I write about AI and Geopolitics
Bill Friend 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