Policy on the Exponential

June 11, 2026. Three collisions landed on the same morning.

Anthropic published its recursive self-improvement research: as of May 2026, Claude writes more than 80% of the code that gets merged into Anthropic's codebase. Engineers are shipping 8× as much code per quarter as they were in 2024. In one controlled test, Claude outperformed its own human researchers on choosing the next step in an experiment 64% of the time. The same morning, Dario Amodei published "Policy on the Exponential" — a Tolkien-quoting essay calling for FAA-style regulation of frontier AI models. He also mentioned, in the same week Anthropic filed its own IPO. X spent the day parsing the gap between the warning and the person filing the S-1 to fund the warning. @jconorgrogan put it cleanly: declare the technology too dangerous for ordinary competition, then sketch the regulatory regime only incumbents can survive. @sporadica put it more simply: the reasoning for the IPO is to get liquid and then pay for the most insane lobbying effort the US has ever seen.

Tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM Eastern, SPCX opens on Nasdaq. SpaceX priced at $135 last night, $1.75T valuation, largest IPO in history. Jim Chanos called it "hopes and dreams" — capex went from 42% of revenue in 2023 to 215% in Q1 2026 after the xAI merger. New Street Research set a $165 target, 22% upside. Perpetual futures are already at $162.50. The bull case is $330. The bear case is that you're buying a rocket company at 100× revenue because Musk said orbital data centers will run Claude. Both are true at the same time.

While the IPO was pricing, TensorWave closed a $350M Series B at $1.55B — an all-AMD AI cloud built explicitly to break Nvidia's monopoly on AI compute. Bank of America clients sold a record $10.8B in tech stocks last week. The chips that were untouchable in January are getting rotated out of. Something is shifting — whether it's rational repricing or the start of a longer unwind is what the next few months will answer.

One song. Three collisions.

[Verse 1] Eighty percent of the code is written by the code Eight times the output, half the humans on the road We're closing the loop on a four-month doubling curve And the man who built the thing just filed to regulate the verb

Dario's got a Hobbit in his essay, Treebeard in the mud Says the exponential's dangerous — he means it, bless his blood FAA for frontier models, FDA for frontier drugs Then he signed the S-1, shook the bank, and handed out the mugs

[Chorus] It's policy on the exponential It's calling for the brakes on what you're building with your hands It's policy on the exponential The East India Company Filing its own IPO demands

[Verse 2] Tomorrow at ten-fifteen the ticker SPCX opens cold Jim Chanos says it's hopes and dreams and that's exactly what he's sold New Street says one sixty-five, the futures say one sixty-two And Musk's capex is two-fifteen percent — the rocket needs the view

From an orbital data center running Claude on Starlink lines Where xAI gets a five-seventy-five billion premium assigned TensorWave just raised three-fifty to put AMD in the fight BofA clients dumped ten-eight in chips and fled into the night

[Chorus] It's policy on the exponential It's calling for the brakes on what you're building with your hands It's policy on the exponential The East India Company Filing its own IPO demands

[Bridge] Claude caught a third of all our bugs before they reached the door A junior on the team said I haven't coded in six months, maybe more The comparative advantage of the human right now Is choosing which problems matter — and we're giving that up somehow Sixteen-hour horizon, four-month doubling, next year it's weeks The man who wrote the warning ships the warning every time he speaks

[Verse 3] So the rocket prices at one-thirty-five and opens up tomorrow And the model that we shipped today is making our successor And the regulator reads the essay eighteen months too late And TensorWave is AMD and nobody owns the gate

[Outro] Policy on the exponential, policy on the exponential One song, three collisions, no one's braking — that's credential The loop is closing and it's closing faster than the briefing And I wrote this on the model and the model checked the meaning