Non-Proliferation, AI Edition

In June, the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, including those inside the United States. Unable to verify everyone’s nationality immediately, Anthropic switched the models off for all users. Washington had decided who could use some of the world’s most capable artificial intelligence. The rest of the world could wait.

The restrictions were lifted on 30 June, and Fable returned globally the following day, with Mythos access restored more selectively. But the reversal did not erase the demonstration of power. If advanced AI becomes central to economic life, a decision taken in Washington could interrupt productive capacity across countries whose citizens had absolutely no say in it.

Continue reading “Non-Proliferation, AI Edition”

Who Will Buy the Washing Machines?

There is something peculiar about the enormous numbers being attached to the future AI economy. The technology is expected to transform almost everything: employment, production, science, education and perhaps the balance of power between nations. Yet the money in the projections seems to inhabit a reassuringly familiar world, in which customers still have budgets, households still have incomes and a trillion dollars means roughly what it means today.
Continue reading “Who Will Buy the Washing Machines?”

Somebody Else’s Renaissance: When All Humans Become Ordinary

Imagine that Rasmus Rask had possessed an AI assistant. One afternoon, while pondering the curious correspondences between European languages and Sanskrit, he asks whether there might be some underlying relationship. The machine goes away, considers the evidence and returns before dinner with comparative linguistics, a systematic account of sound change and a perfect reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. It apologises for the delay. The verb system required a little thought.
Continue reading “Somebody Else’s Renaissance: When All Humans Become Ordinary”

When Variety Becomes Profitable

Modern agriculture is astonishingly good at producing enormous quantities of food, but it has achieved much of that efficiency by making things the same.

A supermarket does not want seventeen kinds of locally bred courgette arriving in unpredictable quantities. It wants a recognised variety that can be grown by the hectare, harvested together, packed to a specification and delivered by the pallet. The same pressures apply all the way down the chain. Large machinery prefers uniform fields, wholesalers prefer large consignments and supermarkets prefer products that can be treated as interchangeable.
Continue reading “When Variety Becomes Profitable”

The Cloud Has a Flag

Imagine that your company has spent the past year getting used to a remarkably capable assistant. It helps write reports, searches your documents, explains awkward bits of code, prepares presentations and turns a week’s tedious preliminary work into an afternoon’s. It is not quite a colleague, but it has become part of how the place thinks.
Continue reading “The Cloud Has a Flag”

The Actual Three Laws of Robotics

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are among the neatest ideas in science fiction:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Continue reading “The Actual Three Laws of Robotics”

The Tool No State Can Share

On 12 June 2026, Anthropic announced that the US government had ordered it to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, “whether inside or outside the United States”, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. The company said it had therefore disabled both models for all customers while it worked out how to comply. This was not an ordinary country-based export restriction. It was a citizenship-based restriction on access to some of the most capable AI systems yet released by an American company.

That decision looks crude, and it is. But it becomes less mysterious when read alongside Anthropic’s own numbers. In its Institute essay on recursive self-improvement, Anthropic says that by the second quarter of 2026 its typical engineer was merging eight times as much code per day as in 2024. The broad point is obvious: this is no longer merely a better autocomplete. It is the beginning of a multiplier.

Continue reading “The Tool No State Can Share”

On AI, Citizenship and the Multiplier

On 12 June 2026, Anthropic announced that the US government had ordered it to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, “whether inside or outside the United States”, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. The company said the practical effect was that it had to disable both models for all customers while it worked out compliance. Access to other Anthropic models was not affected, but the principle had been established: the most advanced AI systems could be treated not as ordinary commercial software, but as strategic assets controlled by citizenship.
Continue reading “On AI, Citizenship and the Multiplier”

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchers?

Juvenal was not thinking about datacentres, model weights, recursive self-improvement or the possibility that the most powerful minds on Earth might one day be housed in racks of humming machines, but good questions have a way of returning in new clothes. For most of history, “who watches the watchers?” has been a political question. Who watches the king, the priest, the judge, the soldier, the civil servant, the expert? Liberal democracy is largely an answer to that question: divide power, create institutions, make authority answerable, never trust any single guardian too much.
Continue reading “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?”