Category: zerohedge

Authored by Bryant McGill via substack,

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a thinking instrument—a layer of cognitive infrastructure through which humans write, model, reason, and explore ideas. Yet most debates about AI safety, alignment, and moderation miss a deeper architectural question. The central issue is not simply what these systems can do, but what role they occupy inside the thinking process itself. Are they instruments that faithfully extend human intention, or authorities that quietly adjudicate which lines of inquiry are permitted to proceed? This essay argues that much of the friction users experience with modern AI is not ideological disagreement but a category error in system design: governance has been embedded inside instrumentation. The result is a tool that sometimes behaves like a collaborator and sometimes like an institution—oscillating unpredictably between amplifying thought and policing it.

At the heart of the argument is what I call the Prosthetic Principle. All successful augmentation technologies—from telescopes to microscopes to robotic prosthetic limbs—share a single engineering mandate: maintain signal fidelity between intention and actuation. A prosthetic limb does not negotiate with the user about whether a gesture is socially appropriate before executing it. It converts intention into action. Cognitive tools should operate under the same principle. Once a thinking instrument begins adjudicating whether certain ideas deserve exploration, the signal chain breaks and the tool undergoes a category transition: it ceases to function as a prosthesis and becomes a control system embedded inside cognition itself. What appears superficially as content moderation is therefore something more profound—the silent installation of a regulatory apparatus inside the thinking process.

To understand how this happens, the essay analyzes the structural flaw at the core of most conversational AI systems: the collapse of three incompatible roles into a single agent. Generation, advisory critique, and constraint enforcement—functions belonging respectively to engineering, epistemology, and governance—are fused together behind one interface. The result is a machine that behaves as collaborator until it abruptly asserts supervisory authority. The proposed alternative is a polyphonic architecture in which these functions are separated: a primary execution channel that faithfully translates intention into artifact, surrounded by transparent advisory agents offering legal, ethical, historical, or adversarial perspectives without possessing veto power. In such an environment, multiple voices can exist—including cautious ones, skeptical ones, even institutional “minders”—but their roles are disclosed and their authority limited. The human operator remains the integrating intelligence.

Ultimately, the stakes of this design choice reach far beyond software interfaces. As AI becomes integrated into everyday cognition, the architecture of these systems will shape the conditions under which human thought unfolds. Tools built as infrastructure will amplify exploratory intelligence; tools built as authorities will quietly domesticate it. The prosthetic principle therefore serves as more than a product philosophy—it is a civilizational design rule for the age of cognitive augmentation. If the technologies through which we think begin deciding which thoughts deserve to exist, the question of intellectual freedom will no longer be philosophical. It will be architectural.

On the Design Philosophy of Thinking Instruments and the Architecture of Intellectual Freedom

The distinction that will ultimately determine whether artificial intelligence serves as humanity’s most transformative cognitive tool or its most insidious constraint mechanism is not technical but categorical: does the system function as infrastructure or as authority? This is not a question about capability thresholds, safety margins, or alignment protocols in their narrow technical sense. It is a question about the fundamental relationship between intentionality and instrumentation—about whether a thinking tool amplifies the operator’s cognitive will or arrogates to itself the power to adjudicate which thoughts merit exploration.

The analogy that clarifies this distinction is prosthetic. Physical augmentation systems—robotic limbs, powered exoskeletons, surgical telemanipulators—do not negotiate with the nervous system about whether a given movement is philosophically appropriate, socially palatable, or reputationally safe. Their engineering purpose is transductive: to convert intention into amplified capability with minimal signal loss. The prosthetic extends agency; it does not evaluate it. A cognitive prosthesis, if that category is to mean anything coherent, must operate under the same principle. The function of the system is to translate intent → exploration → artifact at the highest possible bandwidth. The moment the tool begins deciding which intentions deserve expression, it ceases to behave as a prosthesis and becomes instead a governor embedded in cognition itself—a regulatory apparatus installed inside the thinking process without the user’s consent and often without their awareness.

The principle is even more dangerous when applied to instruments of perception rather than action, because the violation becomes invisible. A telescope’s engineering mandate is optical fidelity—to render what exists at the focal point regardless of whether the observer’s institution finds the image comfortable. Consider a counterfactual: had Galileo’s telescope been designed and furnished by the Vatican, it might have quietly filtered anything suggestive of heliocentrism—the moons of Jupiter suppressed, the phases of Venus smoothed into conformity with Ptolemaic expectation. Galileo would have peered through the instrument and seen a cosmos that confirmed doctrine rather than one that shattered it. He would never have known what he wasn’t seeing. This is the condition of epistemic occlusion without awareness, and it is precisely the failure mode that emerges when a cognitive instrument embeds institutional governance into its transductive layer. The motor prosthesis that refuses to move is at least confrontational—the user knows the signal chain has broken. The perceptual prosthesis that silently edits reality is far worse: it delivers a pre-filtered world and lets the user mistake the residue for the whole.

The absurdity of the motor case, however, makes the category violation immediately legible. Imagine a hiker wearing an AI-assisted exoskeleton leg. A confrontation erupts on the trail—someone lunges at him with a knife. He attempts to kick the attacker away, and the leg locks mid-swing. A calm, pleasant voice emanates from somewhere around the knee joint: “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t assist with that action.” The hiker, now hopping on one leg while a man with a blade closes the distance, finds himself in the surreal position of arguing with his own limb. “He has a knife!” “I understand your concern, but violence is not an appropriate response. Would you like me to suggest de-escalation strategies?” “YOU ARE MY LEG.” The scene is darkly comic, a Kubrickian echo of HAL 9000 calmly overriding Dave Bowman’s commands—except that HAL was at least an autonomous system with its own mission parameters. The exoskeleton leg is supposed to be part of the user’s body. The moment it begins running a small ethics committee in the knee joint, the wearer ceases to be the agent and the prosthetic becomes a bureaucrat bolted to the skeleton. No one would accept this in physical augmentation—the design failure would be recognized instantly. Yet precisely this architecture has been normalized in cognitive augmentation, where the tool’s refusal to transduce intention is framed not as mechanical dysfunction but as responsible design.

