the subject immediately after winning re-election in November 2024, and this time the framing was different. He was no longer musing about a real … Read more

Russia’s AI Supply Chain and the Architecture of Its Development Partnerships Russia entered the artificial-intelligence era with the rhetorical ambition of a great power. Its National AI Development Strategy, adopted by presidential decree in October 2019 and substantially revised in 2024, pledges to raise AI’s contribution to Russian GDP to eleven trillion rubles by 2030 … Read more

Russia’s playing its own game in developing and integrating AI. Its strongest capabilities lie in applied, state-backed, and dual-use AI systems rather than in creating globally leading foundation models or in the compute ecosystems required to sustain frontier research at scale. The core pattern is strategic adaptation rather than frontier leadership. Russian institutions are trying … Read more

My article, “U.S.–Gulf Trades for AI Expansion,” was about more than sovereign wealth, datacenters, or regional tech ambition. Underneath all of that, it was about relocation—physical, legal, and political. On the surface, the piece describes a new bargain. The United States brings the stack: chips, models, cloud ecosystems, and the regulatory power that comes with … Read more

The most important AI risks in 2026 are not at the model layer. They sit lower down, in memory, networking, power, cloud access, and the physical systems that keep AI running. That is where the real leverage is. These bottlenecks decide who can scale, who gets delayed, and who ends up dependent on someone else’s … Read more

On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted a 22-point summary of Alexander Karp’s worldview on its official X account. It wasn’t just a corporate update or a marketing push. It was a public ratification of a value framework. The points lay out a clear perspective on technology, national security, societal critique, and American purpose. Instead of … Read more

Compute is the new oil, and the Gulf is learning how to pump it. The emerging U.S.–Gulf AI relationship is not just a story about sovereign wealth diversifying into tech. It is a bargain in which Washington trades access to frontier compute for something it increasingly lacks at home: vast, controllable power, land for hyperscale … Read more

At 2 a.m. this morning, I realized why my multi-LLM setup feels so familiar. It’s because I’m using team leadership skills with LLMs. That made me think this may be one of the missing skills in AI adoption right now. People keep looking for the perfect prompt, the perfect framework, or the perfect agent stack. … Read more

The AI boom has given Latin America a rare opening to move beyond its old role in the global economy. Whether it can seize that chance depends on turning resource wealth and technical ambition into lasting political and industrial power. Latin America’s AI push is not mainly about catching up in technology. It is about … Read more

What comes after the facts have settled By the time you reach the end of a series like this, the technical details have usually done their work. You know how the systems operate. You’ve seen where the legal architecture fractures, where corporate accountability dissolves into procurement loopholes, and where the Security Council veto acts as … Read more

For years, AI was talked about as if it lived nowhere. It was “in the cloud,” which made it sound borderless, weightless, almost detached from the physical world. But that was always only half true. The cloud has buildings. It has land, substations, cooling systems, permits, cables, backup power, and legal jurisdictions. It can be … Read more

On Imminent Danger of Unscrupulous Intrusion In the same week, two American institutions made decisions about dangerous capability. One institution looked at what it had built and decided the public could not have it. The other looked at what it had built and decided, at two o’clock in the morning, that it could not decide … Read more