Permissionless Innovation: 10 Questions on its 10th Anniversary This week marks the 10th anniversary of the release of my 2016 book, "Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.” In the book, I argued that the freedom to innovate was a foundational building block of human flourishing and deserved a greater defense as such. Here are 10 questions asked and answered about the book and the concept of permissionless innovation more generally.

First Amendment, Fable and Anthropic... Let's dig into the constitutional core. Software and the publication of model components are expression. That is why US export rules already carve out published and open source software 1/5

By the way, people mocking Anthropic by pointing out that they “asked for this” are missing the entire plot. This export control makes it *more* likely we end up with the type of pre-release licensing regime Anthropic has been asking for. The export control stuff will be dialed back and replaced with something and that something will be more regulatory than the pre-Fable status quo. Yes, Anthropic asked for intervention. And it’s looking like they’re going to get it. Given their missionary style belief in AI safety, I suspect they’re ok taking some licks along the way.

It is indeed time to litigate the right to access AI! Though there's reason to fear this specific case could go sideways because of some kind of Holder v. HLP bullshit. Fulsome case for 1A right to AI access here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

For anyone looking for a quick primer on the 1st amendment as applied to model weights for oh I dunno no reason, @CenDemTech's comments in the NTIA's open weights proceeding from a couple years ago are a good place to start. See pp. 33-40. cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2…

Suspending Fable for all “foreign person inside the US” is wild. How can you even enforce this properly?

For anyone wondering what this means: - Anthropic (and potentially future OpenAI, Google, xAI) models that cost billions to develop will make 0 revenue outside the US - a big double digit percentage of Anthropic (and potentially OpenAI, Google, xAI) workforce can no longer work there, because they are foreigners and are not allowed to use those models So Trump just made frontier model development effectively unprofitable and tremendously slowed down Anthropic (and potentially others in the future) He's handing China the win on a gold platter. *potentially: if the same restrictions are imposed on other frontier labs and models

WOW. This is an intense and—I would argue—unconstitutional escalation by the government, violating Anthropic’s 1st amendment right to offer this information service and individuals’ right to access it in the US. Time to litigate the right to access AI?

Because this is happening to Anthropic, the temptation for many will be to say: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They have relentlessly raised the regulatory temperature in Washington by inviting far-reaching controls of frontier models. They made this bed and now they have to lay in it. But this decision by the Trump administration should not be judged on a desire for payback politics, but on the merits, and specifically what it means for America's broader AI objectives. In that regard, this action is truly outrageous. How exactly is the government planning on even going about verifying everyone who uses this specific model to ensure compliance? That alone raises huge flags. Between the latest Executive Order shifting more control to NSA, and the recent chatter about quasi-nationalization / equity stakes, and now this action, we are talking about a significant escalation in the politicization of AI and centralization of control over advanced computation in this country. And this is all being done by an administration that had previously made acceleration and winning the great AI race a priority. We're moving backwards now.

This is wonderful. Tech of all kinds provides freedom and capabilities for so many with disabilities. It's great to see @meta both developing products that are affordable and helpful to everyone and now giving one of these products to these veterans.

.@SenTedCruz and @RonWyden are doing incredible work with their JAWBONE Act! It is not the place of government to force private actors to censor free speech. It needs to stop. But information sharing is also legitimate. Their work here strikes an important balance

SpaceX created over 4,400 millionaires today, and many of them are regular working people. They are not executives or founders, they are welders, technicians, machinists, and launch crew, the people who showed up every day and built the rockets with their hands. Around 400 of them are sitting on stakes worth over $100 million each. For context, Google's IPO created roughly 1,000 millionaires. Facebook's created around the same. SpaceX is doing more than four times both of them in a single day. Juan Hernandez is one of them.

This is important and much-needed bipartisan legislation to protect our First Amendment rights against government coercion. Every American should support it, regardless of party. Grateful to Senator Cruz and Senator Wyden for introducing it. Now let's get it enacted.

Years demonizing "big tech" and "gatekeepers" and "surveillance capitalism", but when asked directly, people still love these digital companies. That's the real reason they have millions of fan customers.

John has it exactly right. Selling out digital liberty and free speech in exchange for a few crumbs of limited state AI preemption is not a good deal. Wrote about that yesterday with @JGWithrow: rstreet.org/commentary/ai-pr…

weird how there's always a Next Reason the government needs to be in control of everything

At Box, we just surveyed 1,640 IT leaders across the US, Japan, and Europe about agentic AI adoption. Many standout findings, but a big one was that the companies that adopted AI the most are planning to grow headcount the most. Obviously lots of ways you can read that data and variables mixed in, but it’s actually quite intuitive that the companies that become most productive want to (and are able to) reinvest back into the business to keep getting the gains going. The narrative of jobs being wiped out assumes that companies will take a fixed approach to what they want to be able for work on. What’s happening in practice is it’s causing companies to want to light up more engineering projects, sell to more customers, automate more processes to give time back, and more. That all leads to more work to be done by people.

outstanding essay about one of my biggest pet peeves. Modern psychiatry is a scam meant to fill our heads with lies about having an endless list of disorders that are really just part of the normal human condition. "The story of rising mental illness rates is not primarily a story of declining wellbeing. It is a story of a diagnostic system with no external validator, a reimbursement structure that rewards volume over accuracy, and a culture that has taught people to mistake normal distress for clinical pathology." 🎯