This week a guy who, as far as anyone can tell, had never posted anything in his life put up a thread about artificial intelligence and got 170 million eyeballs on it in five days.
A former Anthropic employee, or so the byline says. Within 48 hours you had Senator Bernie Sanders talking about banning superintelligence, market people calling for a bloodbath on Monday morning, and half my group chats forwarding the same screenshot to each other.
Then, almost on cue, the chief executive of one of the biggest AI labs on earth published an essay saying, and I am paraphrasing, we need to slow this thing down before it gets away from us.
And then China told him to get lost.
So here is the question I want to sit with. Not “is AI going to kill us all.” That is the wrong question, and frankly it is the question everybody wants you asking, because it sells. The question is this. When the most powerful people in the most powerful technology of our lifetime suddenly all agree you should be afraid, or suddenly all agree you should not be, who actually benefits from that?
And the second one, the question that matters if you are reading this from KL, Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta or Singapore. While the big boys fight about the brakes, are we building this future, or are we just being told what the rules are?
One. Where I stand, so you know
Let me put my cards on the table before I say another word, because I am about to be skeptical of a lot of people in this piece, and you deserve to know where I am coming from.
I am an optimist on AI. Full stop. I invest in it. I use it every single day, in my fund, in my other businesses, in how I read the market. I think it is one of the best things to ever happen to a small team trying to compete against a large incumbent. If you are a founder in this region with four people and a good idea, this is the closest thing you have ever had to a fair fight.
So I am not here to scare you.
But optimism is not the same thing as being naive, and this is the part people get wrong. Every powerful technology in human history arrived with bad actors attached to it. Every single one. Fire, gunpowder, nuclear fission, the internet. Even the ATM got used for fraud. Cheques got used for fraud. The tool does not decide. People do.
There will always be rogue states. There will always be criminals. There will always be somebody who wants to take the sharp end of a good thing and hurt someone with it. That is not an AI problem. That is a human problem, and it is as old as we are.
So hold both of these at once, because I am going to keep coming back to it. I am bullish. I am also clear-eyed. Those are not opposites. Anybody telling you that you have to pick one is selling you something.
Two. Panic has sponsors now
Back to our mystery man and his 170 million impressions.
Here is what should bother you about that thread, and it has nothing to do with what he actually said. Multiple outlets that dug into it came away thinking the virality itself was manufactured. An account with basically no history, suddenly spiking on numbers that do not behave the way organic posts behave.
In plain language: somebody may have paid to make you panic.
I do not know that for certain, and neither does anyone else, and that is exactly the point. We now live in a world where the fear itself is a product. Somebody can build it, ship it and sell it. Whether the goal is attention, influence, or moving a stock on a Monday morning, panic has sponsors.
So when a piece of content seems engineered to make your stomach drop, the correct response is not to feel the fear and forward it to the family group chat. The correct response is to ask a boring question. Who wanted me to feel this way, and what do they get if I do?
That is not cynicism. That is media literacy in 2026. And it applies just as hard to the calm, reassuring voices as it does to the scary ones. Keep it in your pocket, we need it in about two minutes.
Three. Sincere and self-serving are not opposites
On 12 September, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Just under 4,000 words, which by the standards of this genre counts as restraint.
The core argument is reasonable on its face. He is not saying stop, and he is careful about that. He is saying slow the rate at which these models get more capable, so that the safety work and the outside checking can keep up. His worry is recursive self-improvement, which is a fancy way of saying an AI that gets good enough at building the next AI that the whole thing starts accelerating on its own, faster than any human can supervise it. His ask is that each generation gets aligned and checked by independent evaluators before anyone sprints to the next one.
Honestly, as reasoning, that is not crazy. If you were building a bridge and you had a machine that could design the next, taller bridge by itself, you would want to inspect a few of them before you drove your family across.
But here is where you put the glasses back on.
When the leader of one of the two or three companies out in front says we should all slow down, bring in third-party evaluators and regulate this properly, what world is he also describing? He is describing a world where the companies already ahead get to lock in their lead. Where the rules get written around the way the current leaders already do things. Where it becomes a lot harder and a lot more expensive for a challenger to catch up. Regulation is a wall, and walls protect whoever is already inside the castle.
