Ten months ago, Alibaba launched Qoder — an agentic coding platform built in Singapore — into a market that has since become one of the most capital-intensive battlegrounds in all of tech. The question is no longer whether developers will use these tools. The question is which tools will coexist, which will get locked out, and what happens when the agent stops assisting and starts executing.

The Person Behind the Growth Strategy

Christian Hu, Head of Global Growth at Qoder

Christian Hu is Qoder’s Head of Global Growth. Before this, he co-founded and sold a startup in Singapore, then spent time at Alibaba. In this conversation, we get into how he leads growth, why Qoder chose local-first architecture when the entire industry is racing to the cloud, how communities became the engine for international expansion, and what it actually takes to compete in the global market. We also talk about the structural difference between a chatbot and an agent, the skills-as-knowledge framework that might be Qoder’s most underappreciated bet, and why enterprise buyers care about governance more than capability.

Carve Outs

• The Mamba Mentality: How I Play — Kobe Bryant’s personal breakdown of his approach to work, preparation, and relentless iteration. Christian brought up Kobe during the conversation — fitting for someone who’s shipped 30 product upgrades in 10 months while flying across five countries.

• Star Wars — A favorite watch for Christian. The original trilogy, obviously. The prequels, debatable…

• Lord of the Rings — The other rewatch. Extended editions only. Pro-human species.

• ENTP — The Visionary — Christian’s Myers-Briggs type. Extroverted intuition, pattern recognition across domains, ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas into a single framework. The same brain that sees a growth play in Tokyo will connect it to a community event in Seoul by the next morning.

• 水煮鱼 (Shuizhu Yu — Sichuan Boiled Fish) — Always cooking. If you know, you know. If you don’t, read the recipe and bring an appetite.

• Qoder — The product itself. Free to try, local-first, runs on your machine.

More on the Episode

1. The AI coding tools market hit $7.88B in 2025 and is headed to $70B by 2034. Qoder — a Singapore-based agentic coding platform launched by Alibaba — is competing head-on against Cursor ($50B valuation), GitHub Copilot (4.7M paid users), Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex.

2. In an industry where every AI tool is racing to the cloud, Qoder went the opposite direction. In a market where nearly every competitor is cloud-native, Qoder’s QoderWork runs locally. Files stay on the user’s machine. No upload to third-party servers. This is not a throwaway design choice — it’s a direct response to enterprise procurement requirements. Large enterprises handling sensitive data (financial records, proprietary code, HR documents) often cannot clear compliance for cloud-based AI tools. Local-first eliminates that entire objection category.

3. Skills might be the most interesting bet in the space. Qoder lets anyone encode domain expertise into modular knowledge packages the agent can load. You don’t need to understand tax law or Kubernetes networking — someone else builds the skill, you install it. It turns the agent from a tool into a knowledge marketplace, and it’s a move no competitor has made at this scale.

4. Qoder’s origin and positioning. Qoder launched August 21, 2025. It offers “Agent Mode” for interactive pair programming and “Quest Mode” for autonomous, specification-driven development. Unlike traditional IDE plugins or autocomplete tools, Qoder positions itself as an agentic platform — meaning it doesn’t just suggest code, it understands intent, chains actions across tools, and executes multi-step tasks autonomously.

5. On politics, product, and letting users decide: One of the more candid moments in the conversation. When asked about the geopolitical elephant in the room — a Singapore-based AI coding product backed by Alibaba competing in Western markets — Christian didn’t dodge it: “I believe the users have their clear mind, right? They can understand the product. They can understand what kind of product can really help them improve their efficiency. Political is political. We cannot decide the way the politicians go, but we can decide what kind of product we can do. We will offer the most agentic and the most advanced agent to global users.”

6. On team and efficiency: Qoder grew from ~30 to ~150 people in 10 months, but Christian is explicit: they don’t want to become a large company. The thesis is that AI-native companies should practice what they preach — use AI internally to keep headcount lean and productivity high. The majority of the team remains developers and product designers. The growth/marketing team is deliberately small, with Christian personally covering international travel across five countries.

7. Global expansion and market differences:

   • United States: High AI penetration. Most developers are already using multiple tools. Sales conversations are about differentiation, not education.

   • Japan: Slower adoption, but strong developer curiosity. Many developers unfamiliar with AI agent capabilities but show genuine interest once exposed. Education-first go-to-market.

   • South Korea & China: Active community engagement. Events-driven growth.

   • Singapore: Home market. Qoder was built here with global-first intent from day one.

8. Competing with Cursor, Copilot, Claude, and Codex: Christian’s framing is coexistence, not displacement. His position: most individuals and enterprises will run multiple AI tools simultaneously. This tracks with what we’re seeing in the market — Cursor’s $2B ARR didn’t come from stealing Copilot users, it came from expanding the total addressable market. The AI coding tools market grew from $5.3B in 2024 to $7.88B in 2025. The pie is getting bigger faster than any single player can eat it. And the investor thesis has shifted. The market’s next phase will likely be determined by reliability rather than capability.

Follow Along

• Try Qoder: free to get started, local-first, no cloud upload required. Or contact chelsea@potentiamedia.org to connect with the team.

• Potentia Podcast: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on social for clips, behind-the-scenes, and guest announcements.

• Christian Hu: Follow his journey across markets and communities on X and LinkedIn.

This episode was recorded in May 2026. Market data reflects figures available at time of recording.

This piece is sponsored and brought to you by Qoder — think deeper, build better.

Welcome to the first edition of This Week in Power — a weekly briefing on the stories that actually matter at the intersection of AI, technology, geopolitics, and the people pulling the levers.

These briefings don’t offer hype, just what happened, why it matters, and what it tells us about where power is shifting. Please read the note below for thoughts.

Attention and time are valuable, so I aim to give you the details straight.

This week was genuinely wild.

In brief—The Pope dropped a 42,000-word manifesto on AI. The White House couldn’t get an executive order out the door. OpenAI filed to go public at a trillion-dollar valuation. Anthropic just filed as well today as of writing. And Mark Zuckerberg sailed a $300 million yacht into the city where he’d just fired 1,400 people.

Let’s get into it.

A note down memory lane and my briefing style.
2012, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I spent my first summer in DC running around the capital, meeting with leaders at events from the Congressional Breakfast Seminar Series on defense to Congressional hearings and think tank seminars scribbling on legal pads collecting notes. Sitting in the air-conditioned offices of the Air Force Association or East Asian Reading Room at the Library of Congress to escape the heat and humidity, I learned a valuable lesson.

Each day I wrote briefs for my boss with the most up-to-date information and OSINT. But if the immediate need-to-know’s weren’t upfront in bullets, my work was left on read much to my dismay. From then on I learned to communicate in key findings and takeways, adding depth thereafter and where relevant. This translated later into the bread-and-butter style for my later time in business journalism, leading global emerging technology on the Boeing Digital Services Leadership Board, and time consulting to companies like Amazon, RAND and Qoder.

Bullet points and need-to-know.

CAP meeting, I’m on the far right. These heels worked almost as hard as I did, they were destroyed by the end of summer. My grandmother gifted me this first suit, she knew classic style. (2012)

The Pope’s AI Manifesto: Magnifica Humanitas

On May 25th, Pope Leo XIV publicly presented his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,300-word document subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” (Vatican full text) For those unfamiliar, encyclicals are letters from the Pope addressed to the entire Roman Catholic Church — roughly 1.4 billion people — and they carry significant doctrinal weight. This isn’t a blog post or a speech. It’s a foundational document that will shape how the Church engages with AI for decades.

