The Acceleration Era: 2024
The AI race accelerates beyond anyone’s public projections. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google release models that can reason, code, and act autonomously. Palantir joins the S&P 500. The political realignment around tech power becomes visible. The election that changes everything.
November 25, 2024. AI. Anthropic Launches Model Context Protocol. Anthropic releases MCP, an open standard for connecting AI models to external data sources and tools. The protocol establishes the universal infrastructure layer for agentic AI, later adopted by OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, and Microsoft. Anthropic
November 2024. Law. CFPB Open Banking Rule Finalized. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalizes its open banking rule, requiring financial institutions to share consumer data with authorized third parties on request. The rule is the CFPB’s last major consumer protection action before DOGE arrives and dismantles the agency in February 2025.
November 2024. Platform. Trump Elected. Donald Trump wins the presidential election, ending a campaign in which Elon Musk donated approximately $290 to $300 million to Trump’s campaign and aligned political infrastructure.
November 2024. Platform. Bezos Blocks Washington Post Endorsement. Jeff Bezos blocks the Washington Post’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris, the first time in the paper’s history its owner has intervened to suppress a presidential endorsement.
November 2024. Platform. Tech Executive Coalition Forms Around Transition. A coalition of major technology executives has aligned with the Trump transition, including Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and others, foreshadowing the January 20 inauguration seating arrangement.
September 12, 2024. Surveillance. Larry Ellison: Citizens Will Be on Their Best Behavior. At Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison states: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Oracle is subsequently confirmed as a key infrastructure partner for TikTok’s U.S. behavioral data layer and the Stargate AI data center program. Fortune
September 2024. AI. OpenAI Releases o1-Preview. OpenAI releases its first model to reason before answering using chain-of-thought processing, marking the transition from generative AI to reasoning AI.
September 2024. AI. Colossus 1 Operational in Memphis. xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis becomes operational with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the largest single AI training cluster at the time of launch.
September 2024. AI. Project Ludicrous Announced: Stargate Data Center in Abilene, Texas. A next-generation Stargate AI data center is announced in Abilene, Texas, the first in what will become a national network of AI compute infrastructure.
August 2024. Surveillance. DOD Increases Palantir’s Cherry Blossom Contract by $795 Million. The Department of Defense increases Palantir’s Cherry Blossom contract to enhance the AI capabilities of the Maven Smart System, the AI-assisted military targeting program.
June 2024. Surveillance. Palantir Joins S&P 500. Palantir Technologies is added to the S&P 500, marking the moment the surveillance and data infrastructure company becomes a mainstream institutional investment.
2024. China. PBOC Ruling Formally Separates Sesame Credit from Government System. A People’s Bank of China ruling formally separates Alibaba’s Sesame Credit and other private scoring systems from the state-run social credit enforcement infrastructure. China draws a legal boundary between private behavioral scoring and government compliance enforcement at the same time that the United States is building an equivalent private behavioral-scoring infrastructure through platform wallets without equivalent constraints.
2024. Surveillance. Trump Meets with Blue Origin Executives. Trump meets with Blue Origin executives who hold a $3.4 billion federal lunar spacecraft contract, establishing a pattern of pre-inauguration alignment between the incoming administration and defense-adjacent technology companies.
2024. AI. The U.S.-Saudi Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation Expires. The U.S.-Saudi Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation, the institutional backbone of the petrodollar arrangement established in the 1970s, is set to expire after 50 years. Saudi Arabia declines to renew it. The geopolitical foundation of dollar dominance quietly lapses without announcement.
2024. AI. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike Resign from OpenAI. OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, and head of alignment, Jan Leike, both resigned, citing concerns about the company’s direction on safety. Leopold Aschenbrenner is fired. Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders resign from the governance and safety teams. The alignment function of the world’s most prominent AI company effectively loses its leadership in a single year.