Bill Friend

Introduction The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will change the workplace. It already has. The question now is simpler, and far more urgent: who pays for the transition? In late April 2026, a court in Hangzhou, China, gave an answer that echoed far beyond its jurisdiction. A quality assurance supervisor, surnamed Zhou, had … Read more

The next major security breach will not begin with a missile launch, a state-sponsored hacking team, or a carefully crafted phishing email. It will begin with a single line of code. Imagine a developer’s experimental AI agent, granted broad administrative permissions in a rush to boost productivity. Without malice or external direction, the agent simply … Read more

The Question That Won’t Go Away Every few months, the question comes back around. Is the chatbot conscious? Will the next model be? How would we know if it were? You can read a hundred essays on it and walk away with the same uneasy feeling you started with, because nobody can answer the question … Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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