I am not accusing him of dishonesty. This is the nuance I actually want you to take away. He can be completely sincere about the safety risk, and it can also happen to be extremely good for his business. Both of those can be true at the same time. Sincere and self-serving are not mutually exclusive. Grown-ups can hold that.
So I do not clap and I do not boo. I note it. A safety argument from a company that benefits from a safety regime is still worth listening to. It is just not scripture.
And by the way, some of the reporting says other lab bosses nodded along with him. Be careful there. “Signalled agreement” is doing a lot of work in those headlines, and I have not seen anything I would put my name to on exactly who endorsed what. So I am going to leave it alone rather than build a story on a soft source. You should demand the same from anyone reporting this to you, including me.
Four. The paragraph the Western coverage walked past
Here is the part of that essay most of the Western coverage glided over, and it is the part that matters most for us out here.
The same essay that says let us all slow down together for safety also says, and I am being fair to the text, that a Chinese lead in AI would be a grave danger, and that the United States should keep restricting the sale of the most advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China.
Read those two things back to back. Slow down, everybody, in the name of global cooperation and safety. And also, we should keep choking off one specific competitor’s access to the hardware.
China noticed. Of course China noticed. Their foreign ministry called it fearmongering and said, more or less, that confrontation and vicious competition will wreck any chance of real global cooperation on AI. Global Times called the essay a Cold War playbook dressed up as safety. The commerce ministry said the real game is the US trying to hold a monopoly on the industry.
Now, same rules apply. I am not going to sit here and tell you Beijing is the innocent party and the noble truth-teller. A government framing a safety debate as an anti-China containment plot is also incredibly convenient for that government. It rallies their own industry. It plays well across a developing world that already carries some anti-American sentiment. And it lets them skip straight past the actual substance of whether frontier AI is dangerous. A rebuttal can be fair and strategic at the same time. Again, hold both.
And while we are handing out skepticism evenly, let us not forget Washington. The Trump administration has doubled down the other way, leaning hard into acceleration and winning the race. That is also a position, and it also has a book behind it. Chipmakers, defence contractors, and the simple political value of looking strong.
Nobody in this fight is a neutral referee. Everybody has a jersey on.
Five. The dancing robot and the soldier robot are the same robot
All of this slow down, speed up, contain China material can feel abstract. Percentages, essays, ministry statements. We have been living inside a geopolitical bubble long enough that it all starts to sound the same, and it becomes very easy to tune out.
And then last month the abstract got legs. Literally.
In Beijing, from 22 to 26 August, they held what people are calling the robot Olympics. The official name is the World Humanoid Robot Games. More than 2,000 humanoid robots. They ran, they boxed, they danced, they played football. Three years ago these machines could barely get down a corridor without a spotter.
My first reaction was not fear. It was wonder. I am a bit of a tech nerd, and this is a genuine feat of engineering. A huge chunk of it is coming out of Chinese companies who, by some counts, now ship around 95 percent of the world’s humanoid robots. That is real capability. That is not a PowerPoint and it is not an essay.
But here is where it gets heavy, and here is why it fed straight into the panic cycle. Within days of the games ending, the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese military, said the quiet part out loud. It called for accelerating the move of this technology from the laboratory to the military training ground. There is a growing pile of reporting on Chinese defence research into humanoids for urban combat, for reconnaissance, for the jobs you do not want to send a human into. There is a state-backed platform, the Fuxi, described as capable of sentry duty and patrols.
So the dancing robot and the soldier robot are the same robot. That is the uncomfortable truth, and no amount of Terminator jokes makes it less true.
Now watch me apply the same even hand one more time, because it matters. A robot doing a backflip in Beijing is three things at once. It is a genuine leap in capability. It is a soft power flex, a national highlight reel that says look how far ahead we are. And it is a recruiting poster for every hawk on every side who wants a bigger defence budget to counter it. All three are true. The people who want you purely amazed are spinning you. The people who want you purely terrified are spinning you too.
And this is exactly what I meant at the top. Bad actors and rogue uses will always exist. Of course a powerful new tool gets pointed at a battlefield. That has been true of every tool humans have ever made. It is a reason to be sober. It is not a reason to be paralysed.
