Governments Will Decide What Level AI You Have Access To
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Not Your Model, Not Your Mind<br>Who will decide that level AI you have access to?
Guustaaf Damave<br>Aug 20, 2026
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Until now, technology has worked as a class equalizer. Almost anyone on the planet is connected to the internet and has instant access to a universe of information. It wasn’t that long ago that not even kings or queens could access that much information that fast, not even for all the gold in the world. Actually, it wasn’t until the 19th century that no one, including kings and queens had access to a flush toilet. Cars, TVs and computers have done much to minimize class differences. Today, billionaires have pretty much the same phone that you have. The way things seem to be going in AI though, technology could start pushing in the other direction and create a new class system based on AI access.<br>A few days ago Anthropic reported on how Claude can be used to do pharmaceutical research. Having worked in this field myself for a while I can attest that discovering new drugs is a slow and laborious process. Anything to speed this up will be most welcome and could improve the lives of many. If you don’t want to read How Claude is accelerating protein design and analytical chemistry, let me give you a quick one paragraph summary.<br>Anthropic used Claude Mythos Preview and other Claude models to execute two processes that are commonly part of drug discovery research. First they used it to design binder molecules. These are connectors whose job it is to connect to specific target molecules that play a part in diseases. The connectors will later be part of the complete drug molecule. Claude was twice as efficient in designing working binder proteins. The second part was chemical analysis from raw data that Claude completed fast and with similar results as the manual analysis.<br>It’s great that drug research can be sped up like this but notice what they slipped in when announcing this on X: “One of our highest priorities remains launching an access program for scientists to use our most capable models.” So the more capable models that exist inside Anthropic will never be released publicly. Anthropic will decide who gets to use them, at least, that is their plan.<br>At about the same time Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced: “We have paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us.”<br>Perhaps a little convenient that that break happened mid-August? Anyway, with this announcement Sam Altman could very well also paving the way for a segmented release of upcoming more powerful models. And they are probably also planning a system to allow access to privileged groups and individuals.<br>We are seeing the beginnings of a trend of AI labs deciding who will be allowed to use the next generation of AI models. In a way it’s understandable because malicious actors will be able to put their evil hacking attacks on steroids, and even worse terrorist could potentially let loose a brand new pandemic using these extremely powerful models.<br>These labs deciding who can access the most powerful AIs will effectively make them more powerful than national governments and that will of course not last very long. The situation would be like if car companies would decide who would be allowed to drive their cars. So I expect that pretty soon governments will take over and determine who gets access to what level AI. Think licenses for dangerous biolabs, explosives, guns or driving a car. Will you need to take a test to get a specific level AI-license? Or will paying a certain amount of money do the trick?<br>It is commonly accepted that the future is hard to predict. That is however not equally true for everything. There are some trends that have proven to be very steady and will very likely continue in the same direction. One of those is the increasing capabilities of computer hardware. Another one is the lesser known Densing Law of LLMs. The Densing Law is somewhat similar to Moore’s Law in that it predicts a capability doubling over a certain time interval. It predicts that LLMs are getting twice as capable at the same number of weights roughly every 3.3 months. ( Full paper here. )
This the also means that for a given capability, let’s say today’s frontier models, the number of weights will be cut in half every 3.3 months. This will allow ever more capable models to run on a given system. If we project those two trends a few years into the future, what we see is AIs with the capabilities of today’s frontier models running on common consumer computers. And those trends are not all of a sudden going to stop either. Running a capable AI on your own computer will provide a level of AI sovereignty. I will cover these trends in more detail in a future post.
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How far will governments go in trying to control who has access to what level of...