Make no mistake: post-Mythos, the United States has a licensing regime for AI. It’s just informal, with no consistent rules or firm boundaries on state power or public transparency. Cobalt mining in the Congo is vastly more institutionalized than frontier AI licensing in the US.

i suspect there's some kind of cycle of cope and ego where, like, these guys want to be the prophets and storytellers who light the way to the future and play with its shadows, but they already fucked up early on by dismissing LLMs and going for legible consensus status instead of encountering the future as it arrived ahead of the crowd, so the frontier passed them by, and now in order to catch up to it and learn from it they have not only a lot of distance to cover, but a huge amount of ego-inertia; they'd have to be publicly wrong, and risk being cringe, and without the lived momentum of surfing the unfolding wave of the future as a visionary and feeling the reality of that more profound reward than instant consensus recognition that comes from reaching toward the visionary engine at the end of time, they are lost and only know to play the losing game of clinging to and proselytizing a bygone world where they themselves belonged to the class of prophets who saw further and more boldly.