Compute Freedom

Once AI crosses a defined capability threshold, developers should be legally required to offer a version runnable on personal hardware — without cloud dependency, without ongoing access fees, without surveillance. We call this the Threshold Obligation. It secures the right of the citizen to a machine that answers to them.

Once frontier development crosses into AGI, AGIplus, and ASI, no single corporation and no single state holds the democratic mandate to proceed alone. Decisions of consequence to the species require legitimation by the species — encoded in a binding international treaty, with verifiable compute and energy limits, IAEA-grade inspections, and pause mechanisms anchored in law. We call this the Treaty Obligation.

Two thresholds. One architecture. AI is too consequential to remain in the hands of a small number of unaccountable actors — neither at the point of access, nor at the point of risk.

Open source is not the same as compute sovereignty. Releasing model weights that only function at scale on hyperscaler infrastructure is a formal gesture, not a functional one. The code may be visible; the capability remains inaccessible. Whoever controls the inference infrastructure controls the knowledge — and if that knowledge becomes foundational to medicine, education, law, and governance, concentrating it in three to five private corporations is not a market outcome we should accept by default.

History does not repeat itself. It scales.

The Threshold Obligation secures the lower boundary: the right of the citizen to a machine they actually control. The Treaty Obligation secures the upper one: the right of the species to a voice in decisions taken in its name. Each obligation, alone, is symbolic. Together, they are an architecture.

The Threshold Obligation

The standard response to concerns about AI concentration is a language of openness: papers, benchmarks, model cards, APIs, and occasional weight releases. But this answer mistakes visibility for access, and access for sovereignty.

Even where model weights are released, the most capable systems remain practically dependent on infrastructure costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Researchers may inspect parts of the stack. Citizens may, in theory, audit it. But they cannot run frontier capability independently. The appearance of openness remains; the substance of control does not.

Compute Freedom proposes a concrete mechanism: once an AI system crosses a defined capability threshold, its developer should be legally required to offer a compressed, locally-runnable version — on consumer hardware, offline-capable, without mandatory cloud authentication.

What we already know:

The pharmaceutical parallel is instructive. Drug developers are required to disclose formulations, submit to regulatory review, and — after a period — open compounds to generics. We accept that the public has a legitimate interest in not having life-critical knowledge permanently locked inside private infrastructure. AI is becoming life-critical knowledge. The argument is the same.

This is not an argument against commercial AI development. It is an argument for a structural floor beneath it: a minimum condition of compute sovereignty that preserves the possibility of independent verification, academic research, and democratic accountability.

The Treaty Obligation

The lower threshold protects the citizen. The upper threshold protects the species — and we have been quiet about it for too long.

As frontier systems advance toward general human-level capability and beyond — AGI, AGIplus, and ASI — their development becomes a matter of consequence beyond any single state or any single corporation. The current trajectory has neither democratic mandate nor binding treaty. Stargate, Colossus, the multi-hundred-billion-dollar build-outs of OpenAI, Google, and xAI — all dependent on the de facto NVIDIA monopoly on frontier training silicon — proceed at competitive tempo, accountable to shareholders, not to citizens.

The physical signature of this race is no longer subtle. When an AI company announces it requires not the electrical capacity of Silicon Valley but ten new nuclear reactors, the appropriate response of any constitutional state is not admiration. It is the question: by whose authority? That this question has not been asked — has barely been articulated — is the deepest failure of contemporary political thought.

We have built such treaties before. The Non-Proliferation Treaty. The IAEA. The Biological Weapons Convention. The Montreal Protocol. None were utopian when proposed; all function today — imperfect, monitored, real. The technologies they govern are no more transformative, no more dual-use, no more globally consequential than frontier AI. The institutional infrastructure exists. Only the will is missing.

The case is not ours alone. The 2023 Center for AI Safety statement — placing AI risk on the same axis as pandemics and nuclear war — was signed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis. The signatories include the very executives currently building the frontier. Their warning is not an outside critique. It is a confession — one that has produced no binding constraint on their own behavior, because none has been demanded of them.

The pricing model is changing under everyone's feet. Flat subscriptions are giving way to metered inference: €20 becomes €200, €2,000, or simply unavailable at your tier. If access to intelligence becomes a metered utility, understanding becomes a function of budget. The thresholds will be crossed — in months, not decades. Whoever does not act now will have no leverage later.

What the Treaty Obligation demands:

The citizen below. The species above.
The corporation answers to neither.