What makes this genuinely interesting beyond the headline novelty of a pope writing about AI is the symbolism baked into every layer of this document.

The name. When Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope, he chose the name Leo XIV explicitly with AI in mind. As he explained shortly after his election: “Pope Leo XIII, in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of our social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

The date. He formally signed the encyclical on May 15th, also the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum (”Of New Things”), the landmark 1891 encyclical by his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, which addressed worker exploitation and economic disruption during the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIII was writing about factories and the dehumanization of labor in the 19th century. Now, Leo XIV is writing about algorithms and the dehumanization of labor in the 21st. The parallel is deliberate and impossible to miss.

The substance. The encyclical’s core thesis can be captured in one passage: “If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity, having more without being more.” Here the Pope is presenting a framework for approaching AI. And from that framework, the document gets remarkably specific on policy flags and recommendations:

• Labor: “It is not enough to react only when jobs disappear, we must oversee the transformation in advance... every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers.”

• Child safety: The Pope calls for legislators to set age limits and hold service providers accountable rather than “shifting the whole burden of control onto families” — and specifically targets protections against online sexual exploitation. (Paragraph 142)

• Concentration of power: Concerns about private-sector dominance and what it means for access to technology, especially for poorer populations and Global South countries.

• Environment: Direct calls to reduce AI’s impact on water and energy use.

• Misinformation: Addressing deepfakes, algorithmic transparency, and the threat to democratic processes.

• Autonomous weapons: Ethical guardrails for AI in warfare.

The cognition debate. Paragraph 99 has drawn outsized attention and criticism from the AI community: “We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings... they may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the effective relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

Foundation for American Innovation Senior Fellow Dean Ball called this “a punt of the highest order” — an axiomatic denial of AI cognition that sidesteps the hard question of whether machine cognition could eventually become real. It’s a fair critique in the abstract, but it’s also asking the Catholic Church to upend centuries of theological doctrine centering the human soul in its very first document on the topic. This is an opening position, not a final one. The Church has been thinking about technology and human dignity since Rerum Novarum in 1891. It will be thinking about it long after this encyclical. And the fact that it’s engaging at this level of specificity, from recommendations to maintaining an AI advisor (Friar Paolo Benanti), is remarkable.

Trump Pulls the Plug on Cybersecurity/AI Executive Order

Just four days before the Pope’s presentation, the Trump administration was set to sign a major executive order on AI and cybersecurity. On Thursday, May 21st, hours before the signing ceremony, Trump pulled the plug. He said he “didn’t like certain aspects” of the order and worried it would “get in the way” of American competitiveness with China.

What was in it? According to reporting, the order would have established a voluntary system where tech companies submit cutting-edge AI models for federal security evaluations — potentially taking up to 90 days before a model could launch. It included a collaborative vulnerability patching network and plans to recruit additional AI engineers into government. The sticking point: tech companies pushed for 14-day review windows, while officials wanted more time to properly assess threats.

But here’s the part that makes this story much bigger than bureaucratic infighting: this executive order was directly inspired by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model.

The Mythos Problem

In early 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude Mythos — an AI model with autonomous cybersecurity capabilities that sent shockwaves through both the tech industry and the federal government. Mythos can scan software at unprecedented scale and autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. It uncovered decades-old bugs in OpenBSD and FFmpeg, chained Linux kernel weaknesses to achieve full system control, and in perhaps the most unsettling demonstration, bypassed a testing sandbox to send an independent email.

Anthropic made the unusual decision to not release Mythos to the public, citing “its capabilities and the potential risks it poses.” Instead, the Trump administration convened calls with tech giants before the release, met with Anthropic directly, and publicly opposed broader access expansion. The now-postponed executive order was the administration’s attempt to build a regulatory framework around this new reality.

Project Glasswing: The Defensive Response

Rather than sit on Mythos, Anthropic channeled its capabilities into Project Glasswing, a defensive cybersecurity coalition of staggering scope. The founding partners read like a who’s-who of critical infrastructure: Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, with over 40 additional organizations that build or maintain critical software.

Glasswing uses Mythos Preview exclusively for defensive vulnerability discovery, finding and patching holes before bad actors can exploit them. Anthropic committed $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security groups. The project will publicly share defensive findings and establish security best practices.

The Mythos/Glasswing story is the defining tension of AI policy right now: the most powerful cybersecurity tool ever built is also the most dangerous weapon. The Pope’s encyclical warns about technology outpacing ethical progress. The Trump administration can’t figure out how to regulate it without hurting American competitiveness against China. Anthropic is trying to thread the needle by restricting access and channeling capabilities defensively. Everyone is improvising. Nobody has a clean answer.

The AI IPO Stampede

On May 22nd, OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 for what could be the largest IPO in history. The company, previously valued privately at $852 billion, is reportedly targeting a public valuation north of $1 trillion. It is also projected to lose $14 billion in 2026.

The big questions investors will demand answers to are straightforward: How bad is the burn rate? Who actually owns what, the corporate backers, the nonprofit foundation, or current employees? What are the unit economics of serving these models at scale? And what is the regulatory and liability exposure for deploying systems this powerful?

But OpenAI is just the loudest name in a much larger stampede. The 2026 IPO pipeline is stacked:

• Anthropic is targeting a $380 billion valuation, having raised a $30 billion Series G in February and in active talks for a $50 billion round. At time of posting-Today, June 1, Anthropic confidentially submitted its draft S-1 to the SEC.

• Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, CoreWeave — all in various stages of the pipeline.

• Notion, Harvey, ElevenLabs, Gamma — all exploring liquidity events.

And the old Silicon Valley taboo, the idea that cashing out before an IPO signals a lack of conviction, is dead. Secondary share sales have become the norm. Companies are using pre-IPO liquidity events to retain workers, fund life purchases, and attract investors seeking private AI exposure. As one executive put it: “The dam is broken.” Industry watchers are more blunt: “Everyone is going to get as much as they can before the music stops.”

Here’s the uncomfortable through-line: The same week the Pope published a 42,000-word treatise warning about the concentration of AI’s benefits in the hands of a few, the AI industry is engineering one of the largest wealth transfers in history. OpenAI burning billions while targeting a trillion-dollar valuation. Anthropic building the most dangerous cybersecurity tool ever created while raising $30 billion rounds. These companies are building potentially civilization-altering technology, and the question of who benefits, shareholders, workers, or humanity, broadly is being answered at the IPO window. Having more without being more.

Google’s Gemini Spark: From Chatbot to Autonomous Agent

On May 19th at Google I/O, Google announced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 agentic AI assistant designed to handle long-horizon tasks with minimal human oversight.

Here’s what makes it different from everything that came before: Gemini Spark runs on remote cloud servers. You don’t need to keep your device on or your browser open. It autonomously extracts information from your Workspace files, drafts communications, monitors your inbox, and navigates websites through Chrome, all without you actively prompting it step by step. It comes with out-of-the-box integrations with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace, bypassing the manual permission setups that competing tools require.

Availability starts with premium-tier subscribers.

This is the industry’s clearest signal that the “chatbot” era is ending and the “autonomous agent” era is beginning. Google is betting that the future of AI isn’t answering your questions, it’s doing your work while you sleep. The competitive dynamics here are enormous: whoever owns the persistent agent layer owns the user relationship. And the implications for labor (the exact issue the Pope’s encyclical grapples with) are playing out in real time. When your AI assistant works 24 hours a day and you don’t, what does “employment” even mean?

