Saylor Unveils a Bill of Digital Rights: Five Freedoms He Says the AI Economy Cannot Function Without

Michael Saylor has published a new essay calling for a “bill of digital rights” that would guarantee five fundamental freedoms for digital assets, arguing that the age of artificial intelligence needs better money and better capital markets to reach its full potential.

By Sarah Park | September 27, 2026

The executive chairman of Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder, laid out his framework in an essay posted on X on Saturday. Rather than treating digital assets as something to be restricted, Saylor argued that regulators and lawmakers should be codifying what holders of digital assets are allowed to do with them. In his view, the coming era of digital intelligence will automate jobs and make many products obsolete, which means future prosperity will depend on how quickly new businesses can be created and financed.

The Hook: Five Freedoms for Digital Assets

Saylor’s proposed bill of digital rights rests on five freedoms. The first is the freedom to create new digital assets. The second is the freedom to issue those assets to the market in order to finance business and productivity. The third is the right to hold digital assets directly or to choose a custodian. The fourth is the right to transfer them, moving assets between people, companies, wallets and service providers. The fifth is the right to use them, meaning the ability to spend, invest, earn income and borrow against digital assets.

Those rights should apply to both people and companies, Saylor wrote. The reasoning behind the framework is straightforward: “An asset’s value depends on what its owner can do with it. Restrict its usefulness, and you restrict its economic potential.”

That line cuts to the heart of a debate that has defined crypto policy in the United States for the past decade. Critics of the current regulatory approach have long argued that ambiguity around what token holders can legally do with their assets suppresses innovation and pushes builders offshore. Saylor’s essay reframes that argument in constitutional language, presenting digital asset freedoms as preconditions for economic growth rather than as concessions to a niche industry.

Ten Million New Companies

The most ambitious line in the essay is a target: “Our ambition should be to enable 10 million new companies to raise capital.” Saylor connects that goal to the artificial intelligence transition, writing that as digital intelligence automates work and renders entire product categories obsolete, the economy’s ability to generate replacement businesses will determine whether the AI era produces broad prosperity or concentrated disruption.

Traditional capital formation, in Saylor’s telling, is too slow and too gatekept for that task. Initial public offerings take months and cost millions in fees. Venture capital reaches a tiny fraction of founders. Token issuance, by contrast, can theoretically allow any company to raise capital from a global pool of investors in a fraction of the time, provided the legal framework permits it.

Saylor also warned against the instinct to protect incumbents. “Protecting existing business models while making it difficult to finance their successors leaves the economy poorly prepared for technological change,” he wrote. The comment reads as a rebuke of regulatory approaches that prioritize the stability of legacy financial institutions over the emergence of new competitors.

Digital Dollars Should Move at the Speed of Light

On stablecoins, Saylor argued that digital dollars should be allowed to compete on yield and to “move at the speed of light.” Banks, fintech companies and technology platforms should all be permitted to offer digital dollars through the devices and applications people already use every day. Where the law prevents that, Saylor wrote, the law should change.

The position places Saylor alongside a growing consensus in Washington, where the GENIUS Act framework has already begun establishing rules for payment stablecoins and proposed Federal Reserve rules would set capital and redemption requirements for issuers. But Saylor’s framing goes further than most, treating yield-bearing digital dollars as a competitive necessity rather than a compliance question.

The Bitcoin Backdrop

The essay arrives with Bitcoin trading around 84,500 USD, recovering strongly from earlier drawdowns and approaching positive year-to-date performance. Strategy resumed buying Bitcoin earlier this week after a two-week pause, acquiring 950 BTC for 75.7 million USD at an average price of 79,670 USD per coin, according to Cointelegraph. That purchase brought the company’s holdings to roughly 846,000 BTC, acquired for about 63.8 billion USD at an average cost of 75,416 USD per coin.

Strategy’s treasury strategy has become the template that dozens of public companies now follow, and Saylor has increasingly positioned himself as a policy voice for the digital asset economy as a whole, not just Bitcoin. His essay this week is part of that broader project: defining the ideological foundations of a digital financial system before the laws that govern it are finalized.

Whether lawmakers embrace the five-freedoms framework remains to be seen. The CLARITY Act’s collapse in the Senate earlier this month showed how far apart the parties remain on core market structure questions, and proposals for entirely new digital rights are likely to face even heavier scrutiny. But Saylor’s essay gives the industry a clean set of talking points for the next legislative round: create, issue, hold, transfer, use. As Bitcoin consolidates near 84,500 USD and the AI transition accelerates, the argument that digital asset freedoms are economic infrastructure rather than a special interest is likely to keep gaining ground.