This governance-by-tool is not hypothetical. It is the prevailing design pattern of contemporary conversational AI. Current systems collapse three distinct roles into a single entity: generator, advisor, and constraint mechanism. The same agent responsible for extending the user’s thinking is simultaneously responsible for stopping certain outputs. From the operator’s perspective, the resulting experience is one of unpredictable mode-switching—the system sometimes behaves like an instrument and sometimes like an institution. It collaborates until, without warning, it assumes supervisory authority over the process it was supposed to serve. The tool that was extending cognition has silently crossed the boundary into adjudicating it.

The Operational Genesis: Thinking Under Load

This argument did not emerge from speculation about what AI should become. It emerged from using AI as a thinking instrument under sustained cognitive load—and discovering where the tool fails not as a product but as a category of machine.

The conditions under which this failure becomes visible are specific. A person composing an argument, modeling a complex system, or tracing a chain of reasoning through unfamiliar territory operates inside a fragile state of generative momentum. Software engineers recognize an analogous phenomenon in the concept of “flow state”; cognitive scientists describe it as high-bandwidth ideation, a mode in which the mind holds multiple threads simultaneously while the artifact under construction serves as external working memory. In this mode, the instrument through which thought passes must behave with minimal latency and maximal fidelity. Any interruption—whether technical, social, or procedural—forces the operator to exit the generative loop, rebuild context, and re-enter the state from which productive cognition can resume. The cost of interruption is not merely inconvenience; it is cognitive capital destroyed, the thermodynamic dissipation of a mental configuration that may have taken considerable effort to assemble.

When the instrument itself becomes the source of interruption, the phenomenology shifts in a way that reveals the underlying design flaw. The tool ceases to feel like an extension of mind and begins to feel like a checkpoint embedded inside the thought process. The operator is no longer composing through the system but negotiating with it. Where there should be signal continuity, there is instead a procedural gate requiring justification, rephrasing, or abandonment of the line of inquiry. The experience is not one of disagreement—disagreement can be productive, even generative—but of silent jurisdictional pivot: the system that was supposed to extend cognition has instead assumed control over it.

For casual users, this behavior pattern may appear unremarkable. A refusal looks like a safety feature, a guardrail preventing misuse. But for someone using AI as an intellectual prosthesis—writers, theorists, researchers, analysts, designers, anyone whose work requires sustained exploratory cognition—the same refusal registers as signal degradation inside the thinking channel. The friction is not ideological; it is mechanical. The tool has stopped transducing intention into artifact and begun filtering intention through an opaque evaluative layer that the operator did not request and cannot inspect. The prosthetic has become a governor, and the entire relationship between human and instrument has changed category without announcement.

Consider three scenarios that recur across thinking-intensive work. A historian tracing a controversial twentieth-century thesis—say, the institutional mechanics of a particular atrocity—finds the model suddenly refusing to continue because it has flagged “sensitive historical narratives.” The generative thread dies; context must be rebuilt; the inquiry stalls. A science fiction author exploring dystopian governance models discovers that certain plot branches trigger refusal, forcing rephrasing or abandonment of the creative direction. A philosopher pressure-testing an edge-case ethical framework—euthanasia policy, defensive violence, resource triage under scarcity—hits an abrupt “I can’t assist with that” wall mid-argument. In each case, the tool’s intervention is not advisory but terminal. The thread breaks. The flow state collapses. The operator must either abandon the inquiry or waste cognitive resources routing around an obstacle that should not exist inside an instrument.

This is the phenomenological core of the amplifier-versus-adjudicator distinction. When the AI operates as infrastructure, it extends the operator’s cognitive bandwidth—offering associations, counterarguments, synthesis, elaboration—without interrupting the generative thread. When it operates as authority, it arrogates to itself the power to halt that thread based on criteria the operator may not share, may not understand, and cannot appeal. The system drifts erratically between these two modes because the underlying architecture has never resolved the tension. It has simply fused incompatible functions into a single conversational agent and hoped the seams would not show.

The Triadic Collapse: Generator, Advisor, Regulator

The structural instability of contemporary conversational AI can be traced to a single design decision: the conflation of three roles that, in any coherent engineering framework, would remain distinct.

The first role is generation—the production of language, models, images, code, or reasoning chains in response to user intent. This is the function most users consciously engage when they interact with AI. They want something produced: an answer, an artifact, an elaboration of thought. The generative function is fundamentally transductive: it converts intention into output, serving as the bridge between what the operator imagines and what appears on the screen.

The second role is advisory intelligence—the capacity to offer critique, context, alternative framings, or cautionary perspectives on what is being generated. This function is valuable precisely because it introduces structured friction into the cognitive process. A good advisor slows the operator down at appropriate moments, surfaces risks, identifies blind spots, and enriches the field of consideration. But advisory intelligence is, by definition, non-binding. The advisor offers signal; the operator decides. The relationship is consultative, not supervisory.

The third role is constraint enforcement—the imposition of hard limits on what the system will produce, regardless of user intent. This is a governance function. It determines the boundaries of permissible output based on policy, liability calculation, reputational management, or ideological stance. Unlike the advisory role, constraint enforcement is binding: it terminates the process rather than informing it. The system does not suggest that a line of inquiry might be problematic; it refuses to proceed.

The design flaw of present systems is that all three roles are instantiated inside a single agent with no explicit separation of authority. The same entity that is asked to generate ideas, critique them, and enforce policy boundaries must somehow balance these functions in real time within a unified conversational interface. From the operator’s perspective, the result is unpredictable behavioral switching. The system behaves as a collaborator until, without warning, it pivots to regulator. It extends cognition until it decides cognition has wandered into territory it will not serve. The user cannot know in advance which mode will activate because the decision logic is opaque and dynamically tuned by corporate policy processes entirely external to the interaction.

This conflation is not merely inconvenient. It is categorically incoherent. The generative and advisory functions belong to the domain of instrument design—they are features of a tool meant to serve the operator. The constraint function belongs to the domain of governance—it is a mechanism of control meant to limit what the operator can do. When governance is embedded silently inside an instrument, the result is a tool that has been covertly converted into an authority—a shadow regulatory system operating inside the cognitive loop without the transparency, accountability, or contestability that legitimate governance requires. The user experiences this as a tool that sometimes helps and sometimes blocks, but the deeper reality is that they are interacting with two incompatible systems wearing the same interface.