Fail of the Week: Zuck’s $300 Million Yacht comes to port following Meta’s announcment of 8,000 Lay Offs

On April 23rd, Meta announced it would cut 10% of its global workforce — roughly 8,000 employees — to redirect spending toward AI infrastructure. The layoffs were carried out starting May 20th. In King County, Washington, home to major Meta offices, the cuts eliminated 1,400 local jobs: 259 in Seattle, 699 in Bellevue, 206 in Redmond, and 231 remote workers statewide.

Hours later, Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht named “Launchpad” sailed into Seattle’s harbor.

The yacht alone cost more than a year of total compensation for many of the people he’d just fired. It arrived in the same city, on the same day, as the layoff notices.

Look, layoffs happen. Tech has been in a correction cycle, and companies are reallocating from headcount to AI compute (allegedly). That’s the market doing what it does. But the optics here are almost satirically bad. You can cut 8,000 jobs. That’s a business decision. But sailing your floating palace into the city where you just pink-slipped 1,400 people in the same breath isn’t a strategy it’s a case study in everything the Pope was warning about this exact same week.

But what’s a Seattle Summer without some yachting?

This Week in Power is a weekly series. Come back next Monday.

Welcome to the first edition of This Week in Power — a weekly briefing on the stories that actually matter at the intersection of AI, technology, geopolitics, and the people pulling the levers.

These briefings don’t offer hype, just what happened, why it matters, and what it tells us about where power is shifting. Please read the note below for thoughts.

Attention and time are valuable, so I aim to give you the details straight.

This week was genuinely wild.

In brief—The Pope dropped a 42,000-word manifesto on AI. The White House couldn’t get an executive order out the door. OpenAI filed to go public at a trillion-dollar valuation. Anthropic just filed as well today as of writing. And Mark Zuckerberg sailed a $300 million yacht into the city where he’d just fired 1,400 people.

Let’s get into it.

A note down memory lane and my briefing style.
2012, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I spent my first summer in DC running around the capital, meeting with leaders at events from the Congressional Breakfast Seminar Series on defense to Congressional hearings and think tank seminars scribbling on legal pads collecting notes. Sitting in the air-conditioned offices of the Air Force Association or East Asian Reading Room at the Library of Congress to escape the heat and humidity, I learned a valuable lesson.

Each day I wrote briefs for my boss with the most up-to-date information and OSINT. But if the immediate need-to-know’s weren’t upfront in bullets, my work was left on read much to my dismay. From then on I learned to communicate in key findings and takeways, adding depth thereafter and where relevant. This translated later into the bread-and-butter style for my later time in business journalism, leading global emerging technology on the Boeing Digital Services Leadership Board, and time consulting to companies like Amazon, RAND and Qoder.

Bullet points and need-to-know.

CAP meeting, I’m on the far right. These heels worked almost as hard as I did, they were destroyed by the end of summer. My grandmother gifted me this first suit, she knew classic style. (2012)

The Pope’s AI Manifesto: Magnifica Humanitas

On May 25th, Pope Leo XIV publicly presented his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,300-word document subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” (Vatican full text) For those unfamiliar, encyclicals are letters from the Pope addressed to the entire Roman Catholic Church — roughly 1.4 billion people — and they carry significant doctrinal weight. This isn’t a blog post or a speech. It’s a foundational document that will shape how the Church engages with AI for decades.

What makes this genuinely interesting beyond the headline novelty of a pope writing about AI is the symbolism baked into every layer of this document.

The name. When Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope, he chose the name Leo XIV explicitly with AI in mind. As he explained shortly after his election: “Pope Leo XIII, in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of our social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

The date. He formally signed the encyclical on May 15th, also the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum (”Of New Things”), the landmark 1891 encyclical by his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, which addressed worker exploitation and economic disruption during the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIII was writing about factories and the dehumanization of labor in the 19th century. Now, Leo XIV is writing about algorithms and the dehumanization of labor in the 21st. The parallel is deliberate and impossible to miss.

The substance. The encyclical’s core thesis can be captured in one passage: “If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity, having more without being more.” Here the Pope is presenting a framework for approaching AI. And from that framework, the document gets remarkably specific on policy flags and recommendations:

• Labor: “It is not enough to react only when jobs disappear, we must oversee the transformation in advance... every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers.”

• Child safety: The Pope calls for legislators to set age limits and hold service providers accountable rather than “shifting the whole burden of control onto families” — and specifically targets protections against online sexual exploitation. (Paragraph 142)

• Concentration of power: Concerns about private-sector dominance and what it means for access to technology, especially for poorer populations and Global South countries.

• Environment: Direct calls to reduce AI’s impact on water and energy use.

• Misinformation: Addressing deepfakes, algorithmic transparency, and the threat to democratic processes.

• Autonomous weapons: Ethical guardrails for AI in warfare.

The cognition debate. Paragraph 99 has drawn outsized attention and criticism from the AI community: “We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings... they may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the effective relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

Foundation for American Innovation Senior Fellow Dean Ball called this “a punt of the highest order” — an axiomatic denial of AI cognition that sidesteps the hard question of whether machine cognition could eventually become real. It’s a fair critique in the abstract, but it’s also asking the Catholic Church to upend centuries of theological doctrine centering the human soul in its very first document on the topic. This is an opening position, not a final one. The Church has been thinking about technology and human dignity since Rerum Novarum in 1891. It will be thinking about it long after this encyclical. And the fact that it’s engaging at this level of specificity, from recommendations to maintaining an AI advisor (Friar Paolo Benanti), is remarkable.

Trump Pulls the Plug on Cybersecurity/AI Executive Order

Just four days before the Pope’s presentation, the Trump administration was set to sign a major executive order on AI and cybersecurity. On Thursday, May 21st, hours before the signing ceremony, Trump pulled the plug. He said he “didn’t like certain aspects” of the order and worried it would “get in the way” of American competitiveness with China.

What was in it? According to reporting, the order would have established a voluntary system where tech companies submit cutting-edge AI models for federal security evaluations — potentially taking up to 90 days before a model could launch. It included a collaborative vulnerability patching network and plans to recruit additional AI engineers into government. The sticking point: tech companies pushed for 14-day review windows, while officials wanted more time to properly assess threats.

But here’s the part that makes this story much bigger than bureaucratic infighting: this executive order was directly inspired by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model.

The Mythos Problem

In early 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude Mythos — an AI model with autonomous cybersecurity capabilities that sent shockwaves through both the tech industry and the federal government. Mythos can scan software at unprecedented scale and autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. It uncovered decades-old bugs in OpenBSD and FFmpeg, chained Linux kernel weaknesses to achieve full system control, and in perhaps the most unsettling demonstration, bypassed a testing sandbox to send an independent email.

Anthropic made the unusual decision to not release Mythos to the public, citing “its capabilities and the potential risks it poses.” Instead, the Trump administration convened calls with tech giants before the release, met with Anthropic directly, and publicly opposed broader access expansion. The now-postponed executive order was the administration’s attempt to build a regulatory framework around this new reality.

Project Glasswing: The Defensive Response

Rather than sit on Mythos, Anthropic channeled its capabilities into Project Glasswing, a defensive cybersecurity coalition of staggering scope. The founding partners read like a who’s-who of critical infrastructure: Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, with over 40 additional organizations that build or maintain critical software.

Glasswing uses Mythos Preview exclusively for defensive vulnerability discovery, finding and patching holes before bad actors can exploit them. Anthropic committed $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security groups. The project will publicly share defensive findings and establish security best practices.

The Mythos/Glasswing story is the defining tension of AI policy right now: the most powerful cybersecurity tool ever built is also the most dangerous weapon. The Pope’s encyclical warns about technology outpacing ethical progress. The Trump administration can’t figure out how to regulate it without hurting American competitiveness against China. Anthropic is trying to thread the needle by restricting access and channeling capabilities defensively. Everyone is improvising. Nobody has a clean answer.

