White House Drafts AI Executive Order as Anthropic's Jack Clark Puts Recursive Self-Improvement at 60% by 2028

The Singularity has finally caught the regulators' attention. The White House is reportedly considering an executive order to create an AI working group and a formal review process for new models, which would mean abandoning its hands-off doctrine just as the curves are going vertical. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, for his part, now puts the odds of recursive self-improvement by the end of 2028 at 60%, based on hundreds of public data sources he has been tracking.

The benchmarks are catching up to the forecast. Andon Labs' new Blueprint-Bench 2 finds GPT-5.5 hitting 36.2% at converting apartment photos into 2D floor plans, closing on the 58.6% human baseline. University of Chicago researchers report that frontier coding agents can now autonomously implement an AlphaZero pipeline for Connect Four at a level comparable with external solvers.

Meanwhile, the agentic stack is reshuffling. OpenAI's Codex has overtaken Claude Code in downloads just a week after GPT-5.5 shipped, and OpenAI is adding optional AI-generated pets to Codex as floating overlays that announce task completions. If your code is going to write itself, it might as well come with a Tamagotchi.

Capital is racing to financialize the recursion. Anthropic just unveiled a $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman to push AI into private-equity portfolio companies, and OpenAI finalized a parallel $10B JV with TPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain. Bloomberg is wondering whether the labs are essentially paying their partners to use the software rather than selling it, but in an exponential market, seeding distribution is a natural strategy.

The recursion is also conscripting oceans and silicon. Banks are scrambling to offload data center debt as the AI buildout accelerates. Peter Thiel is leading a $140M round into Panthalassa to power floating data centers with wave energy. On chips, the policy bill is now due. Jensen Huang says Nvidia now has "zero percent" market share in China and that US export policy "has already largely backfired." Energy trade is moving in the opposite direction. Chinese exports of solar, batteries, and EVs all hit record highs in March as the Iran war oil shock turbocharged global clean-energy adoption.

Robotics is rewriting the physical economy from the ground up. Terran Robotics is building clay homes in Central Texas using dirt straight from the ground, which is the cheapest building material in existence. Amazon, for its part, is opening up its global logistics network with Amazon Supply Chain Services, going after UPS and FedEx across ocean, road, rail, and air. Even the soda fountain is bowing to automation logic. McDonald's is quietly retiring self-serve soda nationwide as drive-through and delivery eat the dining room.

AI is making prevention cheaper than cure. India's Remidio has built a battery-powered fundus camera that lets a community health worker capture a high-resolution retinal image in seconds, already used to screen 15 million patients across 40 countries for diabetic eye disease, with new software flagging dangerous pregnancies on the same hardware. The brain itself may benefit from the grind, too. New NBER research suggests leaving the workforce before retirement age may accelerate cognitive decline, which implies that working longer is, on the margin, a nootropic. AI sensors are migrating outside the clinic. Pano AI's high-definition cameras and satellite feeds are spreading across the fire-prone West as record heat and a thin snowpack threaten a brutal wildfire season.

The cosmos is also appearing profligate with planets but parsimonious with physics. Researchers have discovered 27 potential new "Tatooine" planets orbiting two stars, more than doubling the known circumbinary catalog. On the physics side, cosmologists just confirmed Newton's law of gravity at the scale of galaxy clusters hundreds of millions of light-years apart, tightening the noose on MOND and reminding us that some 17th-century code still ships in production.

Even institutions are starting to price in the recursion. Senator Adam Schiff's bipartisan LIFT AI Act, endorsed by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, would hardwire AI literacy into K-12 and empower the NSF to fund AI curricula at scale. Across the Atlantic, hardware is being returned to its owner. Starting February 2027, new EU phones and tablets must have user-replaceable batteries, which is essentially shipping right-to-repair into your pocket. The courtroom theater is loud but distracting. Kalshi traders now put Elon Musk's odds of beating OpenAI in court at 37%, and two days before trial, Musk reportedly texted Greg Brockman that "by the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America."

Musk can sue. The recursion compounds anyway.

That's today. More tomorrow.