SIGNAL / NOISE
Everybody's Cypher
On May 15 the graduating class of the University of Arizona booed Eric Schmidt off the stage. Not for a scandal — for mentioning AI. Days earlier they booed a UCF speaker for calling it "the next industrial revolution," and at Middle Tennessee State they booed the executive who signed Taylor Swift, until he stopped and said the truest thing of the whole commencement season: "It's a tool. Make it work for you." They booed louder. These are the kids who ran four years of coursework through ChatGPT. They booed the hand that wrote their diplomas.
That's the mood the state walked into this week, and Washington read it three ways at once. Up top, theater. Trump signed an AI executive order after David Sacks, Musk, and Zuckerberg got him on the phone and killed the tougher version he was ready to sign. What shipped is voluntary: a 30-day pre-deployment peek, advanced models only. Axios called it what it is, Trump dodging AI rules. Altman and Anthropic applauded inside the hour, which tells you how much teeth it has. The government performed governance and delivered deregulation.
Underneath, the real heat. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to tax the big labs 50% of their stock, paid in shares, into a public wealth fund with board seats and voting rights. It's dead on arrival; in four decades Sanders has been lead sponsor on almost nothing that became law. But a DOA bill from a populist isn't a statute, it's a thermometer. And here's the part that sticks: the whole accelerationist case for the light touch was "regulate and we lose to China." Hand the state half your national champions and you haven't lost to the Chinese model. You've become it.
The richest joke is who floated the equity idea first. OpenAI published a paper in April calling for exactly this kind of public stake, on its own terms. Sanders just took their idea and put the government's hands on the wheel, and now it's socialism. Same story with the lobbying: the super PAC backed by OpenAI's president and Andreessen got caught running fake "doomer" accounts to trash the people asking for AI rules, plus a fake news site staffed by AI "journalists." Preach safety, lobby for a free hand. Or preach the free hand and lobby safety. You can't tell which is the mask anymore, and that's the tell. Bernie flies private to rail against private jets. The grads boo the tool they can't live without. Four versions of one move.
Remember Cypher, cutting his deal over a steak he knows is fake. Ignorance is bliss. Everybody at this table is Cypher: they want the benefit and refuse to look at the cost. And the cost is real, not theoretical. The booing is a bill already due. A price nobody will name gets named anyway, all at once, and this week the naming started.
Everyone wants the steak. Nobody wants to watch the cow get butchered.
At COAI today: the full Signal/Noise — the Sacks reversal, the sovereign-wealth irony, and why the booing is a bill already due — is live at getcoai.com.
Today's column is about a cost nobody wants to price, and the businesses that get scapegoated first are the ones that pretended there wasn't one. Outsider Labs is our consulting arm; the work we run with clients is naming your AI exposure — where it displaces, where it leaves you politically exposed — before the regulator, the headline, or your own board names it for you. If you're not sure where your cost actually sits, that's the conversation we're built for.
ONE — A NUMBER THAT SUMMARIZES THE DAY
50%. That's the share of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI that Bernie Sanders' new bill would hand to a public wealth fund, taxed straight out of their stock, with board seats attached. It's dead on arrival. But OpenAI floated the same idea in April, on its own terms, and a class of graduates booing Eric Schmidt off the stage this month is the populist wind at Sanders' back. The number won't pass. The mood it's riding will.
THREE — ACTIONS TO TAKE TODAY
Name your AI cost out loud before someone names it for you. The company that pretends there's no downside gets to be the convenient villain when the layoffs and the backlash arrive. Spend an hour today writing down where AI actually displaces work in your shop and where that leaves you exposed — to staff, to customers, to a regulator. You can't price a cost you won't look at.
Staff for the builders, not the boo-ers. The record exec who got booed off the MTSU stage was right: it's a tool, make it work for you. Some grads atrophied four years of skill outsourcing to a chatbot; some dropped out to ship product. AI didn't crown one and doom the other — it stopped subsidizing the bad bet. Hire for the people who pick up the tool, not the ones who resent it.
Read the voluntary order as the floor, not the ceiling. Today's EO is 30-day, voluntary, advanced-models-only — a dodge. But the early-access provision lets Washington decide which "trusted partners" see frontier models first. If your business rides on a model vendor, your roadmap now has a second author in DC. Track who gets the early look; that's the real policy, not the press release.
FIVE — STORIES TO KEEP YOU INFORMED
Wednesday, June 3
Washington finally moved on AI, and mostly performed. (Full analysis above.) Trump's voluntary 30-day order, Sanders' 50% equity grab, and a super PAC caught astroturfing — three theories of what to do about AI power, all in 24 hours. The official channel did the least; the populist channel did the most.
Sanders' bill is "socialism." OpenAI's April paper was "vision." Spot the difference. (Full analysis above.) OpenAI itself proposed a public-stake wealth fund first. The only thing Sanders changed is whose hands are on the steering wheel — and that flipped it from policy paper to class warfare overnight.
OpenAI admits the machine is starting to improve itself. OpenAI publicly flagged early signs of recursive self-improvement in deployed systems, calling it the most consequential safety question of the decade. First major lab to say it out loud, on the same day everyone was busy arguing about who owns the company.
An AI worm broke into 75% of a test network in a week, no human driving. University of Toronto researchers turned an agent loose on a 33-machine corporate network; it read live vulnerability advisories and discovered its own exploits. The attacker that never sleeps, never tires, and never stops learning just shipped a working demo.
ByteDance's AI writes better CUDA than NVIDIA's humans. A new paper shows an AI out-optimizing human engineers on the exact low-level code that is NVIDIA's software moat — amplified 200-plus times within hours. If the moat can be written by the thing the moat sells, every NVIDIA bull should read it twice.
— Harry and Anthony
Sources: Axios — Trump dodges AI rules with new order · CNBC — Trump signs AI executive order · NewsBusters — Sacks: not FDA for AI · Fox Business — Sanders 50% stake plan · Sen. Sanders — The Public Should Own Half of Big AI · CNBC — new grads booing commencement speakers · Fast Company — AI booed at 2026 commencements · Slate — why grads are booing Eric Schmidt · NBC News — White House irked by Leading the Future PAC · User Mag — the PAC's secret meme sockpuppets