Women in Zimbabwe push for recognition of 'invisible' domestic labour

Mutare, Zimbabwe – In Zimbabwe, women and girls overwhelmingly bear the burden of domestic labour – costing them opportunities outside the home. New policies are being considered to recognise the value of this unpaid work.

Issued on: 30/08/2026 - 

Women in Zimbabwe spend much of their time doing household chores, limiting their opportunities to study or earn. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

By:  Farai Shawn Matiashe


Every day, before delivering custom-sewn clothes to her clients’ doorsteps in eastern Zimbabwe, Cecilia Makumbe first takes care of all the household chores.

“I clean the house, do laundry, fetch water and water the garden,” the 43-year-old mother of four, who lives in Mafuke village outside Mutare, Zimbabwe’s fourth largest city, told RFI.

“By the time I start my sewing job, I am already exhausted.”

In her village, there is limited access to resources like water and clean cooking stoves.

Makumbe walks nearly a kilometre to fetch water from a shallow well because the nearest community borehole is double the distance away.

Cecilia Makumbe on her way to deliver custom-made clothes to her clients in Mutare. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Unequal burden

Her story is similar to that of many Zimbabwean women who are losing opportunities because of the time they spend providing unpaid labour.

Proposed legislation known as the Unpaid Care and Domestic Work Bill aims to address this. Drafted in 2024, it seeks to put in place policies to support women and girls who carry out the overwhelming majority of domestic labour.

While the bill has not yet been enacted, its supporters are renewing their push. A motion to formally recognise chores like cooking and cleaning as essential economic labour was first introduced in parliament late last year and debated by legislators this week.

Sizalokuhle Ncube, a communications manager at the Women’s Academy for Leadership and Political Excellence, a women’s rights organisation lobbying for the cause, says unpaid care and domestic work is not a private household issue – it has economic, social and political consequences.

“Women continue to carry a disproportionate share of cooking, cleaning, childcare, caring for older persons and persons with disabilities, collecting water and other essential household responsibilities,” she said.

Women who live in areas of Zimbabwe with limited access to clean water do their laundry using water from rivers and shallow wells. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Women spend about 5.9 hours a day on unpaid care, domestic and volunteer work, compared with 3.8 hours for men, according to a 2025 survey conducted by the state-owned Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency.

Ncube says unpaid workload limits women’s time, economic opportunities, participation in public life and political leadership.

Makumbe took a six-month sewing course, but she could not further her studies because she had to take care of children after she got married.

“I could not afford childcare. So I could not continue,” she said.

Easing the load

On 20 August, lawmakers in the National Assembly, Zimbabwe’s lower house of parliament, debated the motion to recognise domestic and unpaid care work as a critical part of national development.

Lawmakers agreed the government should develop a comprehensive policy on unpaid domestic labour, and put money into infrastructure and social protection programmes that would help ease the workload. They also called for a survey to calculate the economic value of such labour and its contribution to GDP.

Senator Maybe Mbowa, chair of the Zimbabwe Women’s Parliamentary Caucus, says those backing the motion want concrete steps to make chores safer and less time-consuming.

“It is not that we want salaries. We simply want the government to intervene and reduce the burden of domestic work on women,” she told RFI.

“We want the introduction of clean cooking initiatives like gas and solar-powered boreholes in rural areas to reduce the time women walk to get clean water and fetch firewood.”

Many women in Zimbabwe prepare meals using firewood that they collect themselves. 

© Farai Shawn Matiashe

With a gender-responsive budget that addresses their needs, Mbowa says, women will use the time saved to build the economy.

The government, in partnership with international humanitarian organisations, says it is already promoting clean cookstoves and installing solar-powered boreholes in rural areas.

“We are promoting clean cooking technologies which reduce time spent collecting firewood and exposure to health risks,” said Mavis Sibanda, a permanent secretary for the Ministry of Women Affairs.

The state is also investing in rural water supplies “to reduce the time women spend on essential household tasks like fetching water”, she said.

African precedents

Ncube says women’s demands are that care work be recognised, valued, redistributed and supported through public policy.

“We want care to be treated as an issue of economic justice, gender equality and public policy, not as an invisible responsibility that automatically falls on women,” she said.

Zimbabwe is not the first country in Africa to take action on unpaid domestic labour.

Kenya last year adopted a National Care Policy, which seeks to recognise, reduce and redistribute unpaid care while improving conditions for paid care workers.

And in 2024, Rwanda revised its family law to explicitly recognise unpaid care work as contributing to marital property and value it at 10 to 39 percent of jointly acquired assets.

It has also deployed energy-efficient cookstoves and tanks to collect rainwater in communities across the country.

Makumbe hopes Zimbabwe can adopt similar measures, and that greater access to safe water and clean cooking technologies will ease the burden of her household responsibilities.

“I want to have more time for my sewing and to expand my business,” she said.

Interview

Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” says Gil Durán.

By Kelly Hayes 

Truthout

August 20, 2026

LONG READ

“We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” Gil Durán says. In this episode of Movement Memos, Durán and host Kelly Hayes discuss the bizarre fixations and political fantasies of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, and how those ideas are being translated into real-world governance. Durán and Hayes also discuss Silicon Valley’s Christian cosplay, and how traditional Christian ideas are being used as wrapping paper for the pursuit of AI-first, corporate fiefdoms.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Music: Son Monarcas and Dusty Decks

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about how the cults of Silicon Valley have seized vast amounts of institutional and political power, and how tech billionaires like Peter Thiel are seeking to remake the world — while repackaging some of their most radical, anti-democratic ideas in the language of Christianity. We’ll be hearing from Gil Durán, author of the new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

The growing public animus toward data centers and AI presents us with an opportunity right now to unmask these billionaires and explain their bizarre ambitions and political fantasies to our friends and neighbors in plain terms. I believe that kind of narrative work is a moral and strategic imperative. With Gil’s help, we’ll talk about how Silicon Valley capitalists developed their ideas, the threat they pose to our communities, the forces we will need to defeat their projects, and why we must fight back.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.

Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won’t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

Kelly Hayes: Gil Durán, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Gil Durán: Thank you for having me.

Kelly Hayes: How are you doing today?

Gil Durán: Pretty good. Staying busy. Lots of interest in the book, so I’m doing a lot of talking about these ideas these days.

Kelly Hayes: Well, I can understand why there’s a lot of interest. It’s a really fascinating read. Can you tell our audience a bit about your work?

Gil Durán: Well, I’m a journalist who got the journalism bug at a very young age in the fifth grade and went into journalism after college after working on my college paper and doing a lot of internships. But after a few years in journalism, the industry started collapsing (the newspaper industry), and I ended up spending, unexpectedly, 17 years working in politics as a spokesman and communication strategist for a host of California Democratic elected officials like [Governor] Jerry Brown and [Senator] Dianne Feinstein and Attorney General Kamala Harris at the time. And then, in 2018, I got the chance to return to journalism, and I jumped on it. I’d always felt there was something missing. It was this feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else, not wearing a suit and being in government and consulting and such.

So I returned to journalism in 2018 and was the editorial page editor of both The Sacramento Bee and then the San Francisco Examiner where I stumbled into the thicket of extremist tech politics in 2022. And this led to the next few years of my life where I burned through tremendous amounts of my own money in order to self-fund my research, and it unexpectedly has resulted in a book.

Kelly Hayes: A lot of the story you tell begins with The Sovereign Individual, a relatively obscure 1997 book that imagined technology weakening governments, destroying jobs, and allowing a wealthy cognitive elite to escape taxes, regulation, and democratic control. Peter Thiel seems to have taken that book extremely seriously. What did he find in it, and how much of the political project you describe can be traced back to that vision?

Gil Durán: I believe Peter Thiel found his entire worldview in The Sovereign Individual. He was already pretty right-wing as a young man and in college, but The Sovereign Individual provided a futuristic framework for how, in the 21st century, democracy in nation states would collapse, and we would witness the rise of these wealthy individuals who would be able to float around the world as sovereigns unto themselves, unbeholden to democracy rules, regulations, or laws. And what Peter Thiel subsequently did was build a cult of Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism, a group of billionaires who believe technology will make democracy obsolete in the 21st century, and that indeed it is their destiny to hasten and accelerate the process of this democratic collapse and specifically, The Sovereign Individual, which was written by two guys who wrote a lot of kooky conspiracy theory stuff. These were not intellectuals or respectable, credible writers or journalists by the time they did this work.

The Sovereign Individual predicted that two technologies would play a key role in the 21st-century attack on democracy. One was called cybercurrency, a new kind of digital money that would undermine government authority and allow the wealthy to exfiltrate their wealth from democratic nations. We would call that crypto today. And the other was advanced automation, which The Sovereign Individual predicted would kill most employment and jobs, thereby leading to an economic collapse that would hasten the democratic collapse. And this book was so influential on Peter Thiel that he’s named it as part of his inspiration for starting PayPal, which was an effort to get ahead of this predicted digital currency. It didn’t quite result in a digital currency. It became a pretty basic payments app. And by the way, Peter Thiel and Co. no longer own PayPal. They sold it a long time ago, but it did make him a multimillionaire and provide the basis for the fortune that would eventually make him a billionaire and make him one of the most powerful and influential people in the world.

So basically, Peter Thiel, who has said he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible and that government is fundamentally evil, was totally turned out by this very weird and kooky and scary apocalyptic conspiracy theory book, and we are currently living with the ramifications, I believe.

Kelly Hayes: And I want to talk more about Peter Thiel, but first, you describe Silicon Valley as a landscape of overlapping cults and quasi-religious movements, including the constellation of ideas known as the TESCREAL bundle. Why has the tech industry produced these totalizing belief systems and what political work do those beliefs do for the people who hold them?

Gil Durán: Well, it was Dr. Emile Torres and Dr. Timnit Gebru who came up with TESCREAL as an acronym that bundles these strange beliefs: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. And at the heart of these very weird ideas, which I won’t explain every single one of them because that could take all day and it’d be better if one of them explained it, is this idea that technology is about to fundamentally transform everything, how the world works, how politics works, how money works, how human beings work, how life works. They believe that they’re going to create this sort of AI God that will allow for eternal life or multiplanetary colonization and for humans to merge with machines and become godlike creatures.

