The Outsider Perspective Issue 484 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to Veronika, a Swiss Brown cow in Austria who just became the first documented bovine tool user. Scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna published the findings in Current Biology this week. National Geographic has the video.

Here’s what she does: she picks up a brush, selects which end to use depending on the body part, and adjusts her technique. Bristle side for the thick skin on her back. Smooth handle for the sensitive belly. This kind of flexible, multipurpose tool use was previously observed only in primates.

Two thoughts. First, the cow is named Veronika. That is a better name than most people give their children. Second, I now have to explain to you that an AI agent controlled my computer this week while I ate dinner, and a cow in Austria independently figured out how to use a back scratcher. The timeline is moving fast for all species.

This week, I’m writing about the biggest shift in AI since it went mainstream, and why Congress is fighting the last war.

Quick Hits:

Day 27, and Trump just pushes for ten more days. The Iran war is approaching its one-month mark, and may go longer. Trump extended the pause on strikes against Iranian energy sites to April 6, claiming Tehran requested the extension and that “talks are going very well.” Pakistan’s foreign minister confirmed his country has been facilitating indirect talks between Washington and Tehran, with a 15-point U.S. framework now on the table. Iran’s alleged Foreign Minister rejected the terms and issued five conditions of his own, including compensation and sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian demands are… absurd. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia quietly cranked production to 10.34 million barrels a day in February, the highest since Q3 2022, accounting for half of OPEC’s 640,000 bpd output surge. And the U.S. granted India a 30-day emergency waiver to buy stranded Russian oil cargoes. The pattern I’ve written about is holding: Trump is leveraging energy against the Iranians. If the Gulf states take over Iran’s place in the oil supply chain, they will lose plenty of leverage. Extending the energy deadline costs the U.S. nothing. Iran’s leverage gets weaker every day the world reroutes around it. Trump also continues to play rope-a-dope, where he talks escalation while preparing for a strike. Deescalating while sending more troops overseas is… mixed messaging to say the least. And with a stack of dead Iranian leaders, I know what I’d believe in this situation – it’s shocking the Iranians don’t.
Philadelphia, 2026, meets Westboro, 2005. A masked speaker at an anti-war protest outside Philadelphia City Hall told a cheering crowd that for every U.S. soldier who comes home in a casket, “we cheer.” He called Hamas and Hezbollah “resistance forces” and urged people to bring America to its knees. Fetterman responded on X: “Here in Philadelphia. Truly appalling. These assholes chanting for the death of our servicemembers. Where’s the Dem outrage and condemnation?” Good question. I remember this. I was in college during the Iraq War, and the left treated the Westboro Baptist Church — who protested military funerals — as uniquely evil. And it was. But the Westboro people were a fringe cult from Topeka, universally condemned. This is different. These are the same activist networks that have marched at every major left-wing demonstration for the last decade. They are not fringe. They are infrastructure. And other than Fetterman, I’m not seeing many Democrats rush to point this video out, because condemning these protesters means condemning their own coalition’s foot soldiers.
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Where you can find me this week

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The Chuck Norris Facts Were True. All of Them. – Conservative Institute

Hard to Chicken Out When the Chicken Is Dead – Conservative Institute

Fetterman Isn’t the Problem. His Party Is. – Conservative Institute

The Year of the Agent

AI stopped answering questions and started doing the work. Congress responded by trying to ban the factory after the product already shipped.

A few weeks ago, I was doing keyword research for a book project. I ran my searches in Publisher Rocket, pulled the Amazon category URLs I needed, and handed them to an AI agent running on my desktop.

The agent opened my browser. It navigated to Amazon. It clicked through bestseller pages, one by one, pulling titles, prices, rankings, and review counts. It visited more than a hundred individual book listings. It wrote a competitive intelligence report. It saved the files to my desktop. I watched my browser move without touching the mouse.

I did not ask AI a question. I gave it a job.

That distinction is one most Americans haven’t made yet. For three years, the AI conversation has been about chatbots. You type a question, the machine types an answer. It was useful and impressive early on. You were “talking” with a robot. But it was still a conversation. You went to the AI. The AI did not come to you.

That changed. In the last three months, every major AI company on earth shipped the same product: agents that control your computer. Not chatbots. Co-workers.