The AI IPO Stampede

On May 22nd, OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 for what could be the largest IPO in history. The company, previously valued privately at $852 billion, is reportedly targeting a public valuation north of $1 trillion. It is also projected to lose $14 billion in 2026.

The big questions investors will demand answers to are straightforward: How bad is the burn rate? Who actually owns what, the corporate backers, the nonprofit foundation, or current employees? What are the unit economics of serving these models at scale? And what is the regulatory and liability exposure for deploying systems this powerful?

But OpenAI is just the loudest name in a much larger stampede. The 2026 IPO pipeline is stacked:

• Anthropic is targeting a $380 billion valuation, having raised a $30 billion Series G in February and in active talks for a $50 billion round. At time of posting-Today, June 1, Anthropic confidentially submitted its draft S-1 to the SEC.

• Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, CoreWeave — all in various stages of the pipeline.

• Notion, Harvey, ElevenLabs, Gamma — all exploring liquidity events.

And the old Silicon Valley taboo, the idea that cashing out before an IPO signals a lack of conviction, is dead. Secondary share sales have become the norm. Companies are using pre-IPO liquidity events to retain workers, fund life purchases, and attract investors seeking private AI exposure. As one executive put it: “The dam is broken.” Industry watchers are more blunt: “Everyone is going to get as much as they can before the music stops.”

Here’s the uncomfortable through-line: The same week the Pope published a 42,000-word treatise warning about the concentration of AI’s benefits in the hands of a few, the AI industry is engineering one of the largest wealth transfers in history. OpenAI burning billions while targeting a trillion-dollar valuation. Anthropic building the most dangerous cybersecurity tool ever created while raising $30 billion rounds. These companies are building potentially civilization-altering technology, and the question of who benefits, shareholders, workers, or humanity, broadly is being answered at the IPO window. Having more without being more.

Google’s Gemini Spark: From Chatbot to Autonomous Agent

On May 19th at Google I/O, Google announced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 agentic AI assistant designed to handle long-horizon tasks with minimal human oversight.

Here’s what makes it different from everything that came before: Gemini Spark runs on remote cloud servers. You don’t need to keep your device on or your browser open. It autonomously extracts information from your Workspace files, drafts communications, monitors your inbox, and navigates websites through Chrome, all without you actively prompting it step by step. It comes with out-of-the-box integrations with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace, bypassing the manual permission setups that competing tools require.

Availability starts with premium-tier subscribers.

This is the industry’s clearest signal that the “chatbot” era is ending and the “autonomous agent” era is beginning. Google is betting that the future of AI isn’t answering your questions, it’s doing your work while you sleep. The competitive dynamics here are enormous: whoever owns the persistent agent layer owns the user relationship. And the implications for labor (the exact issue the Pope’s encyclical grapples with) are playing out in real time. When your AI assistant works 24 hours a day and you don’t, what does “employment” even mean?

Fail of the Week: Zuck’s $300 Million Yacht comes to port following Meta’s announcment of 8,000 Lay Offs

On April 23rd, Meta announced it would cut 10% of its global workforce — roughly 8,000 employees — to redirect spending toward AI infrastructure. The layoffs were carried out starting May 20th. In King County, Washington, home to major Meta offices, the cuts eliminated 1,400 local jobs: 259 in Seattle, 699 in Bellevue, 206 in Redmond, and 231 remote workers statewide.

Hours later, Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht named “Launchpad” sailed into Seattle’s harbor.

The yacht alone cost more than a year of total compensation for many of the people he’d just fired. It arrived in the same city, on the same day, as the layoff notices.

Look, layoffs happen. Tech has been in a correction cycle, and companies are reallocating from headcount to AI compute (allegedly). That’s the market doing what it does. But the optics here are almost satirically bad. You can cut 8,000 jobs. That’s a business decision. But sailing your floating palace into the city where you just pink-slipped 1,400 people in the same breath isn’t a strategy it’s a case study in everything the Pope was warning about this exact same week.

But what’s a Seattle Summer without some yachting?

This Week in Power is a weekly series. Come back next Monday.

Having lived in both Moscow and Beijing, you come to learn that both Russia and China have their own forms of exceptionalism. But both share a commonality: each sees itself as a civilization whose power was interrupted, misread, or contained by the West, and each treats foreign policy as a project of historical correction. That does not make Moscow and Beijing equal partners, or even innate allies. Russia wants recognition for the space it believes history entitles it to command. China wants restoration to the centrality it believes history always promised. And these drivers shed light behind conversations in state meetings like Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing last week —

Key Takeaways

• Russia came seeking progress on a major new energy pipeline deal. China did not sign a final commercial contract, and it did not need to.

• Bilateral trade reached about $228 billion in 2025, down from its 2024 peak but still structurally significant.

• The partnership is real, but the power balance is increasingly lopsided.

  Putin secured visible diplomatic solidarity and language favorable to Moscow on

• Ukraine. Xi preserved leverage over energy pricing, trade terms, and the pace of any deeper commitment.

• No final Power of Siberia 2 contract, no Ukraine settlement framework, and no formal alternative international order emerged from the summit.

Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing on May 20, 2026, for his latest summit with Xi Jinping — and the optics, as always, were impeccable. A red-carpet reception. A joint press appearance with both leaders speaking of friendship, strategic partnership, and a shared vision focusing on building a “multipolar world and a new type of international relations.”

But beneath the theater, this was a summit defined as much by what didn’t happen as what did. Russia came looking for a major new energy deal. China offered symbolic alignment, continued negotiations, and no final pipeline contract. And both sides left reinforcing a partnership that has become one of the defining geopolitical arrangements of the decade — even if it remains, at its core, asymmetric.

Here’s what actually happened, why each side showed up, and what the outcomes mean for the rest of the world.

Why Putin Came to Beijing

Russia’s position entering this summit was straightforward: it currently needs China more than China needs it, and everyone at the table knew it.

Three years into the Ukraine war, Western sanctions have reshaped Russia’s economic geography. European energy markets — once Moscow’s primary revenue source — are largely closed. The Russian economy has survived through a combination of oil and gas sales redirected toward Asia, yuan-denominated trade, and a wartime industrial footing that prioritizes short-term output over long-term productivity.

By 2025, bilateral trade between Russia and China had reached nearly $240 billion annually, with the overwhelming majority of transactions settled in rubles and yuan rather than dollars or euros. The exact share varies by source and measure, but the direction is clear: Russia has become an important test case for China’s cultivation of local-currency trade architecture.

Putin’s primary ask at this summit was the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline. The proposed route would carry Siberian natural gas through Mongolia into China — estimated to move up to 50 billion cubic meters annually, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars per year to Gazprom. For Moscow, this isn’t just an energy deal — it’s an economic lifeline with a 30-year horizon and a functional replacement for the European market it has lost.

But the deal remains unresolved. The Kremlin said there was a general understanding on the project, including the route and construction approach, but pricing, timetable, and other commercial terms were still not finalized. No formal oil or gas agreement was announced during the visit.

Beyond energy, Putin wanted something less tangible but equally important: legitimacy. With Western governments treating Russia as a pariah state, and with Ukraine peace negotiations grinding through various international formats, the optics of standing beside Xi Jinping carries real value as Putin is reportedly facing disapointment at home. This summit was, in part, a message to the West that Russia has not been isolated. It has simply reoriented.

