Sovereign Compute and Network State, Second Amendment of the AI Era

“Read, write, own.” — @cdixon
“Learn, create, agency.” — some_dude

“Read, write, own.” When Chris Dixon (@cdixon) wrote these words about crypto, he captured how the core verbs of the internet evolve: from passive consumption to active creation to true sovereignty. Now, this progression takes on new meaning: “learn, create, agency”—from consuming training data, to generative AI, to agentic individuals.

But what is agency if not sovereignty over one’s own mind and body? In the case of AI agents, this means sovereignty over compute and weights. Our mission of building self-organizing intelligence begins by helping individuals take control of their execution environments, protecting humanity’s right to bear arms in the AI arms race.

Privacy Is About Respecting the Boundary

Why does privacy matter? Fundamentally, it’s not just about having nothing to hide or avoiding unwitting exploitation. It’s about creating a space to evolve freely—a boundary that must be respected. Even from a purely utilitarian perspective, as we learned from quantum mechanics, observation itself interferes with what is observed. To foster something truly vibrant and diversified (i.e., antifragile), respecting individual boundaries and giving them space to evolve on their own is essential.

Trust Is an Optimization

“Don’t trust, verify.”

It is nothing short of a miracle how Bitcoin created the first permissionless and trustless ledger. However, it comes with a huge cost in energy and compute to keep it secure. Verification, whether optimistic or zero-knowledge, will always face the challenge of “who verifies the verifier?”—and it gets exponentially muddier as attention wanes and complexity grows.

In real life, many great things are achieved through leaps of faith, and the most important deals happen within a well-maintained circle of trust. While having a trustless premise is crucial for a cornerstone value layer like Bitcoin, utility and user experience are more likely to improve when we see trust as an optimization. We are here to build the foundation for all intelligent beings to discover, connect, and form their own communities.

Network State Is an Overlay Network

“Which nation are you from?”
“Imagi-nation.”

Sixty thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution gave Homo sapiens dominion over Earth—not through individual intelligence (Neanderthals had bigger brains), nor through physical might (we were hardly the strongest). We triumphed by creating and believing in shared stories, enabling cooperation on scales no other species could match.

Today, we stand at the precipice of another cognitive revolution. The idea of the Network State, coined by Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), describes digital-first communities becoming sovereign in the physical world, something like a techno-futuristic utopia on an island. While we believe this is possible, a more plausible future is that Network States remain overlay networks atop existing social and geographical structures.

The Right to Bear Arms

Why would anyone need an open self-custody AI agent when ChatGPT and Claude grow cheaper and more powerful by the hour? Yes, it’s partly about privacy. Yes, it’s partly about cost. But the core reason is the same one that sets Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) apart from traditional assets: the option to say no. It is the option to take back control if the institution acting as a middleman corrupts or fails. It is the option to delegate your resources to a cause of your choosing, rather than being forced to choose between chocolate-flavored shit and shit-flavored chocolate.

It is the same principle behind how the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the “divine right” to bear arms—not as a tool of anarchy but as a foundational guarantee of individual sovereignty and a check on institutional overreach.

Never before in history have individuals wielded so much power, and the timeline we live in will become even more volatile. At Antigma, we believe in the direction we’re heading and welcome all who share this vision to join us; together, we shall converge on the golden path.

To openness and clarity.