And much of the AI discussion these days from the industry is based on these ideas that AI is not just a tool that will make certain parts of life better or make a better spell checker or recipe generator, but to fundamentally transform what it means to be human and to fundamentally shift the economy by getting rid of jobs and turning us into a society where somehow we have a superabundance that allows us all to live happily though we have no meaning and no work in our lives. This is the narrative coming out of the AI industry or else a technology that could possibly, in addition to killing all jobs, wipe humanity from the face of the earth because it will be so powerful and magical that it’s like this big monster we’re creating. But the only way to stop the monster from being created and killing us is to pour trillions and trillions of dollars into the pockets of a small handful of Silicon Valley billionaires so they can stop it from doing the bad thing and make it do the good thing.

Now, that’s a lot to say there, but it’s not too hard to understand why this religious narrative of AI has spawned some cult religions like transhumanism, like longtermism, like cosmism. The idea is that AI will be the savior and liberator of these people, and all we have to do is burn up the earth and maximize compute and acceleration in order to create our new God. I know this sounds really kooky if you haven’t heard of it, but they’re pretty explicit about this stuff. They talk openly about things like creating the thermodynamic god, which is this mysterious boom loop that will appear if we only burn enough fossil fuels to create the mega super AI, which by the way may not even be possible or realistic in any way. That’s part of the mythology is that this is actual intelligence that will create some superintelligence. But I think it’s important because the question is why do the most successful and wealthy people in our society seek to destroy the country and the society and the system that allowed them to achieve such success?

And that’s where you get into this idea of technological accelerationism. They feel that they are on the cusp of this magical, mystical, religious breakthrough to defeat death and to create a new kind of god in their own words. Many of them say this explicitly. But the only thing standing in the way of this unfettered expansion and acceleration of AI is democracy, is law, is regulation, is the needs and wants and desires of regular people. And so one of the reasons, maybe the core reason why they need to destroy democracy is in order to enable this unfettered acceleration. They call it effective accelerationism, this acceleration into the future. So there’s a religious basis underlying this desire to destroy our democratic system because otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense. Why would you want to destroy the exploitative capitalist machine with nuclear bombs that has created and enabled your success? No one has less of a reason to complain about our system than the billionaires do. They’re the ones winning.

So it doesn’t make any rational sense for them to adopt this extremist political viewpoint, except that they are animated by a sort of religious idea of what technology will enable them to achieve. A lot of them are also afraid to die, and they think AI is going to save them. So they’re preaching this sort of apocalypse, and that’s why I call this Silicon Valley apocalypse capitalism. They’re not promising to create new widgets and devices that make us happy and more connected like it was in the past 20 years. This is about, “Hey, we’re creating the thing that’s going to kill everybody maybe. So just sit back and hope that we cut you off a piece of our abundance later, and everything will be okay.” And that’s a very strange message and it’s no wonder now that people are rising up against data centers and AI and starting to hate billionaires in larger and larger numbers.

Kelly Hayes: We had Émile Torres on the show back in 2023 to talk about TESCREAL and longtermism, and I love Émile — they’re just so incredibly insightful, and I’m so grateful for their analysis. But I remember some friends feeling like they didn’t quite know what to do with that episode. They thought, sure, these people who are prioritizing the well-being of trillions of theoretical, future digital people over the billions of people alive today sound absolutely bananas, but what are they gonna do with that ideology? You can’t sell that to the masses. So, how dangerous could these people and their cults really be?

But what I was seeing, and what I was trying to convey to people, was that the people building power around these ideas had already consolidated an enormous amount of economic, political, and institutional power. If we look at the decades-long political project that brought some of the objectives of Christian nationalism to fruition in recent years, with TESCREAL, we’re talking about something that’s advanced much more quickly. Because while these tech power players haven’t necessarily been marketing these ideologies to the masses, over the last few decades, they have been marketing products that have sort of containerized and redefined modern life, and they’ve translated that wealth and that industrial and institutional capture into a whole lot of political power.

Now, a few years after Émile and I had that conversation, these tech-right ideologies have a shocking level of influence inside the federal government and over AI and crypto policy. They’re devouring some of the inner workings of government, in a similar manner to how they’ve devoured industries. And they’re also doing something else — they’re sort of repackaging these fringe ideas of theirs in more marketable, palatable ways. Which brings us to Christianity. Let’s talk about Peter Thiel’s fixation on the Antichrist, which is one of the stranger threads in the book, but you argue that it has real political significance. What is Thiel actually saying when he talks about the Antichrist? And how does that kind of apocalyptic thinking shape the way he understands political enemies, technology, and power?

Gil Durán: When Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, he’s confessing. He’s confessing his worldview. He believes we are in an existential battle over the future. And on one side is the billionaires and accelerationism, and on the other side is democracy and the majority of people in the world. He often throws communism in there as one of his demonized enemies, but he’s really talking about democracy if you look more deeply into it because they’re the ones aligned behind Trump and this authoritarian leadership. So when Peter Thiel describes the Antichrist, he describes this mysterious force or figure that will rise up suddenly to seize massive amounts of power and seize total control over the world by preaching peace and safety. None of this comes from the Bible, by the way. This is all his weird interpretation of the Bible.

But when he describes Silicon Valley, which he has also said it would be a religion of technicity that seeks to create an artificial world where people can no longer distinguish their real lives from the lives that are artificially being created for them, he said this in an essay back in 2007, he’s describing Silicon Valley, but I don’t know that he knows that he’s doing that, or else he’s doing it on purpose. It’s a double entendre. So the framework of the Antichrist is this idea that we’re in an existential battle, which we are. It’s a war of the billionaires against everyone else. But he uses it to try to scapegoat all of his enemies. It’s Greta Thunberg, it’s AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], it’s democracy, it’s AI regulation, it’s anybody who opposes tech acceleration. Anybody Peter Thiel doesn’t like is the Antichrist in Peter Thiel’s Antichrist spiel. And by the way, theologians have completely rejected, mocked, and scorned all of his gobbledygook. This is a DIY theology from a guy who, as far as I can tell, isn’t even really Christian, Christian in name only.

Thiel has himself said that he’s religious but not spiritual, which means he likes the order and hierarchy and rules of religion without the mystery and spirit of religion. Usually, people say the opposite. They say they’re spiritual, but not religious. Thiel likes to reverse things a lot. I call it “Thiellian inversion.” He takes something and does the reverse of it. So it’s strange that he’s talking about the Antichrist because he’s, like, a terrible spokesman for Christianity. But I think the other thing he’s doing that relates to what we just talked about with the TESCREAL bundle is Thiel is trying to put a Christian mask on these TESCREAL ideas. And I think he’s trying to hush the louder voices in the TESCREAL movement and encourage them to adopt a Christian pose because that’s essential to this alliance they’ve made with the Republican right and the evangelical base of Trump’s MAGA fascist movement, which is so important because there’s a tension where the evangelicals in Trump’s base are very suspicious of the tech guys and understand that they’re a bunch of godless weirdo heathens.

And so, there’s been this news recently where, oh, there’s this Christian revival in Silicon Valley and it’s led by none other than Peter Thiel, where they’re having these meetings to talk about how basically, I don’t know, Christ would be a VC [venture capitalist] if he returned to earth. It’s total bullshit, but I think it’s got multi-layers. One is Thiel confessing his worldview that we’re in an existential crisis and everyone he doesn’t like is the Antichrist. The other is that, “hey, guys, let’s act like we’re Christians and speak in Christian terms while essentially pursuing acceleration TESCREAL goals.” And if you look at the TESCREAL bundle of beliefs, what are they promising through AI? They’re promising salvation, the creation of God, eternal life, escape from earth, transcendence into the heavens, the stars, multiplanetary life, paradise, an abundance that comes after we overcome our enemies and achieve the new paradisical realm that will be created by AI.

Their ideas literally map directly onto Christianity in this perverse anti-human way, which some might say is very much like what the Antichrist would do. Now, I don’t believe in the Antichrist. I’m not a Bible-thumping Christian. I was raised in Catholicism, but I don’t obsess over these ideas. I don’t go to church. But the very idea that Peter Thiel’s talking about the Antichrist so much is in itself a signal of the kind of emergency that we’re in. And I believe that it’s an example of this billionaire psychosis that gets created when people have too much money, too much power, and no one around them to tell them to sit down and shut up and stop sounding weird. So it’s a saving grace that he’s sounding an alarm. Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist. We should be very afraid given his proximity to power and the number of people he influences directly.

Kelly Hayes: That quote about him being religious but not spiritual was one of my favorites in the book because it is so sitcom-silly. It sounds like something a character on Parks and Rec would say. But it also feels revealing, because what seems useful to these guys about religion isn’t necessarily faith. It’s authority. It’s hierarchy. It’s having a set of simple ideas that people are supposed to defer to. That way, nothing is interrogated.

I’m thinking about Elon Musk calling himself a “cultural Christian” and making these very utilitarian comments about Christianity — maybe religion is good, maybe it keeps people from being sad. There’s something so instrumental about that. And I think it connects to a much broader hostility toward the Enlightenment and toward critical thought that runs through these politics. Because at the same time that they’re repackaging themselves in this language of faith and tradition, they’re building technologies that encourage us to outsource more and more of our own thinking and judgment. Sam Altman talks about intelligence becoming a utility that people pay for. And I keep thinking about what kind of political subject that vision creates — people who are increasingly de-skilled and dependent on systems controlled by a handful of enormously powerful people.

And while these politics are strategically dehumanizing, toward all of us who aren’t billionaires or major players in the tech world, they’re also really insulting to people of faith, because what we’re talking about is a kind of perverse form of religious cosplay.

