Key Takeaways
- Jack Dorsey is joining the debate over how fast frontier AI should develop, backing open-source approaches to AI.
- Block is building open-source AI tools while also expanding bitcoin services across its products.
- Dorsey’s AI and bitcoin positions reflect a broader push for open, decentralized technology — and put Block at the center of that debate.
Claude developer Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei recently started a heated debate in both the private sector and government. He called on the industry to pace the frontier — the development of the most advanced, powerful and capable AI models built and trained by top AI labs. Amodei suggested introducing third-party evaluators and government-backed coordination among AI firms. His ideas were immediately backed by Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Meanwhile, Dorsey’s initial, one-word public reactions supporting open source led to a more elaborate response, published Sept. 14.
Not for Governments and Top AI Players to Decide
In short, the Block CEO agrees that scrutiny, independent evaluation and planning for recursive self-improvement matter, but rejects the idea that all this should be in the hands of governments and leading companies.
Dorsey calls for open releases so outsiders can reproduce results, expose failures and build alternatives without first convincing a lab. He also wants more independent researchers and defenders to have models and compute, plus public funding for shared facilities that labs and governments cannot veto.
“i oppose industry-wide limits negotiated by today’s leaders because they could exclude the people who might expose failures or build alternatives. preserving a company’s commercial advantage is not a safety objective.” Dorsey said in an X article, “researched and edited with the assistance of three models (two open-weight and one closed) and a bunch of humans.”
According to the CEO, neither the U.S. nor Chinese governments should decide “how much intelligence everyone else is allowed to develop,” as this would “leave most of the world waiting for permission.”
“I want people in China to have the same freedom to build and control their technology that I want here in the US. I don’t see a Chinese discovery as an American loss, or researchers as interchangeable with their government,” Dorsey added.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump said calls for more control of AI are a “Sick conspiracy” and has continued emphasizing that the U.S. needs to beat China in the AI race. House Speaker Mike Johnson also warned that heavy regulations could “smother innovation” and let China dominate global AI.
Open Source Advocates and Builders
The Amodei-prompted AI pacing debate is relevant for Block as well. The company is broadly pro-open-source, supporting technologies like Bitcoin while actively developing its own open-source AI products.
In 2025, Block introduced goose, an open-source AI agent that developers can customize and point at whichever model they want. In July 2026, the company launched the Nostr protocol-powered Buzz, a free, open-source workspace and competitor to Slack, where humans and AI agents can get their own cryptographic identity and collaborate.
What’s more, Dorsey was behind the launch of decentralized social media platform Bluesky (he left the Bluesky board in 2024) and helps develop Bitchat, a messaging app that can run without the internet and has already faced attempts to ban it by the Chinese and Indian governments.
On the Bitcoin side, Block holds BTC on its balance sheet, while bitcoin is supported by Block companies such as Square and Cash App. Block is also manufacturing Proto, bitcoin mining hardware, and Bitkey, a bitcoin hardware wallet.
All this ideologically and conceptually contradicts what Amodei is suggesting: using models already implemented in the banking industry, where regulators sometimes place supervisors alongside employees, and calling for greater oversight. This is the case even if Anthropic’s CEO is not openly debating an open-source ban at all.
In any case, none of the proposed supervision ideas would cover Block, as it builds on top of other companies’ AI models.
The Downsides of Restrictions
In Block’s Q2 2026 letter to investors, Dorsey already pointed out that owning an AI model doesn’t matter to the company: “To us the models are interchangeable, and everything that matters, the harness, the data, and the distribution, is ours” and that “betting on a single lab means inheriting its ceiling.”
However, should Amodei’s suggestions be implemented by all top AI labs in the “democratic nations,” Block might have fewer options, while the AI models it uses could arrive more slowly and under greater supervision.
Also, pacing AI development and implementing restrictions the way Amodei suggests might hurt the development of the agentic economy and everyone building payment rails on it, including Block.
Risks to Agentic Bitcoin Payments
Block’s initiative, Spiral, is focused on “making bitcoin the planet’s preferred currency,” as it advances Lightning Network infrastructure and advocates for BTC as “the best money for agents.”
Meanwhile, Amodei’s suggestions seem to favor more centralized and permissioned agentic crypto and stablecoin payments, including those facilitated by the x402 protocol, backed by Coinbase and Stripe, among others. Therefore, adoption of agentic BTC payments enabled by the L402 protocol could be hampered in that case.
However, Cash App now supports stablecoins too, suggesting that Block might look beyond bitcoin as well in agentic commerce.
In either case, Block’s Square also has a chance to advocate for agentic BTC payments on a global scale. It is a member of the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group and the W3C Web Payments Working Group, while also participating in the Universal Commerce Protocol effort led by Google and Shopify.
Also, interestingly, in 2025, Block, OpenAI, and Anthropic created the Agentic AI Foundation, an organization designed to cultivate open-source projects that leverage autonomous systems capable of independent decision-making.
Slowing Block Down
Therefore, Amodei’s suggestions could slow Block down while also hurting both its customers and investors.
“Internally, AI is helping us move faster and improve quality. Externally, it is helping us build products that act earlier for customers and sellers,” Dorsey told Block’s investors in his Q1 2026 letter.
Block’s shares are up 22% this year and almost 7% over the past year, trimming its losses over the past five years to 69%.
