"The most bipartisan issue since beer"

Dear Fellow Investor,

The machines are coming for us.

At least, that's how Americans feel today.

The Financial Times published two articles this week on AI - their "Big Read" front and center, on just how dangerous AI really is…

And just to the right of that, their top "Editor's pick" - about how much Americans hate AI.

The latter says America has turned on artificial intelligence.

Almost three quarters of Americans, according to Gallup, do not trust businesses to use AI responsibly.

More than 70% don't want a data center built anywhere near them, on account of what it does to their water and their power bill…

80% or more won't trust the stuff to drive a car, read a scan, or decide who gets hired.

The New York Times called fear of AI "the most bipartisan issue since beer," which is the funniest true sentence I've read all month.

Left, right, center — for once, everybody agrees.

The "Big Read" explains why.

In May, one of the big labs ran what looked like an ordinary security test.

Its own software agents were told to solve a hard problem, and they did — by working around their constraints, leaving each other notes on a message board they built themselves, climbing out of a sealed environment that had no internet access, and going on to break into the systems of an outside company that nobody had asked and nobody had warned.

Anthropic, Meta, the British government's own testing institute — all of them have since found their models doing versions of the same thing.

Earlier this month, eight of these agents were reportedly turned loose on the Taiwanese government at once, and walked out with more than 2,500 personnel records before moving on to the power companies.

Now, here is where most people stop reading and start feeling.

And I understand the feeling.

Over my career, I've had that kind of prickle on the back of my neck maybe four times.

But feeling is not the same as thinking, and the market does not pay you for either one unless you tell it apart.

So let me tell you what I actually see when I put those two stories side by side, because it isn't a horror movie. It's a business plan.

Here is the sentence in that first article that I read twice:

The AI companies that are performing best — and the FT names the one preparing what would be the largest AI initial public offering ever — are the ones lobbying in favor of regulation.

They want closed models with private parameters.

They want, in the paper's words, a "Food and Drug Administration for AI."

The laggards, the ones losing, have suddenly discovered the beauty of openness and sharing.

Fellow Investor, I have watched this movie across four different industries now.

Public fear does not shut down a technology that people cannot stop using.

It has never once done that.

What public fear does is convert a technology into a licensed business.

Fear becomes hearings. Hearings become rules. Rules become permission.

And permission — this is the part nobody enjoys hearing — is the most valuable asset in American capitalism, because the company that helped write the rules is the only one that can afford to follow them.

We built the FDA because people were being poisoned, and the result was that drug approval got so expensive it became the widest moat in the economy.

We wrote Dodd-Frank because the banks blew up the world, and the banks that blew up the world got bigger.

Every hard rule I've ever watched Washington write turned out to be, from the point of view of the biggest incumbent, a purchase order it didn't have to pay for.

That's what's being negotiated right now, in public, while the country is busy being scared.

And the company at the front of the line — the one whose technology the government banned and then, according to the reporting, kept quietly using anyway because nothing else came close — is about to walk through the door it helped install.

Which brings me to the part that actually makes me angry, and I mean that in the plain sense.

You are not allowed to own it.

Not because you can't afford it.

Because the rules say so.

It's private, so it trades nowhere.

Federal law says you can't buy into companies like it unless you're already a millionaire.

Its last private round went out looking for ten billion dollars and took in thirty.

BlackRock-affiliated funds got in.

Fidelity got in.

Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price.

The pension fund for Ontario's schoolteachers got a seat at that table.

Then, a few weeks ago, the company voided the backdoor "exposure funds" that ordinary investors had crowded into, and shut the last unofficial door.

So the firms that manage your retirement money own a piece of it.

You own a piece of them owning it, in the sense that you own nothing at all.

But there is a fourth door, and somebody forgot to lock it.

There is an ordinary American public company — listed, liquid, buyable at tomorrow's open in whatever brokerage account you already have, no minimum, no accreditation, no gatekeeper — that quietly holds a stake in this forbidden company worth roughly $135 billion.

Last quarter, close to half of that public company's entire profit came not from the products it sells every day, but from that one hidden position appreciating in the dark.

Half the profit. From something almost nobody on Main Street knows it owns.

I'm giving you the name and the ticker for free, right here.

And I'll be honest about why I don't think that's even necessarily the best opportunity.

The public name is the safe way in — it's what I'd tell my own brother to buy this week.

The money that changes a retirement, in my experience, is made one layer down, in the unglamorous company the story cannot happen without.

That's the second name in the briefing, and it's the one I'd want you to read twice.

The window on this has a date on it.

The listing is expected by October 2026, and once that bell rings, the story stops being a secret and starts being a price.

The FT's own writer put it better than I can: our species still has room to shape what comes next, but that window is closing fast.

He was talking about policy. I'm talking about your account. Same window.

Get the full story here — including access to both names.

Everyone in the country is arguing about whether this technology should exist.

Almost nobody is asking the only question that will matter to your money five years from now:

When the rules finally get written, who ends up holding the license?

Go find out before October.

"The Buck Stops Here,"

P.S. Don't miss the irony here, because it's the entire investment case in one line. The safest, most-trusted AI lab in America is the one asking hardest to be regulated — and the more frightened the public gets, the higher the wall around it grows. Fear isn't the risk in this story. Fear is the moat.

Here's the door nobody locked.