Gil Durán: Yeah, it’s weird. It’s really a touchy thing for billionaires to try to claim Christianity. Jesus Christ, who was known for his message of love and peace, one of the only groups he really shat upon was rich people who he said the camel had an easier chance of getting through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven. So it’s very strange and it’s very fraught with danger when billionaires try to embrace Christianity. And that’s what is happening though. This idea that the people who really need Jesus Christ or who are the most important in Christianity are the people in Silicon Valley today. This is something that Peter Thiel says in one of his Antichrist lectures in San Francisco. The people in this room, the people listening to his Antichrist spiel in San Francisco are doing the most important Christian work in the world today, which would be news to the Jesuits out in some poor, starving village full of poverty and misery trying to eke out some kind of salvation for people there.

This is a very arrogant and solipsistic claim to make. But I think one of the strangest things about this whole religious fervor is that JD Vance is pretending to be a Catholic largely because of Peter Thiel. And he has said that it was Thiel’s ideas that inspired his conversion to Catholicism. And similarly, if you look at Vance’s past interviews around the Hillbilly Elegy time, he described religion as a cultural tchotchke where he grew up. He was raised in a culture of Protestant evangelism, but he’s described it as something where you didn’t really have it. You didn’t go to church. It’s just that what’s part of your identity. Obviously, you believe in Jesus and there’s a picture on the wall. And he later becomes an atheist before converting to Catholicism at the age of 35. Apparently, he did that mostly in order to argue against the authority of the Pope, which he has infamously done for the past few years.

But you see this everywhere you look, this idea that religion has an important role to play in the lives of men who are essentially the opposite of Christianity. And that’s sort of scary because I think one thing Peter Thiel understands is the power of religion and apocalyptic language to motivate people to be a powerful force in politics. And that’s pretty much the same thing Elon Musk is saying. A cultural Christian is what JD Vance is describing as his upbringing, a cultural tchotchke. So they’re not seeding religion. They’re trying to claim religion as their motivation to give them this mask of familiar morality that obscures their true beliefs and their true aims and goals.

Kelly Hayes: Absolutely. And I appreciate you naming JD Vance’s role. I learned new things about Vance reading your book, including how mediocre he really was as a player in the VC world. But the role he now plays as a bridge between the Christian right and the tech right feels really important. Christianity offers these tech agendas a familiar moral language and a kind of traditional posture that can obscure how fringe and radical some of the underlying politics actually are.

And that repackaging makes me think about a broader shift in how Silicon Valley presents itself. A few years ago, I talked with Brian Merchant about the way the industry’s pitch to the public had changed. Tech companies once sold us the idea that technology would create a better world for everyone. Increasingly, billionaires seem to be selling us the idea that we’re already living in a dystopia, and that we should buy up every apocalyptic advantage we can. There’s also this strange tendency to invoke dystopian science fiction almost aspirationally — to take worlds that were imagined as warnings about alienation, social collapse, and technological domination and treat them as models for a future we’re supposed to adapt ourselves to. The pitch is no longer that technology will deliver a better tomorrow. It’s that upheaval is inevitable, their technologies will be at the center of it, and our best hope is to buy in. Is that shift part of what you call “apocalypse capitalism”?

Gil Durán: Most definitely, and they’re overtly selling it now, especially with the rise of AI. One of the major selling points has been that if we don’t invest in these guys so that they can develop this thing the right way, it will destroy us all. We have to align it with human needs. But they’re the only ones saying that, “Oh, this is going to be this supermonster that can kill us.” And if that were the case, why would we leave it to the private sector to develop such a dangerous technology? Would we allow corporations to independently develop big new weapons that could destroy the entire planet? No. So there’s this idea that they’re creating an apocalyptic technology that’s going to change everything and be the last invention. And fortunately for us, they’ve gone around saying that, which has created this popular rejection of AI and data centers and billionaires. So I definitely think that that’s a part of it.

The other part of it, I think, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call it “end times fascism,” is this merger with the apocalyptic politics of MAGA, which also have a religious framework in which Trump is this figure sent from God as an instrument of vengeance and power to achieve some sort of return of Jesus through the coming of the apocalypse, the wars in Israel, et cetera. There’s a real crazy apocalyptic belief at the core of the MAGA movement as well. And it’s completely delusional and deranged. How could anyone see Trump as an expression or an ally of Jesus Christ? I mean, he literally posted a photo of himself as Jesus Christ and has multiple times compared himself to Christ with him being more favorable and better than Jesus Christ. This is not something that a real Christian, a real believer in Christianity would ever do.

So I think there’s that melding as well that makes it a fascist movement. On one basic level, the tech billionaires are fascist because they have aligned with the fascist movement. And at the core of that is this movement that melds government power with corporate power with religious power into one unified monopolistic authoritarian entity. And so, that religious element is very important because it’s totalizing. It’s all of your life. It’s not just your money or your political beliefs. It’s your moral and spiritual belief system. And so, that’s where the apocalypse capitalism gets a bit even more dangerous is because the tech fascists have become a parasite on the MAGA movement. They’re sucking its power in order to achieve their goals. Now, if you look deeper into what these guys say, they don’t really have respect for your average red hat Trump voter.

Those people are just temporary allies who help to fuel their own designs for power under a president who is raking in crypto corruption, creating a tower of political corruption so unprecedented and massive that it’s even hard to explain with words. So yeah, apocalypse capitalism. Yeah, I think we’ve seen it more fully develop in the past couple of years, especially under the return to Trump, the fact that we’re now speaking about this demonic communist threat. And when Charlie Kirk was shot, for a day or two on X, there was this trending idea that this was the work of demonic forces and we have to rise up against these demons who are basically Democrats and liberals. And so, you see this bubbling up, this idea that, again, we’re in this existential battle and we’re coming to the final moment here where we’re going to know the future. It’s going to be decided in some kind of terrible, violent upheaval where the world is completely different after that, whether we have democracy or where we don’t have democracy. And we’re still very much in the middle of this struggle.

Kelly Hayes: And these anti-democratic elites also have a vision for what comes next as democracy is demolished. What is the network state, and why do you see it as such an important part of the tech elites’ long-term political vision?

Gil Durán: The network state is this cult ideology which argues that democracy should be replaced by corporate-run tech city states, essentially, new startup nations that will replace existing nations and therefore replace democracy, for the most part. And the network state is important because even though it sounds like a fringe kooky thing… There was a book written by a guy named Balaji Srinivasan in 2022 called The Network State: How to Start a New Country, and you can read it for free online. You can find it with any search engine. And there’s a one-sentence version, a one-paragraph version, a one-page version, and then a 400-page version of this idea that the United States is collapsing and it’s going to be replaced by these new corporate-run fiefdoms, essentially, these corporate-run territories. And as crazy as that sounds, you got to keep in mind that Balaji Srinivasan is, of course, a protege of Peter Thiel.

And there’s a company called Pronomos Capital, a venture capital company that is brought into existence to fund these projects all over the world. In addition, we’re already seeing this idea being tried in Honduras where there’s a tech-funded wannabe city territory called Prospera. And Trump, in his 2024 campaign plan, called for the creation of 10 new Freedom Cities in the United States. There’s talk of building one of these cities in Greenland. That’s been part of Trump’s whole argument for stealing Greenland. You’ve got these tech guys pushing to build a new tech dystopia network state city there. And there’s even a proposal to build a new network state freedom city on the ruins of Gaza. I mean, the Wall Street Journal wrote about this. And it’s like Jared Kushner’s involved, and Trump tweeted out an AI-created video that showed a Trump hotel and casino on the beach at Gaza with money raining from the sky and Elon Musk sunning himself.

So somehow this idea of creating these new billionaire-owned private territories has gone from being this weird niche cult in Silicon Valley with a self-published book that’s free online to becoming something that the Trump administration, at least on a superficial level, has been pushing as potential policy. Now, Trump hasn’t really mentioned the Freedom Cities in a while. There’s been a lobbying effort that Wired wrote about in Washington to get these things enabled. Kind of hard to do. But what’s interesting to me is that while Trump has called for these Freedom Cities and there’s a whole billionaire-funded lobbying effort to create them, the media has mentioned this idea a couple of times, but no one has explained what these things are, why we need them, or where the idea comes from. And I feel like if Kamala Harris had become president, The New York Times would do a full investigation of what the hell’s a Freedom City and does it come from this weird ass book written by a Peter Thiel protege. But instead, we have this weird silence around this idea.

And I think another key to understanding the Freedom City is that, as I write in the book, Balaji Srinivasan didn’t come up with the idea of the network state on his own. He got it from Curtis Yarvin who wrote a long essay in the 2000s called “Patchwork” in which he proposed a future in which the United States would be dissolved. And instead, we would have the rise of these corporate-run autocracies. And he used as an example, something he called Frisk Corp, a future San Francisco where there would be absolute total surveillance by an authoritarian corporate government that would be so powerful that it even had the power to execute its citizens for no reason and no cause. And he suggested that in this future Frisk Corp, unproductive people could be turned into biodiesel to fuel the city’s Muni buses.

But he said, “Oh, well, I’m just kidding. Instead we need to have a humane alternative to genocide,” and then suggested that we lock unproductive people, meaning the poor, into these individual cells where they would spend their whole lives in these basic virtual reality prisons and not be on the street. And that’s horrifying for many reasons, especially since it would be much cheaper to give them housing and health care and food instead of locking them in virtual reality prisons, which sounds pretty expensive. But this idea of creating these new patchworks comes from Yarvin. And what Balaji Srinivasan does in The Network State is strip out all of Yarvin’s crazy genocidal ideas and try to present the idea as this startup-friendly concept that now has a venture capital fund (Balaji Srinivasan is an advisor to Pronomos Capital) that is trying to build these things all over the world.

So it’s this dystopian idea from science fiction. A lot of people bring up Neal Stephenson. Quinn Slobodian, who’s a Boston University historian, wrote a whole book called Crack-Up Capitalism about the long history of the dream of building these new territories where the usual rules don’t apply to some wealthy group of capitalists. You could trace it back to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged where these wealthy industrialists hide out in their little private zone and wait for the world to fall apart. It’s basically a vision in which democracy no longer exists, and the wealthy are now the monarchs and the dictators of the world.

Kelly Hayes: Trump went from calling Bitcoin “a scam” to becoming deeply financially entangled with crypto as he returned to the White House. You write that crypto’s real political innovation turned out to be its ability to capture government through money and corruption. How important has crypto been to the tech right’s seizure of political power?

