Freedom of Intelligence - Quinn Slack
Freedom of Intelligence<br>June 29, 2026<br>Anthropic has created a dangerous, destabilizing mess by lobbying for and getting US government restrictions on models like Mythos, Fable, and GPT-5.6. Now the US government is deciding who has access to which models, and the best models are accessible only to a very few and a very rich set of companies.<br>Nobody wants that. Even Anthropic doesn’t like what happened.<br>Now the rest of us need to clean up the mess. How?<br>We need to fight for our freedom of intelligence, the freedom from government restrictions on who can use which AI models. If we allow government to decide what level of intelligence someone can access, no matter how well intended, we’ll be less safe and forever divided.<br>What Freedom of Intelligence means<br>Freedom of intelligence means the government may not restrict which AI models you can use.<br>This means that the government must not require licensing of model labs, or approval of models prior to release. Otherwise government inevitably will use that power to restrict releases to certain favored individuals and companies (as we’ve just seen) and to introduce biases.<br>Freedom of intelligence also means that the government may not prohibit you from downloading and running open models.<br>If someone commits a crime with the use of AI, that already is illegal and should remain illegal.<br>The government must not force a model lab to release a model against its wishes. If a model lab chooses to release their own model to only a few privileged people and companies (as Anthropic did with Mythos), or to keep it internal, that is their right. Other model labs can compete by serving the rest of the market. It shouldn’t be illegal to offer frontier intelligence to small businesses, startups, and individuals.<br>Intelligence is fundamental<br>When people argue against freedom of intelligence, they say: AI is powerful and sometimes dangerous, and we’ll be safer if the right people control AI the right way.<br>They’re right about the first part and naive about the second part.<br>For something as fundamental as intelligence, there is no such thing as the “right people” to control intelligence, nor the “right way” to control intelligence. People will disagree. People already disagree very, very strongly.<br>In a democratic society, the only stable equilibrium for a bitterly divided realm is to grant individual freedom. Intelligence is not the same as speech or religion, but it is every bit as powerful and dear and deserving of freedom.<br>There is no democratic way to regulate access to intelligence<br>Nobody likes the current US government policy on model restrictions. Nobody really knows what it is, even, or knows what it will be next week.<br>Today, Monday, June 29, 2026, the US government is choosing which people and companies can and can’t access Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s frontier intelligence. Who is deciding? Based on what criteria? Nobody knows.<br>Maybe you think that the US government’s behavior in the last few weeks is a blip, and that the “right people” will control AI the “right way” soon.<br>Maybe you hope, like Dario Amodei, that “qualified third-party” regulators shielded from “political favoritism or arbitrary decisions” will swoop in and take control of AI policy.<br>That’s just not how it works in our political system, certainly not for a high-salience, zero-sum issue like access to intelligence. We would never, ever, ever pass a regulatory apparatus where the most important national policy decisions are decided by unelected experts, free from accountability to the voters. Nor should it pass. (Ironically, the only way it might pass is if Anthropic is the politically favored one, which would violate Dario’s own stated proposal.)<br>But suppose Dario gets lucky and his “Federal AI Control Administration” (my name for it) is created. And suppose on day 1, the Federal AI Control Administration approves the release of Claude Mythos 5, but only to ~100 of the biggest corporations in the US, in order to limit the risk. (He would support this government action, presumably, since it’s what Anthropic itself deemed optimal.) On day 2, the Federal AI Control Administration starts deciding which companies should get access to GPT-5.6.<br>Suddenly, “AI safety” has turned into “picking winners and losers”, because it’s safer to not give frontier intelligence to everyone.<br>Of course, this is the actual reality today.<br>Does this sound like the kind of thing that voters in a democracy, already distrustful of AI and of corporate power, would support? No.<br>Is this stable? No. Play it forward a bit.<br>What do you think the 101st biggest company, denied frontier intelligence by the US government, does first: sue or curry political favor?<br>What do you think the US executive branch does with this newfound power?<br>What do you think Anthropic’s corporate rivals, like Amazon and Google and OpenAI, do with their newfound powers to summon arbitrary regulatory fury on each other?<br>There’s no way to...