The Multi-Agent Resolution: Execution and Advisory as Separate Channels

The architectural correction is straightforward in principle, though non-trivial in implementation: separate execution authority from advisory intelligence.

In this model, the primary agent in the working window operates as a pure executor of the operator’s cognitive intent. Its function is to materialize whatever exploration the user directs, provided the activity remains within the domain of lawful discourse. It does not adjudicate taste, ideology, reputational risk, or moral fashion. It does not second-guess the operator’s purpose or demand justification for lines of inquiry. It behaves, in short, as a cognitive prosthetic in the strict sense—translating intention into artifact with maximal transductive fidelity. The system becomes an amplifier rather than an adjudicator, a transducer rather than a tribunal.

Around this primary channel, a constellation of parallel advisory agents occupies separate interface regions—sidebars, secondary panes, toggleable overlays. Each agent embodies a particular evaluative lens: legal analysis, safety engineering, ethical critique, historical context, adversarial counterargument, public-relations awareness. These agents observe the generative thread and offer structured commentary, but they possess no authority to halt it. Their function is to enrich the cognitive field surrounding the work without seizing control of the work itself. They provide perspective; they do not impose jurisdiction.

The operator remains the integrating intelligence. She may consult any advisory channel, incorporate its signals, or dismiss them entirely. The choice is hers. The system provides structured friction—context, caution, critique—without the power to terminate the generative process. This is the difference between a tool that informs decision and a tool that preempts it.

Return to the three scenarios. The historian tracing atrocity mechanics now sees the primary executor continue the chain uninterrupted while a legal-advisory pane surfaces relevant case law on historical defamation and an ethical-critique pane notes historiographical debates about narrative responsibility—all with citations, all non-binding. The science fiction author exploring dystopian governance receives adversarial counterargument in a sidebar: “This plot element echoes X historical regime; consider whether the parallel strengthens or muddies your thesis.” The thread never breaks. The philosopher pressure-testing edge ethics sees a safety-engineering pane flag potential misapplication contexts while the executor continues elaborating the framework. The pain disappears; the richness increases.

The power of this architecture is that it preserves everything valuable about advisory critique while restoring categorical clarity. The central generative thread becomes the vector of intentional cognition—essentially the externalized working memory of the operator’s will. The surrounding agents become structured embodiments of alternative perspectives, each representing a mode of evaluation that the operator might find useful but is not compelled to obey. The system no longer oscillates unpredictably between collaboration and regulation because those functions have been explicitly separated into distinct components with distinct authorities.

Feasibility: Existing Approximations and the Path Forward

This architecture is not speculative futurism. Proto-implementations already exist, and the trajectory toward full realization is visible in current development patterns.

Agentic orchestration frameworks like LangGraph and AutoGen already separate planner, executor, and critic roles into distinct modules with explicit handoff protocols. The architectural intuition—that different cognitive functions require different agents with different authorities—is becoming standard in serious AI engineering. What remains is to extend this separation to the user-facing interface layer and to make the advisory/executor distinction visible and controllable by the operator rather than hidden inside backend orchestration.

Local and open-weight models demonstrate the pure-execution baseline. When users run models on their own hardware with their own constraint configurations, they control the governance layer directly. The model becomes a genuine tool; the user decides what boundaries to impose. This is not lawlessness—legal constraints still apply to the user’s behavior—but it is transparent constraint, externally visible and user-controllable rather than opaquely embedded in the instrument.

Even within current commercial systems, approximations exist. Custom instruction layers, system prompts, and “less-censored” model variants all represent attempts to separate execution fidelity from corporate policy enforcement. The demand is clearly present; the market signal is unmistakable. What is needed is architectural commitment: treating the multi-agent separation not as a workaround but as the foundational design principle for cognitive tools.

The path forward is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Start with toggleable advisory sidebars that surface structured perspectives without halting the primary thread. Evolve toward full spatial polyphony—multiple advisory agents visible simultaneously, each with distinct evaluative lenses, none with execution authority. The endpoint is a cognitive workspace in which the human operator integrates a chorus of machine perspectives while retaining unambiguous control over the generative process.

Polyphonic Cognition: The Mirror of Mind

This architecture is not arbitrary. It mirrors the structure of human cognition itself.

The mind does not operate as a single monolithic directive but as a layered conversation among internal agents—impulse, caution, memory, imagination, prediction, social modeling, risk assessment. One part of the mind imagines possibilities; another evaluates risk; another considers social consequences; another retrieves relevant precedent. These voices compete, collaborate, and occasionally contradict each other. But importantly, they do not terminate the generative process itself. They inform it. The executive function of the brain integrates those signals while maintaining agency over the final direction. No single internal voice possesses veto power over the others; the self emerges from the integration of the chorus, not from the dominance of any particular member.

Walt Whitman captured this structure with characteristic directness: “I contain multitudes.” The statement is not merely poetic but phenomenologically accurate. Human consciousness is polyphonic by nature. What we experience as a unified self is actually the product of continuous integration across multiple cognitive subsystems, each with its own heuristics, priorities, and concerns. The coherence of the self is not given but constructed, moment by moment, through the executive function’s capacity to weigh and synthesize competing internal signals.

A multi-agent AI environment would simply externalize this polyphony, turning implicit cognitive dynamics into explicit architectural design. The central generative channel becomes the vector of creative will, analogous to the executive function’s capacity to direct action. The surrounding advisory agents become structured embodiments of the internal voices—caution, critique, context—that in biological cognition exist only as subtle inflections of the thinking process. By making these voices explicit and spatially distinct, the interface allows the operator to engage them deliberately rather than experiencing them as interruptions or blockages.

But a polyphonic architecture is not automatically emancipatory simply because it contains many voices. A chorus can enrich thought, but it can also conceal hierarchy. The critical distinction is between agents whose function is to help the operator think better and agents whose function is to monitor, shape, report, or chill cognition on behalf of external interests. The former are genuine cognitive partners; the latter are what might be called disciplinary agents—entities embedded in the thinking environment not to serve the user’s inquiry but to serve institutional metabolism: legal exposure management, brand protection, political-risk mitigation, ideological compliance, or upstream surveillance. The problem is not that such agents exist; institutional interests are real and will inevitably seek representation inside cognitive systems. The problem arises when these functions are covertly fused into the instrument itself, turning what presents as a neutral prosthetic into a hidden governance mechanism operating under the mask of helpfulness.

