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Prince Alois expands his authority while loosening checks within Europe’s wealthiest ruling family

Prince Alois chose Liechtenstein’s national day on August 15 to announce a break with three centuries of dynastic tradition: future generations of women could inherit the throne on equal terms with men.

For a country that was Europe’s last to give women the vote, in 1984, the change was hailed as overdue progress. But it also masked a much broader consolidation of power.

Internal documents reviewed by the FT show that three days earlier, behind the walls of Vaduz Castle, Europe’s wealthiest ruling dynasty had quietly approved an overhaul that strengthens the authority of a prince who already wields extraordinary power over his 42,000 citizens, while reducing some of the rights and checks exercised by his relatives in the Princely House of Liechtenstein.

Even before the changes, Prince Alois could veto legislation, dismiss the government, dissolve parliament, appoint judges and reject laws approved by referendum. In June, the Catholic prince said he would veto a citizens’ initiative to legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, even if voters backed it.

“The prince is the most powerful ‘politician’ in the country,” said Wouter Veenendaal, professor of kingdom affairs at Leiden University, who has studied Liechtenstein. “Such a role for the monarch would be unthinkable in Europe’s larger constitutional monarchies.”

Hereditary Prince Alois, 58, has acted as Liechtenstein’s head of state since 2004, when his father, Hans-Adam II, handed him day-to-day sovereign powers while retaining the title of reigning prince. Educated at Sandhurst, Alois served in the Coldstream Guards and worked for an accountancy firm in London before returning to Vaduz.

Alois’s political authority is backed by extraordinary private wealth. The Princely House of Liechtenstein owns LGT, the international private banking group overseen by Alois’s brother, Prince Max, which manages about $482bn in client assets — including the family fortune. For 2025, the bank paid the princely family a dividend of about $878mn.

In the tiny country wedged between Switzerland and Austria, that financial clout makes the dynasty difficult to disentangle from the state itself. In 2002, Hans-Adam II threatened to move his family to Vienna unless voters backed reforms giving the monarchy the power to appoint and dismiss governments.

The threat carried historical weight: from Liechtenstein’s creation in 1719 until Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, its princes ruled the country from Vienna.

Liechtensteiners backed him in a referendum, despite a Council of Europe warning against the expansion of princely power. The Strasbourg-based rights watchdog described Liechtenstein’s Hausgesetz, or House Law governing the monarchy, as “astonishing” for sitting outside the state constitution.

The latest changes to the House Law go far beyond succession. According to internal documents, the prince gains greater discretion over who belongs to the dynasty and explicit authority to set rules on family names, titles and coats of arms. The Family Council, a body of relatives that oversees dynastic affairs, will expand from three to five members but loses an important check: the prince will no longer need its consent for pardons, only to consult it.

Checks on the prince were already “quite limited”, said Veenendaal.

Some of the reforms appear liberalising. Aside from allowing female succession, the new House Law widens family voting rights from adult male members eligible for the throne to all adult members by birth.

The Princely House rejects the suggestion that the changes consolidate the monarch’s powers. Many were technical or codified existing practice, said spokesperson Anja Nöstler, and they did not “affect the constitutional balance between the reigning prince and the people”.

The reforms were approved not by parliament or the public, but by members of the dynasty itself.

Documents dated June 11 show voting family members — adult males eligible for the throne — were sent a proposal for the amendment, rather than the full text, and asked to return Ja or Nein ballots by post by August 11.

Under a procedure that the Princely House said mirrored Liechtenstein’s national postal voting system, unsigned ballots were placed in sealed inner envelopes, separate from signed identification cards.

On August 12, the ballots were counted at Vaduz Castle. An internal letter reviewed by the FT named Hans-Adam II and four other princes as present; Alois was not among them. Nöstler said the count was attended by six family members, not the five listed in the letter, but later confirmed that Alois was the additional family member. She added that two family members were also present, but declined to identify them for “data protection reasons”.

In a letter sent that afternoon, the family was told the reform had passed with a 70 per cent majority. Members were asked to keep the result “strictly confidential” until Alois’s National Day speech. Nöstler said the restriction was intended simply to co-ordinate the public announcement.

The same letter suggested disagreement behind the result. It thanked relatives who had backed the changes as well as those who had “reservations or held a different view”, then urged the dynasty to unite behind the decision.

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The concept of creating an independent AI oversight body modeled on FINRA has faced opposition from former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks

The Trump administration has internally circulated a draft executive order in recent weeks, calling for the creation of a self-regulatory organization for AI companies that produce state-of-the-art models, according to two people who have viewed a draft.

Drafting of the order represents a significant step toward creation of such a regulator, although major obstacles remain. To be finalized, the order still needs buy-in from a range of senior officials, including the president, and lately progress in that direction has stalled, according to three other people familiar with the matter.

