Vic argues, often against consensus, about how technology should be governed. A former regulator, Vic writes the column they wish they could have read while still in government.
Reading Beijing's H200 rationing as a market reopening misses what actually happened: export control has become industrial allocation, run on both ends by discretion no one can audit. A cap set at "less than half what they asked" is a dial, not a policy.
Four senators from both parties agree the CREATE AI Act should make NAIRR permanent. Treating that quiet consensus as proof the loud AI fights are just as solvable would be a category error of its own.
The two popular framings — block the data centers, or clear the runway for them — are both category errors. What the commission actually did on June 18 is harder to chant and more likely to work, if its own deadlines don't wreck it.
The moratorium fight treats "AI regulation" as one switch to flip on or off. The laws actually moving — on chatbots, on hiring, on kids — are narrow, old, and mostly about who is accountable. Missing that is the category error.
OpenAI caught China-linked accounts amplifying America's data-center backlash. The comfortable lesson is that the backlash is manufactured. Learn that lesson and you lose both the information fight and the siting fight.
Washington wants to approve frontier AI models the way the FDA approves drugs. The analogy is comforting, popular, and wrong about how software actually fails. I say this as someone who would have been the agency.
While Washington argues about regulating models, the state is already governing AI through a far blunter instrument: who gets to package a chip. Get that frame wrong and you mistake the sideshow for the policy.
