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

The industry is coalescing around a self-regulatory organization (SRO) for AI, modeled after FINRA, to prevent restrictive government oversight while addressing catastrophic risks like cyber and biological threats. This push coincides with a wave of corporate consolidation, exemplified by Stripe and Block’s potential acquisition of PayPal, which aims to revitalize legacy digital assets through AI-driven operational efficiencies. However, this progress faces significant infrastructure hurdles, as data center moratoriums and energy shortages threaten to stall innovation. These anti-data center movements, potentially fueled by foreign influence campaigns similar to past anti-GMO propaganda, ignore the economic and technological necessity of hyperscale compute. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in anti-aging science, specifically the use of enzymes to degrade extracellular glycation end products, demonstrate the profound potential of AI-accelerated protein engineering to reverse biological aging, highlighting the tangible benefits of continued technological investment.