Tim Puko

For the record. Just walked out of PDAC in Toronto — and if you needed proof the mining sector’s gone full mania, this year’s your exhibit A. I’ve been coming since the ’90s, and I’ve never seen such a crush of wide-eyed “new entrants” talking like they just discovered rocks. Seven levels of the convention center packed shoulder-to-shoulder with speculators masquerading as miners. Call it what you like — innovation, renaissance, “new cycle” — but let’s not kid ourselves. This is what the top of a bubble looks like.

Reports coming in that Iranian fire has hit an Emirati offshore oil platform in the Gulf. Would be a direct attack on the Gulf's energy infrastructure.

I’m at a mining conference panel entitled “Navigating a bull market (finally!)” You’re never going to believe this but the unanimous advice on what to do is: KEEP BUYING!!!

Some Trump official was openly talking about the plan to go to war with Iran at Joe’s Stone Crab BEFORE IT HAPPENED and this TMZ reporter overheard him

Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies. In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD contracts with—all their services and products can be denied to any economic actor at will by the Secretary of War. This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States Government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compared to this arson.

"Anthropic currently requires human oversight of autonomous operations when used to kill things for safety reasons because... soldiers and others could lose control of the model and [Claude could] automatically start killing large groups."

At high stakes Pentagon meeting today Sec Hegseth gave Anthropic head Dario Amodei ultimatum to allow the Pentagon to use Anthropic’s AI model for mass domestic surveillance and kinetic autonomous operations without human oversight or face censure and be labeled “supply chain threat.” According to a source familiar: The meeting was cordial, not a dressing down, not a screaming match, all business. Hegseth praised the Anthropic product but then said if by Friday Anthropic does not agree to the Pentagon’s use of the model without restrictions, then Hegseth would terminate the contract and use the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to comply AND/OR designate Anthropic a supply chain threat and national security risk. (EDIT: Both are mutually exclusive. You can’t be a supply chain risk but also invoke the DPA to say that the country needs this product so much for national security that it will override any restrictions put in place by the company that limits govt access to the product. Both cannot be true.) At issue is Anthropic’s two stipulations that its advanced AI model currently used in the Pentagon’s classified systems is NOT used for autonomous kinetic operations (Anthropic currently requires human oversight of autonomous operations when used to kill things for safety reasons because they don’t know how the autonomous system will react and could even endanger soldiers using the model; soldiers and others could lose control of the model and automatically start killing large groups without humans in the “kill chain.”) Second Anthropic bars its models from being used for mass domestic surveillance. Hegseth wants these restrictions lifted. According to a source familiar with the talks, Anthropic has never objected to the use of its models for “legitimate military operations.” It also told the Hegseth it never complained to the Pentagon or Palantir about the use of its models in the Maduro raid.

In Chokepoints, I wrote about how Bob Lighthizer was hyper-vigilant about potential legal challenges to Trump’s tariffs during the first term. That’s why he used Sec 301, not IEEPA The second Trump admin has been far less careful