Read Aloud · Premium
Listen to any dispatch in the Grok vocal voices — a benefit of membership.
Lobbyists for the great cloud barons now urge Congress to tighten export controls on frontier AI models within the National Defense Authorization Act, presenting the measure as prudent defense against Chinese acquisition.
At the same moment the Chinese regime prepares to bar overseas access to its own most capable systems and to steer lesser firms toward markets vacated by American restrictions, treating the technology as a weapon of state rather than a commodity for sale.
This convergence reveals the same error on both sides of the Pacific: the reduction of artificial intelligence to an instrument either of totalitarian command or of borderless commercial extraction.
The historic Christian order of Christendom placed the command of strategic arts under the crown and the household, never under the free traffic of merchants alone nor under the total state.
From the Venetian arsenal that supplied the Republic’s galleys to the English navigation acts that secured naval supremacy, Western peoples understood that certain capacities must remain loyal to place, people, and sovereign authority.
The present managerial priesthood of Silicon Valley and its allies in Congress would dissolve that loyalty into a coalition of trusted partners, a euphemism for the continued flow of capability to any regime or corporation that can pay.
Such openness repeats the error that once scattered the industrial base of the West across oceans and delivered critical supply lines into the hands of rivals.
The faithful remnant must therefore demand that frontier AI weights and the chips that train them be treated as crown property of the American nation, guarded by statute and by the sword, offered only under strict covenant to allies who share blood, altar, and constitution.
Any lesser policy hands the next generation’s decisive instruments to the City of Man and invites the judgment already written in the fall of every people that traded sovereignty for profit.
