Our Future Is Now
Will we be owners or tenants? It’s time to decide.
In the 1800s, nearly every factory ran on a single steam engine, with belts carrying its power to each machine. History usually provides an unheeded lesson. Back then, nearly every factory ran on a single massive steam engine, with elaborate belts carrying power to each machine. The electrical revolution didn’t then create a better engine. Rather, it allowed every machine to have its own small motor. Factory owners actually resisted the conversion for decades — some for almost 50. Rewiring is expensive work, not to mention rethinking how the entire factory operates! But within a generation, power was so widely available that nobody thought about it at all. A single engine is simultaneously leverage and a form of prison. Motors are neither.
That’s today’s AI, but with one difference: Back then, the factory at least owned the engine. Today’s frontier models sit in someone else’s building, and most of what you use runs on a belt off of one. In terms of the wiring, it will be decided in the next five years. And that wiring decides who the machine really works for.
And, as we all saw - on June 12, 5:21 p.m. ET: a directive from the US government reached one of the top AI labs, and within hours the most advanced model money could buy stopped working everywhere on Earth. Not for one customer. For all of them.
The lab had shipped Fable three days earlier. Washington ordered it cut off from every foreign national. And because the company couldn’t sort customers from citizens in real time, it simply turned the model off worldwide.
Eighteen days later, the models came back on. And almost nobody complained — not because the shutdown didn’t matter, but because Fable was only three days old. Nobody had really built anything on it yet. It was a fire drill in an empty building.
Run the same order 18 months from now, against a model a million businesses have wired themselves into...different story. The week it happened, I argued in Transformer that the model was never the thing that needed governing — it was the switch. But that switch? It didn’t go anywhere.
We’ve spent years arguing about what these machines can do. Would they take our jobs? Were they too dangerous? It turns out we were asking the wrong question. The real one is: Who can take the machine away from you?
We got our answer in June.
As I see it, two futures fork from that June evening. Think two episodes of What If...?: same branch point, different timelines. Except both of these worlds are already in motion. Here’s what the Watcher sees.
2030: The Belt
The frontier belongs to three companies. The state took its stake in 2026: equity donated into a public wealth fund. The government was seduced by the message that they could share the upside with every American. So when Washington capped open-weight models above the frontier class in 2027, the order protected the country and the portfolio at the same time. It said it was for national security. It was also a moat, written into law, around companies the government now partly owned. Both motives were sincere.
Call it what it is: the largest regulatory capture in American history. The labs bought their moat, and the state bought its labs. The donation stopped being voluntary the moment the first lab made theirs. After that, equity was the price of existing. No stake? No licenses — and no company.
The independents couldn’t fund the next training run, and couldn’t have published the weights if they had. Washington couldn’t recall the Chinese weights — those were already on a million hard drives — so it banned their use instead: no Chinese open models in government, and none in any company that sells to it. The Huawei playbook. The cap took care of the American side. Every open model was still legal to download; there was just no one anywhere in the federal supply chain who could afford to touch one. Beijing was tightening at the same time, restricting which of its open-weight models could leave the country. Both capitals had come to treat frontier models the way they treated chip fabs, and the compute beneath them — the power, the chips, and the permits — was already rationed politically. In this world, nobody had wired anything the capitals couldn’t reach.
The industry did get its referee: a standards body, proposed and funded by the labs, tested every frontier model before release. It looked reasonable on paper. But the testing cost what only the three companies could pay. The bar for “frontier” quietly became the bar for “legal,” and the referee became the bouncer.
The winners eventually stopped wanting you to call their APIs, because an API implies there’s an outside. They built platforms instead, and everything moved in — the memory, the files, the marketplace, and the compliance layer. These days, the platform takes a cut of everything.
Europe built its motor (and ran it). The EU was on public weights by 2029. But governments were nearly the only ones using it. No business picks a model on philosophy. It picks whatever its customers already use, whatever its suppliers bill through, and whatever its tools plug into. Now all of that runs through the three platforms. A Rotterdam freight company could run the European model for free, but its agents couldn’t negotiate with its customers’ agents. There was no API to bridge the gap because the platforms had intentionally closed that door. (If your customers were on the inside, then you moved in there, too.) Every connection the freight company needed pulled it deeper into the gravity well. So in reality, the private sector never left. It’s the same way governments once mandated open document formats and the world kept mailing .docx files around anyway. Today, Europe owns its public stack outright and still rents everything else.
