The White House Is Going to Expand Its AI Policy

The White House wants to expand its AI policy. Wait - expand? The thing that hasn’t worked yet? The thing they’ve been “grappling with” for years without actually regulating? That thing?

Here’s the thing you have to understand. If the policy were any good, we wouldn’t need to expand it. A good policy is a closed loop: it measures what matters, corrects what doesn’t, and stops when the job is done. But this one isn’t closed. It’s a leaky hose, squirting definitions into the dark and hoping something sticks.

They say they’re adding “open models” to the framework. Fine. What’s an open model? A black box with a license plate? If it’s open, let’s open it all the way. Show me the training data, the evaluation metrics, the failure modes. If it’s closed, call it closed. Don’t dress it in a lab coat and call it science.

Wait - this is the same crowd that once said, “We’ll just nudge the industry.” Nudge? Against a force this strong? A nudge is what you give a shopping cart with a wonky wheel. This is a runaway train.

The real question isn’t how to expand the policy. It’s why the policy keeps failing. The anomaly is right there: every expansion is a confession of the last one’s inadequacy. That’s not regulation. That’s a man running in circles shouting, “I’m gaining on it!”

I’d rather see a single, sharp scalpel than a drawer full of dull butter knives labeled “policy.” Cut to the physics. What actually must be true for this to work? Nothing in the announcement answers that. Nothing ever does.

The announcement is a study in institutional drift. The administration declares it will “expand its AI policy” to include “open models.” This is not a policy; it is a concession that the original framework was structurally incomplete. They designed a mechanism to corral the visible, centralized herds - the large, proprietary models - while leaving the entire frontier open for any actor to establish a homestead. Now they discover the frontier is where the real settlement is happening, and their corral is empty.

It will be argued that this is a necessary adaptation to a changing landscape. But the objection fails to address the core flaw: they designed for the entity, not for the capability. They built a regulatory gate where the road was widest and most traveled, while a hundred footpaths opened in the woods beside it. The revenue model of the proprietary firms made them visible and, to a regulator’s mind, controllable; their dependence on capital and market access created leverage. The open model, by its very architecture, has no such point of leverage. Its “funding” is diffuse, its “operators” are anonymous, and its incentives are aligned with distribution, not consolidation. To apply the same “framework” is to pretend a town watch can police a diaspora.

They have tried not to regulate, and now they must regulate more, and they will do it badly. The worst outcome is not inaction, but action based on a flawed initial audit. They will layer complexity upon a foundation that cannot bear it, creating a dense code for the entities that will comply and a mere suggestion for those that will not. The system will then produce the exact opposite of its stated intent: it will burden the visible, accountable actors while providing competitive shelter to the unaccountable. This is not an expansion of policy. It is an admission that the original design did not understand the terrain. One builds a fortification to command the river, not the meadow; if the enemy moves through the meadow, one does not “expand” the fort - one must build an entirely new kind of defense. They are trying to stretch the walls.

Well, the White House is fixing to expand its AI policy, which is like watching a cowboy who’s never roped a calf before decide he’s gonna teach a whole rodeo. They’ve been trying not to regulate this thing, and now they’re adding “open models” to the mix - whatever those are. I reckon that’s like saying you’re gonna leave the barn door open but still keep track of every horse.

They tell me AI’s moving faster than a jackrabbit in July, and Washington’s still trying to figure out which end of the horse to feed. You’d think after all this time, they’d at least agree on whether it’s a plow horse or a racehorse, but no - just more committees, more frameworks, more folks talking in circles like a dog chasing its tail.

Now, I don’t know much about algorithms, but I do know this: if you wait till the cattle are already out of the pasture to build a fence, you’re gonna spend a lot of time running in the wrong direction. And from where I’m sitting, that’s exactly what’s happening. They’ll keep adding words to the policy until it’s longer than a Senate filibuster, and by then, the whole herd will be halfway to the next county.

But hey, at least they’re trying. That’s more than you can say for most things in Washington.