Interconnected

If I had asked you to guess which country’s tech company has to ask its government for an approved list of customers before releasing a new product, you likely would have guessed China or maybe Russia. Except today that honor belongs to OpenAI in America. If I had asked you which country’s government gets “golden shares” in companies it deems strategic or wants to keep a closer eye on, your answer might be China or even Germany.

The energy to regulate AI is in the air in Washington. With the recently signed executive order to review AI models, a congressional proposal to legislate AI further, the government possibly taking shares of frontier AI labs, and last Friday’s action prohibiting foreign nationals anywhere from accessing Anthropic’s most advanced models, this may be the opening salvo of more AI regulation to come.

Ever since Anthropic released its report in February on three Chinese AI labs distilling its advanced models to train their own, I have been thinking a lot about adversarial distillation. I carried my thoughts to China, when I recently visited most of the leading labs there, including the three being accused. I tracked how the issue has evolved quickly into action and legislative proposals in Washington.

Trump wrapped up his state visit to China a few hours ago. If you are an US-China relations nerd like myself, watching the minute-by-minute unfolding of the visit is like watching the Super Bowl. Having been somewhat on the inside of these types of

Trump wrapped up his state visit to China a few hours ago. If you are an US-China relations nerd like myself, watching the minute-by-minute unfolding of the visit is like watching the Super Bowl. Having been somewhat on the inside of these types of visits before (I was on the White House advance team of Obama’s G20 Summit visit in Hangzhou in 2016), the small details were especially fun to observe and obsess about.

“Updating priors” has become one of those tropey phrases that more and more people say, like “thinking from first principles”. Poker bros started it. Finance bros popularized it. Now tech bros, who are all by default LLM bros, are spreading it more, if only to signal that they know at least something about how backpropagation works. I am as guilty of doing this as any.

Welcome to Interconnected Capital’s Q1 2026 performance update letter. To new and old readers alike, a friendly reminder: I run a global technology long-only fund focused on investing in both the hardware and software “picks and shovels” of the interconnected global digital AI economy. I draw on my technology business operator’s experience and geopolitical antennas to bring an edge to how I assess a tech company’s rhythm and prospects in a constantly changing world.

A key risk to the AI infrastructure buildout I identified in my annual letter was a country-wide, bipartisan pushback against all the constructions. It is one of those risks, like any risk, that you don’t want to be right on, but as a

A key risk to the AI infrastructure buildout I identified in my annual letter was a country-wide, bipartisan pushback against all the constructions. It is one of those risks, like any risk, that you don’t want to be right on, but as a responsible investor, you have to be clear-eyed about it and react accordingly. Looks like this risk is on the “right” track faster than I had anticipated.

Open source used to be a niche topic. China tech also used to be a niche topic. Thanks to AI, the combined topic of “Chinese open source technology” is the topic du jour. It is the story that everyone is trying to understand and