Inside today’s Daily Journal…

Editor’s note: Today, Porter has turned the Journal over to David Trainer of the investment research firm New Constructs.

For the sake of individual investors like you, we should return our attention to the quiet war for safe artificial intelligence (“AI”).

Here’s my proposal: we inoculate society against the risks of rogue AI by protecting the stock market with a verified, publicly available truth about company fundamentals. The tools to do this already exist. What’s missing is the will to deploy these tools at scale.

The industry can’t fix this itself – let’s look at why that is.

In March, leading AI platform Anthropic walked away from a $200 million deal with the Department Of Defense (“DOD”) after refusing to allow its AI technology to be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The speed with which Sam Altman and OpenAI swooped in to take the DOD deal is proof that the AI prize is too valuable for companies to self-police effectively.

The high-profile resignation of the head of Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team earlier this year shows that even the most outspoken firm for safe AI is struggling to hold the line. In his February resignation letter shared on X, Mrinank Sharma told the firm he was leaving amid concerns about AI, bioweapons, and the state of “a world in peril.”

And despite the mission from AI research firms Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines to build safer AI, nothing tangible has materialized.

The risks from AI are well-documented – most recently by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in his early 2026 essay, “The Adolescence Of Technology.” He argues (rather, warns) that the rapid acceleration of AI capability far outpaces our institutional maturity, governance, and norms.

Those risks are here… We don’t need to wait for a crisis to act. In fact, waiting is precisely the mistake we cannot afford to make.

Rather than waiting to react when something goes wrong, we should be asking: where are the most likely and most consequential points of attack? The stock market sits near the top of that list.

Here are just two examples:

An autonomous AI agent goes rogue and gets itself on a mission to accumulate resources to fuel its own growth and manipulates the market to do so. Sounds far-fetched, but it’s real.

There are plenty of similar examples… and they will only grow in number and scale. Any bad actor who wants to use AI to quickly accumulate wealth to enrich themselves would find the stock market an obvious target.

The stock market is a system where misinformation, deployed at scale and at speed, can generate enormous wealth in a very short time. And unlike an attack on a nuclear plant or massive electric power grids, market manipulation doesn’t require physical access – or inflict physical pain. It requires only the ability to corrupt the information that investors rely on.

Protecting the stock market means protecting its core function: allocating capital to companies that earn the highest returns on that capital. The best way to prevent a malevolent force from corrupting that function is to beat it to the punch.

But how?