ELMHURST, IL (JLN) — August 28, 2026: In a setting worlds away from the litigation-heavy atmosphere of the previous administration, industry leaders and regulators gathered at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission headquarters last week, signaling a sharp pivot in how Washington intends to govern the coming “AI supercycle.”
During the inaugural meeting of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC), moderated by FIA Chairman and CEO Walt Lukken, a former CFTC acting chairman, the discussion shifted from the defensive, victim mentality and persecution posturing that defined recent years to a proactive policy dialogue buoyed by the support of an administration with skin in the game.
Don Wilson, in his introductory remarks, said, “I have the honor of being the only one who was sued by Gary Gensler twice: once when he was running the CFTC and once when he was running the SEC. It’s a much, much better environment now, so thank you.”
The central theme of the AI session was not merely how to regulate artificial intelligence, but how to harness it as an asset class to cement American financial leadership.
The most concrete policy proposal to emerge was the push to categorize compute capacity, the processing power powering the AI revolution, as a tradeable commodity.
Raghu Yarlagadda, CEO of FalconX, and Don Wilson, founder of DRW, urged the commission to fast-track regulation for compute derivatives. As US companies face massive spending on data centers without hedging tools, proponents argue that a CFTC-regulated market would allow for reliable price discovery and risk management for this scarce resource.
“The CFTC has a remarkable opportunity to define compute as an asset class,” Yarlagadda told the committee, noting that the agency’s historical success in establishing gold standards for industrial commodities should be the blueprint for the intelligence economy.
Wilson said, “I think one important step is to encourage this administration to let the AI labs, the frontier labs release their newest models as soon as they can.” He added, “That reduces risk. That reduces risk to the markets. It reduces hacking risk. I think that that’s super important”.
Addressing compute futures, Wilson said, “We are in a race for AI supremacy with China. Risk-management instruments in the compute space are essential to reducing the cost of capital, which in turn will give the US a competitive advantage“
The assembled industry leaders also arrived at a firm consensus on the regulatory perimeter: regulators should focus on market outcomes and conduct, rather than the underlying technology.
Tom Sexton, CEO of the National Futures Association (NFA), cautioned the commission against “precautionary” bans, arguing that regulation should remain “technology-agnostic.” Whether an order is submitted by an Excel spreadsheet macro or an advanced generative AI model, Sexton argued, the agency should be concerned only with identification and attribution.
This “principles-based” approach was echoed by others who feared that AI-specific regulations would only create friction that drives innovation offshore.
Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, raised a unique cybersecurity issue, warning against mandating “regulatory honeypots”—the collection of unnecessary sensitive data—which he noted has proven to be a target for hackers in other jurisdictions. Unnecessary data collection is a reflex reaction for many in the industry, but this objection made sense.
The discussion around AI-driven risks also flipped commonly held beliefs on their head. Rather than viewing AI as a tool for bad actors, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong argued that “frontier models” of AI favor defenders. Because defenders can scan proprietary codebases before production, AI acts as a defensive moat against external threats, he claimed.
However, industry participants acknowledged that the “agentic finance” era, where autonomous systems execute trades with limited human intervention, requires modernizing safety frameworks. Proposals included moving beyond manual audits toward “formal verification,” where code correctness is mathematically proven, to ensure system integrity in a high-speed trading environment.
The session underscored the broader administration-wide attempt to end the era of “regulation by enforcement,” whatever the CFTC’s current definition of enforcement is. Throughout the meeting, leaders of major fintech and crypto firms, many of whom spent the last few years entangled in high-profile SEC and CFTC investigations, expressed relief at the newfound emphasis on proactive guidance and inter-agency collaboration.
Yet, the ghost of the past remains: the risk of fragmentation. Participants repeatedly warned that if the US fails to provide clear, harmonized rules, the infrastructure for the next generation of AI and decentralized finance will simply build itself in jurisdictions with more hospitable regulatory climates.
A word heard 28 times during the day was “clarity.” While some industry leaders may have been lobbying for the passage of the Clarity Act, most were just asking for clarity, for the CFTC to
provide the rules of the road for the intelligence economy, or watch the capital and innovation move abroad.
