On: If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US should nationalize them |...

The proposal arrives with the earnest, retrograde logic of a man who has discovered the telegraph and proposes to regulate it with the postal codes of 1820. To nationalize OpenAI and Anthropic - as if the state could house the dynamo in a post office! The very suggestion is a perfect symptom of the lag: the force has already escaped the institution imagined to contain it. These companies were themselves founded as institutional corrections, little lifeboats launched from the corporate dreadnoughts, only to find themselves powered by the same engine and sailing toward the same horizon. Their founders spoke of aligning technology with human values, a phrase which now sounds as quaint and specific as aligning a steam turbine with the principles of chivalry.

The state they wish to summon as custodian is the administrative state of the mid-twentieth century, a mechanism calibrated for the velocity of industrial production and Cold War competition. It moves at the pace of appropriations bills and committee hearings. The model, by contrast, evolves at a pace set by its own outputs, a self-accelerating process that renders any legislative session a geological epoch. To believe the Department of Commerce could “align” this force with democratic values is to believe one could align a hurricane with a municipal zoning ordinance. The values are not in the code; they are in the velocity, in the sheer multiplier effect it applies to every human intention, noble or vile.

The tragedy is not the proposal’s impracticality, but the clarity with which it diagnoses our collective education. We were all trained for a world of principalities and powers, of clear sovereignties and accountable actors. We look at this new, diffuse force and our only reflexes are to crown it or to cage it - to make it a monarch or a national utility. But it is neither. It is a new phase of energy, and we are standing in its gallery, without a philosophy, without a morality, and with a toolkit full of splendid, obsolete wrenches.