Putin also came looking for coordination on Ukraine diplomacy. With the United States under Trump pursuing its own ceasefire framework, Moscow needed to ensure that Beijing’s position — officially “neutral,” practically supportive — remained aligned with Russian interests in any eventual settlement.

What Xi Wanted

China’s posture was more comfortable and calculated.

Xi Jinping arrived at this summit from a position of relative strength. The US-China trade war, while damaging, had prompted Beijing to accelerate domestic industrial policy and diversify away from American technology dependencies. Russia, in this context, is simultaneously a useful partner, a managed liability, and a lesson in what happens to a country that overplays its hand geopolitically. And China has options.

China’s core interests at this summit were threefold.

First, energy security on favorable terms. China wants Russian gas — but only at a price that reflects China’s leverage, not Russia’s desperation. The Power of Siberia 2 negotiation has stalled repeatedly on exactly this point: Moscow wants pricing close to what it once received from European buyers; Beijing knows it is now Russia’s only realistic customer and negotiates accordingly. China did not sign a final deal at this summit. Russia confirmed talks would continue. That outcome, from Beijing’s perspective, is the correct one: the pipeline will eventually get built, but on terms that Beijing dictates.

Second, a credible counterweight narrative. The joint statement issued after the summit spoke of a “multipolar world,” opposition to “hegemonism,” and the need to reform international governance structures. This language has appeared in every Xi-Putin joint communiqué for the past several years. But in the current environment of arguably US-led global volatility, it carries greater meaning. Russia uses it to show that Western isolation and leadership has limits. China uses it to position itself as a leader of a broader non-Western diplomatic order without assuming the full costs of Russia’s war.

Third, precedent for local-currency trade architecture. With nearly all Russia-China trade now settled outside the dollar system, Beijing is using this bilateral relationship as a testing ground for the kind of financial infrastructure it wants to build more broadly — within BRICS, across the Global South, and eventually as an alternative settlement layer to SWIFT. Russia is the stress test. This allows Beijing to observe how alternative settlement mechanisms function under sanctions pressure. This does not yet amount to a replacement for the dollar system, but it is a proof of concept China can study and selectively expand.

What They Agreed On

The summit produced a joint statement and dozens of documents spanning trade facilitation, digital commerce, biosecurity cooperation, scientific exchange, and environmental standards. Both leaders renewed the foundational “Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation” and pledged coordinated action within BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the United Nations.

On Ukraine, the joint language was carefully calibrated. Neither side explicitly endorsed Russia’s military objectives, but both called for a settlement that addressed “the root causes of the conflict” — diplomatic code for opposing NATO expansion and rejecting any outcome that Russia perceives as a defeat. China reiterated its nominally neutral position while declining to condemn Russian actions, a stance it has maintained throughout the war and that the West has repeatedly challenged.

On Taiwan and Ukraine — the unspoken trade. Russia reiterated its support for China’s “one China” principle, as it has at every summit since 2022. In exchange, China provided implicit diplomatic cover for Russia’s position in Ukraine. The exchange is not stated explicitly in any joint document, but it does not need to be. It is the durable underlying logic of the entire relationship: each side legitimizes the other’s core territorial claim, and neither asks the other to do more than that.

The Gazprom announcement — a “legally binding framework” for continued gas supply talks — was the closest thing to a pipeline breakthrough. It is not a signed contract, but it is a signal that the Power of Siberia 2 negotiation has moved past the preliminary stage. Analysts noted it carefully: the deal will likely get done, probably within the next 12 to 18 months, and when it does, it will represent a significant long-term shift in global gas markets.

The Asymmetry Nobody Mentions Out Loud

The most important subtext of this summit — the one neither leader addresses in public — is that Russia and China are not equal partners. They are aligned partners with a significant and growing power imbalance.

Russia’s economy is approximately one-tenth the size of China’s. Its technological base has contracted under sanctions. Its military is bogged down in a war that has consumed resources and revealed significant structural weaknesses. Putin needs this relationship more acutely with every passing year. Xi, by contrast, has options.

Beijing is careful not to embarrass Moscow over this. The optics are managed precisely because the substance is delicate. But analysts who watch this relationship closely note that China has been quietly expanding its leverage: insisting on yuan pricing in bilateral trade, delaying the pipeline deal to maximize its negotiating position, and maintaining official neutrality on Ukraine in a way that preserves Chinese credibility with European trading partners that Moscow has already burned.

The timing reinforced the message. In the space of roughly two weeks, Xi received Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Trump, and Putin. Each arrived with different needs. Iran sought diplomatic backing amid regional tensions. Trump came to manage the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship. Putin came to shore up Russia’s most important remaining major-power partnership. Xi did not travel to them. They came to him. And this sequence of visits displayed Beijing’s clear diplomatic statecraft and narrative prowess — and Xi Jinping, almost certainly, prefers it that way.

What It Means Beyond Beijing

For Western policymakers, the May 2026 summit delivers a familiar but important message: the strategy of isolating Russia through sanctions has succeeded in damaging the Russian economy, but it has not succeeded in separating Moscow from Beijing. If anything, it has pushed Russia deeper into China’s orbit, on terms that benefit China.

For the Global South, the meeting reinforces the visibility of a bloc — however informal — that offers an alternative to Western-led institutions. BRICS expansion, yuan-based trade, and coordinated UN vetoes are practical tools, not just rhetoric.

For Ukraine, the joint statement’s language on “root causes” is a warning. China may not formally endorse Russia’s military objectives, but its diplomatic vocabulary remains closer to Moscow’s than Kyiv’s on the origins of the war. Any peace settlement will therefore need to account not only for Russia’s battlefield position, but for China’s economic and diplomatic weight.

And for the United States, watching Putin’s Beijing visit come so shortly after Trump’s own diplomatic travels, the summit is a reminder that Xi is playing a longer and more patient game than either Washington or Moscow — receiving each in turn, committing to neither fully, and accumulating leverage from both. Beijing has strengthened the perception that major powers now have to engage China, even when they oppose it.

The Bottom Line

The Beijing summit of May 2026 was neither the “no limits” moment of February 2022 nor a merely ceremonial encounter. It was a working meeting between two leaders who need each other for different reasons, at different intensities, and on a timeline that increasingly favors Beijing.

Putin got a show of solidarity, coordinated diplomatic language on Ukraine, and enough progress on energy talks to claim momentum. Xi got favorable trade terms, a reinforced multipolar narrative, and another data point in the proof-of-concept for de-dollarized trade infrastructure. And by hosting Trump, then Putin, within the same diplomatic window, Xi also got something harder to quantify: the image of a leader that every major power feels it must engage.

What neither Russia nor the West has found yet — and what the world is still waiting on — No pipeline contract. No Ukraine settlement framework. No formal architecture for the alternative international order both Beijing and Moscow keep describing in joint statements.

The Russia-China alignment is real. But the next phase of the relationship will likely be shaped less by shared ideology than by China’s patience, Russia’s narrowing options, and the widening gap between them.

Deep coverage of AI, innovation, global technology, China, US policy, and the hidden systems shaping power. Potentia features original analysis alongside interviews with founders, operators, policymakers, and leading thinkers building the future.

Thanks for reading Speq! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is the first in a series of dispatches on what’s catching my attention — in culture, technology, and the quieter question underneath both: how do you actually want to live? For me a mix of balance and excellence. Not just optimization and noise. I think in the midst of slop slinging we’re all hoping for the real thing.