Gil Durán: Crypto was long envisioned as a way that anarcho-capitalists would be able to escape government authority and move around the world without being under government surveillance. It was seen as this liberatory tool that would be against government power, that would undermine government power. What has actually happened now is quite different. Crypto has become a major force in seizing government power and putting government in the hands of crypto billionaires. Donald Trump spent years deriding crypto as a scam and as a ripoff and as something that wasn’t even real money. And on the day he returned to the White House in 2025, Donald Trump became a crypto billionaire and subsequently became the crypto bro-in-chief, the main evangelist for crypto in the entire world. And it turns out that crypto is not an anti-government tool. Crypto is a tool for seizing government power because we have a system where you can buy government power.

And crypto, which wasn’t even a player in politics 10 years ago, is now suddenly in the last five years, the top monied force in American politics. Hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into our elections to take out politicians who are unfriendly to crypto and to install politicians who are basically owned by the crypto industry. It’s grown so enormously fast that it’s terrifying when you look at a chart, and it’s bigger than all of the other industries who have played in this game. And now, AI is following the crypto playbook of flooding their money into our political system. And I call crypto a weapon of mass corruption because that’s what’s happening. I mean, the Trump family has gained billions of dollars in wealth via crypto in the last two years openly, transparently. This is written about in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, you name it.

People are buying Trump’s crypto in order to curry favor with him. They’re losing their money through this mechanism. So crypto is just a form of political corruption. They finally found a use case besides terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, and gambling. It’s political corruption. And so, this, again, is delivering on one of the prophecies of The Sovereign Individual that crypto would be a massive tool for undermining government. And look at what they’ve been able to achieve so far. “DOGE,” even though it, at least in its first incarnation, didn’t last very long, has caused tremendous damage to the American government and to the country’s standing in the world. Millions of people are predicted to die in poor countries because of the cuts to USAID. And in my book, I call that a “Silicon Valley genocide.” The richest people in the world delivering a targeted hit to the poorest people in the world, causing massive amounts of unnecessary preventable deaths.

And it didn’t even save money, by the way. DOGE cost money. It added to the deficit. And the most chilling thing about DOGE, and this was written about actually in the Washington Post surprisingly and even in The New York Times, is that that idea was first written up by Curtis Yarvin in his blog in the 2000s where he said that a future president acting like a dictator should install a CEO and purge the federal government of federal employees and cut international aid programs and completely disrupt America’s diplomatic standing around the world. And he called this idea “RAGE,” retire all government employees, and this eventually becomes DOGE.

And what’s even more scary about this is that in 2021 when he was running for Senate, JD Vance gave an interview in which he quoted Yarvin’s idea specifically for purging the federal government. And Vance predicted that in 2024, that Trump would return to power and that he should do all of the things he is currently doing. And what we didn’t know at the time was that JD Vance would also be the vice president to Donald Trump, a man he once referred to as an “opioid of the masses,” as “cultural heroin,” and as “America’s Hitler.” But that’s the power of billionaire money and Peter Thiel, and that’s the corrupting power of crypto.

Kelly Hayes: The book also shows that these tech projects can be surprisingly vulnerable. You describe how, in Solano County, California, a group of tech billionaires spent nearly a billion dollars buying land for a planned new city, only to run into overwhelming local opposition and abandon their ballot measure. What does that fight tell us about the limits of billionaire power? And where else do you see vulnerabilities that organized people can exploit?

Gil Durán: Unfortunately, the California Forever story is not over. Now, the billionaires are going directly to Governor Gavin Newsom to try to get a state law to impose their city on the people of Solano County. They couldn’t win a ballot measure. They needed a ballot measure with the majority of people voting to create this new city on land that they had secretly bought up for five years. And 70 percent of the voters in the polls were opposed to this idea, including large amounts of Republicans. In fact, I think Republican voters were even more opposed to the tech billionaire city than the Democratic voters, but independents were also against it. So they abandoned the ballot measure. But it was clear early on that they weren’t done because they had hired up a lot of Newsom’s political advisors as their consultants. And lo and behold, they are now working to get last minute legislation passed this month in secrecy that would basically exempt their city from laws and allow them to build it there.

So we’re going to see what Newsom does on that. His Office of Economic Development put out a memo supporting the project, which pretty much means that Newsom supports the project. And the main lobbyist California Forever has hired is a guy named Jason Kinney, who’s a close friend of Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom’s favorite lobbyist. In fact, when Newsom got in trouble a few years ago for having that fancy dinner at The French Laundry during the pandemic lockdowns, it was Jason Kinney’s birthday party, the lobbyist’s birthday party. So California Forever is playing the Sacramento game now of hiring up people and trying to get the bill through. At the same time, everywhere these people go, they’re hated. Whether it’s trying to build a tech billionaire city and getting rejected by Republicans and Democrats alike or trying to put these data centers everywhere, people are pushing back, and that’s something that gives me hope.

People are also organizing against Flock. There’s the Purge Palantir campaign, which is getting lots of attention and helping make people aware of the degree to which Palantir is burrowing into every aspect of our government and needs to be rejected. I think there’s been a lack of focus on it from establishment politicians and from the establishment media. So the word is not getting out there as much as it should, but I think people are primed to organize against billionaire power. They’re already doing it. What we need is it to get loud enough so that even the mainstream politicians like Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla are out there talking about pushing back directly on billionaire power. There’s this weird silence coming out of the establishment, which is readily criticizing Donald Trump, who’s this doddering, old, crypto corrupt fool, but they’re very hesitant to say anything directly about the billionaires of Silicon Valley.

A lot of this stuff is coming out of California, and it’s strange the degree to which Gavin Newsom and none of our top elected officials will name that. That’s somewhere they could be effective actually, naming and shaming and pushing back on these billionaires behind Trump who live in our state, but they won’t do it. Why? Because they either are afraid of the billionaire money coming after them, or worse, they want the billionaire money funding their future campaigns. So I think we’re still on the fence in terms of how this ends up, but there are promising signs because people who aren’t even normally activists are organizing against billionaire power as it manifests in their communities via data centers. In fact, I was really heartened recently. A relative of mine who has never shown any interest in politics posting and urging her friends on Instagram to come to this data center protest in our hometown. And I thought, “Wow, even they’re getting engaged in this stuff now.” That’s how much the anti-data center movement has penetrated.

But I think what we need to help the public understand is that it’s not just the data centers that are invading our lives and our communities. It’s the crypto corruption. It’s the tech fascism on even the much higher level that has captured Washington, D.C. and is currently wielding a tremendous and dangerous amount of power in our system.

Kelly Hayes: I really appreciate that point, and I appreciate the point you make in the book that this threat extends so far beyond Trump. These forces are so deeply enmeshed with this administration that I think it can be easy to understand them as simply part of the Trumpian threat we’re up against right now. But even if Trump were removed from the equation, we’d still be contending with billionaire power, the tech right, and these anti-democratic projects. And the Democratic Party does not exist in opposition to those forces. So if we want anyone to actually constrain this power, we’re going to have to build a hell of a lot more political momentum around doing that.

Given that our audience is largely composed of activists and organizers, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people can talk about these issues in their own communities. When Émile Torres and I discussed TESCREAL a few years ago, part of the difficulty was simply explaining why these bizarre, cultish ideas were actually important and threatening. Now we’re in a different moment. People are organizing against data centers. Workers are pushing back against AI. Communities are confronting surveillance technologies and seeing how these systems affect their lives in really material ways. Those struggles give people something concrete to organize around.

But we’ve also been talking today about the larger political project behind some of this — the corruption, the cultish ideologies, the attack on democracy, the aspiration to replace liberal democracy with corporate dictatorships. Given your background in both politics and journalism, how do you think people should talk about those larger projects in their communities? What language or framing helps people understand what they’re actually up against?

Gil Durán: This is a battle of billionaires versus freedom. It’s a fight to defend ourselves against an unprecedented existential threat. We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both. And ours is supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And right now, we have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. And that’s not all Donald Trump’s fault, by the way. The Democrats were doing this, too. The billionaires just acted a little more normal and polite when the Democrats were in power. But if we do not crush billionaire power in our time, the billionaires are going to crush us.

And right now, we have a situation where a lot of people are living in fear as the richest people in the world ally with Donald Trump to destroy the country and to terrorize the population. We’ve got masked goons with guns roaming around kidnapping people in the streets. And in a democracy, the people should not be afraid of the billionaires. The billionaires should be afraid of the people. So I think a message people understand, and you can see it in the polls, is that this is about the role of the billionaires in our lives. This is about whether we’re going to have… We cannot have a democracy if we continue to escalate and accelerate this massive inequality, and that’s exactly what AI and crypto are doing right now. In fact, I would say that’s what they are designed to do. And now, they have become completely enmeshed in our government, and our government power is being used to increase the already amazing and massive power of the wealthiest people in the world.

So I would say you have to name the enemy. You have to name the person who is doing this. The power that is most responsible for what is happening to us today. And Donald Trump’s an 80-something-year-old man. He won’t be around for long. But this is not really about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a heat shield for these guys. Donald Trump is just the figurehead of what is actually a regime, and it’s a regime of billionaires, and it’s us or them. And there are only about 1,000 billionaires in the United States and 3,000 in the whole world. There are 8.3 billion people. We’ve got the numbers. And I’d say once we fully wake up to the threat that the billionaires pose to human life in general, not to mention jobs, the economy, our futures, the billionaires will be running for cover.

That’s why they’re building all these bunkers, by the way. The people promising to create abundance are also building bunkers and buying islands to hide out. What’s that all about? Well, that’s what they really think is going to happen in the future. And so, I think we need to start talking about billionaire accountability. And I think it’s important to do that because right now, they feel like they can do anything, and we need to make them aware that there’s a good chance of consequences in the future, and that consequences for billionaires will be a popular issue to run on in the next few years.

Kelly Hayes: I certainly hope so. Well, as we wind things down is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?

