A Right Too Expensive to Exercise Isn't a Right — Signal Log
DeepBlue Dynamics<br>Signal Log<br>right-too-expensive-to-exercise
James Otis Arguing the Writs of Assistance in the Old Towne House, mural by Robert Reid, 1901. Courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Art Commission.
The pincer
Can we still run the software we choose on hardware we own? That's no longer just an architecture question; it's a political one. Frontier labs now compete with their own users, because user autonomy threatens the moat.
Collusion or not, the playbook is a pincer: lock the strongest models in datacenters behind metered APIs, and lobby that open-weight models are dangerous, even a national-security problem.
The double standard is almost funny. Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman says it's unacceptable for Microsoft to depend on someone else's models forever; they must own the full stack. That's called “sovereignty.” When you depend on them, it's packaged as “convenience.” Anthropic's framing is subtler, but they've lobbied to restrict certain weight releases too; Amodei has been at this since his OpenAI days.
No conspiracy required; incentives suffice. And if they harden into law, nobody has to ban local AI outright. Just make distribution, insurance, financing, and operations miserable. A right that's too expensive to exercise isn't a right.
The legal collision course
This isn't hypothetical. The legal mechanism the AI lobby is going to reach for already has a name and decades of case law behind it: the distinction the courts draw under the Free Exercise Clause between an absolute right to belief and a regulatable right to action. The precedents map almost exactly onto the playbook Anthropic and Microsoft are already running.
The “neutral law” trap
In Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can restrict a fundamental First Amendment right as long as it does so through a “neutral law of general applicability.”
When Amodei lobbies Congress for AI safety regulations, demanding compute thresholds, mandatory red-teaming, and licenses for “frontier models,” he is designing the ultimate “neutral law.” The legislation won't explicitly say open source is illegal, or that you cannot run local models. It will say: for public safety, any computational system exceeding some threshold of operations per second must possess a federal safety certification.
Because that law applies to everyone equally, a neutral law of general applicability, the courts, following the Smith precedent, will likely uphold it. The fact that a massive corporation can afford a $50 million certification process while a local developer running a decentralized mesh network cannot is entirely legally permissible under this framework.
Code as thought vs. code as action
The Free Exercise Clause grants an absolute, untouchable right to hold a belief or opinion, but your practices and actions can be regulated, the same logic that upheld the polygamy ruling in Reynolds.
That is the exact battleground for sovereign compute. Is running a local open-weight model on your own hardware an extension of human cognition and thought, which is absolutely protected? Or is executing a script an action the government can regulate in the name of public safety?
The AI megacorps are lobbying aggressively to define model execution as a dangerous action: analogous to refining uranium or manufacturing a drug, rather than an extension of speech, thought, or mathematics. If they succeed in defining computation as an action subject to neutral safety laws, the First Amendment will not protect your local rig.
We already ran this experiment in 1761
The neutral-law trap has a founding-era case study: the writs of assistance.
Writs of assistance were general search warrants. Statutorily authorized, facially neutral, applied to every subject equally. Customs officers could enter any house, shop, or warehouse on bare suspicion, without oath, and conscript bystanders to help. In February 1761, James Otis argued against their renewal before the Massachusetts Superior Court for five hours while a young John Adams took notes (the scene at the top of this post).
Otis didn't argue against search power. He conceded that special warrants were lawful: a named officer, a specific place, sworn suspicion before a magistrate, returnable when the job was done. His attack was purely structural. The general writ was universal (anyone holding one became “a tyrant in a legal manner”), perpetual (no return, no expiry, no accountability), discretionary (entry on bare suspicion, no oath required), and transferable (one customs officer endorsed his writ over to his successor, so the court never even judged who wielded the power).
Run the mapping. Universal: blanket authority over all compute above a threshold. Perpetual: standing compliance obligations with no sunset....