Regulation and Oversight

A version of this piece began as a response to Frank S. Robinson's review of Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI (Vintage Books, 2024), published in Philosophy Now, Issue 174. Robinson's review is the jumping-off point, not the source material — the analysis, data, and speculation below draw on dozens of additional sources cited throughout, and any resemblance to Robinson's or Harari's phrasing is unintentional. An old w

Executive Summary Between January and July 2026, the United States and China each moved from indirect, hardware-focused AI controls toward direct, ad hoc interventions on commercial AI models themselves — a shift with no settled legal or administrative framework in either country. The U.S. episode centers on a June 12 Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) "Is Informed" letter ordering Anthropic to cut off foreign-national access to its newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos

For years, the security industry treated AI as a force multiplier for attackers — something that made existing techniques faster and cheaper, but still required a human doing the actual hacking. Check Point Research's newly published AI Security Report 2026, a 56-page analysis released July 14 and built on threat intelligence from more than 100,000 customer organizations blocking roughly 200 million attacks a day, says that framing is now out of date. AI, the report argues, "

On July 1, the Federal Trade Commission published a proposed policy statement with a dry title and a sharp legal edge: "Policy Statement Concerning the Suppression of Accuracy in Artificial Intelligence Systems." The Commission voted 2-0 to put it out for public comment, and the core argument is straightforward. When an AI company markets its system as accurate, objective, or unbiased, that claim creates an expectation. If the company then quietly tunes the model's outputs to