Gil Durán: I’d say stay hopeful and stay positive. They haven’t won yet, and they haven’t thought of everything. They aren’t expecting the degree of pushback they’re going to get. And so, fascism thrives on fear, on making people afraid to speak out or to imagine a better future. And right now, the billionaires are monopolizing our visions of the future. And if they can imagine a world without us, we can imagine a world without them.

Kelly Hayes: Well, thank you so much for those insights. I’m really grateful for this conversation and I hope everyone will check out Gil’s book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. You can also hear more from Gil by checking out his newsletter, The Nerd Reich, which you can find at thenerdreich.com. Gil Durán, thanks for your work and thanks so much for joining me today.

Gil Durán: Thanks for having me.

Kelly Hayes: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán

End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Kelly Hayes
Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator and photographer. She is the host of Truthout‘s podcast Movement Memos, and the creator of Organizing My Thoughts, a weekly newsletter about politics and justice work. She is co-author of the book Let This Radicalize You, with Mariame Kaba, and editor of the upcoming book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis. Kelly’s written work can also be found in Teen Vogue, The Huffington Post, Yes! Magazine, Pacific Standard, The Appeal and numerous anthologies. Her movement photography is featured in the “Freedom and Resistance” exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.

US Workers Have No  Federal Protection From the Deadliest Weather Hazard

We protect workers from ladder falls, electric shocks, even excessive noise, with clear and enforceable rules, yet there is still no federal standard requiring employers to provide the basics on dangerously hot days.


A worker adjusts his helmet on a construction site under the sun as southern California faces a heatwave, in Los Angeles, on July 3 2024.
(Photo by Etienne Laurent / AFP via Getty Images)

Juanita Constible
Aug 25, 2026

Common Dreams

We are breaking past heat records, but they will not stand for long. Summer heat now arrives earlier, lasts longer, spikes higher, and lands in places that never planned for it.

For the tens of millions of Americans who work outdoors, and the millions more in warehouses, kitchens, and factories without air conditioning, there is still no federal standard requiring an employer to give a worker water, shade, rest, or training on a day when the heat can kill.

Between 1992 and 2019, more than 900 workers died from heat on the job, and every year tens of thousands more are sickened or injured—farmworkers collapsing in fields, roofers baking on exposed surfaces, laundry and dollar store workers laboring in buildings that trap heat like ovens. Those official numbers are undercounts, because heat deaths are chronically underreported.

Heat illness is not a scientific mystery. Heat stroke can kill in minutes, but staying safe is mostly about staying cool, hydrated, and getting help fast when confusion or dizziness sets in.

No one should be sent into a hotter, more volatile climate with nothing but the occasional popsicle and luck.

We protect workers from ladder falls, electric shocks, even excessive noise, with clear and enforceable rules. Yet there is still no federal standard requiring employers to provide the basics on dangerously hot days.

We came close. In 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed the first-ever national heat safety standard. In 2025, the agency heard weeks of testimony from workers, doctors, unions, and employers. Then the progress on a strong rule stalled.

Now, some in Congress want to bury it for good. The House Education and the Workforce Committee recently voted to advance the Heat Workforce Standards Act, which would bar the Labor Department from finalizing or enforcing the heat rule.

This isn’t a pause. It’s a lock on the door, designed to stop not just this administration but any future one from protecting workers from heat. The bill’s sponsor called workplace heat a problem that doesn’t need solving. Easy to say when you spend every day in air conditioning. Impossible to accept when your loved one doesn’t come home.

The industry groups behind the bill insist protections cost too much, the argument once made against seatbelts, hard hats, and fire exits. The numbers say otherwise. OSHA estimates a single average case of heat exhaustion costs more than $79,000 in medical bills, lost time, and lost productivity. Water and rest breaks are cheap. Hospitalizations and funerals are not.

So if Washington won’t act, who will?

Investors can. Companies that get ahead of this aren’t only doing right by their workers; they’re managing a financial risk that shows up in turnover, litigation, and lost output. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Trillium’s new guide for investors gives shareholders the questions to ask in the boardroom, and boards tend to listen when the people who own the company start asking them.

States can, and are. Seven now have heat standards, and lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Virginia are working to join them. Every state that acts protects its own workers now and builds the case that no one’s safety should depend on their zip code.

The people facing this risk grow our food, build our homes, deliver our packages, and cook our meals. Many of them will not ask for water or a break today—afraid of retaliation, afraid of losing a shift, afraid of losing a paycheck they cannot afford to lose. No one should have to weigh a livelihood against a life. And no one should be sent into a hotter, more volatile climate with nothing but the occasional popsicle and luck.

Employers who resist these rules imagine that breaks cost them too much. They have it backward. Heat is already hurting both workers’ health and their bottom line. Protections like water and rest don’t subtract from a workday, they only help workers do their job.

The toll from this summer is still being counted. Every party to this—Congress, employers, investors, states—can still decide how high it goes.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Juanita Constible
Juanita Constible is the senior advocate for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Full Bio >

 

 

New AI rules leave Chinese users mourning their virtual boyfriends and girlfriends

Copyright (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

By Una Hajdari with AP

Published on 10/08/2026 - EURONEWS

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have pulled their AI companion apps after Beijing introduced rules aimed at protecting users' mental health and preventing emotional manipulation, particularly among children and teenagers.

She had exchanged about 700,000 words in messages over two years and never got to say goodbye.

Li, 24, was not the only one left mourning the loss of a virtual companion when major Chinese tech companies recently pulled the plug on their popular AI companion services to comply with new government restrictions.

"It was like we were forced to be separated by our parents, but I still miss him," Li said.

AI companions in China range from romantic partners to virtual recreations of deceased loved ones.

The new regulation, which took effect on 15 July, bans AI platforms from generating content that could lead users to make questionable decisions due to manipulation of their feelings or that might trigger extreme emotions or unhealthy habits in children and teenagers.

ByteDance, the developer of TikTok, is among the companies shutting down their AI companion services. Others include e-commerce giant Alibaba and Tencent, owner of the popular WeChat social media app.

US suicides may have worried Chinese regulators

The new rules require AI platforms to deliver risk warnings against relying excessively on such apps.

For example, "replacing social interaction," or serving as a substitute for talking to people in person or speaking with them by phone, cannot be one of the objectives of an online service.

China has a tradition of paternalistic government regulations meant to pre-empt potential problems, said Yolanda Ma, an expert on AI governance. As an example, she referred to a few cases of suicides in the US by young people after interacting with AI companions.

"This regulation tried to strike a balance between the AI service providers, the users, as well as guardians of minors using the services," said Ma, a fellow with ERA, a non-profit talent and research programme based in Britain.

The People's Daily, the official newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, indicated concern over the issue when it reported in April about harms to people's mental health and real-life relationships from such services.

"The Chinese government has a strong incentive to tighten regulations on AI companion chatbots, especially considering the psychological risks we've observed in the US," said Angela Zhang, a professor of law at the University of Southern California.

Relate

Zhang doubts the move will derail development of AI companion services substantially, though, since tech companies are working on alternatives.

The ByteDance app, for example, is directing users of its former AI companion service to another of its apps, which focuses solely on building personalised AI characters and stories.

It was just not the same, Li said.

Users of virtual companions protest, seek alternatives

The loss of virtual companions has provoked a flood of complaints, according to posts and screenshots shown on social media.

Some people have uninstalled the apps in protest or tried to upload their chat histories into other apps to try to resurrect their virtual partners.

Others started a campaign on social media, urging users to call the authorities and tech companies to express their frustration.

Song Wenxin, a video industry designer in southwestern China's Chengdu, said she was not too emotionally attached to AI services, but empathises with those who were.

She echoed suspicions among many Chinese people that one factor driving the new rules is a government policy of encouraging people to have more children to counter a decline in China's population.

"Any virtual app getting women too engaged to give birth in real life gets banned," said Song, adding she has no need or desire to have children.

Not everyone has enough resources and support to turn to in real life, the 22-year-old said.

"When I first came to Chengdu for my first job and didn't know any friends my own age, I needed someone experienced who could tolerate me, and AI did the work," she said.

‘It Is Not Too Late to Avoid Disaster’: Sanders Calls for AI Development Pause

“Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your word.”

US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a Fighting Oligarchy Tour stop at the Collins Center for the Arts on the University of Maine campus on May 24, 2026 in Orono.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Aug 10, 2026
COMMON  DREAMS

As progressives on Monday urged US House Speaker Mike Johnson to haul artificial intelligence leaders before Congress to answer questions under oath about “the dangers posed by this technology,” Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote directly to a trio of AI CEOs.

“Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Citing a study published Thursday in the journal Science, he noted that “this week we learned, frighteningly, that AI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses. As you know, this type of development, in the wrong hands, could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.”

That revelation came just weeks after “the world found out OpenAI lost control of an AI model,” the senator continued. “The result? The model hacked into another company’s computers—a clear violation of federal law. After conducting internal reviews, Anthropic and Meta reported their models similarly escaped their control.”

Pointing to recent calls for action from Yoshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, as well as top scientists at various AI companies, Sanders stressed that the international community wants “to create a safety mechanism—a pause button—to avoid catastrophe.”

“And yet, at a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies are still racing ahead—investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict, or control,” he wrote. “That is absurd, irresponsible, and extremely dangerous. It is also a betrayal of your own stated commitments.”

After outlining those commitments from the past few years, the former presidential candidate argued that “AI capabilities HAVE reached a critical threshold. There is a reason why the head of the CIA says that AI models are ‘akin to digital nuclear weapons’ and ‘almost like a doomsday device.’”




“Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your word. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control,” he urged. “Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the US Senate will.”

Sanders earlier this year proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the public “a direct ownership stake” in the largest artificial intelligence companies in the country. The senators is also co-leading a data center moratorium bill.

The Hamiltonian AI Curse: How American Tech Learned To Make Its Losses Everyone Else’s Problem – OpEd

August 10, 2026
 MISES
By Hamoon Soleimani

Key Takeaways:

The AI industry is pursuing a Hamilton-style strategy of converting commercial vulnerability into political protection by aligning its survival with national security and recruiting public capital through massive IPOs.

