Intelligent Internet, the company founded by former Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, has launched what it calls the Champion — and it is an ownership proposal, not a model. A Champion, per Mostaque's founding essay, is "a private company with a public-benefit purpose, founded and majority owned by people and institutions from the place it serves." One per jurisdiction — a US state, or a country — each taking the name of the place it serves: the AI Company of California, the AI Company of the UK.
The framing on X was blunter: "The cost of intelligence is going to zero. The value of human cognition will go negative. The economy will change forever." II's Champion thesis pins that to a date, citing Mostaque's book The Last Economy: the value of human cognitive labour turns negative in 2028, when retaining human execution costs more than the machine substitute.
The division of labour II proposes is simple: frontier labs build intelligence, Champions own the last mile of it. Each Champion holds the customer relationship, keeps the operating record and carries the balance sheet, so that when models and suppliers change a named local institution stays accountable. It sells three things:
Mostaque's swipe at the usual sovereign-AI playbook is the sharpest line in the essay: "a system can be hosted locally while its memory, relationships and value are governed elsewhere. Sovereignty at the top of the stack does not guarantee ownership at the last mile."
The financial structure is unusually specific. It is modelled on TSMC's 1987 formation, when Taiwan's ITRI transferred factories, equipment, technology and 98 professionals into the new company: ownership followed contribution, with a local majority.
| Round | Terms |
|---|---|
| R1 · Local ownership | $1 nominal pre-money; the first $10m funds recruitment and the initial team |
| R2 · Strategic capital | 10% of the company post-investment, new cash capped at the R1 amount |
| R3 · Public listing | Once listing requirements are met, with local majority preserved |
II's worked example: a $100m R1 followed by a $100m R2 gives a $1bn post-money valuation on $200m raised. Intelligent Internet takes 10% founding equity for establishment work, plus paid pro rata rights in later rounds. A trust holds a further 10% for local children, with 0.5% issued annually for each newborn cohort in perpetuity — the thesis defines the beneficiaries as those aged 18 and under at founding, while ii.inc says everyone under 21 at setup, vesting on their 21st birthday. The thesis also keeps the Foundation Coin from II's earlier whitepaper, a Proof-of-Benefit reward token with a 21,000,000 supply cap, earned by contributing compute to "commons" work.
II says it is forming the first Champions now, starting with Founding Councils and an interest-registration page. It has not named a jurisdiction, a council member, a founding customer or a dollar of committed capital.
The stack it offers those Champions is real but small: Zenith (coordination for work), Radiant (coordination for knowledge), Factory, Genii, II-Search and II-Medical, plus open datasets. Its headline result is self-reported — in II's own published 17-task FrontierSWE V1 comparison, Zenith moved GPT-5.5 from fifth to first using the same base model. An independent review of the project describes a company of roughly 18 people with no publicly disclosed funding, whose released models are fine-tunes of Alibaba's Qwen3 family rather than models trained from scratch, and notes that the earlier II whitepaper used "Champion" to mean a blockchain validator running a sovereign rollup — a different thing from the locally owned operating company being pitched now.
That is the gap to watch. The argument — that hosting compute domestically is not the same as owning the institution that holds your records, your relationships and the value they generate — is a good one, and it is not one the frontier labs or the national-compute programmes are currently answering. Whether an 18-person company can convince a US state or a national government to charter a public-benefit AI utility at a $1 valuation is an entirely separate question, and nothing announced so far tests it.
The Intelligence Age Must Be Built RightThe Champion Thesisii.incChampions pageIntelligent Internet's post on XOwn Your Mind review of Intelligent Internet
