I’m increasingly convinced that most proposals for controlling very powerful AI are trying to regulate something that cannot be regulated. OpenAI has talked about international inspectors, capability thresholds and even limiting the rate at which frontier AI is allowed to improve. That all sounds sensible, but it assumes that humans will remain capable of telling what the machines can do and enforcing the rules on them. I’m not sure that assumption survives the creation of machines cleverer than ourselves.
Category: politics
Who Controls the AI Off Switch?
SpaceX has just provided a rather useful illustration of a problem that has been worrying me about artificial intelligence.
According to Reuters, SpaceX has introduced a restriction on the use of its Starlink service in Ukraine which means that the military-grade version stops working above 160 km/h. Ukrainian officials say they weren’t warned in advance, and that the change disrupted some drone missions.
When the Mule Arrives
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Hari Seldon develops a science capable of predicting the broad course of history. Individual people remain unpredictable, but the behaviour of vast populations can be described mathematically. Empires fall, institutions change and crises arrive, all within a future that Seldon has calculated. Then the Mule turns up. He possesses an extraordinary ability to manipulate human emotions, giving one individual a power that Seldon’s calculations did not accommodate. The predictions cease to be dependable because the world now contains something outside the assumptions on which they were built.
I increasingly think this is a useful way to understand superhuman AI. We keep trying to estimate its consequences by consulting the history of a world in which it did not exist.
Humans are so cute
Anthropic researchers have been warning that AI could cause human extinction. More colleagues have publicly backed those concerns. It is a frightening possibility. But there is another thought experiment worth considering: what happens if we build something vastly more intelligent than ourselves that genuinely wants to keep us safe?
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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