Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Chris Brandt, CEO of UpSurge Baltimore — the innovation arm of the Greater Baltimore Committee — and Managing Director at Audacious Capital, to unpack a growing fight over who controls the intelligence businesses increasingly rely on.

They discuss the tradeoffs between open and closed AI models, from guardrails and censorship to security, trust, and control. The conversation also explores AI distillation, the economics of building versus buying, and why companies may need to think beyond token costs when deciding how much of their intelligence they want to own.

They close by bringing the global debate over AI sovereignty home to Maryland and what it could mean for the region's businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Podcast Notes & Links:
- Who Owns Your Company's Intelligence? — Chris Brandt, UpSurge Baltimore newsletter
- WTCI AGILE Global Innovation Series, Sept 23
- Meta introduces Muse Glimmer
- Anthropic to watermark Claude output under EU rules — The Register
- Anthropic restores Fable 5 with new jailbreak filter — The Hacker News
- Censorship in Chinese AI models can be undone — Semafor
- Kimi vs DeepSeek censorship comparison — ellamind
- OpenAI's gpt-oss open-weight models (Aug 2025) — MIT Technology Review
- PerryLabs - Start with an AI Assessment

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