savient.

America spent $285 billion to LOSE the AI war. Stanford dropped a 423 page report yesterday and revealed the most damning stat on page 200: The number of AI researchers moving to the United States has collapsed 89% since 2017. 80% of that collapse happened in the LAST 12 MONTHS. Let that sink in. The country that invented the transformer. The country that built OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. The country pouring $285.9 billion of private capital into AI in a single year (23x more than China). Can no longer attract the people who actually build the technology. And here's the part that should concern every founder, operator, and investor reading this: The Trump administration just made it official. The H-1B visa now costs employers $100,000 PER HIRE. So OpenAI wants to hire a Chinese postdoc from Tsinghua? $100K before they write a line of code. Anthropic wants a French ML engineer? $100K. Google wants the Indian PhD who literally co-authored the paper their entire model is based on? $100K. And these are the LUCKY ones who even get a visa. The result was instant. 89% drop over 8 years. 80% of it in the last year alone. The talent pipeline got destroyed. Now look at the other side of the chart: China's top model is now 2.7 percentage points behind Anthropic's best. Down from a 20+ point gap two years ago. China leads the world in AI publications. China leads in AI patents. China leads in industrial robot installations. US and Chinese models have traded the #1 spot multiple times since early 2025. Switzerland and Singapore now have more AI researchers per capita than the US. The US ranks 24TH globally in actual AI adoption. Behind the UAE. Behind Singapore. Behind countries most Americans couldn't find on a map. And here's the truly insane part: 50% of the world's top AI researchers are Chinese. Jensen Huang said this on a podcast 3 weeks ago. For 20 years, the US strategy was simple: Let them study at Stanford and MIT, then keep them. Pay them $800K. Give them green cards. Build the future on imported brains. That deal is dead. We just told the smartest people in the world: "Pay $100,000 for the privilege of working here, or go home." And guess what they're doing. They're going to Zurich, where Anthropic and OpenAI are quietly opening offices because they can't get the talent into San Francisco anymore. The strategy is the same as building a Ferrari factory and then banning mechanics from entering the building. You can pour hundreds of billions into data centers. You can buy 4 million Nvidia chips. You can sign $300 billion cloud contracts with Oracle. You can build nuclear reactors to power your GPUs. None of it matters if the people who write the algorithms aren't allowed in the country. Wall Street thinks AI is a capex race. But in reality, it's a TALENT race. Every dollar Microsoft and Meta and Google are spending assumes the same army of researchers will keep showing up to use it. That assumption just broke. And the smart money already knows: Why is Anthropic opening a Zurich office? Why is DeepMind expanding in London instead of Mountain View? Why is OpenAI hiring in Dublin and Singapore? Because the math no longer works in America. The government turned the world's biggest brain magnet into the world's most expensive border wall. 3 years from now, when China launches a frontier model that outperforms anything in the US and the headlines scream "How did we lose the lead?" - remember this post. The lead wasn't lost in a lab. It wasn't lost on a benchmark. It wasn't lost to a smarter algorithm. It was lost at customs.

Oleksandr Yakovenko, the founder of TAF Industries, one of Ukraine's largest drone makers wrote a good response to @RheinmetallAG's Papperger's irritating statement. I used AI to translate it for you. It is worth reading in full. "Dear Mr. Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, When you called Ukrainian drone manufacturers “Ukrainian housewives with 3D printers in their kitchens,” you demonstrated how deeply the European defense establishment still fails to understand the nature of modern warfare. This is not about emоtions. This is about battlefield reality. Here are the figures your industry refuses to acknowledge: In 2025 alone, Ukrainian drones carried out 819,737 confirmed strikes. They accounted for 90% of all combat losses of the Russian army—more than all other types of weapons combined. A single company, TAF Industries, produces up to 100,000 FPV drones per month. Over any given 90-day period, the products of my company alone have more confirmed hits than your entire fleet of equipment over its entire history of combat use across all conflicts. And most importantly—I built this company and achieved these results in two years, not fifty. Think about that. Our drones achieve greater kinetic effect in three months than your flagship platforms have in half a century. Why? Because the battlefield has changed, while your business model has not. Russian electronic warfare has rendered GPS-guided Western munitions (Excalibur, GMLRS, etc.) almost ineffective. Expensive and complex systems designed for wars with air superiority and conventional “peer-on-peer” conflict have become easy targets for drones costing $500–2,000 that attack them from above. The cost-effectiveness ratio has been turned upside down: one 120mm Rheinmetall shell or one anti-tank missile costs more than a dozen of our drones—yet our drones still prevail. This is not a “Lego game.” This is industrial Darwinism in real time. We iterate weekly. We lose factories to missile strikes and rebuild them within weeks. We print parts in basements and deploy 100,000 strike systems per month, while your engineers still require 3–5 years and hundreds of millions of euros to certify even minor upgrades. The war in Ukraine is not a temporary anomaly. It is the first true drone-industrial war. And it has already proven that outdated European platforms—no matter how expensive or “serious”—are becoming increasingly irrelevant if they do not integrate the very technologies you are mocking. So when you say “this is not innovation,” I hear something else: “We do not want to admit that the future is being written in Ukrainian workshops, not in Düsseldorf offices.” The hashtag #MadeByHousewives is trending for a reason. Because these “housewives” destroy more enemy equipment every month than entire European armies do over full campaigns. And they do so while your industry continues to sell 20th-century solutions at 21st-century prices. The invitation stands, Mr. Papperger. Stop laughing at the kitchen table. Come and learn how the war of tomorrow is actually fought. Because the next time someone asks, “Who needs tanks in the age of drones?”, the answer may be simpler than you think: Those who still believe in 1979 will lose to those who are building in 2026. With respect (but with facts), Oleksandr Yakovenko Founder of TAF Industries One of those “Ukrainian housewives”" pravda.com.ua/columns/2026/0…

Und bevor alle sagen, "Passiert ja eh nie!": Zypern wurde Anfang März mutmasslich von iranischen Drohnen getroffen. Distanz Iran-Zypern min. 1200 km. Dies entspricht der Distanz Kaliningrad-Schweiz. Und ja, Drittstaaten wurden auch beim Zypern-Szenario überflogen. Die 🇨🇭-innen und 🇨🇭-er haben keine Ahnung, wie schutzlos wir sind. @Georg_Haesler @karl_rieder @AnwaltSteiner