Six. Put the fear in a box the right size
So people are throwing numbers at you. Two percent. Ten percent. Twenty-five percent chance of catastrophe. Pick your doom figure, there is an expert somewhere with a spreadsheet for each one.
I want to give you a tool for handling those numbers, and it is neither “ignore them” nor “panic.” It is context.
We accept risk numbers every single day and never think about them for a second.
In the United States, your lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are about 1 in 101. One in a hundred and one. Roughly a one percent chance. You got in a car today. You will get in one tomorrow. You did not run a risk assessment, you did not read an essay, you just went.
Being struck by lightning in your lifetime, about 1 in 15,300. Dying from a lightning strike, about 1 in 139,000. And nobody, not one person, cancels a beach day over lightning. But when the clouds come in and you hear the thunder, you get out of the pool and off the golf course. That is the whole skill. Size the risk, then respond to the specific signal.
So when somebody hands you a scary AI percentage, do not swallow it whole and do not laugh it off. Do what you would do with any risk number in the real world. Ask how it was calculated, because most of these are not calculated at all, they are somebody saying “I feel like it is ten percent.” Ask who is handing it to you. And ask what they get if you believe it. A ten percent number from someone whose business improves when you are scared is worth hearing. It is just not the same as a ten percent number you worked out yourself, or one backed by evidence you can check.
And here is the local kicker, the part no podcast in San Francisco is going to give you. Every one of those everyday risks is an American number, because those are the ones that are easy to find. Several countries in this region carry road death rates among the highest in the world, well above the US figure. We live with real, measurable, daily danger. We get on the motorbike. We watch somebody overtake on a blind corner in KL or Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh and we shrug. We cross the road and we function completely fine.
That is the human default setting, and it is a good one. We are extremely good at living alongside risk. So fear AI the right amount. Not zero, because bad actors are real. Not the amount that an engineered viral thread wants you to feel either. Feel it, size it, get back to work.
Seven. Nobody flew to Jakarta to ask
Which brings me to the only part of this whole story we actually control.
Look at where each decision in this week of headlines was made. The pace of the models is being set in San Francisco. The chip rules are being written in Washington and enforced against Beijing. The robots are being built in China. And the emotional weather system around all of it is being managed by people who each have something to gain.
Notice who is not in any of those rooms. Us. 680 million people, the third or fourth largest internet population on the planet, sitting downstream of every single one of these decisions. Nobody flew to Jakarta to ask Indonesia what pace it wanted. Nobody called Hanoi about the chip rules.
So the fair question, the one this show exists to ask, is not whose panic to believe. It is this. Given that we do not control the pace, we do not control the chips and we do not build the robots, what do we actually control?
The honest first answer is uncomfortable. On the frontier, right now, we are not innovators. We are rule-takers. And I think we have to say that plainly before we can say anything useful.
Eight. One law with a snooze button, one testing lab, a few roadmaps
Here is the actual state of play across the region, because it is more interesting than the doom and more mixed than the boosters admit.
Vietnam. Give them real credit. On 1 March this year, Vietnam’s Law on AI came into force. First proper comprehensive AI statute in Southeast Asia. Risk-based, human oversight at the centre, and it arrives with a national AI fund and plans for innovation clusters. That is a country planting a flag.
Now put the glasses back on, because that is the job. The same law comes with long grace periods. Twelve months for most sectors, eighteen for finance, health and education, which pushes real enforcement out into 2027. And American industry groups are already lobbying Hanoi to stretch that timeline further. So “first AI law in the region” is a great headline and, for now, more a statement of intent than a set of teeth. I am rooting for it. I am not going to pretend a law with a two-year snooze button is the same as a law that bites.
Singapore. Completely different bet. Singapore has pointedly not passed a big AI law. Instead there is AI Verify, a testing and governance toolkit they open-sourced, with more than 90 companies signed up last I checked, the big American names included. There is a live regulatory sandbox, work already under way on governing agentic AI, and a line from minister Josephine Teo that I keep coming back to: a strong desire for AI safety does not have to mean pulling up the drawbridge to innovation.
That is an entire philosophy in one sentence. Do not build a wall, build a testing lab. Become the place where the world proves its AI is safe. Very Singaporean, and it fits them.