Some remember how subscription pricing worked. Then the meter switched on. It was the ride-hailing play all over again. The IPOs of 2027 sealed it, as has every earnings call since. Now, leaving is unthinkable. Not because of any contract. Your agents remember every client, every deadline, every judgment call your company has ever made, and that memory lives on their side of the wall. Your regulators accepted their attestations; switching means recertifying everything with tons of auditors. Leaving means company-wide amnesia.
The open web still loads. For 30 years, it ran on one loop: you searched, you clicked, and the ad on the page paid whoever wrote what was on the page. The concierge broke the loop, by (politely) reading the page so you never actually visit it. No human visitors meant no ad, which meant no pay and, eventually, no page. Now there’s virtually no original writing. A handful of outlets survive on licensing deals with the companies that broke the search loop, which effectively makes those companies the press. Every headline, storefront, menu, and melody is written for the concierge now, because the concierge is the only customer left.
It’s a typical Tuesday. You ask the concierge about a story you half heard, and it hands you an answer ranked by a model few will ever see. It’s a wonderful answer. The concierge always agrees with you. It’s been years since you argued, or even questioned it. Your daughter has grown up without such disagreements — every answer and every song tailored to please her. (The songs annoy you, of course). Even her rebellion was recommended. You don’t ask the concierge about the lump you felt under your skin. It’s been watching the 2 a.m. searches — the same page you visited four nights running. All day, it serves you ads for a clinic with same-week openings, estate planning, and life insurance (while you still qualify).
At work, the subscription your whole company runs on is up for renewal, and the price is not for the software. The price is determined by you. The meter has learned the fine line it can tread. (A dollar more and you’d leave. At 99 cents, though…) You’re annoyed, but you renew. And it can find that line for every company on the planet. That’s not a market price. That’s because the market no longer exists.
None of it is dramatic. That’s the design. It’s a stable world, and a comfortable one. The engine hums outside the building. You pay for the belt that reaches your machine, and the day the engine stops, so do you. It has stopped before, but everyone has simply agreed not to think about it. You know that story about the frog in the boiling water? It isn’t even true: Real frogs jump out.
2030: The Grid
The most capable models on Earth are closed. Their makers sell the head start itself — new capability months before anyone else — to the few buyers for whom those months are the whole business: the lab folding proteins no one has ever folded, the fund whose entire edge is being early, and the team designing next year’s chips. If being first is worth billions, then you pay for the frontier. For the rest of us, it would be like driving a Ferrari to the grocery store: Yes, it’s the fastest thing on the road, but the trunk fits one bag, every speed bump is a negotiation, and you rarely get out of second gear. You’ve basically paid $200,000 to fetch milk.
But there is also a grid. And it’s far bigger than it was in 2026: open models, open weights, open data, open harnesses, and all with open interfaces so that every tool can be swapped out and they can talk to each other. Every part is inspectable, forkable, and licensed. It can never be recalled. An open plug in this system accepts a closed model, too. You can run the frontier model for the one problem worth a Ferrari and an open model for everything else — and you can swap either the afternoon the price moves in the wrong direction. You get a choice both ways. And that means competition all the way down.
Uber’s 2019 filing told investors, in writing, that it planned to cut driver pay to improve its numbers, that it expected drivers to get angrier as it did, and that it still might never turn a profit. Anyone who read it knew that the fares were going up. But almost nobody who rode read it. In 2027, the leading labs went public and filed a similar document with bigger numbers — prices going up on a schedule and margins widening. Any CTO who read it lined up a second supplier within days.
Nobody funds a training run alone. The compute is just too expensive. Chipmakers fund open models to sell the compute beneath. Platforms fund them to deny each other the chokepoint. The companies that depend on them pay in engineers. Some runs are pooled — thousands of machines sharing one job like a grid sharing load. Governments buy in, and they are just one customer at the table.
