On: The White House Is Going to Expand Its AI Policy

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.