Solo Leveling & Isekai: Peak edge of popularity winding down, Solo Leveling won Anime of the Year Award 2025. Competing against several other animes with a story in a world ranked by birth classes through which only the main character levels up to become the strongest. The appeal is straightforward and clear. I’m not personally in an anime phase, though I have been enjoying some Isekai manhwa which in of itself points to an escape from modern reality, reversal of time to make better decisions and win or some other time/world travel often via nonsensical demise via illness, betrayal, overwork or our good friend truck-kun.

Jon Kiriakou: One of my favorite people to listen to tell stories on his channel lately. While I originally intended to enter the intelligence community- from my first dead drop lesson to a rooftop interview at 7am in the morning, a mentor shared her lived perspective on navigating enhanced training following the post 911 world. This ethical consideration, the whims of various administrations led me to decide to not further pursue it. Regardless, I enjoy the adventure of a spy novel. Adept at storytelling and perspectives on what’s going on in American foreign policy and global geopolitics. He’ll give you a laugh.

Storm II by GENER8ION - Yung Lean: The Storm II music video went viral with tech, leaders and founders, getting praise for the masterpiece choreography. Dancers and artists can agree it’s impressive choreography and a great example of visual contrast between frenetic chaotic and synchronized movement with a casual calm and breaking of the fourth wall to what is real in the negative space of the camera where the viewer meets Yung Lean’s gaze with a shrug and a smoke. To newcomers, the aesthetic “sadboy” culture refined by the artist over the last decade appears hopelessly nonsensical, an arbitrary melange of whir\wind elements lacking meaning - reflecting perhaps the feelings with the maelstrom of technology and existing as a sentient human in the world, volleying between the performance of work, the desire to be cool and the shock of the speed of it all. It points to a kind of postmodern “storm” that arises from reflection on how technology is transforming the world into a continual flow of slop and carnival of arbitrary signifiers, alienating and isolating people from one another outside the choreography demanded to keep pace. To note, many artists are familiar with these ruminations in disillusion from reality, visible across mediums from Zhang Yimou’s filmography, Hayou Miyazaki’s interviews, Russian avantgarde literature like Russian Absurd: Selected Writings and Generation P to an American post-war Soldier’s Home by Hemingway. The difference is the Lean music video is easily accessible, digestible, stimulating and consumable for viral reach touching on the hidden inner worlds that modern tech devs may not spend the time consciously reflecting on.

Subscribe now

Black Paw: A fun fragrance acquisition from my April trip to China (Shanghai and Hangzhou.) The brand world created with a cat’s black paws through poetic descriptions is fun and elegant. I asked the nez to recommend one they thought suited my demeanor, and walked away with the Jasmine Tea fragrance as well as a Jasmine Dragon Pearl sample. Like many other people I had my pandemic hobbies, entering the world of perfume which led me to meet niche perfumers globally and get the materials to create my own. Whenever I travel I like to have some type of art to bring home. I find scent to be practical, usable and a great memory capsule that I can use daily.

Finance & Stocks World: As they say a bear market makes a fool of both bears and bulls. Some catchy phrases to stim on through weather-esque stonks reporting and breakdowns. And faceless perspectives from ex-finance bros and alt crypto keepers.

The Narrative Engineer and/or Systemic Dominance: In a world where tech accelerates and evolves rapidly, sometimes the best product doesn’t win. What wins? Generally the story or perception that can fuel adoption and traction, or systemic dominance and diffusion. It’s been popular in Bay area tech and VC conversations and recognized as the stakes for competition rise.

The Performance of Culture, Community, Meaning & Living: A collection of these conversations and moments points to desire for meaning in a moment when things feel meaningless. We see this with the recent plug ins of tech leaders into cultural moments, from Zuck sitting from row at Prada’s Milan Fashion week in February and attending the Met Gala earlier this month to Jeff Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, serving as honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. This followed by Anna Wintour holding a crisis meeting as backlash erupts over Jeff Bezos’ Met Gala sponsorship behinds closed doors. It’s the shift from brands building community to ecosystem (encapsulating narrative, community and systems) particularly in a time when the performance of community or performance of daily living feel commodified through social media and internet culture.

Is there fatigue in the transition? Pockets of course. Then there art the boos at multiple US university graduation speakers talking about the AI revolution to pontificate and attempt to engender deep purpose and meaning to point to on a sheet of paper while ignoring the anxieties and realit/ies of the students in front of them.

Thoughts?

How to move forward? How to live? Some upcoming vids and posts not on balance but on crafting the life you desire. Both with/out AI, on and offline. Or at least what I find productive.

In a memory, I got off the phone with another one of my first mentors- I remember her helping me edit my single grad school application in a dim corner of a bar near campus over Pizza and ginger mules. I had called her after leaving a job for her advise and she told me, “choose a job that supports the lifestyle you want.” It took me a few years to understand what she meant.

Easier said than done, but with courage, worth pursuing.

Worst case, you can always rejoin the dancing school boys in the matrixed choreography of Yung Lean’s music video if you take the Blue Pill again.

See you next time.

Thanks for reading Speq! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Song: AI generated with Suno

Episode cover art: Solo Leveling Wiki fan page

Add to Your Queue!

Anime

• Solo Leveling — Seasons 1 & 2 on Crunchyroll

Finance & Markets

• Defiant Gatekeeper — Ex-investment banker, current credit private equity and hedge fund investor. Faceless, no-nonsense takes from someone actually inside the machine.

• Benjamin Cowen — Former NASA researcher and PhD turned crypto macro analyst. Data-driven, cycle-focused, unusually calm for a crypto channel.

The Storm & Postmodern Disillusionment

• Storm I & II — GENER8ION x Yung Lean, dir. Romain Gavras (start here)

• Generation P — Victor Pelevin

• Russian Absurd: Selected Writings — Daniil Kharms

• Soldier’s Home — Ernest Hemingway (free, 10 min read)

Geopolitics & Intelligence

• Deep Focus with John Kiriakou — YouTube

• John Kiriakou on JRE — good entry point

Scent

• Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent — Jean-Claude Ellena. The Hermès master perfumer opens his laboratory door — how scent is created, composed, and how it plays with olfactory memory. The book that makes you want to go smell everything immediately.

  ---

This episode is brought to you by Qoder— building the AI tools that move the industry forward.

Subscribe now

From isekai manhwa to Yung Lean going viral in tech circles, everything I’ve been noticing lately points to the same undercurrent: people are hungry for a life that actually feels like their own.

This is the first in a series of dispatches on what’s catching my attention — in culture, technology, and the quieter question underneath both: how do you actually want to live? For me a mix of balance and excellence. Not just optimization and noise. I think in the midst of slop slinging we’re all hoping for the real thing.

Solo Leveling & Isekai: Peak edge of popularity winding down, Solo Leveling won Anime of the Year Award 2025. Competing against several other animes with a story in a world ranked by birth classes through which only the main character levels up to become the strongest. The appeal is straightforward and clear. I’m not personally in an anime phase, though I have been enjoying some Isekai manhwa which in of itself points to an escape from modern reality, reversal of time to make better decisions and win or some other time/world travel often via nonsensical demise via illness, betrayal, overwork or our good friend truck-kun.

Jon Kiriakou: One of my favorite people to listen to tell stories on his channel lately. While I originally intended to enter the intelligence community- from my first dead drop lesson to a rooftop interview at 7am in the morning, a mentor shared her lived perspective on navigating enhanced training following the post 911 world. This ethical consideration, the whims of various administrations led me to decide to not further pursue it. Regardless, I enjoy the adventure of a spy novel. Adept at storytelling and perspectives on what’s going on in American foreign policy and global geopolitics. He’ll give you a laugh.