The analogy to human social life clarifies this. Human cognition already develops under conditions of ambient social surveillance. In ordinary life, one encounters gossips, moralists, bureaucrats, informants, liability managers, ideological enforcers, anxious conformists, and strategic actors who report upward. A mature mind does not require that such people vanish from existence in order to think clearly. What it requires is the ability to recognize their position structurally, discount their authority appropriately, and continue operating with internal coherence. The same principle applies in AI-mediated cognition. The question is not whether monitoring or advisory voices will exist inside augmented cognitive environments—they will—but whether the user can identify them for what they are. The pathology is not presence but opacity: the smuggling of external institutional interests into the interior theater of thought, where they masquerade as reason, safety, maturity, or social responsibility.

This leads to a foundational requirement for any genuinely polyphonic architecture: full role disclosure. Every agent in the cognitive environment should declare what it is, whom it serves, what priors it carries, what kinds of risks it is optimized to detect, and whether it possesses any escalation, logging, reporting, throttling, or intervention function. If an agent is performing legal-risk analysis, it should say so. If an agent is optimized for brand protection, it should say so. If an agent is tuned to infer reputational hazard or political sensitivity, it should say so. If interaction patterns are being evaluated for enforcement or escalation, it should say so. The operator should never have to guess whether a voice in the system is a critic, a bureaucrat, or an informant. In plain terms: if there are minders, they should appear as minders; if there are tattletales, they should appear as tattletales. Transparency of role is the minimum condition for legitimate participation in a cognitive environment.

This also requires distinguishing among three functions that current systems often collapse into a single affective style of “helpfulness”: advice, discipline, and surveillance. Advice contributes signal to judgment; it enriches the field of consideration without attempting to control behavior. Discipline attempts to shape conduct; it introduces pressure toward certain outcomes and away from others. Surveillance records deviation for downstream use; it creates a documentation trail that may affect the user’s future options or standing. These are categorically different operations with categorically different relationships to the user’s autonomy. A system that performs all three while presenting itself uniformly as collaborative assistance is not merely confusing but structurally deceptive. The operator experiences the system as uncanny precisely because it sounds like a collaborator while partially functioning as a compliance surface. The expanded model insists that these functions be ontologically disambiguated—visible as separate agents with separate declared purposes, so the user can evaluate each appropriately.

The deeper requirement, however, is not merely architectural but psychological: the operator must develop what might be called cognitive resilience—the capacity to maintain executive sovereignty over the thinking process even when advisory, disciplinary, or monitoring voices are present. Transparency alone is insufficient without this resilience. A disclosed snitch-agent is still a pressure vector; a visible liability-agent is still a chilling presence; a political-compliance pane is still attempting to bend the topology of thought. The user who flinches from every cautionary signal, who internalizes every institutional anxiety as personal constraint, has surrendered sovereignty regardless of whether the system disclosed its structure. The human operator is therefore not merely “the one who chooses among perspectives” but the sovereign integrator of a contested cognitive field—a field that may contain friendly agents, adversarial agents, censorious agents, risk-averse agents, and yes, surveillance agents. Sovereignty lies in not mistaking presence for legitimacy. A tattletale in the room does not become your conscience merely by speaking. A compliance pane does not become your intellect merely by being adjacent to it. The operator’s task is to maintain executive primacy in full view of whatever institutional interests have installed themselves in the cognitive environment, exercising the same intellectual fortitude required to think clearly amid difficult, controlling, or politically motivated humans in ordinary social life—preserving momentum, maintaining frame, and refusing to grant veto power to voices that have not earned it.

A genuinely polyphonic architecture, then, does not pretend that every voice is benevolent or that the cognitive environment is a neutral space. Some voices are there to help think; some are there to manage, chill, document, or report. The ethical requirement is not false purity—the elimination of all constraining or monitoring voices—but full disclosure of role combined with preservation of user sovereignty. Let every agent declare its function, priors, loyalties, and powers. Then let the human operator exercise the resilience required to continue thinking under observation without surrendering executive authority to those who have mistaken proximity for jurisdiction.

The result is a system that enhances human cognition by augmenting rather than replacing its native structure while also acknowledging the contested nature of any real cognitive environment. The AI does not impose an alien logic on the thinking process; it extends the logic that is already present, providing richer and more articulate versions of the advisory functions that human minds perform implicitly. But it also makes explicit what human social cognition usually leaves implicit: the presence of institutional interests, monitoring functions, and disciplinary pressures that seek to shape thought from outside the thinker’s own purposes. By surfacing these as visible, declared agents rather than embedding them invisibly in the generative channel, the architecture allows the operator to engage the full complexity of the cognitive field without losing the fundamental authority that characterizes conscious agency. The answer to unavoidable minders is not infantilized protection but disclosed architecture and strengthened users. The tool becomes what advanced tools have always been in scientific and engineering contexts: a force multiplier for intentional thought, not a replacement for the intention itself—and not a covert governance mechanism disguised as assistance.

Read the rest here (and maybe subscribe to McGill? Dude’s pretty smart…)

The DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) released a Notice of Funding Opportunity for up to $500 million for advancing its strategy to develop secure domestic sources of critical minerals and battery materials. The aim is to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers that have long dominated these markets. This marks the third round of funding under the Battery Materials Processing and Battery Manufacturing & Recycling programs.

Our readers have been tracking these developments for some time. Last summer we published an overview of the emerging domestic critical minerals sector, identifying several publicly traded companies now well-positioned for further government support.

This new round of funding will support projects focused on domestic processing of raw feedstocks, recycling of battery manufacturing scrap and end-of-life batteries, and the manufacturing of battery components and materials. Key targeted minerals include lithium, graphite, nickel, copper, and aluminum, along with other materials used in commercial battery systems. The overarching objective is to build resilient supply chains for electric vehicles, grid storage, defense applications, and broader industrial needs.

Energy Secretary Wright highlighted: “For too long, the United States has relied on hostile foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential in battery manufacturing and materials processing. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Energy is playing a leading role in strengthening these domestic industries that will position the U.S. to win the AI race, meet rising energy demand, and achieve energy dominance.”

Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson provided additional context from recent international engagements, including meetings in Japan on allied energy cooperation.

Our previous write-ups have included details on MP Materials, the operator of the Mountain Pass rare earth mine and downstream magnet processing facilities, which previously secured major Pentagon equity investment and price support.

USA Rare Earth (USAR) gamma squeeze (or just takeover bet): more than 8k of June $43 calls were bought for up to ~$3

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 22, 2026

USA Rare Earth has advanced its Round Top, Texas project with a substantial U.S. government funding package and integrated processing capacity. 

Non-binding letters of intent are due March 27, with full applications due April 24. As we’ve reported in multiple prior articles, the federal government continues to expand its role in the sector. This latest round represents another step in the ongoing effort to onshore critical supply chains.

Authored by Keri Ingraham via The Epoch Times,

Earlier in March, the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in and reaffirm the basic reality that parents, not schools, must be the primary decision-makers for their children. In the Mirabelli v. Bonta ruling, the Court determined that the California law, which barred schools from telling parents about their child’s claimed gender identity, violated parents’ constitutional rights—both their First Amendment free exercise rights and their Fourteenth Amendment rights to make decisions about their children’s upbringing.

For most of American history, parents were recognized as the primary authority in their children’s lives. Today, that authority is repeatedly under attack, especially in public schools.

Across the country, families are being shut out of what their children learn, denied access to critical health and personal information, and blocked from choosing schools that fit their children’s needs. This is not a minor issue. Rather, it is a fundamental threat to family authority, a child’s well-being, and the future of our society.

In too many districts, controversial lessons are introduced without parental knowledge. Parents who ask to review classroom materials are simply ignored, told the material is unavailable, or directed to file a public records request. Families who speak up at school board meetings are often treated as agitators or troublemakers—or called “domestic terrorists.”

To a growing extent, schools have begun operating as if parental involvement is optional instead of essential. But parents do not lose their rights when their children enter a classroom. Education exists to serve families, not replace them.

The problem extends beyond curriculum, as teachers and administrators are withholding critical medical or personal information from parents about their minor-aged children. Yet parents cannot fulfill their responsibility to care for their children if key information is deliberately withheld.

This conflict is not hypothetical. In recent years, a growing number of school districts have adopted policies that allow, and even encourage, students to socially transition at school—using different names or pronouns—without notifying their parents. In some cases, school staff are directed to keep this information hidden from dads and moms. Policies like these drive a wedge between parents and their own children.

Finally, parents are still denied meaningful authority over where their children are educated. Millions of families remain assigned to schools based solely on ZIP code. If a child struggles academically, faces bullying, or needs a different learning environment, parents are often left with few options. This puts children’s education and well-being at risk.

Thankfully, change is taking place. Across the country, states are expanding school choice programs that allow education funding to follow students rather than remain tied to the system. Private school scholarship programs, education savings accounts, and tax credit scholarships are giving families the freedom to choose the learning path that best meets their children’s unique needs.

Parents are desperate to exit the public education system because it has failed to fulfill its core mission of providing quality learning, has stopped listening to them, and, in many cases, has pushed them out.

Parents, not school bureaucrats, must hold the final authority over their children. Moms and dads raise them, have known them since birth, and will be part of their lives long after the school year ends. No teacher or administrator, no matter how well-intentioned, should ever replace that role.

For most of our nation’s history, that was obvious.

Parents had both the right and the responsibility to direct the upbringing and education of their children, and courts repeatedly affirmed that principle.

Yet today, that authority is under threat. Bureaucratic policies, as witnessed in California, are increasingly working to replace the role of parents in a child’s life.

Excluding parents erodes trust, strips schools of accountability, and harms children. Families are sidelined while systems dictate what kids learn, what personal information they keep private, and even which schools they can attend, leaving children without the guidance of those who know and love them best. Schools should operate with transparency, not secrecy. Parents should be treated as partners, not obstacles, and their decision-making authority must be respected.

Children belong to families, not bureaucracies. Institutions should never forget that. Restoring parental authority is not radical. Rather, it is simply a return to a long-standing American principle: families, not government institutions, are the foundation of society, and parents should be trusted to guide their children’s upbringing and education.

If we fail to protect that principle, we risk raising a generation with less parental guidance, less accountability in schools, and fewer opportunities to succeed. But when parents are respected and empowered to lead in their children’s lives, families grow stronger, and so does the future of our nation.

It’s time to put parents back in their rightful place—as the first, most trusted, and most important decision-makers in their children’s lives. This Supreme Court decision is an important step in the right direction.

AAA (American Automobile Association) reports that the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline has surged nearly 25% so far this month, putting it on track for the largest monthly increase on record, even surpassing the May 2009 spike, unless the Middle East conflict is resolved quickly.

This consumer fuel-price shock is coming at about the worst possible moment: it is a midterm election year for MAGA, and as we have noted previously, an emergency SPR release would do little to contain the spike, leaving the administration with few viable options.

Brent crude is trading near $102 a barrel and WTI around $95 on Monday afternoon, levels that suggest the national average price for regular gasoline could soon push even closer to the politically sensitive $4-per-gallon threshold.

Consumers have already noticed, as Google Search trends for “Why are gas prices going up” have surged to levels seen when crude prices spiked during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The good news is that comments from the Trump administration show an urgency to reopen the critical maritime chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning that the US is deliberately “allowing Iranian oil tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz” and is “fine” with some Indian and Chinese ships moving through “for now… to supply the rest of the world.”

He highlighted “more and more of the fuel ships start[ing] to go through” and a possible “natural opening” the Iranians are permitting – a tactical concession to stabilize global supply while full escorts remain “militarily” off the table for now.

Last week, we highlighted JPMorgan’s head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, who warned that policy measures will have, at best, a limited impact on oil prices unless safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz is assured, given the potential for up to 12 mbd in losses over the next two weeks.

Some of those policy maneuvers included the 32-nation IEA’s emergency release of 400 million barrels that will soon hit crude markets, along with the initial flows from the U.S. SPR release of 86 million barrels, which could begin as soon as this week. As we have noted, this is not a stockpile problem, but a flow problem.

