Bullet Trains without Tracks - by Dennis Wilson

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Bullet Trains without Tracks<br>On Fable 5 and regulating infrastructure

Dennis Wilson<br>Jun 14, 2026

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On Friday evening, the United States stopped a piece of software at the border. At 5:21 PM Eastern on June 12, the Department of Commerce issued an emergency directive ordering that Anthropic’s newest models, Claude Fable 5 and its unredacted foundation Mythos 5, be made unavailable to any foreign national, anywhere in the world. So, Anthropic pulled the models offline entirely. Software that had been writing code for people in Lagos and Lyon and São Paulo a few hours earlier simply went dark.<br>This event has refocused discussion around a larger question, one that has been building for years and that I think we are only now learning to ask correctly. The question is usually phrased as should we regulate AI? I think that phrasing hides the real issue. The better question is: what kind of thing are current AI systems, such that a government would reach out and recall it the way you might recall a faulty car? My thought is that current AI is part of an infrastructure of information. Not just a product, and not a tool in isolation. It is the newest part of a type of infrastructure we have been building, mostly without calling it as such, for a while now. And infrastructure, if history rhymes, is governed in its own peculiar and bloody way.<br>Share<br>The thing we already built

When we say a system is infrastructure, we usually mean that it has stopped being optional. Electricity, once a marvel you paid to see at a fair, became the thing whose absence we call an emergency. Roads, water, the grid: these are not products you choose among so much as the floor you stand on. When they fail, it is not a bad purchase, it is a crisis.<br>Information technology has quietly become this kind of floor. The internet, the world’s data, the technologies we build on top of them, social media, web search, and now large language models, together form a single, continuous thing. I’d call it, simply, information infrastructure. It runs in an unbroken line from the telegraph, undersea cables, Starlink satellites, through the World Wide Web to the model that wrote you an email this morning. Most nations now depend on it the way they depend on the power grid, and it is welded to the power grid besides: data centers in the US already draw something like four percent of the country’s electricity, and that share is climbing. The trains, it turns out, need a lot of coal.<br>The US government did not treat Fable 5 as a consumer product that had disappointed its customers. It treated it as a strategic asset, a piece of the national substrate, a thing whose flow across borders was a matter of state. Whether or not that response was wise or measured, it was the response you give to infrastructure, not to an app.<br>The railways

To understand how a society absorbs a new kind of infrastructure, it helps to look at a recent time that we did it from scratch: trains.<br>I find the railway a convincing metaphor for what is happening now. Things map pretty precisely. The internet is the track, the fixed, physical bed over which everything else must run. Data is the fuel that’s fed into the engines. And the information technologies, the search engines, the social platforms, and now the AI models, are the trains themselves. We’re at the point of making new high-speed machines that carry us places in this information infrastructure, and that also occasionally jump the rails.<br>The early decades of rail were a glorious, dangerous mess, and they do correlate well with our present. In the nineteenth century there was no agreement on something as basic as how far apart to lay the two rails. Companies chose their own track gauges on purpose, so that a competitor’s train physically could not run on their line; at the boundary between two networks, every passenger and every crate had to be unloaded and hauled onto a different train. We are living through our own gauge wars right now. We just call them walled gardens, proprietary APIs, vendor lock-in, data silos. The startups that ported their whole business to Fable 5 and woke up Saturday to find the track torn out beneath their new train car learned the nineteenth-century lesson the nineteenth-century way.<br>And the trains exploded back then. Before anyone had invented the standardized signal, the automatic air brake, or the federal inspector, steam locomotives blew their boilers and ran headlong into one another with appalling regularity. When a model today hallucinates a fact into a legal brief, leaks the code it was supposed to protect, or helps tip a market into a flash crash, we are watching a boiler explosion. We have built the bullet train before we have finished laying the track, and we are trying to install the brakes while the thing is already moving at speed. This is not a new predicament. It is the normal predicament of new...