Anthropic released an update to its Cowork tool this week that went further: it can control your computer completely. The same keyword research I described above? This time, I told Cowork the task, it took over my computer, ran the searches itself, did the analysis, and spat out a detailed report for my review, and a gameplan to execute it.

It did that while I grabbed dinner. 2026 is the year AI agents are taking over… everywhere.

From chatbot to co-worker

An AI agent is not a smarter chatbot. It is software that takes control of your mouse, your keyboard, your browser, and your file system. It reads your screen. It opens applications. It fills out forms. It creates documents, names them, saves them where you tell it to. It sends emails. It pulls data from websites and builds spreadsheets from what it finds. It does this while you watch, or while you do something else entirely.

That specific shift has happened fast. Anthropic released computer-control capabilities way back in October 2024, but no one could really use those features. This year, they launched Cowork and Claude Code — agentic software that sits on your desktop and works alongside you, creating documents, browsing the web, running code, managing projects. Those programs exploded in popularity.

Anthropic was not alone.

OpenClaw, an open-source desktop agent framework, hit 337,000 stars on GitHub in a matter of weeks. Perplexity shipped Computer, a system that orchestrates 19 different AI models: one for writing, one for coding, one for images, one for video. It runs in an isolated environment that can work for hours or months without stopping. OpenAI launched Operator, a computer-using agent that browses the web independently. Google shipped Project Mariner, which handles ten tasks simultaneously. The list goes on, with new products hitting the market every day.

The backbone making all of this possible is something called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. Think of it as the USB port of the AI era — an open standard that lets any agent connect to any tool, any database, any application. Anthropic built it, open-sourced it, and donated it to the Linux Foundation. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft adopted it. It has been downloaded tens of millions of times. That is how fast this infrastructure matured.

I have been writing about AI heavily since 2023. I told you about the data center buildout — the $4 to $5 trillion infrastructure bet I compared to World War II mobilization. I told you about AI becoming “systematically important,” too big to fail like a bank in 2008. I told you the real political fight would be over electricity. All of that massive buildout is about building the AI factory. The agents are the product that just rolled off the assembly line. The agents you can use now — Anthropic’s Cowork or Code, Perplexity’s Computer, OpenClaw — these are the Model T of AI agents.

In 2025, less than 5% of enterprise applications had AI agents. By the end of 2026, Gartner projects that number will hit 40%. Goldman Sachs is deploying thousands of autonomous AI software engineers internally right now. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, told a conference this month that his 75,000 employees will soon be working alongside 7.5 million agents. “Every engineer is going to have a hundred agents,” he said. McKinsey estimates AI agents and robots will generate $2.9 trillion in annual economic value for the United States by 2030.

To bring this closer to home: in the past three weeks I’ve had around 50 agents built for my own purposes. I’ve talked with engineers running hundreds of agents across their work and personal lives.

This is not coming. It arrived.

The barn is empty

On March 25, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. It bans new data center construction until Congress passes legislation establishing “safeguards” in four areas: safety, worker protection, utility costs, and export controls.

The bill does not define what those safeguards are. It sets no metrics. It has no sunset clause. The moratorium lifts when Congress passes legislation meeting criteria that the moratorium bill never specifies. It is a circular lock with no key.

But the larger problem is not the bill’s design. It is its target. The Sanders-AOC moratorium regulates data center construction. Desktop agents live on your laptop, your terminal, your desktop. Yes, most of them still call out to cloud-based AI models to do their thinking. But the agent itself — the software that controls your mouse, reads your screen, and takes action — runs locally. And the direction of where AI is headed is clear: CPU chip makers from Apple and beyond are redesigning its chips to run advanced language models directly on-device. The industry is racing toward a future where the AI brain lives on the same machine as the AI hands. A moratorium on data centers does not slow that down.

The horse is out of the barn. Sanders is locking the door.

Even today’s cloud-dependent agents already have the data center infrastructure they need. The buildout is happening. New facilities are under construction. A moratorium does not unplug existing capacity. It just makes sure no more gets built — while every competitor keeps building.