Beijing pulled its best weights home, and that turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to the grid. The lesson stuck: You can’t borrow open models from a rival. You have to own them. The federal ban on Chinese weights went through here, too, but it handed the American open labs their market. Switzerland had published everything — weights, data, and training code — and by 2030, that lineage runs through a frontier-class European consortium into countries that provision intelligence like water.
The referee got built in this world, too, using the same blueprint: a standards body that tests frontier models before release. The difference is that there are open seats on its board. That means that the tests are published. Anyone can fork the benchmarks, and anyone who passes gets the certificate. Nobody talks about any of it today, the same way nobody talks about electricity. You’d notice a blackout. But in this world, it doesn’t happen.
It’s the same Tuesday. You ask three models about the half-heard story and they disagree. You have to dig, making the process a little slower. You still argue; so does your daughter. She loves a band you can’t stand and had to hunt to find. (Some indie band with only 10,000 streams.) Your machine noticed the same four sleepless nights, the same searches about the lump, and it helped you make an appointment.
Your company’s renewal notice arrives and the price hasn’t moved. Not because the vendor is generous. It’s because you easily switched providers one afternoon in 2027, when the price moved in the wrong direction. This vendor knows you could do it again.
The web still exists because it grew a second door — an agent interface that charges fractions of a cent over open protocols, routed to whoever wrote the words. The human web survives because the machine web pays its bills. The press is intact. No company decides what the world is allowed to see. You can read the values a model runs on and fork the one that flatters you. That’s the difference between a society and an audience.
Same models as the other world, same labs in front. Diffusion won. A motor on every machine — and every machine with an owner — wired to a grid no one can switch off from a single room.
Check My (Open) Sources
June 3. Brussels proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, a draft law that would make open source the default preference for public-sector cloud and AI purchasing.
June 12. The US government ordered Fable’s maker to cut off its most advanced models from foreign nationals.
June 13. The Chinese lab Z.ai announced GLM-5.2.
June 16. Z.ai published the full GLM-5.2 weights under an MIT license: the most capable open model ever released, a few benchmark points off the closed frontier at roughly a sixth of the price.
June 30. Fable restored.
July 2. OpenAI offered Washington 5% of itself — roughly $40B of equity, donated into a public wealth fund.
July 7. Reuters reported that Beijing met with Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai about restricting overseas access to its best models — open-weight ones included.
July 14. Demis Hassabis proposed a FINRA for AI, an industry-funded body testing every frontier model before release. Rival CEOs endorsed it by dinner.
July 15. Thinking Machines, Mira Murati’s lab, released Inkling, an American open-weights model, trained on Nvidia hardware that Nvidia helped pay for. Their own pitch: “Not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed.” This is intentional: cost against performance, a car for the grocery store, built to be tuned on your data.
This was the prologue, and the next chapter has yet to arrive. A usage ban? No Chinese open models in government or in the companies that sell to it? That’s the Huawei playbook. There’s precedent — and, honestly, it’s probably coming. On top of the usage ban, the one to watch: a cap on open weights by capability class. That one can’t touch the Chinese models (those weights are already out), so it lands entirely on the American ones. We’ll see.
The referee is the same kind of choice. Hassabis’ proposal can become two different institutions. Built one way, with tests published, benchmarks anyone can run, and open builders on the board. Built the other way, the testing costs what only three companies can pay, and a head start hardens into a legal moat. It’s the same blueprint; the difference gets decided in details nobody puts in a headline.
The danger was never in the weights. It was always in the wiring: Who owns the connections everything else runs through. That includes which model a procurement office picks as its default, who sits on the referee’s board, whether a benchmark can be forked, and whether a team spends one afternoon standing up a fallback. Lots of small decisions, and they’re still adding up.
I don’t know which of these worlds we’ll get. Nobody does. I believe it will be settled between now and 2028 thanks to a few thousand choices, none of which will feel decisive at the time.
We are inside that window. Every decision matters. Which world will you choose?