The idea has its roots in a proposal last month from Demis Hassabis, then the CEO of Google DeepMind, for a new public-private organization to supervise AI. Hassabis published an essay on X calling for a standards body modeled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a self-regulatory organization that for years has overseen U.S. broker-dealers and securities professionals.

The executive order for the new AI group emerged from proposals by senior administration officials, according to two of the people. Bloomberg reported in July that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had proposed the creation of such a regulator.

It couldn’t be learned why the executive order has stalled. But the idea of a FINRA-like group for AI is strongly opposed by former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks. Last week, Sacks described it as a “horrible idea” on an episode of his “All-In” podcast, specifically criticizing the idea of testing models prior to their release and the idea that the self-regulatory organization would report to the government. Instead, he expressed support for the Motion Picture Association model, which independently oversees the ratings system for movies and doesn’t report to the government.

Further details of the executive order and the structure of the self-regulatory organization couldn’t be learned. Its timing is hard to predict. A June AI-related executive order from the Trump administration that established a voluntary framework for frontier model evaluation went through months of negotiation.

“Any policy announcement will come directly from the president. Discussion about potential executive orders is speculation,” said a White House spokesperson.

Model evaluation has been a politically charged topic during the Trump administration. The White House renamed and downsized the U.S. AI Safety Institute—an organization first started by the Biden administration. Driven by Sacks, the Trump administration pushed a hands-off approach that removed many Biden-era regulations.

But as AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos became more advanced, Trump administration officials began pushing for more safeguards on the technology. The June executive order on AI, which created the voluntary testing framework, stemmed from concerns over the cybersecurity capabilities of the new models. But there is still confusion within the tech industry over how the framework will function. The White House has yet to release it publicly, even though it was finalized in early August.

Meanwhile, different industry leaders have released their own proposals for regulatory systems, including Hassabis. In his essay, he wrote that an AI standards body modeled on FINRA would be responsible for developing assessment protocols and working with “appropriate federal agencies.”

It would also classify models as “frontier class” if they met certain thresholds set by the body, and it would encourage developers of those models to adopt best practices such as publishing model cards, maintaining cybersecurity and vetting personnel. Frontier labs would share models with the body up to 30 days before release.

Much of the language in Hassabis’ proposal mirrors the White House’s earlier voluntary framework, which raises questions as to how the two systems would interact.

While Hassabis’ essay encountered widespread support, the opposition of figures like Sacks, who continues to have influence in the Trump administration, could threaten to derail the effort.

In a post on X last week, Sacks criticized the idea of a “FINRA for AI,” likening it to the Department of Motor Vehicles, though he associated it with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, not Hassabis. “This process will only become more labyrinthine as rules accumulate to prevent theoretical harms,” Sacks wrote.

Why the Drugmaker Behind a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough Stayed Independent

Revolution Medicines attracted takeover interest but decided to go it alone. This week’s FDA approval of its pancreatic cancer pill is the payoff.

Earlier this year, an oncology biotech with no drugs on the market—just promising research—was attracting takeover interest. Revolution Medicines RVMD 2.65%increase; up pointing triangle stayed independent.

This week, that bet paid off.

The 12-year-old drugmaker, more commonly known as RevMed, had spent much of its existence trying to solve a scientific puzzle that had stumped some of the industry’s leading researchers. It successfully targeted a common cancer mutation, resulting in a drug that nearly doubled how long people with pancreatic cancer survived—a remarkable breakthrough for a notoriously deadly disease.

Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved its new drug, Rasonque, the Redwood City, Calif., biotech is taking on its next challenge: figuring out how to quickly bring the drug to the thousands of patients desperate to take it.

RevMed CEO Mark Goldsmith, a doctor-scientist who has led the company since its founding, said last year he faced a decision about whether the company should deliver this product on its own, a complicated and costly undertaking.

He was approached by financial institutions that offered money to help RevMed reach global markets, he said. “When they asked me what sort of scale of financial support did we need, I told them it was big,” Goldsmith said. “I didn’t think they’d continue the conversation, and they came back and said, ‘We’re interested.’”

RevMed is set on doing this on its own. In a matter of months, it has built its first-ever sales force, distribution network and reimbursement operation from scratch. It has struck deals to make the drug overseas and is planning to invest in several manufacturing lines to guard against bottlenecks.

“Successful biotechs tend to be acquired by large pharma companies,” said Michael Schmidt, a biotech analyst at Guggenheim. “Having a company remain independent, at least at this stage in the game, is definitely something that’s very exciting and interesting to follow.”

Wall Street expects Rasonque—which costs more than $477,000 for a year’s supply—to generate more than $1 billion in sales as soon as next year. The company has more assets in development that could also hold blockbuster potential.

Rasonque targets a mutated protein called RAS that drives about a third of all cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic tumors. For decades, drugmakers had called RAS “undruggable,” because its surface was too smooth for traditional molecules to latch on to.

