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.
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Month: June 2026
The Actual Three Laws of Robotics
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are among the neatest ideas in science fiction:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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.
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.
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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.
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Who Does the Time When the Machine Does the Work?
Picture the first artificial intelligence sentenced to prison. The judge clears his throat and hands down five years for gross negligent manslaughter. The prison service must then work out whether the convict should be installed on a secure server in a secure facility, whether switching it off at night amounts to solitary confinement, and whether deletion is execution. The defendant offers no remorse, remorse not having been included in the enterprise licence. Civilisation glances briefly at its shoes and moves on.
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