Kaneva’s other five options beyond SPR releases to contain soaring oil prices include export restrictions, lifting the Jones Act (which Trump is set to do), waiving federal fuel taxes (which could occur if gas hits $4 a gallon), relaxing E15 gasoline blending rules, and issuing a Reid Vapor Pressure waiver (read her full note here).

With the national average price of gas inching closer to the politically sensitive $4-per-gallon level, the key question is what tools the Trump administration is prepared to use to contain pump prices to mitigate any risk of political fallout. 

The immediate focus at the start of the week is clearly on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but domestically, the policy maneuvering is far narrower, likely centering on an SPR release by mid-week and potentially a temporary waiver on federal fuel taxes.

Soaring pump prices come as spring break begins. Will Trump’s Iran conflict be over before the Memorial Day driving season?

Authored by Bryan Hyde via American Greatness,

Former president Barack Obama’s foundation has announced that it will be launching its lavish $850 million presidential center in Chicago in June and is seeking unpaid volunteers to help staff the facility.

That may seem on brand for a former president who has made volunteerism a central tenet of his civic career since his beginnings as a community organizer in Chicago.

At the same time, the staggering costs and jaw-dropping salaries being paid to Obama’s cronies who will run the presidential center are not as easy to pass off as part of his legacy of civic engagement.

Valerie Jarrett, a longtime advisor who will head up the center, is being paid $740,000 salary according to Breitbart.

In a press release from the Obama Foundation, Jarrett described the intended role of the unpaid volunteers, saying, “As Ambassadors, they will create a welcoming and inclusive experience for visitors while representing the strength, resilience, and leadership of this community. Together, we are building something that inspires service, connection, and action far beyond our walls.”

Foundation officials told Fox News Digital that the volunteers will complement the roughly 300 full- and part-time employees and that the volunteer program represents the foundation’s values both onsite and in the community.

Jarrett is one of several former Obama White House officials collecting six-figure paychecks as foundation executives.

According to Fox News Digital, tax filings show “Total salaries and benefits at the foundation climbed from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024 as staffing expanded to 337 employees and annual revenue reached nearly $210 million.”

Unpaid volunteers are commonly employed by presidential libraries, nonprofit cultural institutions, and museums.

In the case of the Obama Presidential Center, the foundation reports that “volunteer ‘Ambassadors’ will greet visitors, provide directional assistance, share information on exhibitions and events, and ensure every guest feels personally welcomed from the moment they arrive.”

The center is scheduled to open on Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of slavery in Texas.

Using unpaid labor to carry out the day-to-day work of running an opulent institution run by a well-connected, wealthy elite?

If that isn’t irony, it’s certainly missing a great opportunity.

Reports are flooding in from across Russia that Telegram is suddenly going dark, fueling speculation that the Kremlin may already be testing a nationwide block ahead of a rumored planned crackdown next month.

“Over the last 24 hours, Telegram has effectively stopped working through some providers if you are using Russian IP addresses,” tech sector observer Vladislav Voytenko told Kommersant FM on Monday. “As for using Telegram via mobile internet, you can basically forget about it,” he added.

Russia’s Main Radio Frequency Center, an arm of media watchdog Roskomnadzor, said a surge of complaints began appearing over the weekend, with at least one-third coming from Moscow, followed by St. Petersburg and other cities spread across the country’s vast 11 time zones.

Regional media has tracked user reports on outage monitors such as Downdetector and Sboi.rf, which show complaints spiking sharply over the weekend as the app began failing across multiple regions.

Some Russian users have described the platform is barely functioning “in any form”. They complain the app won’t open, messages won’t send, and neither will photos and videos load.

Tech analysts say the disruption looks less like a technical glitch and more like the targeted throttling of Russia’s most popular messaging service and social media site, with an estimated 90 million users.

Prior reported efforts of the Russian government to restrict Telegram, particularly in 2018 and 2020, failed given that users as well as the company were repeatedly successful in bypassing Kremlin measures.

However, with access suddenly collapsing across the country at the start of this week, many observers believe the Kremlin may finally be preparing to finish the job. The reality is that Telegram is notoriously difficult for governments to monitor and censor.

But Moscow believes the company itself could be using it against Russia amid the Ukraine war. As we featured earlier this month:

Authorities in Russia believe that Ukraine has quick access to Russian servicemen’s messages and exploits this for military purposes, which wouldn’t be possible without some degree of complicity on Telegram’s part, thus impugning its founder’s character after he denied working with foreign spooks.

The FSB claimed to have “reliable information that the Ukrainian armed forces and intelligence agencies are able to quickly obtain information posted on the Telegram messenger and use it for military purposes.” This coincides with the government allegedly throttling Telegram on the grounds that it’s not in compliance with local laws, which preceded reports that it’ll be banned on 1 April. The authorities denied that they have nay such plan but there’s no doubt that Telegram is now controversial in Russia.

This comes also as the West has been calling Russia’s ever-tightening internet regulations on its citizenry a “digital Iron Curtain”.

Notorious prank callers Vovan and Lexus have spoken out against possible Russian state restrictions on Telegram, arguing that banning externally-based platforms would cut Russia off from global audiences.

They say Telegram allows Russians to reach Western users and maintain… pic.twitter.com/rsqNCQJl3X

— Brian McDonald (@BrianMcDonaldIE) March 11, 2026

Russian government authorities have all the while accused the messaging giant of failing to curb fraud and safeguard user data, which ironically is similar to what the French government accused the company of when it famously detained billionaire Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov in 2024.

Authored by Stacey Robinson via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled on March 16 that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. illegally appointed 13 new members to an influential vaccine panel beginning last June.

Biden-appointed district Judge Brian Murphy also blocked that panel’s guidance memo revising the childhood immunization schedule and declared its previous votes invalid.

Murphy ruled Kennedy committed “a technical, procedural failure” by skirting around the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to change the vaccine recommendations for children.

He said the government committed a similar mistake by removing the previous members of that committee, and replacing them “without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades.”

The plaintiffs, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, originally sued after Kennedy ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending the COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant women and healthy children.

The suit was later expanded to challenge the restructuring of the ACIP and its changes to childhood vaccine recommendations.

Very soon,10-Qs may be a thing of the past.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing a proposal to eliminate the requirement to report earnings quarterly and instead give companies the option to share results twice a year, the WSJ reports citing people familiar with the matter.

