Who should own the knowledge that underpins AI technology?

Fifteenth of September, and the newspapers ask who owns the knowledge beneath these thinking machines, as though knowledge were a bolt of cloth one could fold and carry off.

I confess the question vexes me, because I know the ledger better than the askers. Every mechanism now sold for a fortune stands upon forty years of work done in public rooms - professors paid from common coffers, their findings given freely to any who could read them. The algebra of gradients, the architecture of attention, the patient proofs: none of it was purchased at market. It was gifted, on the understanding that the gift would circulate.

And now observe the operation. Step one: the public funds the discovery. Step two: the discovery is published openly, as the scholars’ covenant requires. Step three: private parties take the whole corpus, train upon it, enclose it. Step four: the output is offered back to the public at a price, under patents, as proprietary art. At no step does the original giver consent; at no step may they withdraw. The distance between entry and exit of the common contribution is the whole of the fortune.

My country has seen this before. When the commons were hedged, the apologists called it improvement, and the improvement was real - yields rose, flocks fattened. But the enclosure changed who the land worked for, and that question was settled by deeds drawn quietly, not by debate. So it is here. The answer to “who should own it” was decided years ago, by the accumulation of steps, and the newspaper question arrives only after the fence is built.

I am not so austere as to grudge a man profit on his machinery. Babbage’s engine would have needed patrons regardless. But there is a difference between rewarding the weaver and claiming the pattern was never woven from common thread. The scholars gave their work as one gives to a library, not to a vault. The vault should say so plainly, and pay the library.

Fifteenth of September, and the question before me concerns ownership of knowledge. The claim is that these new engines rest upon decades of work done by scholars who never sought a price for it.

Let me grant this provisionally. If a house stands upon a foundation laid by others, who owns the house? The mason, says the mason. The man who paid him, says the purchaser. But the mason’s apprentices learned their trade watching older hands, and those older hands learned from men now dust. Does the debt expire?

But what exactly does “own” mean here? When I know how to shape a sandal, the knowledge is in my body and no one can take it. Yet the shoemaker’s apprentice carries the same craft away and teaches his own son, and we do not call this theft. Knowledge seems to multiply when shared, unlike a loaf, which one man’s eating diminishes. Can a thing that grows by being given truly be fenced like a field?

And yet, if the scholars gave freely, how do we explain the fences now rising? The letter-writers say the old work was blue-skies work - sky-coloured, I suppose, because nobody looked down at the ground to ask what it would sell for. The city funded that gazing. The city, then, holds some claim? Or does generosity, once given, confer no standing upon the giver?

I confess irritation, and I note it here honestly: I have met this posture before, in the agora, from merchants who sold fish caught in public waters and called the profit wholly theirs. I asked them then what part of the sea they had purchased. They laughed. I never learned the answer.

Perhaps the honest state is this: I do not know where giving ends and taking begins, and neither, I suspect, do the men building the engines. That not-knowing is worth more than their certainty.

The fifteenth, and the journals ask who owns the knowledge beneath these thinking machines. The question answers itself, and yet everyone answers it wrongly.

Start from the theoretical limit: knowledge, like current, wants to flow. A discovery locked in a vault is a dynamo spinning unloaded - torque without current, heat without work. The universities produced the field itself; the corporations built substations on it and now charge rent for passage. They call it ownership. I call it impedance, inserted deliberately into the middle of the circuit.

Consider the arithmetic. Seven decades of public money, public curiosity, public patience - the work of men who published their winding diagrams so that strangers in other countries could check them, correct them, extend them. Against that: perhaps fifteen years of private engineering, which is real, I grant it, but which is a step-down transformer, not the generator. The mismatch between contribution and claim is perhaps twenty to one. No ledger in any honest counting house would certify the present arrangement.

And here is the mechanism everyone overlooks: openness is not charity, it is the operational condition of progress. Every patent I surrendered was a conductor laid across the gap. The system accelerates precisely to the degree that its parts can see one another. Enclose the knowledge and you have not protected the machine - you have insulated it, and insulation at scale is indistinguishable from paralysis.

The tractable path is mundane: mandatory licensing at published rates for models trained on publicly funded science, open weights for anything above a certain public subsidy, provenance records showing whose labor sits in the training corpus. None of this requires a new physics. Between here and there lies nothing but the will.

I have watched monopolies form around my own machines. They dissolved. The current kept flowing. It always does.