To my American friends, part two. Last time I talked about France. This time I want to talk about something bigger than France, bigger than any midterm you've ever voted in: who will control artificial intelligence. You carry a responsibility no other people on earth carries right now. The most powerful technology in human history is being built in your country, under your laws. Whatever rules you choose will become the rules for the world. If Democrats retake Congress, here is the playbook I see coming, because in Europe we've already watched the first chapters. It starts with a beautiful promise. Superintelligence will bring abundance. Cures for every disease, free education, the end of scarcity. And it might. But then comes the sentence that always follows: "This is too important to be left to the market." Then comes regulation. It won't be one law. It will be a thicket of them: licenses to train a model, mandatory audits, compliance offices, approved datasets, safety boards staffed by people who have never shipped anything. Each rule sounds reasonable on its own. Together they build a wall. Who can climb that wall? Not the kid in a garage in Ohio. Not the two-person startup. Only the giants with armies of lawyers and lobbyists. Some of the biggest AI companies have already gone to Congress asking for a licensing regime. When incumbents beg to be regulated, it's not because they love rules. It's because rules are a moat. So you end up with two or three approved AI companies sitting next to the government, dressed up as competition. They would share the same values, the same filters, and the same red lines, all decided in the same rooms. Europe just did this with the AI Act. The result is that we barely build anything. We regulate what Americans and Chinese create. Now think about what that means once AI is everywhere. It will decide what information you see, what loans you get, which jobs you're screened for, and what speech gets flagged. A small class of officials and their partner corporations would hold the master switch on human knowledge. That is a new nomenklatura. The Soviet apparatchiks needed millions of informants to control what people thought. This one would need a few data centers and a compliance policy. Orwell imagined a telescreen in every room. We're building something far more intimate. This is exactly what your Founding Fathers feared. They had just escaped a distant power that decided everything for them, so they designed a country where power could never concentrate in one place. They split it, checked it, and handed the most important guarantees directly to the people: the right to speak and the right to bear arms. Those rights were never gifts from the state. They were limits on the state. Free speech came back to life the day X stopped being a censorship machine. But a Constitution is only as strong as the citizens who defend it at the ballot box. If AI gets centralized in a handful of approved hands, those rights become words on old paper. Have you watched Altered Carbon? In that world, the ultra-rich live for centuries by buying new bodies. Everyone else gets one life, rents their existence, and dies. Society hasn't collapsed. It works perfectly for the people at the top. That's the real horror: it's stable. No amount of work, talent or merit can lift someone from the bottom, because the ladder itself is owned. That's what a captured AI economy looks like. It won't be chaos. It will be a permanent ceiling. America has always been the opposite: the one country on earth where a nobody with a laptop can become somebody. I build my company between Paris and San Francisco. I know which side of the Atlantic still lets you try. So before you vote, ask every candidate one simple question: will your AI policy let a 19-year-old in a dorm room compete with the giants, or will it protect the giants from that 19-year-old? Keep AI open. Keep power distributed. Keep the ladder. Stay American.