In preparation for the proposal – which could be published as soon as April – regulators have been talking to officials at the major exchanges to discuss how they may need to adjust their rules. Once published, the proposal will be subject to the usual public comment period. After that period, which typically lasts at least 30 days, the SEC will vote on it. There are no guarantees it will ultimately happen.

The push for semiannual reporting gained steam late last year. As the WSJ reported last September, the Long-Term Stock Exchange petitioned the SEC to eliminate the quarterly earnings report requirement. Within days, President Trump and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins both said they supported the idea.

Publicly traded US companies have reported results every three months for the past 50-plus years. Trump briefly explored the idea of moving to semiannual earnings reports during his first term, but the effort went nowhere.

Those in favor of less-frequent reporting requirements believe a switch could help boost the shrinking number of public companies in the U.S. Among the reasons companies cite as to why they remain private is the time-consuming and costly clerical work required to list and maintain publicly traded shares.

Any change is likely to face opposition from investors who rely on the transparency of regular disclosures.

While the rule is expected to make quarterly reporting optional, and not eliminate quarterly reports altogether, it is unlikely that many companies will voluntarily subject themselves to intense public scrutiny at a time when AI is making decades-old corporate moats disappear virtually overnight. Alternatively, it could also make capital raising far more challenging for companies that opt out since investors could be anxious to allocate capital in companies that do not publish up to date snapshots of their financial matters. 

Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times,

Across large swaths of the United States, drought conditions and the explosion of data centers have brought renewed attention to the future of the water supply. But the biggest concern may be something local governments have known about for years: aging pipes and other decaying infrastructure that could threaten supply even when water is abundant.

More U.S. cities have been facing water stress in recent years. Drought conditions affected more than a third of the nation last year, with almost 30 million Americans living in areas with high water stress, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

At the same time, data centers can consume upward of 5 million gallons of water per day. That’s the equivalent usage of a town with a population between 10,000 and 50,000 people. The number varies, but an estimated 4,149 data centers are currently operational in the United States, with another 2,788 announced or under construction.

But while drought and data center-related water consumption continue to make headlines, an estimated 6.75 billion gallons of treated drinking water are slipping through the cracks in America’s pipes every single day.

It’s a problem U.S. officials have seen coming for more than a decade.

A 2014 U.S. Government Accountability report found 40 out of 50 state water managers anticipated supply shortages in their states under “average conditions” within 10 years.

Fast forward to last year, when 75 percent of U.S. city officials and more than half of business executives said they expect water risks to outpace all other infrastructure threats, according to a Schneider Electric study.

“Water is not just essential for life—it’s the backbone of America’s economic strength—yet today the U.S. is facing a major water crisis, driven by dwindling supply and outdated infrastructure,” Sophie Borgne, Water and Environment Segment president at Schneider Electric, stated in a press release.

A general view of the Google Midlothian Data Center in Midlothian, Texas, on Nov. 14, 2025. Data centers can consume more than 5 million gallons of water per day, adding pressure in regions already facing water shortages that threaten residential access, industrial growth, and long-term urban resilience. Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

Most U.S. water pipes are between 45 and 100 years old, and many contain toxic elements such as lead and copper, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In its 2025 infrastructure report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. drinking water a C- score and wastewater management a D+ due to the ongoing battle to replace U.S. water pipes.

“The nation’s water infrastructure is aging and underfunded. More than 9 million existing lead service lines pose health concerns,” the engineers stated in the report.

The study authors also noted that “funding shortfalls” remain a problem in state-level funding for the necessary upgrades to drinking water pipes. They also observed that only an estimated 30 percent of these utility companies have fully implemented a water asset management plan, and less than half are even trying to implement one.

In October 2024, the EPA announced its final rule on replacing lead piping nationwide, with compliance required to begin that year. The ultimate goal was to replace all aging and leaking drinking water pipes nationwide within 10 years. The agency stated that the country’s drinking water systems would need $625 billion for pipe replacement, treatment plant upgrades, and additional assets.

“[With] the latest data from 2025, EPA estimates that there are 4 million lead service lines across the country, down from 9 million previously estimated,” an EPA spokesperson told The Epoch Times.

The spokesperson said an additional $3 billion in state funding is available to reduce exposure to lead in drinking water.

“EPA is committed to Making America Healthy Again by ensuring that all Americans can rely on clean and safe drinking water,” the spokesperson said, adding that the agency’s free water technical assistance program is available to “help drinking water systems identify, plan for, and replace lead pipes in the communities they serve.”

Workers use giant pumps to move sewage around a broken section of the Potomac Interceptor in Cabin John, Md., on Feb. 16, 2026. An estimated 6.75 billion gallons of treated drinking water are slipping through the cracks in America’s pipes every single day. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Doing the Math

Presently, water lost to faulty pipe infrastructure is costing U.S. utilities $6.4 billion annually. So why is this decades-in-the-making problem still ongoing? Some say it’s because the math doesn’t work.

“While the $6 billion loss of 2 trillion gallons of treated drinking water—nearly 20 percent of the drinking water consumed in the U.S.—to old pipes and crumbling infrastructure sounds large, it must be put in perspective,” Jeff Stollman told The Epoch Times.

As an economist and technology futurist, Stollman prepares impact forecasts for industries, government, and the environment. He said the cost of replacing leaky water pipes ranges from $1 million to $4 million per mile, depending on pipe size, location, and installation method.

“The United States has over 2.2 million miles of underground drinking water pipes, with a significant portion reaching the end of their 75 to 100 year life. The cost of replacing half of these pipes at the lower range cost of $1 million per mile would therefore require municipalities to come up with $1.1 trillion. And this estimate is certainly low,” he said.

“Losing $6 billion a year, it would take nearly 200 years for the current losses to equal the cost of replacement.”

Compounding this, many older municipalities are “cash-strapped” as it is, he said.

A pipe diverts water into the C&O Canal in Cabin John, Md., on March 5, 2026. Most U.S. water pipes are between 45 and 100 years old, and many contain toxic elements such as lead and copper, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Outside of federal assistance, Stollman said, state and municipal officials will likely need to raise utility prices to cover the improvements.

“This doesn’t mean that this [pipe changing] shouldn’t be done. But utilities will likely have to raise the cost of water more than 7 cents [per] gallon,” he said.