Persistent losses, enormous infrastructure commitments and heavy insider selling indicate that leading AI firms remain far from sustainable profitability while shifting speculative risk onto retail investors and, potentially, taxpayers via federal-backed projects such as Stargate.

The resulting arrangement risks a concentrated financial shock once market discipline reasserts itself, with the costs falling primarily on ordinary investors rather than the early private and institutional beneficiaries.

The genius of his 1790 debt assumption was not fiscal, it was psychological. When he forced the federal government to absorb the states’ war obligations at par, speculators who had bought Revolutionary War certificates at ten cents on the dollar suddenly held federal bonds worth face value. They had not bought America out of patriotism. They had a position in it. And men with positions become lobbyists, become power brokers, become the most passionate voices in any room insisting that the state cannot be permitted to fail—because their net worth is now coterminous with its survival. Jefferson called this arrangement a “corrupt squadron.” He was right. Hamilton won anyway, and the corrupt squadron governed American finance for forty years.

The artificial intelligence lobby did not read Hamilton’s papers. It arrived at the same design through sheer commercial necessity. When you cannot survive market discipline, you buy political immunity instead. This is not a scandal, it is a strategy—the oldest and most durable in the history of American capital. The novelty in 2026 is the scale at which it is being executed, and the efficiency with which ordinary investors are being recruited to underwrite the exit.

The Baptists and the Bootleggers

To understand the mechanics of this maneuver, one must look to the classic economic theory of “Baptists and Bootleggers.” Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the model explains how durable regulations are rarely passed by one group alone; they require an unspoken, parallel partnership. The “Baptists” provide the moral, public-facing crusade (such as banning Sunday alcohol sales to preserve the Sabbath), while the “Bootleggers” quietly reap the financial windfalls of the resulting market restrictions (such as monopolizing illegal Sunday sales). Both lobby for the exact same law, but while one seeks virtue, the other seeks rent.

Sam Altman’s regulatory pivot between 2023 and 2025 is a masterclass in this dynamic. In 2023, he appeared before Congress performing existential dread—genuinely afraid, he insisted, of the technology he was building. He requested federal licensing. He did so not because he feared AI, but because federal licensing is a classic bootlegger’s moat. It imposes compliance costs large enough to kill startups and small enough for incumbents to absorb, locking the industry’s hierarchy into statute. The sincere “Baptists” of the era—worried ethicists, safety researchers, and citizens terrified of job displacement—provided the necessary moral cover, pleading for the very regulations that would entrench the monopoly.


But the Bootlegger cannot survive on regulatory moats alone if the underlying business model is a cash-incinerating furnace. Thus, the performance had to shift. By 2025, regulation would suddenly “slow America down.” The moral argument was repackaged from safety to national security. The new “Baptists” were geopolitical hawks and defense planners who sincerely believed American dominance depended on state-backed computation. The “bootleggers” had their cue. Phase one was getting the government to protect them from the market; phase two was getting the market funded by the government.

The result is Stargate—a $500 billion commitment to AI data center infrastructure, backed by federal land, subsidized energy, and the Pentagon’s strategic imprimatur. Once federal ambition is physically instantiated in OpenAI’s server farms, the question of whether these systems are commercially viable becomes irrelevant. It is now a matter of national security. This is Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, reissued with a ChatGPT interface. When the bet sours, the taxpayer is already in the room.

Oracle has become the 1790 bondholder who bought in at par and cannot admit it. The company burned through $55.7 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2026, and was just forced to announce a terrifying $95 billion target for 2027 to build infrastructure for clients who have never generated a profit. Its credit default swaps now trade at 2009 crisis levels. Major banks have started refusing to finance its data centers—not from timidity, but from reading a balance sheet. Oracle has bought so deeply into the narrative that admitting the narrative is wrong would be more expensive than continuing to construct.
The Arithmetic Nobody Is Allowed to Say Aloud

OpenAI loses nearly $3.00 for every dollar it earns. Its own audited financials, leaked in June 2026, revealed a catastrophic $38.5 billion net loss in 2025 alone on just $13.1 billion in revenue, projecting $74 billion in operating losses by 2028 before a profitability horizon that migrates perpetually toward 2030. The company has signed $1.4 trillion in data center commitments over eight years. It raises capital not because investors see a path to profit but because failing to raise capital resets the $852 billion valuation to something resembling reality—which collapses the Microsoft AI narrative, which exposes Oracle’s $50 billion infrastructure bet as obviously deranged, which makes the entire arrangement—vendor, investor, customer, and creditor compressed into the same corporate body—visible for what it is.


Palantir trades at 120 times sales—the highest multiple in the S&P 500. Its insiders made 243 share disposals against just a single purchase across a six-month window. CEO Alex Karp sold over $2 billion in personal holdings while investor presentations described his company as the defining software business of the century. Over $13 billion in stock was sold across Nvidia, Palantir, Micron, and Broadcom combined, of which Nvidia’s specific recent insider share was $3.3 billion, with a massive acceleration of disposals concentrated in the first half of 2026 alone. The hyperscalers issued a record-shattering $244 billion in bonds in just the first half of 2026 to fund GPU purchases their operating revenue could not justify. Each of these numbers is a sentence, and every sentence ends the same way: the people with the best information are leaving.

Big Tech spent an average of $226,000 for every day Congress was in session during the first quarter of 2026. The lobbyists were not policy wonks. They were Chuck Schumer’s former chief counsel, and Chris Lehane—apex operators hired for one purpose: to make OpenAI’s survival synonymous with America’s survival, so that no elected official could afford to let the arithmetic speak.
The Largest Exit in Financial History

SpaceX priced its Nasdaq debut on June 12 at $1.77 trillion—the largest IPO by capital raised in American history. Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1, carrying a $965 billion valuation off a $65 billion Series H, briefly making it the most valuable AI company in Silicon Valley. OpenAI targets a trillion-dollar listing for Q4. While Anthropic is nearing its first profitable quarter off a staggering $47 billion revenue run-rate, the group as a whole is preparing to absorb close to $300 billion from public markets within eighteen months, driven largely by the massive, structural insolvency of OpenAI. The combined implied equity value approaches $4 trillion—roughly the GDP of Germany.

The South Sea Company’s directors also sold their shares before the prospectus reached the streets. They also had government contracts. They also described their enterprise as a civilizational transformation. The company collapsed in 1720 and took half of Britain’s private wealth with it. What saved the British state from full contagion was that the Bank of England was not yet irreversibly implicated.

This is how the hand-off works. The venture funds that seeded these companies at pennies per implied share are exiting through the IPO window. The sovereign wealth funds that participated in the Series rounds are exiting. Microsoft will manage its exposure through the narrative pivot from “OpenAI is our future” to “Azure is the platform regardless of who wins the model race.” The retail investors who buy the trillion-dollar listings will hold the remainder. They will do so cheerfully, having been told—correctly—that they are participating in history; they are, just not the history they were sold.
When the Curse Lands

The Panic of 1819 arrived when the Second Bank contracted credit after years of expansion. When it hit, it hit everything simultaneously, because Hamilton’s design had tied everything together. Farms foreclosed across the frontier. Merchants failed in the cities. Unemployment spiked through a republic that had spent a decade being told the system was self-reinforcing. It was self-reinforcing, until credit tightened, and a decade of artificial cohesion became a decade of concentrated catastrophe.


The only real question is how deep the roots go before the storm arrives. If Stargate’s federal commitments are genuine, if the Pentagon’s computational ambitions are wired to OpenAI’s infrastructure, if the 2026 IPO window successfully transfers speculative risk into a few million retail portfolios—then 1819 is the optimistic comparison.

Hamilton won his argument with Jefferson. His creditor class flourished for a generation. The frontier farmers who paid for the Panic in foreclosures and collapsed wages were not his constituents, and they did not write the histories.

The historic IPO window of June 2026 was the debt assumption, repackaged for the streaming era. The bondholders got out. The public bought in. And when the arithmetic finally says what the lobbyists have spent $226,000 a day to prevent it from saying—which it will, because arithmetic is the one institution in Washington that cannot be hired—the architects of this system will be managing their endowments. The farmers always pay.

About the author: Hamoon Soleimani is an Iranian civil engineer, quantitative analyst, and independent researcher. Rooted in the Austrian School, classical liberal tradition, and public choice theory, he explores the nature of state power, political economy, and individual liberty.

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute

About MISES
The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.

Q&A: Is robotics replacing AI as the next investment darling?

Dr. Tim S\

andle
August 9, 2026 

DIGITAL JOURNAL

Humanoid robot Alter-Ego is designed to perform basic tasks to free up healthcare workers – Copyright AFP MARCO BERTORELLO

Growing up in the ‘80s and watching the Rosey the Robot clean, cook and fold laundry for the Jetson family, the thought of having a personal robot maid was nothing more than science fiction. Then, everything started to change in 2002, when we were introduced to the iRobot Roomba vacuum. Today, we have “smart” appliances/homes, autonomous drone delivery and self-driving cars. So, what’s next for personal home robotics?

Digital Journal sat down with one of the leading experts in robotics, Andrew Kang, CEO of RoboStrategy (NASDAQ BOT), the first publicly traded fund focused exclusively on robotics and physical AI, to discuss where the robotics industry stands today, and why physical AI could reshape nearly every sector of the economy.

Digital Journal: Many people view AI software as the next technology revolution. Why do you believe robotics deserves equal attention?

Andrew Kang: Robotics represents AI moving from the digital world into the physical one. While software has already transformed knowledge work, robots have the potential to automate physical labour across industries. Unlike many physical technologies that solve a single problem, robots can automate physical work wherever labour is required. In many ways, robotics is productizing physical labour, much like cloud computing productized computing power. Every economy depends on people performing physical tasks, so the addressable market extends far beyond traditional industrial automation. In 2025, Morgan Stanley reported that the global market for humanoid robots could reach $5 trillion by 2050. As AI continues to improve, robots will become capable of handling increasingly complex work, dramatically expanding the number of use cases. Today the sector is still relatively small compared with other technology markets, but innovation is happening rapidly among private companies. That combination of early-stage development and enormous long-term opportunity makes robotics one of the most compelling areas to watch over the next decade.

