Three power centers spoke. Trump’s shelved AI order had been set for signing on May 21-22 before three phone calls reached the White House. The draft would have set a voluntary mechanism for developers to submit frontier models for federal review up to 90 days before release, with agencies given 60 days to build a classified benchmarking process. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and David Sacks all reached Trump between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. The federal rulebook didn’t get written this week.
While Washington stepped back, an institution reaching 1.4 billion Catholics stepped forward. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, the first papal encyclical on AI ever, published Monday at 11:30 a.m. in the Vatican’s Synod Hall. The pope signed it on May 15—the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum—and presented it personally. Topics span autonomous weapons, worker rights, and the concentration of AI power among profit-driven firms. Anthropic’s Christopher Olah attended as a lay guest speaker. The moral framework arrived before the federal one.
The third move came from Shanghai. Huawei’s Tau scaling law, unveiled Monday at IEEE ISCAS by semiconductor chief He Tingbo, replaces Moore’s geometric scaling with a time-based framework. Its paired architecture, LogicFolding, compresses signal propagation delay to lift transistor density and chip efficiency, targeting 14-angstrom-equivalent (1.4nm) density by 2031. Huawei has mass-produced 381 chips over six years using the approach; the next Kirin generation, launching Fall 2026, will be the first to ship it. China’s response is engineered around US export controls—building rather than legislating.
The Pulse
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That’s the signal.
— The PulseMark Team
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