Speaker 1: AI daily breathing. I'm d sharp, thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 1: The standard's body trap who controls AI guardrails. The most
Speaker 1: significant proposal in AI governance right now isn't coming from
Speaker 1: a regulator. It's coming from the CEO of Google deep Mind.
Speaker 1: Demas Hassebis published a framework this week calling for a
Speaker 1: US South led federal private standards body to test frontier
Speaker 1: AI models before they're released. The model he's pointing to
Speaker 1: is FINRA, the financial industry self regulatory organization. Start voluntary,
Speaker 1: prove it works, then make it mandatory. The pitch sounds reasonable,
Speaker 1: the implications are considerably more complicated. Here's what matters about
Speaker 1: who's making this proposal. Hassabis runs one of the two
Speaker 1: or three most capable AI labs on Earth. A pre
Speaker 1: release testing regime built around a threshold called frontier model
Speaker 1: would almost certainly cover Google deep minds competitors faster than
Speaker 1: it covers Google deep Mind. That's not a conspiracy, that's
Speaker 1: just how standards bodies work. The entity with the most
Speaker 1: influence over the definition controls the playing field. The enforcement
Speaker 1: question is also unresolved. This proposed body would have US
Speaker 1: South jurisdiction. It's unclear how it binds labs operating outside
Speaker 1: US South territory, how the frontier threshold gets defined and updated,
Speaker 1: and where the voluntary compliance is viable in a market
Speaker 1: where speed to deployment is a competitive advantage. Directly connected
Speaker 1: to that governance question is a separate development from the
Speaker 1: State Department, which officially raised serious concerns about US South
Speaker 1: companies adopting Chinese AI models, specifically Deepseek and z dot Ai.
Speaker 1: This is the first high level public warning on that
Speaker 1: specific issue. Prior coverage focused on capability comparisons. The framing
Speaker 1: has now shifted to policy threat. The key distinction is
Speaker 1: this Deep Seek's cost advantage is real and measurable, policy
Speaker 1: pressure is not. If the price differential is large enough,
Speaker 1: security concerns tend to loose use and procurement decisions. That's
Speaker 1: the actual risk the State Department is flagging, and it's
Speaker 1: one that export controls alone are unlikely to solve cleanly.
Speaker 1: The signal here is that the US self governance debate
Speaker 1: isn't only about regulating domestic AI development. It's about who
Speaker 1: controls the standards that determine which AI is safe to
Speaker 1: use at all. Here's the thing Hassebi's also published what
Speaker 1: he's calling a manifesto, framing agi arrival as only years away,
Speaker 1: not decades. He describes the impact as ten times the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution at ten times the speed he flagged cybersecurity
Speaker 1: and biological risks. Specifically, the claim deserves calibration. Altman Ammaday
Speaker 1: and others have made comparable statements. None of them attach
Speaker 1: precise probabilities or specific timelines. What's different here is the
Speaker 1: institutional weight behind the framing. When a Deep Mind CEO
Speaker 1: says AGI's imminent and transformative, it justifies safety research funding,
Speaker 1: sovereign compute investment, and yes X pre release testing regimes.
Speaker 1: The urgency narrative and the governance proposal are not separate.
Speaker 1: They're reinforcing the capital flows today. Make that reinforcement concrete. Helsing,
Speaker 1: a European defense AI startup, raised one point eight billion
Speaker 1: dollars and is building a drone manufacturing facility in West Virginia,
Speaker 1: producing more than two thousand HX two strike drones monthly.
Speaker 1: The company is now valued at eighteen billion dollars. Its
Speaker 1: drones are already deployed in Ukraine. That's not a bet
Speaker 1: on a future conflict. That's production scale commitment to an
Speaker 1: active one consider this. Quantum Systems followed with a one
Speaker 1: point two billion dollar raise valued at eight billion dollars
Speaker 1: focused on multi domain autonomous systems. Combined with other defense
Speaker 1: and aerospace deals, roughly seventy percent of today's three billion
Speaker 1: dollars in total funding landed in geopolitically aligned categories. The
Speaker 1: valuation meth on these deals is aggressive eighteen billion for
Speaker 1: helsing an eight billion for quantum systems in play by
Speaker 1: revenue multiples that require sustained conflict, sustained government contracts, or both.
Speaker 1: If either condition softens, those numbers get tested hard outside defense.
Speaker 1: Two other rounds are worth tracking. Picks Verse, a Singapore
Speaker 1: based video generation startup backed by Ali Barber, closed the
Speaker 1: four hundred and thirty nine million dollars Series C extension
Speaker 1: at a valuation above two billion dollars, and CHI Discovery
Speaker 1: raised four hundred million dollars for AI driven drug design,
Speaker 1: valued at approximately three point eight billion dollars. Both rounds
Speaker 1: confirm that mega round appetite in applied AI hasn't slowed,
Speaker 1: but the gravitational center of capital today is clearly defense
Speaker 1: and sovereignty infrastructure. The practical test for everything raised today
Speaker 1: is where the standards become protectionist. A US South led
Speaker 1: pre release testing body applied selectively could function as a
Speaker 1: competitive mode rather than a safety mechanism. The difference between
Speaker 1: those two outcomes depends entirely on how the frontier threshold
Speaker 1: is defined and who defines it. Watch the Hassabis proposal
Speaker 1: for specifics on that threshold. Watch the State Department's next
Speaker 1: move on Chinese model adoption for whether this stays at
Speaker 1: the level of concern or becomes enforceable policy. And watch
Speaker 1: whether the defense tech funding pace holds when the next
Speaker 1: quarterly numbers come in. The governance race and the capital
Speaker 1: race are running on the same track right now, that's
Speaker 1: the thing to keep in focus. Thanks for listening. This
Speaker 1: podcast was built using AI technology, a yes We production