Asked for his news of the week on the Moonshots panel, Emad Mostaque did not bring a model release. He brought a corporate structure.
He described the path to it as several years of work on what he called the last economy — what the economics of an automated world look like — followed by Common Wealth, his collection of essays on personhood, law and political authority. The question people kept putting to him, he said, was how the gains of artificial intelligence get shared. "So we went back to the drawing board and think about what type of institution and future do we want to see," he said. "And we came up with this idea of the champion."
A Champion, in his description, is a company that does the last mile of AI work inside one jurisdiction — a state or a country — and is owned by the people who live there. "We think that AI should be like a utility and it should be owned by the people," he said. "So you need the children to own it. You need the locals to own it."
Why he thinks the money ends up downstream
The proposal rests on a claim Mostaque returns to throughout the segment: the cost of intelligence itself is heading to zero, and the value moves to whoever brings it into contact with real work. That means AI inside enterprises — "as Saleem would kind of indicate it," he said, nodding to fellow panelist Salim Ismail's argument that the durable advantage sits in deployment rather than in the model — and it means physical machines.
"The humanoids, who owns those humanoids, because those will drive the economy," he said, citing a remark by Elon Musk at the G20 that the average humanoid robot would have five times the output of a person and that there would be a billion of them. In robotics, he argued, 80% of the value is downstream of building the unit, as it is for carmakers: in fleets, deployment and everything that follows the sale.
So a Champion would own robots and put them to work; train a workforce of forward-deployed engineers — the people embedded inside an institution to make systems fit its processes — to "transform every institution"; give an agent to every citizen; and supply AI to government, courts, education and healthcare. He mentioned SAGE, a government-AI project he said he, the host and others had been working on. The result, in his framing, would be "a play on the index GDP of the state owned by the people of the state with the smartest people in the state involved."
The dollar that does the work
The financing comes from an analogy. Mostaque's account of TSMC's founding is that the chipmaker was started at a valuation of 10 Taiwanese dollars, with local money supplying 75% and Philips 25%. "Is that for real?" a panelist asked. "It's for real," he said. In his telling, neither the chief executive nor the team received founder shares; they got shares out of the profits, and the CEO had to buy a stake now worth $10 billion. The company listed, he said, at six billion Taiwanese dollars, which was the cash on its balance sheet.
His version for AI: "the intelligence company of California, the intelligence company of the UK. One dollar pre-money." Locals of every size — institutions, wealthy individuals, ordinary retail investors — buy in at that nominal valuation. A pre-money valuation is what a company is deemed to be worth before new money arrives; setting it at a dollar means price is not rationing who gets in. He floated a figure of $75 million per state, and suggested an endowment such as MIT's could invest and be handed back compute worth the same dollar amount. "There's all sorts of interesting things you do at $1."
Only afterwards, he said, do international and strategic investors come in at market rate, "which will be 10 times that, because you've got everyone on board." The premise is that broad local ownership is itself what makes the company worth more to the outsiders who buy in later. "Get everyone in. You want it to be a success? It's up to you."
Ten percent, in perpetuity, for the children
The part with no obvious precedent is the children's allocation. Mostaque proposes handing 10% of the equity in perpetuity to every child under 20: "So every year you issue half a percent of the equity to every kid."
Equity issued annually to each new cohort is not a one-off grant; it is a standing claim on the company that renews as children are born and age out. Each Champion, he said, covers a certain number of citizens "because, again, it gives equity to every child born."
How finely would the map be sliced? "So in the United States, we're doing one per state because a lot of data has to stay state boundaries," he said. "Otherwise, it's pretty much one per country." The comparison he reached for was a national utility: it "acts like British gas here, for example," and "acts like the telco and more."
An idea, and its unanswered parts
A host stopped the segment to mark its status: right now this is just an idea, not an investment offering and not investment advice, and listeners wanting to learn more should go to Intelligent Internet, whose Champion page presents the same concept as an institution-building proposal and an invitation to form founding councils. Mostaque agreed and asked for input. "It's all about if a state wants this, then it's all about the people of that state. It's not like a foreign company coming in." He placed it alongside other distribution schemes — "just like you have your UBI, just like you've got your shares in the frontier labs." The first phase, as the host put it back to him, is lining up local champions and letting the structure cascade upward.
What the segment did not settle is how any of it would be governed. Nothing in the discussion describes who sits on a Champion's board, who votes the children's shares before they come of age, or what stops later outside investment at ten times the price from diluting the local holders whose participation created that price. A perpetual half-percent annual issuance dilutes someone by design; the proposal does not say whom. Nor is it clear who counts as a local, how a state-chartered company would come to hold the roles of citizen-agent provider, robot fleet owner and supplier of AI to the courts at once, or what becomes of a Champion whose state declines to back it.
Mostaque's own essays supply the sharpest objection. Common Wealth argues that political authority lies with whoever can write and revise a community's rules, and that combining rulemaking, provisioning and enforcement inside one highly capable system could remove meaningful human control even when the decisions look benevolent. A Champion, as described, would provision an unusually large share of a jurisdiction's administrative capacity. Local shareholding answers who profits; it does not yet answer who can say no.
"Equitized from day one"
The reason he gives for hurrying is bleak. A host read his own bullets back to him: the cost of intelligence is going to zero, the economy changes forever, and the value of human cognition goes negative — a person still eats while being, economically, the least capable member of the team, however good the ideas. "It's like adding a human driver to an autonomous highway," came the reply on the panel. Mostaque said this was the subject of his book last year, and that it is why ownership has to come first: "you need to have a share in the means of production, which will be the robots and the forward deployed engineers and people like that, and so you need to make sure that's equitized from day one."
Nobody on the call claimed exemption. "I'm not the smartest person on my agent team anymore," one of them said, expecting to be eclipsed quickly; another called it humbling for humanity. Then the comparison that closed the segment: when Stockfish started beating everybody at chess, people still played chess.