Hi all,

I sent a note on Thomas Piketty’s blueprint for global justice to members of Exponential View yesterday. I call its recommendations a “blueprint for managed decline”. The commentary touches on the future of modernity, scientific dynamism and democratic legitimacy. Read it here.

In today’s Sunday briefing, we look at:

• The iPhone reduced fertility; what will AI do?

• What’s driving the consensus behind pausing AI development?

• The largest solar factory, gene therapy for rejuvenation & Chinese Gen Z finds inspiration in Western memes++

But, first…

Bernie Sanders, Sam Altman, Donald Trump and Vinod Khosla all agree that the public should own a slice of AI. Bernie proposes transferring 50% of ownership of leading AI companies into a sovereign wealth fund; Trump is supportive; Sam agrees in principle but pushed back on the 50%; and Vinod wrote an op-ed in the FT advocating for a new tax code on wealth AI creates and eventually pooling it into a sovereign wealth fund:

A sovereign fund with ownership of AI companies makes every American a capital owner, not a bystander to the AI economy.

The same day the Senate held a hearing on AI, Anthropic published a framework that has sovereign wealth funds as one of the mechanisms to deploy in case of the worst-case scenario, when “[t]he search for work stretches past a year, then past two, and for some, eventually stops”.

The core assumption here is that AI will tilt the economy’s income from labor to capital. We don’t have evidence that this is happening yet and we may not know for a long time.

Vinod believes that AI will be capable of doing 80% of jobs by 2030 and that $15 trillion of US GDP, which is labor compensation, will mostly disappear. Economist Chad Jones, in contrast, thinks the transition will take closer to thirty years because of weak links – even if we automate most tasks, the ones that don’t get automated will slow everything down (this aligns with what we see happening with AI diffusion into organizations right now). Slow doesn’t mean painless, though. And for a long time, we may not know which scenario we’re in.

My view is that there will be human jobs around for much longer than the prevailing narratives might suggest. Virtually all of these jobpocalypse scenarios of recent years have been mooted theoretically but not in the messy world of life. We’ll create more roles and that last mile (what Chad calls “the weak link”) will command decent wages. That doesn’t mean we won’t see increasing returns to capital over labor. So, societies might decide to change how they tax and redistribute. The different experiences between the UK and Norway over North Sea oil suggest that endowments seem to work better than transfers.

See also: I was on Paul Krugman’s podcast this week. We covered the AI bubble question, the productivity paradox and why Chinese AI engineers are Claude-pilled. Watch or listen here.

Washington has issued an export control order that prevents Anthropic from offering its Fable and Mythos models to non-US citizens, including Anthropic’s own employees. Apparently, researchers at Amazon discovered a jailbreak and it seems like Amazon’s boss, Andy Jassy, passed concerns on to the Commerce Department. (Amazon recently invested $5 billion into Anthropic and indicated it would invest a further $20 billion, having already put $8 billion into the firm and acting as its major distributor.)

The reaction seems a little over the top, given the minor trigger. I’d half expect it to be diluted in the next few days. Or it might just be the next stage in the feud between the Defense apparatchiks and Anthropic.

But it comes at a time when Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind are signaling they’re in favor of slowing down frontier AI development. Erik Brynjolfsson rightly asks, what did they see? Is it the fear of the growing backlash or a genuine capability explosion?

Erik Brynjolfsson@erikbryn

What did they see? A pause used to be at the edge of the overton window. Now it's being considered by 3 out of the 3 leading labs.

Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin

Anthropic, OpenAI and Demis are all in favour of preparing a coordinate pause of frontier AI development. Skate to where the puck will be people, not where it is now. This is a fast puck.

4:14 AM · Jun 11, 2026 · 20.7K Views

19 Replies · 14 Reposts · 83 Likes

My brief thoughts on what’s behind this.

The most charitable reading is that the labs feel they are reaching a point at which their AI models challenge the security assumptions that underpin modern life. This isn’t unreasonable: they have consistently worried that this point might arise. That actual point may still be years away, but Demis and Dario do think in long arcs – and we might need years to prepare.

There is a less charitable reading that is also plausible.