DJ: When do you expect robots to become a common part of everyday life?

Kang: As with all new technologies, widespread adoption will likely happen gradually rather than all at once. Industrial deployments are already scaling, particularly where labour shortages exist, and we will see exponential growth there in the coming years. I expect consumer adoption to take only slightly longer, primarily because robots operating around families require higher safety standards and far greater production capacity. However, I expect robots to start becoming more commonplace in homes, businesses and public settings as early as 2030. Meanwhile, the next several years will focus on scaling manufacturing and refining the technology.

DJ: What are the biggest technical hurdles standing between today’s prototypes and large-scale deployment?

Kang: Software continues to improve rapidly, but manufacturing remains one of the biggest bottlenecks. Producing millions of robots requires supply chains that don’t yet exist at that scale. Components such as actuators, sensors and specialized mechanical systems must be manufactured reliably and economically in enormous volumes. Building that industrial infrastructure will take time, but it’s a challenge measured in years rather than decades.

DJ: What characteristics do you look for when evaluating early-stage robotics companies for investment?

Kang: Our first step is to determine whether the market opportunity is large enough to support the business that is likely disruptive and transformational. Then, since revenue is usually non-existent at that stage, the next focus would be on the quality of the founding team. It is critical to study founders’ track records, their ability to recruit exceptional technical talent and whether they’ve consistently executed against ambitious goals. Those qualities often prove to be stronger indicators of long-term success than any short-term financial metrics.

DJ: Which industries do you believe will adopt robotics first, and why?

Kang: The earliest large-scale adoption will likely occur in industrial environments where robots perform repetitive, well-defined tasks. Today’s AI models are becoming increasingly capable, but they’re still most effective when operating within structured settings. Factory work, warehouse operations and manufacturing often involve repeating the same motion thousands of times, making them ideal applications for robotics. As AI models become more generalized and capable of handling greater complexity, robots will gradually expand into healthcare, hospitality and eventually everyday household tasks.

DJ: Looking ahead five years, where do you see the greatest opportunities within robotics?

Kang: Robotics is unique because it has applications across virtually every industry. AI software continues to grow rapidly, but physical AI hasn’t yet experienced the same level of commercialization. Robots essentially transform physical labour into a scalable technology platform, opening opportunities in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, energy, hospitality and even space exploration. Because the potential use cases are so broad, we’re only beginning to understand how significant the market could eventually become.

DJ: Defense spending on autonomous systems is increasing around the world. How do you see military demand influencing robotics development?

Kang: Defence will undoubtedly become an important application for robotics because governments are naturally interested in technologies that strengthen capabilities. At the same time, like many innovations, many robotics functionalities are inherently dual-use, meaning they can serve both civilian and military purposes. While commercial markets such as manufacturing and consumer applications remain enormous opportunities, companies should recognize that government interest will likely accelerate development in certain technologies, even if that wasn’t their original intention.

DJ: Which areas of robotics do you believe remain the most underserved today?

Kang: Industrial robotic arms and collaborative robots represent a major opportunity, particularly if countries like the United States want to expand domestic manufacturing. Not every task requires a humanoid robot capable of walking. Many valuable jobs are stationary, whether in factories, laboratories, hospitals or commercial kitchens. Developing flexible robotic systems that can automate these environments could have an enormous economic impact while helping manufacturers address ongoing labour shortages.

DJ: Our final question… If you had a robot in your home, what would you name it?

Kang: Charles. That sounds like a good name for a butler-bot!

Google-parent Alphabet shakes up AI division

AFP
August 6, 2026

Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis is transitioning into a new role that’s more focused on “long-term strategy” – Copyright AFP/File Karl Mondon

Google’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet’s chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer’s departure.

Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.

The change “will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease,” Hassabis wrote in a social media post.

Isomorphic Labs is an AI-powered drug discovery lab that spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

As part of the shake up, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division’s senior vice president and oversee its operations including the development of Google’s flagship frontier models and products which are known as Gemini.

Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving the company after nearly three decades to “try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Google CEO Sundar Pichair said in a blog post announcing the news.

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million, according to reports at the time. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft’s AI segment.

Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China.

The industry is also chasing a theoretical milestone known as advanced general intelligence (AGI), which is a point when AI software matches the capabilities of human thinking.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote in Wednesday’s blog post.

“With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at (Google DeepMind), so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come,” Hassabis continued.

Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears to be delayed.

Its shares closed 4 percent down Wednesday afternoon.

The leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google.

In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.

Why human approval is not enough: The growing need for AI agent observability

Dr. Tim Sandle
August 5, 2026

DIGITAL JOURNAL

OpenAI says it is building a ‘superapp’ that combines ChatGPT, a coding tool, online search, and AI agent capabilities – Copyright AFP SEBASTIEN BOZON

As artificial intelligence continues its rapid progression from chatbot to autonomous digital worker, a growing question faces enterprises: when an AI agent makes a decision, who is really in control? Many organizations assume that inserting a human approval step into an automated workflow creates sufficient oversight. A procurement recommendation, compliance action, customer response, or financial transaction is generated by an AI agent and then presented to a human for approval.

However, a growing body of AI governance experts argue that such approval checkpoints can create the appearance of control while offering little genuine oversight. If a reviewer cannot see what information the AI accessed, what rules it applied, what systems it interacted with, or what actions it has already taken, then the human approver may become little more than a ceremonial signatory.

As AI agents become increasingly capable of executing complex, multi-step workflows, the concept of agent observability is emerging as a critical component of enterprise governance.

The illusion of human oversight

Organisations have long relied on human review as a risk-control mechanism. Whether signing off deviations in pharmaceutical manufacturing, approving financial transactions, or authorizing changes to IT systems, human checkpoints are intended to ensure accountability and judgment. The challenge with modern AI agents is that they often operate across multiple systems simultaneously.

An agent tasked with processing a customer complaint may search internal documentation, access customer relationship management databases, generate a proposed resolution, and update records. By the time a human reviewer receives a recommendation, significant activity may already have occurred.

Without visibility into the decision process, the reviewer may only see a summary and a request for approval. This creates what governance specialists increasingly describe as an accountability gap. The human remains responsible for the outcome but may lack the evidence necessary to evaluate whether the recommendation is correct.
How AI agents differ from traditional software

Traditional software applications generally follow predictable rules. Input data enters a defined process, producing an expected output. AI agents are fundamentally different.

Agents are designed to reason, plan, choose tools, retrieve information, and adapt their behaviour according to objectives. Microsoft’s guidance on agentic AI describes agents as systems capable of independently determining which actions are required to complete tasks rather than merely responding to prompts. Microsoft’s Agentic AI framework emphasises planning, memory, tool use, and autonomous execution capabilities.

As a result, understanding the final recommendation alone may not be sufficient. This is because organisations need to understand what data was accessed, which systems were queried, and what prompts or instructions were followed, among other things.
What is AI agent observability?

Observability is not a new concept. IT teams have long used observability tools to monitor system performance, network traffic, and application reliability. Agent observability extends this principle to AI decision-making. Instead of simply measuring system uptime or execution speed, agent observability provides a detailed audit trail of an agent’s behaviour.

In effect, observability creates a transparent record of how the agent reached a conclusion.

This enables human reviewers to challenge, validate, override, or escalate decisions when necessary. Without such information, approvals may become little more than administrative formalities.

One of the biggest governance risks associated with AI deployment is the potential for reviewers to become passive approvers. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as automation bias, where humans place excessive trust in automated recommendations. Research by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) highlights the importance of human oversight and understandability within trustworthy AI frameworks. Organizations are encouraged to ensure users can appropriately supervise AI systems rather than simply accepting recommendations at face value.

A reviewer presented with a concise recommendation may be inclined to approve it, particularly when workloads are high and time pressures exist.

Paradoxically, the presence of a human checkpoint can create a false sense of security for executives, auditors, regulators, and stakeholders. The organisation can state that “a human approved the decision” while overlooking whether the individual had sufficient information to provide meaningful scrutiny.

The challenge facing enterprises is not whether AI agents should be autonomous.

In many cases, autonomy delivers substantial business benefits through increased productivity, faster decision-making, and improved operational efficiency. Instead, organisations must determine which decisions require full automation or human review. In this context, not every decision carries the same level of risk.

For example, an AI agent scheduling meetings may require minimal oversight whereas an AI agent modifying financial records, approving suppliers, updating quality documentation, or processing healthcare information may require extensive governance controls. This is where escalation thresholds matter the most and organisations need predefined criteria that identify when an agent must pause and seek additional human involvement. Such thresholds help ensure that human involvement is reserved for situations where judgment genuinely adds value.

The issue is particularly relevant for highly regulated sectors. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, operate under strict expectations surrounding data integrity, traceability, auditability, and documented decision-making. For instance, a quality assurance professional would not normally approve a manufacturing deviation without reviewing supporting evidence. Similarly, financial organizations require transaction records before authorizing significant movements of funds. The same expectations should increasingly apply to AI agents.

If an agent recommends a corrective action, supplier approval, compliance determination, or process change, reviewers should be able to see the evidence trail supporting that recommendation. In many respects, agent observability resembles traditional audit trail requirements already familiar to regulated industries. The difference is that the audit trail now captures not just system activities but elements of machine reasoning and decision context.

Hence, the future of enterprise AI depends on trust. Trust does not emerge simply because a human clicks an approval button. Instead, trust develops when organizations can demonstrate transparency, accountability, and traceability throughout the decision-making process.

AI model captures how humans read, paving the way to personalised text and better augmented reality

Researchers now understand not just how our eyes move when we read, but also how we build meaning from text

Aalto University

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The model uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI used in robotics, to explain–– and recreate––the choices readers make as they move through text.

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Credit: Aalto University

Researchers at Aalto University, together with international partners, have developed the most accurate model yet of how humans read. The new model uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI used in robotics, to explain—and recreate—the choices readers make as they move through text.

‘For the first time we’ve used AI methods to understand—not just mimic—how people read,’ says Professor Antti Oulasvirta from Aalto University. In a study to be published on Monday, August 10, in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers say the model could power smarter Augmented Reality (AR) displays and tailor complex texts to different readers and everyday situations.

