Can the AI Industry Regulate Itself? Stripe Wants PayPal, China Catches Up, NY Bans Datacenters

What It Covers

The All-In hosts debate Demis Hassabis's proposal for an AI self-regulatory organization modeled after FINRA, analyze Stripe's $53B bid for PayPal alongside Block and Advent, examine New York's data center moratorium, cover Apple's trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI, and discuss a breakthrough enzyme that reverses skin aging by 40 years.

Key Questions Answered

• •AI Self-Regulation Framework: David Sacks outlines five conditions for a viable AI SRO: broad representation including startups and open source, review limited to true frontier models only, focus exclusively on catastrophic risks like cyber and CBRN threats, voluntary operation before becoming mandatory, and functioning as a substitute for new government agencies rather than an additive layer. Without these guardrails, the SRO becomes an opening bid for deeper regulatory capture.
• •Regulatory Capture Playbook: Anthropic pursues a state-by-state strategy of incrementally tightening AI regulations rather than aligning around a single national framework, per a Politico investigation. Each new state adoption introduces stricter rules than the previous one, creating a ratchet effect. Anthropic also funds NGOs opposing data center construction, despite compute scarcity being the primary constraint on its own revenue growth.
• •Payments Consolidation Thesis: Stripe, Block, and private equity firm Advent are jointly bidding roughly $53-60B for PayPal, which peaked at $322B and now trades near $40B. The strategic logic: combining Stripe's 2T annual merchant volume, PayPal's 439M consumer accounts, Block's point-of-sale infrastructure, Cash App, Venmo, Braintree, and stablecoin assets creates a viable end-to-end competitor to Visa and Mastercard on proprietary rails.
• •AI Token Cost Arbitrage: Input token pricing varies by 100x across providers: Claude charges approximately $56 per million tokens, GPT-4 around $26, Grok roughly $1.50, and leading Chinese models near $0.50. Ramp data shows enterprise token spend grew 21x in one year, not 21%. CFOs lack visibility into this spend, creating earnings risk. Switching to lower-cost models for non-frontier tasks captures most of the savings with minimal quality loss.
• •Data Center Energy Crisis: The US faces an energy deficit equivalent to 2.5 times California's total consumption by 2050. PJM, the utility serving 13 states, needed 7-8 gigawatts in a recent capacity auction and received roughly 156 megawatts. Approximately 40% of planned data center projects are being cancelled or paused. New York's statewide hyperscale moratorium effectively creates a 5-year delay when accounting for permitting and construction ramp-up timelines.
• •Extracellular Matrix Age Reversal: Calico and Revel Pharma used AlphaFold combined with five rounds of directed protein evolution to engineer a novel enzyme that degrades CML, the primary advanced glycation end product accumulating between cells with age. Applied to donated skin from patients over 70, the enzyme eliminated 55% of CML, reverting tissue markers to those of a 31-year-old. Cosmetic topical application is the likely first commercial pathway.