The bill’s reception was bipartisan rejection. Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, called it “China First.” Senator Mark Warner, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “idiocy” at an AI summit the same day the bill was introduced. “The idea that we’re going to stuff this back into the bottle, this genie, that’s a ridiculous premise,” he said. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said a moratorium would be “complete capitulation.” Adam Thierer of the R Street Institute said it might as well be called the “Hand China the Lead on AI Act.”

Five days before the bill was introduced, the White House released its own AI framework with six objectives: protect children, strengthen communities, protect creators, defend free speech, lead on innovation, and develop the workforce. It emphasized light-touch regulation and federal preemption of state AI laws. Not a moratorium. Guardrails while building.

They build in months

Jensen Huang made another point at the same conference. In the United States, it takes roughly three years from groundbreaking to an operational data center. In China, it takes months. China has twice our energy capacity. Its data center electricity rates are less than half of ours. In 2024 alone, China added 543 gigawatts of power generation capacity — more than India’s entire grid.

The United States outspends China on AI infrastructure five to one. But money does not matter if you cannot build. A moratorium does not slow China. It slows us.

McKinsey’s $2.9 trillion projection is not hypothetical upside. It is the floor for what America needs to remain competitive in an aging economy. The U.S. fertility rate hit 1.599 in 2024 — the lowest ever recorded, well below the 2.1 replacement level. Sustaining the current labor force without productivity gains would require 3.5 times the current immigration rate, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. There is no political appetite for tripling immigration. There is no demographic rescue coming. Japan’s experience — fertility collapse combined with slow AI adoption, followed by three decades of economic stagnation — is the cautionary tale.

In an aging country, a moratorium on productivity tools is a moratorium on the economy.

What they should actually worry about

There is a real AI risk, and Sanders and AOC are not talking about it. It is not at the power plant. It is at the keyboard.

CrowdStrike published a security analysis of OpenClaw in this month. They found internet-exposed instances running with no authentication. They found malicious “skills” — essentially apps for agents — circulating in OpenClaw’s marketplace. They documented indirect prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions hidden in emails or documents trick an agent into treating them as legitimate commands.

This is what happens when an AI that controls your computer gets compromised. It does not just give a bad answer. It takes a bad action. It clicks. It sends. It files. It moves money.

I wrote about AI accountability in 2018, before most people had heard the word “chatbot.” The question I raised then was simple: what happens when a non-human makes the unethical decision? That question is more urgent today than it was eight years ago, because the non-human is no longer answering questions. It is taking actions. The answer is not a construction moratorium. It is transparency, accountability, and open standards. MCP was open-sourced for exactly this reason.

The answer is not to stop

The electricity concerns are real. I have written about them. Analysts project major electricity shortfalls for U.S. data centers within three years. Worker displacement is real. Most companies have barely begun deploying agents. By the end of this year, Gartner says 40% of enterprise applications will have them. That is a steep ramp for workers who have not been prepared.

The concern is not crazy. The prescription is.

Senator Warner proposed an alternative the same day he called the moratorium “idiocy”: tax data centers and use the revenue to fund worker transition programs. Build. Do not block. I don’t necessarily think this will work, because things are moving too quickly for government retraining programs. But it at least directionally understands the problem before us. AOC and Bernie are out to lunch, and it’s disturbing. I can understand an old socialist like Bernie not grasping the technology or the speed of it, but AOC pitches herself as a tech-savvy millennial. She has no excuse.

History has tested the moratorium model before. The Ottoman Empire banned the printing press for 250 years. Europe accelerated. The knowledge gap became permanent. Britain’s Red Flag Acts required a man to walk in front of every automobile waving a red flag. The auto industry moved to the United States. After Three Mile Island, no new nuclear plants were approved in America for nearly six years. France built nuclear. Germany did not. Today Germany buys French electricity.

The pattern is universal. Fast adopters win. Slow adopters pay double. They eventually adopt the technology anyway — and they lose the competitive advantage they had while they waited.

The moratorium regulates the factory. The agents already left the factory floor and will exist by the millions within a few months.

Quick Hits:

Where you can find me this week

The Year of the Agent

From chatbot to co-worker

The barn is empty

They build in months

What they should actually worry about

The answer is not to stop

Links of the week

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

Satire of the week

Thanks for reading!