Essay
The Next AI Fight Is Over the Right to Leave
As AI systems learn our preferences, projects, and workflows, portability will determine whether model choice becomes customer power.
Explore The Race
Articles
Signals, essays, and Scoreboard Reviews examining how artificial intelligence is changing the distribution of power.
Signal
Private Infrastructure, Public Permission
The federal government is becoming the gatekeeper for a privately owned AI infrastructure system. That combination concentrates power—and creates structural incentives for corruption.
Signal
The AI Layoff Story Is Too Simple
AI is not simply replacing jobs. It is compressing teams, shifting work outside firms, concentrating implementation expertise, and changing who holds authority. The early workforce struggle is over who controls the redesign—and whether workers can contest it.
Essay
Is the Window of Contestability Still Open?
Six practical questions help reveal whether AI choices can still be changed. Applied to data centers, Android, OpenAI Presence, and Meta’s Hyperion project, they show a window being preserved, reopened, narrowed—and nearly closed.
Essay
From Land Use to Capacity Governance: The AI Infrastructure Problem Coming Into View
AI data centers are no longer merely local land-use projects. They are claims on regional power, water, infrastructure, and public capacity. Can our distributed institutions govern the whole before the choices become difficult to reverse?
Essay
Institutional Capacity to Contest: Why an Open Window Means Little Without the Power to Act
AI will not reshape society through algorithms alone. It will depend on whether governments, schools, utilities, and other public institutions develop the capacity to understand, procure, and govern it before dependence on a handful of private actors becomes the default.
Signal
Utility Governance Is Democracy’s Entry Point Into the AI Race
AI’s physical expansion depends on electricity, water, land, and grid access. That gives utilities, regulators, and local governments a crucial opening to shape who pays, who benefits, and whether the public retains a meaningful say in the AI race.
Essay
States Are Starting to Build the Public Layer for AI
States are beginning to build a public layer for AI through inventories, procurement rules, training, shared tools, and limits on consequential uses. The framework is emerging, but dependence on private platforms remains its weakest point.
Essay
Buying AI Is the Easy Part
Buying access to AI is easy. Durable implementation capacity depends on whether organizations can redesign workflows, train people, preserve learning, and switch providers without surrendering control to vendors or platforms.
Essay
Who Gets Access to Frontier AI?
Governments are beginning to decide who can access frontier AI, under what safeguards, and through which trusted-user systems. The challenge is to address real security risks without turning advanced capability into permanent discretionary privilege.
Essay
What Would It Take to Make AI Public Infrastructure?
Public models and public compute are only the beginning. AI becomes public infrastructure when governments and civic institutions can use, adapt, govern, and sustain it without becoming permanently dependent on a single vendor.
Essay
When the Doorway Becomes the Operating Layer
AI assistants may begin as convenient doorways into information and services, then become the operating layer that shapes what users see, choose, and do. The challenge is to preserve that convenience while keeping the path open, portable, and contestable.