Open Source AI Is How America Loses | Diogo Mónica

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:00)
Did you do illegal hacks?

**Diogo Mónica** (0:01)
Absolutely not gonna admit about illegal hacks on camera and recorded. But let's just say, I definitely learned from the best at the time when I was 12 And there were no computer crime laws in Portugal at the time.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:13)
I'm Amanda Cassatt, and you're watching Endgame.

**Diogo Mónica** (0:16)
AI is the ultimate weapon, because it is intelligence. Even if there is a small likelihood that an adversary gains an edge over you, then that is something that is not okay. If you have the point at which an adversary has an AI that is powerful enough to inoculate my nuclear bombs, then all of a sudden, mutually assured destruction no longer works.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:38)
My impression is always that protectionism is a sign of weakness. If you've actually got the best and the brightest, if you're actually confident in what you can create, why not do it open?

**Diogo Mónica** (0:46)
You're right. Why not allow Google in China? Why not allow Gmail in China? Why not allow Twitter in China?

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:56)
Let's start with Haun Ventures, Katie Haun, someone I've been aware of for a very long time in the crypto space.
Sorry, this is going to be a shaggy dog joke. This is going to be a long tee up of this question. But I, like many people, got interested in crypto because it enabled an alternate system, and enables people to potentially, theoretically, exit from a top-down system of command and control, and loosen the grip of authoritarianism, or potential authoritarianism. I think that might have been what motivated Satoshi, and it might have been to some degree what motivated Vitalik. Then you look at someone like Katie Haun, who's a US prosecutor, who prosecuted the Silk Road case, who put Dread Pirate Roberts away.

**Diogo Mónica** (1:53)
So she actually didn't put DPR away, she put the Secret Service and US. Marshals that stole their big claim.

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:00)
Okay, but still, right? If she's probably not on the Ed Snowden side of things, she's probably not on the Ross Taylor Ulbricht, walking free immediately side of things.
How do you reconcile as someone who's been in the space as a crypto investor? How do you reconcile that crypto anarchist heritage that we have in our space with where you work and with your own ideology and philosophy coming into this space? Because I think you aren't a crypto anarchist.

**Diogo Mónica** (2:34)
No, I think my roots definitely are more crypto anarchists than most young hacker. I was a teenager loving security, smashing the stack for fun and profit, and reading all about the hackers manifesto. So there is definitely like that.

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:49)
Did you do illegal hacks?

**Diogo Mónica** (2:51)
Absolutely not going to admit about illegal hacks on camera and recorded. But let's just say I definitely learned from the best at the time when I was 12
There were no computer crime laws in Portugal at the time. So that was pretty great. So I grew up in Portugal. Let me just say in terms of like, it's actually very easy to do the bridge between the end of the spectrum of ideology and I think the traditional finance ideology. And I mean, I myself like I created a federal bank, the first federal bank in the US that took crypto. That is like asking for permission of the system in a world where everybody was asking for forgiveness. And so even my own career as a co-founder of Anchorage Digital, like I was doing this of believing that the space is better if we bring traditional economy with us. So I think the practical answer to your question is, Katie comes from the federal prosecutor and prosecuting criminals and then realizes, becomes the first independent board member of Coinbase and realizes that there's amazing founders and there's amazing reasons why Bitcoin should exist, and then comes to our side and ends up co-leading A6C's crypto fund one, two, and three. And so she is the perfect example of somebody that is as part of the system realizing that there's so many benefits of the technology that we're building and then dedicating her career to it. And Anchorage is the same example like bridging traditional finance with crypto. And so what I feel like is happening is by creating a spectrum instead of like anarchists or traditional finance by creating a spectrum of access of different things. I think stable coins are a perfect example of that. Stable coins live on truly decentralized rails like Ethereum, but they themselves are centralized. And so they're kind of an interesting-

**Amanda Cassatt** (4:27)