Infinite Loops · Oct 1, 2026 · 1h 28m · 68m saved
With Julie Fredrickson, Managing Partner of Chaotic Capital
Montana now has a law called the Right to Compute, signed by Governor Gianforte, that treats using a phone, a laptop or a data center as a protected right, and Julie Fredrickson is the investor who first put it forward.
Most of the AI-policy fight is between people who want new rules written now and people who want none. Fredrickson argues the existing Constitution and the laws already against fraud and violence should be tried first, and she points to nuclear power, where four new reactors were approved in two years, as evidence that moving quickly and staying safe can go together.
"Safe and fast actually is probably more likely than safe and slow." — Julie Fredrickson
Julie Fredrickson, managing partner of the early-stage venture fund Chaotic Capital, on Infinite Loops, knew Isaiah Taylor before he had started Valar Atomics, invested in it, and this summer watched it raise a billion-dollar round from Sequoia. She has also published something every day since January 1, 2021.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 28 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Fredrickson treats compute as a right on par with speech and property, and Montana has written that into law
Fast and safe are not opposites: four reactors were approved in two years, against a decade per reactor before
AI is probably still in its invention phase, not its build-out, and today's large language models are not the endgame
AI crawlers now read the web at a scale that leaves the machine-readable web orders of magnitude larger than the human one
Chatbots recommend CeraVe because one brand dominated Reddit's skincare forums, and those forums may soon fill with bots
Verified human data may become the most valuable asset online, and proving identity will need zero-knowledge proofs
Much of the world's information is not machine readable at all, from Soviet patents with no owner to undigitized archives
AI can already persuade at scale, she says, and questioning everything is the best defense she knows
Most of what slowed US nuclear construction was rules that did not necessarily make anything safer
Compute has been subsidized by the labs, and the industry will need spot prices before AI can be sold at scale
1. Compute Is a Right
Asked what has surprised her about the last two years, Fredrickson said it was how much AI pulled her into the physical world: data centers, energy production and, eventually, politics. What started as a hobby project became a campaign over what rights people have to use their own computers.
She argues the First Amendment already covers compute, because compute is mathematics and mathematics is speech
"And I tend to think of math as a subsection of speech, not the other way around." — Julie Fredrickson
Montana's law, she said, is an amalgamation of the First, Second and Fourth Amendments: compute is partly speech, partly property, and carries cybersecurity and defense implications. Montana took a strict-scrutiny approach, meaning the state has to make the case for banning a use of compute, rather than the citizen having to make the case for being allowed it.
Existing law already covers the crimes people fear AI will enable
"Fraud and violence are already proscribed." — Julie Fredrickson
She pointed to two earlier fights. In the browser wars of the 1990s the concern was regulatory capture. In the encryption wars before that, the US built back doors into systems, which made the country easier to hack, and very nearly banned strong encryption, without which online shopping and secure meetings would not exist. Her conclusion was to lean on the systems already in place before writing "a whole new body of regulations and moratoriums," and she closed the point with the advice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Don't panic."