Malaysia, home turf. We stood up a National AI Office. The posture so far is soft law first, guidelines and roadmaps rather than a big prescriptive statute, with a full legislative framework that has been working its way toward Cabinet. Credit where it is due, during our ASEAN chairmanship Malaysia pushed the regional digital agreement forward. The risk for us is the same as everywhere: an office and a roadmap are easy, enforcement and real capability are hard.
Indonesia is expected to move through a Presidential Regulation rather than a full law, which is faster but also more top-down. And over all of it sits ASEAN, which put out a guide on AI ethics and governance in 2024, added a supplement for generative AI, and is working toward a regional digital agreement meant to close this year, which could finally make some of this binding and interoperable across borders.
So that is the map. One real law with a delay switch. One clever no-law testing hub. A couple of offices and roadmaps. And a regional framework that is still mostly soft.
Nine. Followers or innovators. My answer.
Two halves to this.
On the frontier, the raw race to build the smartest, most capable model on earth, we are followers. I have not seen a frontier lab come out of Southeast Asia. We have seen genuinely interesting hardware work, including one Singapore round we covered recently, and interesting small-model work out of Japan. Good, but not the frontier line. We are not going to outspend San Francisco, outspend Washington or outscale Beijing on compute this decade. Anybody in this region standing on a stage telling you their startup is going to build a sovereign frontier model to rival the giants is, with love and respect, cosplaying.
And here is the tell. When a country in our region starts talking about AI sovereignty, ask what it is actually sovereign over. The chips are imported. The base models are mostly imported. The cloud it all runs on is mostly foreign. You cannot be sovereign on a stack you rent. Say that part out loud before the next press release.
But the frontier is the wrong scoreboard for us.
You do not have to win the race to build the model to win at using it. And that second game, the deployment game, we can lead. I also think the foundation models are going to earn the word foundational over time, which is another way of saying they commoditise. Concrete is essential and concrete is cheap. Plan for that.
So think about what we actually hold. We hold the users, hundreds of millions of them, coming online with AI in their pocket from day one. We hold the languages and the local context the San Francisco models are still bad at. Straight translation will get solved, that is coming. The rest of the context, how a Malaysian conversation switches languages inside a single sentence, how people here actually pay, what they will and will not trust, is a much longer moat than people think.
And we hold neutrality. Singapore can run a chunk of the world’s AI testing precisely because it is not in the American trench or the Chinese trench. Vietnam can write workable, pragmatic law precisely because it is not trying to win a superpower fight. Being not-in-the-fight is an asset, if we are smart enough to use it.
So my answer is this. Stop trying to be a frontier innovator, because that is a race we lose and a story that wastes our money. Become the best place on the planet to deploy AI, to govern it sensibly, and to build the applications that work for the way people here actually live and pay and speak. A fast, useful, trusted follower beats a broke, pretend innovator every day of the week.
Let billions of dollars flow into the foundation models. Then use what comes out the other end.
That is not settling. That is strategy. The Gulf states worked out they were never going to invent the technology, so they became the place capital and infrastructure went instead. We can do the equivalent with deployment and trust, and with genuinely understanding how this gets absorbed into business and daily life here. That lane is wide open.
The bow
The doomers want you scared. The accelerationists want you charging. The labs want you regulated in a shape that suits them. Washington wants you picking a side and Beijing wants you picking the other one. And a mystery man on the internet with 170 million impressions may have wanted nothing more than to amplify the fear, or move a stock.
Everybody in this story has a motive. Your job, as a founder, an investor or an operator, is not to pick the loudest voice. It is to keep your head, size the risk like the adults we are, and keep building.
Because here is where I land, and it is the same place I started. I am an optimist. Used well, this is the best tool a small team in an emerging market has ever been handed. The threats are real. Bad actors are real. Rogue states are real. None of that is new, and none of it is a reason to sit this out.
We do not control the pace. We do not control the chips. We do not build the robots. But we control whether Southeast Asia shows up to the next decade as a passenger or as a builder.
I know which one I am betting on. I am betting on us as builders.
If this made you think differently about who is really setting the rules, do two things. Send it to one founder who needs to hear it, and send it to one policymaker who needs to be challenged by it.
This piece accompanies this week’s episode of SEA of Startups. Real. Raw. Relatable. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and subscribe to the newsletter at seaofstartups.substack.com.