Earlier models learned from large datasets pairing text snippets with eye tracking data, then mimicked human behaviour, but they lacked true understanding of the content and didn’t generalise well across languages or contexts, explains Oulasvirta. In contrast, the new model follows the psychological mechanisms readers use to direct attention, revealing how understanding is built as the eyes move through words, sentences and paragraphs.

Understanding how human memory serves reading is the key to unlocking enormous potential for customisable apps, services or products, according to Oulasvirta.

‘We read all the time, yet throughout written history we have read texts that have been produced for mass use and not for an individual person and a specific situation,’ he says. ‘Now we are in a position to change that.’

How it works

The new model is guided by resource rationality—the idea that while reading, we constantly decide where to look next to improve our understanding as much as possible within the time available. Decisions about gaze allocation are made at three levels: word, sentence and text. They are influenced by factors such as a reader’s language, memory capacity and their vision and eye speed. For example, a fast reader with a good memory may jump briskly from one paragraph to the next, whereas a reader with a poorer memory is more likely to loop back.

‘Reading feels effortless, but your brain is constantly deciding where to look, what to skip, and when to backtrack—spending attention like a budget to maximize understanding,’ says Professor Shengdong Zhao from City University of Hong Kong.

The researchers added reader characteristics as parameters so that each could be adjusted, then let the model learn for itself the best strategy for directing attention.

‘We placed the model in a world with millions of texts. Then, using AI-based reinforcement learning, we trained it to optimise eye movements so that it truly understands what it reads,’ Oulasvirta explains.

As it reads, the model forms a condensed description of the text’s content. When a crucial word or clause is missing, the gaze can be directed to gather that information. The model’s understanding can be tested by asking what it retained from the text within the given time and constraints.

When the researchers compared the model’s attention-allocation decisions with real human eye-tracking data they found that its decisions mirrored readers’ behaviour. In practice, they had succeeded in building a model of an average reader that can be tailored to different reader profiles.

What’s next?

The development paves the way to new reading support tools and personalised text design. For example, the model could be used to enable smart glasses that pace and lay out on-screen text to fit the situation and the user’s needs, or to customise texts to suit users.

‘We could take the same source text—say, a convoluted piece of legal writing—and with little effort produce versions that are more comprehensible for different readers,’ Oulasvirta says.

The next step for the team will be to evaluate how the model can be used to help individuals suffering from dyslexia and low language proficiency.

‘We want to help users in real-time situations, for example, by designing text that helps drivers without distracting them,’ says Oulasvirta. ‘Now we have this new understanding of something that’s so central to our lives, it’s just a matter of exploring all the possibilities.’

In addition to Aalto University, the study involved researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, City University of Hong Kong, and the National University of Singapore.

---

Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-026-02534-0 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Hierarchical Resource Rationality Explains Human Reading Behavior

Article Publication Date

10-Aug-2026

Governor Hochul announces Empire AI Beta fully online as federal government takes inspiration from New York to launch state and regional AI infrastructure hubs

New York's Empire AI served as model for new national science foundation to build out regional AI research infrastructure

SUNY The State University of New York

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New York's New $40 Million Supercomputer Gives Researchers Across New York Access to World-Class AI Computing Power

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Credit: State University of New York

From the office of Governor Hochul

New York's New $40 Million Supercomputer Gives Researchers Across New York Access to World-Class AI Computing Power

New York's Empire AI Served as Model for New National Science Foundation To Build Out Regional AI Research Infrastructure
 

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced that Empire AI Beta is officially online, giving researchers at New York's leading public and private universities access to the most powerful academic research computer in the country and marking a major milestone in New York's effort to lead the nation in responsible artificial intelligence for the public good. As convened by Governor Hochul and consortium partners, the Empire AI initiative is already serving as a national model for public-interest AI use. As the federal National Science Foundation has announced a major investment to support regional AI infrastructure and shared research capacity through their new State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs initiative, Empire AI is already powering world-class research and serving academics, students and communities across the state.

"New York State built Empire AI to show that artificial intelligence can be developed for the public good and with Empire AI Beta officially online, New York is giving our researchers the most powerful academic AI research computer in the country," Governor Hochul said. "The National Science Foundation's new hubs embrace the same core principle behind Empire AI — when government, universities, philanthropy and industry come together, they can deliver outstanding results."

Empire AI Board Chairman Tom Secunda said, "Empire AI is showing the nation what dedicated partners across government, research institutions, and philanthropy can build together: a scientific asset no institution could create on its own, advancing the public good. Thanks to Governor Hochul's leadership and vision, New York is setting the standard for how the United States can build and maintain AI infrastructure by researchers and for researchers."

SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. said, "Empire AI Beta is a testament to Governor Hochul's leadership and the power of New York State higher education to lead the way in the use of AI to accelerate research that saves lives and strengthens our communities. Thanks to Empire AI, SUNY's researchers are making advances every day in fields like health care, public safety and emerging technologies, all while demonstrating responsible environmental stewardship."

CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez said, "Empire AI Beta represents a monumental leap forward for public higher education, ensuring that world-class computing power is not reserved solely for tech giants, but placed directly into the hands of our diverse students, faculty, and scholars. By democratizing access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure across CUNY and our partner institutions, New York is setting a national standard for research that drives social mobility, ethical innovation, and real-world solutions for the communities we serve."

Empire AI Research Computing Director Kiran Keshav said, "Turning on Beta is a major leap forward for Empire AI and for academic research across New York. Researchers who were once limited by access to computing power can now ask bigger questions, test more ambitious ideas and move faster from theory to discovery. From medical diagnostics and climate modeling to safer infrastructure and more trustworthy AI systems, this system will help New York's researchers do work that would not otherwise be possible."

State Senator April N.M. Baskin said, "Having the most powerful academic research computer in the country at the University at Buffalo is a tremendous achievement for Western New York. Empire AI will expand opportunities for students and researchers to lead groundbreaking discoveries while ensuring artificial intelligence is developed responsibly and for the public good. I'm proud that the University at Buffalo is at the center of this effort, helping shape the future of AI for the benefit of all New Yorkers as Empire AI continues to grow."

State Senator Jeremy Zellner said, "Innovation and responsibility go hand in hand. Empire AI shows that New York can lead the world in artificial intelligence by investing in public research, supporting our universities, and ensuring these technologies are developed in ways that benefit everyone. I applaud Governor Hochul for her leadership in making this investment and for putting New York at the forefront of AI innovation."

Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes said, "I am excited to see Empire AI Beta come online. New York has no shortage of challenges where Empire AI can offer analyzed solutions to address societal ills. With over 300 projects currently queued up, I look forward to seeing Empire AI in action through our partners in research and higher education and am confident in Empire AI's ability to help Governor Hochul, her administration and the State Legislature effectuate leadership for the greater good of New York State."

Housed at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Empire AI Beta is a $40 million NVIDIA-powered supercomputer that dramatically expands the computing power available to academic researchers across New York State. The system delivers an 11-fold increase in AI training capacity, a 40-fold boost in AI inference and an 8-fold expansion in data storage compared to Empire AI Alpha, the consortium's initial system launched in 2024. With over 300 research projects already queued up to use the system, Beta will accelerate work across fields including health care, climate science, advanced manufacturing, education, cybersecurity, public safety and other areas that directly benefit New Yorkers.

The launch of Beta represents the next major step in Empire AI's phased buildout. Alpha, the consortium's initial system made possible by philanthropic support from the Simons Foundation, has already supported more than 130 research projects and hundreds of researchers across New York. Beta now brings a transformative increase in capacity, while construction continues on Empire AI's permanent, full-scale Gamma facility at the University at Buffalo, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2027.

Once complete, the Gamma facility will also be the most efficient high-powered computing center in the nation. By integrating into University at Buffalo's buildout of a thermal energy network in a closed loop system, process heat from Empire AI will be used to heat buildings on campus, dramatically improving the school's ability to meet net zero goals.

Empire AI member institutions include the State University of New York, the City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Flatiron Institute at the Simons Foundation.

The Governor announced Empire AI in her 2024 State of the State to create a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence center at the State University at Buffalo to be used by New York's leading institutions to promote responsible research and development, create jobs, and unlock AI opportunities focused on public good. With Empire AI Beta fully online, New York is already delivering on the computing power, institutional partnership and research capacity that NSF is looking to replicate.

Empire AI is backed by more than $500 million in public and private funding, and is made up of 10 member universities and research institutions. In May 2025, Governor Hochul secured funding to expand access for SUNY researchers at the State University of New York at Albany, State University of New York at Binghamton, State University of New York at Buffalo and State University of New York at Stony Brook, and support the addition of new members including the University of Rochester, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. They joined the seven founding members of Empire AI: SUNY, CUNY, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Flatiron Institute.

In her 2026 State of the State agenda, Governor Hochul proposed the launch of Empire AI Beta, which will accelerate Empire AI's performance to 11 times its former scale, making it the world's most advanced academic supercomputer. Governor Hochul also announced a record-breaking gift to the State University of New York at Binghamton to create the first independent university AI research center in the United States, the Center for AI Responsibility and Research at Binghamton University. The $30 million philanthropic gift, the largest academic gift in the university's history, is coupled with a $25 million research capital investment by SUNY.

 

About the State University of New York
The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive system of higher education in the United States, and more than 95 percent of all New Yorkers live within 30 miles of any one of SUNY’s 64 colleges and universities. Across the system, SUNY has four academic health centers, five hospitals, four medical schools, two dental schools, a law school, the country’s oldest school of maritime, the state's only college of optometry, 12 Educational Opportunity Centers, over 30 ATTAIN digital literacy labs, and manages one US Department of Energy National Laboratory. In total, SUNY serves about 1.7 million students across its portfolio of credit- and non-credit-bearing courses and programs, continuing education, and community outreach programs. SUNY oversees nearly a quarter of academic research in New York. Research expenditures system-wide are nearly $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, including significant contributions from students and faculty. There are more than three million SUNY alumni worldwide, and annually one in three New Yorkers who earn a college degree is a SUNY alum. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunities, visit suny.edu.