On 4 June 2026, the Financial Times ran an op-ed under Javier Milei’s name — “Argentina invites AI to free itself” — co-contributed by his Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger.

It is a slick piece of jurisdictional marketing. It sells Argentina as a haven for AI-corporate capital: a new legal entity called the “non-human corporation,” limited liability for autonomous AI agents, the lowest corporate tax, and “unmatched terms” for the companies that will define the 21st century. Buenos Aires, it proposes, can become for the age of AI what Amsterdam was for the age of sail.

It is clever legal engineering. But here is what the pitch leaves out.

The science base is being starved to fund the runway.

The op-ed never mentions that the scientific institutions this country built over generations — CONICET, the public universities, world-class research assembled painstakingly over decades — are being gutted under the banner of “austerity.” I am not writing this from the outside. I am one of the scientists it pushed out: a researcher on unpaid leave because the funding that sustained the work was cut. Chainsaw for the laboratories; velvet for the funds.

A government that promised to burn the central bank and free Argentines from monetary debasement has, in practice, delivered austerity onto main street and onto science — while rolling out the red carpet for token-DAOs and AI-corporate capital. This op-ed does not stand alone: it accompanies the “Súper RIGI” bill, a regime designed to attract investments above US$1 billion in strategic sectors, from data centres and AI to lithium.

And the monetary substrate it courts is hollow.

The framework is built around tokenised, DAO-style structures. But priced in Bitcoin — not in dollars — the altcoin and token sector has been a multi-cycle wealth-destroyer. No token has durably held its value against Bitcoin across full market cycles. You can build the world’s most sophisticated legal wrapper around a melting ice cube; it still melts.

This is not hypothetical for Argentina. In February 2025, Milei himself promoted a memecoin, $LIBRA, on X. It surged, then collapsed within hours — wiping out an estimated US$250 million from investors. A congressional investigation later concluded he had provided “essential collaboration” to the project; he is under judicial investigation and denies wrongdoing. The token economy this op-ed courts is the same one that already cost Argentines their savings, promoted from the highest office in the land.

Real monetary freedom is not a low-tax wrapper for speculation. It is an incorruptible, fixed-supply base layer that has held value across every cycle this legislation flirts with.

Consider who holds the pen.

Federico Sturzenegger was President of the Central Bank of Argentina (2015–2018), resigning as the 2018 peso crisis began. The man who once embodied the “burn it down” monetary rhetoric now authors the framework that delivers austerity to the people who actually expand human knowledge. Real freedom is not defunding your scientists.

This is not abstract for me.

My recent paper renormalises civilisational progress by Bitcoin’s hashrate — the one auditable, globally-measurable, value-holding computational substrate we have. It tests the standard Kardashev assumption of exponential energy growth against six decades of real data, finds it fails, and proposes the Kardashev–Sagan–Nakamoto framework to repair it. I can still do the science. They just stopped paying for it.

📄 Read the paper (NASA ADS): https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026arXiv260417516G

Aside: the Argentine press has openly framed this column as a pitch to attract investors like Peter Thiel — whom Milei received at the Casa Rosada around the same period. Thiel funded Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin (2014, $100k fellowship) and later backed JD Vance’s political rise. I draw no conclusions about who shaped this op-ed — I don’t know. But the “freedom tech” world it courts is closer to power than its branding suggests.

And well may we say “God save Argentina” — because nothing will save Milei from LIBRA.

Citation: Milei, J. (2026, 4 June). “Argentina invites AI to free itself.” Financial Times, Opinion. Co-contributed by F. Sturzenegger.