Storm II by GENER8ION - Yung Lean: The Storm II music video went viral with tech, leaders and founders, getting praise for the masterpiece choreography. Dancers and artists can agree it’s impressive choreography and a great example of visual contrast between frenetic chaotic and synchronized movement with a casual calm and breaking of the fourth wall to what is real in the negative space of the camera where the viewer meets Yung Lean’s gaze with a shrug and a smoke. To newcomers, the aesthetic “sadboy” culture refined by the artist over the last decade appears hopelessly nonsensical, an arbitrary melange of whir\wind elements lacking meaning - reflecting perhaps the feelings with the maelstrom of technology and existing as a sentient human in the world, volleying between the performance of work, the desire to be cool and the shock of the speed of it all. It points to a kind of postmodern “storm” that arises from reflection on how technology is transforming the world into a continual flow of slop and carnival of arbitrary signifiers, alienating and isolating people from one another outside the choreography demanded to keep pace. To note, many artists are familiar with these ruminations in disillusion from reality, visible across mediums from Zhang Yimou’s filmography, Hayou Miyazaki’s interviews, Russian avantgarde literature like Russian Absurd: Selected Writings and Generation P to an American post-war Soldier’s Home by Hemingway. The difference is the Lean music video is easily accessible, digestible, stimulating and consumable for viral reach touching on the hidden inner worlds that modern tech devs may not spend the time consciously reflecting on.

Black Paw: A fun fragrance acquisition from my April trip to China (Shanghai and Hangzhou.) The brand world created with a cat’s black paws through poetic descriptions is fun and elegant. I asked the nez to recommend one they thought suited my demeanor, and walked away with the Jasmine Tea fragrance as well as a Jasmine Dragon Pearl sample. Like many other people I had my pandemic hobbies, entering the world of perfume which led me to meet niche perfumers globally and get the materials to create my own. Whenever I travel I like to have some type of art to bring home. I find scent to be practical, usable and a great memory capsule that I can use daily.

Finance & Stocks World: As they say a bear market makes a fool of both bears and bulls. Some catchy phrases to stim on through weather-esque stonks reporting and breakdowns. And faceless perspectives from ex-finance bros and alt crypto keepers.

The Narrative Engineer and/or Systemic Dominance: In a world where tech accelerates and evolves rapidly, sometimes the best product doesn’t win. What wins? Generally the story or perception that can fuel adoption and traction, or systemic dominance and diffusion. It’s been popular in Bay area tech and VC conversations and recognized as the stakes for competition rise.

The Performance of Culture, Community, Meaning & Living: A collection of these conversations and moments points to desire for meaning in a moment when things feel meaningless. We see this with the recent plug ins of tech leaders into cultural moments, from Zuck sitting from row at Prada’s Milan Fashion week in February and attending the Met Gala earlier this month to Jeff Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, serving as honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. This followed by Anna Wintour holding a crisis meeting as backlash erupts over Jeff Bezos’ Met Gala sponsorship behinds closed doors. It’s the shift from brands building community to ecosystem (encapsulating narrative, community and systems) particularly in a time when the performance of community or performance of daily living feel commodified through social media and internet culture.

Is there fatigue in the transition? Pockets of course. Then there art the boos at multiple US university graduation speakers talking about the AI revolution to pontificate and attempt to engender deep purpose and meaning to point to on a sheet of paper while ignoring the anxieties and realit/ies of the students in front of them.

Thoughts?

How to move forward? How to live? Some upcoming vids and posts not on balance but on crafting the life you desire. Both with/out AI, on and offline. Or at least what I find productive.

In a memory, I got off the phone with another one of my first mentors- I remember her helping me edit my single grad school application in a dim corner of a bar near campus over Pizza and ginger mules. I had called her after leaving a job for her advise and she told me, “choose a job that supports the lifestyle you want.” It took me a few years to understand what she meant.

Easier said than done, but with courage, worth pursuing.

Worst case, you can always rejoin the dancing school boys in the matrixed choreography of Yung Lean’s music video if you take the Blue Pill again.

See you next time.

Add to Your Queue!

Anime

• Solo Leveling — Seasons 1 & 2 on Crunchyroll

Finance & Markets

• Defiant Gatekeeper — Ex-investment banker, current credit private equity and hedge fund investor. Faceless, no-nonsense takes from someone actually inside the machine.

• Benjamin Cowen — Former NASA researcher and PhD turned crypto macro analyst. Data-driven, cycle-focused, unusually calm for a crypto channel.

The Storm & Postmodern Disillusionment

• Storm I & II — GENER8ION x Yung Lean, dir. Romain Gavras (start here)

• Generation P — Victor Pelevin

• Russian Absurd: Selected Writings — Daniil Kharms

• Soldier’s Home — Ernest Hemingway (free, 10 min read)

Geopolitics & Intelligence

• Deep Focus with John Kiriakou — YouTube

• John Kiriakou on JRE — good entry point

Scent

• Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent — Jean-Claude Ellena. The Hermès master perfumer opens his laboratory door — how scent is created, composed, and how it plays with olfactory memory. The book that makes you want to go smell everything immediately.

This Summit brings us into a dynamic where we are looking at US-China affairs through more of a business, transactional engagements. People calling it a snooze fest and old men just doing things, miss the larger picture and evolving undercurrent.

“In the realm of AI, we can also see introduction of talks on US-China cooperation on AI and what that could look like… This opens up a window for perhaps flexibility in the types of deals that we could see coming out to industry, policy, and business moving forward. Something to reimagine and not what we’ve traditionally seen.”

Host: Chelsea Toczauer

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Above: AI-generated image inspired by US-China leaders meeting over chuan’er and drinks.

Context

• Summit nearly canceled due to US–Iran tensions and uncertainty around Trump’s participation and delegation composition

• Three figures driving US China policy right now: Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio

• Notable Chinese flexibility: Rubio (under Chinese sanctions) and Jensen Huang (last-minute Alaska refueling arrival) were both included

• Largest net-worth business delegation in US history; first inclusion of the US defense industry in a bilateral summit since Nixon

• Delegation included Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Elon Musk, Apple, BlackRock, Boeing, and financial services and defense representatives

Tone & the new dynamic

• Relationship shifting from adversarial to transactional — “interconnected competition” replacing open hostility

• Current de-escalation driven partly by the US being preoccupied with Iran and other global activities

• Trump was flattering and effusive; Xi was measured, restrained, and polite — a deliberate contrast

• Xi granted Trump rare access to the Zhongnanhai residence gardens; Putin is the only other leader mentioned as having visited

• Overall framing from both sides: move from adversarial enemies toward strategic, commercially-minded partners

• Chinese netizens noted: if this is now a transactional relationship, and that the delegates were the agenda

Key geopolitical signals

• Taiwan red line: Xi raised Taiwan early — framing it as personal legacy and an internal Chinese matter. Trump did not respond directly, leaving deliberate ambiguity

• Thucydides Trap: Xi invoked the concept of a rising power inevitably clashing with an incumbent one, implicitly positioning China as the rising global leader. Notably this framing also appeared in the US–UK relationship, one of the few historical cases where the trap was avoided

• Denuclearization: Trump briefly raised this, extending his conversations with Putin; China is unlikely to engage

• China positioning itself as a stabilizing global force amid US volatility

• Trump responded to Xi’s Thucydides framing on Truth Social after the trip, attributing US decline to the Biden era while presenting his own administration as a reset

Technology & chips

• No change on chip export policy: the US approved H200 sales to 10 Chinese tech companies, but China declined — directing domestic companies toward Chinese-made chips instead, notably Huawei

• That rejection has not been reversed, meaning the US approval currently means nothing in practice