The company spent nearly a decade trying to make it work anyway. By April, it had the data to support its hypothesis. In a 500-person study, patients on the drug lived a median of 13.2 months—nearly double the time those on standard chemotherapy survived.

Rasonque wasn’t part of RevMed’s portfolio. Its lead drug, which targeted a different protein involved in cancer, had attracted investment from Sanofi, but the French pharma company walked away from it in 2022.

Across the country, Harvard University researcher Greg Verdine had started a company, Warp Drive Bio, that was targeting RAS with a technology called “molecular glue”—compounds that recruit a helper protein, latch on to RAS and block its signal that drives cancer cells to multiply.

During a retreat on Cape Cod, Mass., Goldsmith, RevMed’s CEO, found himself sitting next to Laurence Reid, then-CEO of Warp Drive. Over a clam bake, Goldsmith brought up the subject of licensing Warp Drive’s technology to RevMed to target RAS.

Reid balked at the idea of licensing away the company’s core technology, Goldsmith said, so RevMed decided to acquire Warp Drive instead.

“We had decided we wanted to embrace RAS, we needed to get some technology to give us a differentiated approach,” Goldsmith said. “The opportunity was very particular.”

To close the deal, Goldsmith had to pull off a boardroom maneuver. Warp Drive’s largest shareholder at the time was Sanofi. Goldsmith said he phoned the French company’s leadership to make sure they didn’t feel blindsided, and pitched the idea of swapping their majority stake in Warp Drive for some of RevMed’s equity.

It worked. In 2018, RevMed bought Warp Drive in an all-stock deal, absorbing its technology and resetting the company’s trajectory.

The breakthrough came in 2020, when the company’s researchers showed that the drug that would later become Rasonque targeted RAS in all of its variations. Other testing showed it was tolerable.

“It was serendipity,” said Kevan Shokat, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of RevMed. “This is what happens in chemistry sometimes: You get a molecule, and it does something a little more than you expect.”

To help fund the drug’s launch, RevMed struck a deal with a company called Royalty Pharma that gave it access to up to $2 billion in funding in exchange for future rights to a share of Rasonque and another drug’s sales.

“We were going to build the whole thing ourselves,” Goldsmith said, adding that the company worked out an attractive deal and “simply made the decision.”

Goldsmith is now responsible for bringing Rasonque to market, a rollout that actually began nearly four months ago when the FDA allowed RevMed to distribute the medicine as part of a compassionate-use program before approval. More than 2,000 patients were enrolled in the program at the time of approval.

Claude chatbot maker unveils a system that autonomously operates a wide range of devices in laboratories

Anthropic is launching a research system that allows its software to control scientific and engineering devices to conduct experiments, marking its first tool designed to operate in the physical world.

The advance comes as the Claude chatbot maker seeks to expand its enterprise business and boost revenues with new applications in manufacturing, robotics and pharmaceuticals, ahead of its planned initial public offering, which could value the company at $2tn.

The new tool, called Model Hardware Standard, enables AI agents to autonomously operate a wide range of devices that can be programmed using computer code, ranging from complex microscopes to liquid handlers, lasers and robotic arms.

“The conceptual leap here is going from Claude agents working in the digital world [of] analysis, hypothesis generation . . . to do experiments in the physical world, in the lab,” said Jonah Cool, who leads partnerships and deployment for science at Anthropic.

For instance, advanced microscopes can be composed of hundreds of mirrors, motors and lasers that are normally operated by expert engineers. “Claude is now able to directly talk to and control all of those individual mirrors,” Cool added.

Anthropic has been testing the technology with a small group of labs and hardware manufacturers in biotech, robotics and quantum computing, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Genentech and QuEra, a company that is building quantum computers.

The scientists observed the AI agents tracking, adjusting and repeating experiments in a similar way to human scientists.

Alek Kemeny, an Anthropic scientist, said he observed Claude looking at live brain tissue for the first time during a neuroscience experiment, and asked it to find the alveus, a specific part of the brain that he had not heard of before.

“[Claude] was able to successfully manipulate all the different mirrors and lasers to find the focus on the correct part of the brain, and the neuroscientist sitting there said: ‘Yep, that’s right’,” said Kemeny.

Anthropic says it plans to make this new technology open source, but not until it has worked to safeguard the system from making unforced errors.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said society lacked awareness of the risks AI poses around biology compared with areas such as cyber security. Anthropic and other AI developers have cautioned that bad actors could use models to create novel diseases or bioweapons.

In June, Anthropic launched Claude Science, its first product dedicated to scientists, with use cases including rendering 3D protein structures and drug discovery.

AI has become increasingly important to drug research at big pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly, maker of popular weight-loss drugs, has partnered with AI chipmaker Nvidia chips and earlier this year invested in Insilico Medicine, a company focused on AI for drug discovery.

Meanwhile, Sir Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, has left his day-to-day role to focus on leading his other venture, Isomorphic Labs, an AI drug development start-up.