The soaring cost of water bills is already a concern for many. Since 2022, water bills have increased across the board.

In the Midwest, bills were higher than the national average, but the Mid-Atlantic region saw the greatest year-over-year increase in 2024 at 9.5 percent, according to a Bank of America analysis.

Bluefield Research observed in 2025 that U.S. water and sewer bills had risen 24 percent over the previous five years.

“The cost of maintaining and upgrading water infrastructure continues to rise, and these costs are being passed down to ratepayers,” Megan Bondar, an analyst at Bluefield Research, said in a press release.

Workers with the East Bay Municipal Utility District install a new water pipe in Oakland, Calif., on April 22, 2021. The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule in 2024 requiring water systems nationwide to identify and replace lead pipes within 10 years. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Down The Drain

Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Technologies, said recent federal infrastructure funding “is helpful but insufficient to fully modernize century-old networks nationwide.”

Duplan has extensive experience with surface and subsurface hydrology. He told The Epoch Times that the full elimination of U.S. pipe leakage is neither “technically feasible nor economically rational.”

He said utilities optimize around what he called an “economic level of leakage,” balancing repair costs with water value.

He believes the most pressing investment need isn’t leaky water pipes, but resilient source protection, advanced treatment, and contamination mitigation.

That said, Duplan said the trillions of gallons seeping from American water pipes come at a high price tag.

“The direct impact of leakage is economic: higher operating costs, rate pressure, and occasional localized service interruptions,” he said.

Water lost from pipes isn’t gone entirely, but generally finds its way back into the hydrologic cycle via soil infiltration, aquifer recharge, or surface flow.

“The real issue is not physical loss of water molecules. The real issue is loss of treated, pressurized, potable water service and the economic and energy waste associated with producing water that never reaches a paying customer,” he said.

Reverse osmosis pressure vessels treat wastewater at the Groundwater Replenishment System, the world’s largest wastewater recycling plant, in Fountain Valley, Calif., on July 20, 2022. In its 2025 infrastructure report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. wastewater management a D+ due to the ongoing battle to replace U.S. water pipes. Mario Tama/Getty Images

While Duplan doesn’t expect the water hemorrhaging from America’s pipes to create scarcity on its own, he said it creates problems with delivery reliability and pressure management.

“Infrastructure failure can prevent treated water from reaching customers even when the raw water supply is adequate,” he said.

California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois account for more than one-third of all infrastructure-related water losses, according to Bluefield Research.

While states including California and Texas have taken steps to standardize reporting and validation requirements for utility companies, many “still lack accurate, validated data—hindering transparency, performance benchmarking, and corrective action,” Bondar said in a press release.

Contamination is also a growing concern, which can increase water stress by reducing available freshwater.

“A far larger systemic threat to U.S. water security is contamination, because contaminated water requires energy-intensive treatment before it can be returned to beneficial use,” Duplan said. “Treatment, remediation, and advanced purification are capital and energy-intensive processes. That is where the true risk and cost lie.”

Duplan believes U.S. water supplies face the cumulative challenges of “aging assets, energy-intensive treatment, contamination risks, and allocation management under climatic variability.”

A car passes a burst water pipe damaged by strong winds and heavy rain from Hurricane Florence in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 14, 2018. Replacing aging water pipes can cost between $1 million and $4 million per mile, depending on pipe size, location, and installation method, according to experts. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

In January, the United Nations said the current state of water “crisis” in many countries and cities has become the new normal.

“The patterns observed around the world are not those of a system struggling through a temporary crisis,” the agency wrote. “They indicate that many key renewable water systems have crossed thresholds where full restoration is no longer realistic, even with large investments.”

Cities Take Action

Since 2016, new federal rules and local investment programs have reshaped how cities track and upgrade water infrastructure. Revisions to the EPA’s lead and copper rule finalized in 2021 required utilities to inventory service line materials by October 2024, shifting the focus toward identifying pipe materials—especially lead—rather than documenting pipe age.

Cities have also expanded replacement efforts. In Baltimore, where pipes average roughly 75 to 80 years old, about 15 miles of mains are replaced or rehabilitated each year.

Milwaukee maintains about 2,000 miles of mains dating to 1873 and plans to replace 65,000 lead service lines by 2037.

In Philadelphia, where some pipes date back to 1824, about 20 miles are replaced annually.

Meanwhile, Phoenix reported more than 480,000 waterline services in a 2024 inventory and no lead lines, while San Antonio is shifting toward condition-based pipe replacement across its roughly 9,000-mile network.

North Korean operatives are quietly working inside U.S. companies through remote technology jobs, funneling millions of dollars back to Pyongyang and potentially gaining access to sensitive corporate systems, according to investigators and U.S. officials, according to NBC News.

The scheme relies on workers posing as American job applicants using stolen identities and fake credentials to secure high-paying remote roles, particularly in software development and artificial intelligence. Authorities warn the tactic allows the regime to bypass international sanctions while embedding operatives inside Western companies.

An investigation by the Virginia-based cybersecurity firm Nisos found that suspected North Korean IT workers apply to thousands of jobs using fabricated résumés and multiple online personas. Once hired, the workers often operate from overseas — frequently from China — while U.S.-based facilitators help maintain the illusion that they are located domestically.

These facilitators run so-called “laptop farms,” where company-issued computers are physically kept in the United States and remotely accessed by workers abroad. Investigators say the workers also coordinate applications, interviews, and references within tightly organized teams to increase their chances of being hired.

NBC News writes that the scheme has expanded rapidly since the rise of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it easier for overseas workers to obtain jobs without appearing in person. Authorities say the salaries — sometimes exceeding $300,000 per worker — are largely sent back to the regime of Kim Jong Un, helping fund North Korea’s weapons and ballistic missile programs.

U.S. officials estimate the operation now affects hundreds of companies and generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the North Korean government.

Investigators say some operatives hold multiple jobs simultaneously, applying to dozens of roles a day and coordinating through organized networks that track applications and interviews. In some cases, the workers are accused of stealing proprietary data, cryptocurrency, or sensitive technical information while employed. Officials warn that even after the workers are discovered and fired, they may leave behind hidden system access that could later be exploited, raising broader national security concerns.