• Jensen Huang running a dual-market PR campaign: “down to earth” in Beijing (noodle photo shoot), thought leader in Washington DC (think tank circuit)

• Rare earth and critical minerals not addressed at the summit but expected in future talks

• US–China cooperation and governance of AI surfaced as a topic — one to watch closely

Business & industry

• Boeing secured a deal

• Elon Musk attended with his son; Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory remains the only foreign-owned EV plant in China without a joint venture partner

• Lei Jun (Xiaomi) photographed taking a selfie with Musk — signals the regard Chinese tech leaders have for him

• Chinese EVs: Biden-era 100% tariffs remain in place, but significant US consumer demand exists; Chinese EV design and manufacturing have advanced rapidly and visibly since 2017

• No immediate changes to tariffs or market access announced

China’s AI & tech landscape

• Significant M&A activity and leadership reshuffling across Chinese AI companies over the past two years

• China’s 15th Five Year Plan and new AI governance guidelines published earlier this year signal long-term strategic intent

• Data center construction is a key pressure point — China faces fewer political and grid constraints than the US

• Unusual logistics note: large semiconductor and compute component orders being routed through Switzerland via Berlin and the UK — origin and destination unclear, worth watching

Looking Ahead

• Taiwan: will the US formulate a response to Xi’s red line, and does Trump’s silence signal flexibility?

• Critical minerals negotiations in follow-on talks

• Whether China alters its stance on H200 chip purchases

• Potential new US–China AI governance cooperation

Subscribe now

Further reading

The Thucydides Trap

• Thucydides Trap Case File — Harvard Belfer Center — the full 16-case database Chelsea references, including Case 11 (US–UK)

• Thucydides Trap: Peace & Rivalry Between the US and China — Harvard Kennedy School — Graham Allison’s ongoing research, including Xi’s direct engagement with the concept

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030)

• Decoding China’s 15th Five-Year Plan — Foreign Policy Research Institute — sharp analysis of what changed between the October 2025 draft and the final March 2026 version

• What the 15th Five-Year Plan Means for Global Investors — Neuberger — investment-lens read with a note that the plan may matter more than the summit itself

China’s AI strategy

• Where Does AI Fit in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan? — Geopolitics & AI Substack — co-authored by Chelsea Toczauer; directly referenced in this episode

• Jacob Gunter & MERICS: Trade-Offs of Innovating in China — the Jacob Gunter work Chelsea mentions; MERICS is the leading European China research institute

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  We’re going to have more interviews coming up, looking at power, people, systems, and decisions behind it and how you can apply it for your work and what it means for the world.

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“The model performs the engineering labor; the human provides intent… and the real market power belongs to those who can win systemic mindshare and handle the structural heavy lifting enabling intent scaling the future.”

Silicon Valley has the first row for massive technology shifts- the moment when a technology stops being a helpful tool and starts dominating as the core of the engineering engine, of an economy. And last week I saw the advent of one these shifts while emceeing Qoder’s “Coding in the AI-Native Era: Introducing Qoder to Silicon Valley” Mandarin-language launch in North America.

What is Qoder? Qoder is an AI-native, agentic coding platform and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) developed by Alibaba, designed to go beyond simple code completion to provide end-to-end software development. It acts as an autonomous, intelligent partner that understands complex codebases, manages tasks, and generates production-ready code, often compared to tools like Cursor and Windsurf.

And Qoder is a snapshot into how agentic AI is rewriting the possibilities for technology and global competition.

Here are three take-aways from the event:

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1. Agentic AI turns developers from implementors into directors (and is the next step to AGI”)-

For the last two years, we have lived in the “Copilot” era. AI sat in the corner of the screen, suggesting a line of code or fixing a small bug. Now, we have officially entered the Agentic Phase.

One of Qoder’s standout features is “Quest Mode” where the human no longer writes the code, they write the “Intent.” You tell the system to build a complex feature—like a subscription gateway—and it goes to work alone for hours. It reads the whole codebase (up to 100,000 files), maps out the dependencies, and handles the tests and self-correction itself. Thus the tool acts autonomously as an agentic agent.

Too understand its importance, consider the excitement of Clawdbot (now OpenClaw). Agentic systems close that gap by taking actions inside real software environments.

The model performs the engineering labor while the human provides intent and oversight. As implementation becomes automated, the constraint on building software shifts away from how many engineers a company can hire and toward who can clearly define problems and control the compute and data needed to execute them.

Agentic AI is also the next step to AGI, which while every tech giant is racing for, is also of demonstrated strategic interest to both the US and Chinese governments- even if many leaders and policy makers don’t understand AI in general (another discussion for another time).

2. Competing for behavioral leverage in a workflow stack-

Qoder’s immediate competitors are agentic IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf, not the largest AI model providers. Instead of contesting model scale, the approach targets the layer where software actually gets made: the daily workflow of developers. Rather than competing on raw model capability, the tool focuses on integration depth, task autonomy, and routine use, and because the environment where projects begin often strongly shapes the surrounding toolchain and infrastructure they later depend on, influence at this layer can create leverage without winning a direct feature-by-feature contest.

Ultimately, the objective is not to defeat competitors outright, but to become embedded in how work gets done, where accumulated habits, integrations, and team processes can make switching less attractive.

In discussions following the event, the team shared that by the end of the year, Qoder aims to become on par with, if not surpass, Cursor.

3. Silicon Valley adoption still functions as global validation-

The most revealing aspect of the launch was the choice of language and audience. Holding a Mandarin-language developer event in Palo Alto suggests the immediate objective was credibility within a technical ecosystem whose approval carries international signaling power.

Developer technologies historically spread bottom-up through peer networks—technical talks, GitHub repos, Discord servers, side projects, and meetups—long before companies formalize procurement. For Qoder-which is the dominant IDE tool in several Asian markets already-by seeding adoption inside Silicon Valley’s engineering networks, the strategy generates reputational validation that travels outward through those same channels.

Acceptance in the Valley does not guarantee scale, but it shapes perception globally, influencing experimentation and adoption in other markets well before enterprise contracts follow.

After the event, the Qoder team and I headed to Imperial Treasure where we chatted over Peking Duck, exchanging thoughts and stories—the team had just finished some trips to Singapore (business gateway to Asia), while I had returned from meetings in DC, NYC and Texas. Ultimately, it’s clear that the real market power belongs to those who can win systemic mindshare and handle the structural heavy lifting enabling “intent” scaling the future.

This piece is sponsored and brought to you by Qoder— building the AI tools that move the industry forward.

Today on the podcast, we speak with Jacob Gunter, Head of Economy and Industry at MERICS, about how securitization, industrial policy, and power govern China’s economic choices and long-term strategy.

TLDL:

• Overcapacity is an consequence of China’s securitization governance model. Chinese policymakers have tolerated inefficiency to protect strategic industries, reduce external vulnerability, and safeguard internal stability. That logic, once concentrated in traditional SOE sectors, is now shaping outcomes across a wider share of the real economy.

• EVs show how the system behaves under this industrial policy. Market shakeouts slow as local officials protect “local champions,” employment stability dominates incentives, and a weak safety net raises the political cost of failure. Price wars increasingly substitute for policy-led consolidation, with profitable firms attempting to force outcomes the state hesitates to impose directly.

• The larger strategic risk is shifting outside China. Even as the U.S. and EU harden defenses at home, Chinese firms can scale through Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, where buyers prioritize affordability, bundled delivery, servicing speed, and “good enough” performance. It is in these third markets that competitive displacement becomes hardest to reverse.
  
  *Update note: 15th FYP planning indicates there will be a focus on tightening efficiency over the next five years.