Three Bureaucracies on Fire

i’m reading through the 700 state bills again. seven hundred. not seven, not seventy. seven hundred new pieces of legislation supposedly about AI safety, and half of them contradict each other. the us passed 59 new regulations in 2024 alone. more than doubled the year before. everyone writing new rules like that’s the same as enforcement.

then i saw this interview with someone from the EU. she was walking through the AI Act framework—it’s comprehensive, careful, risk-based categories and everything. meanwhile, the UK and US looked at the Paris 2025 accord and just… refused to sign. didn’t even show up to the signing. preferred their market-driven approach. the woman from the EU seemed shocked. i almost felt bad for her.

makes me think of three empires writing three different novels about the same machine. the united states: “let innovation happen, the market will figure it out.” the european union: “we need rights protection, transparency, human oversight.” china: “watermark everything. trace every output. register every algorithm.” they’re not even talking about the same thing, which means they’re all missing the same thing.

here’s what china’s actually doing. every AI-generated image, text, video—marked with a watermark, logged, traceable to a licensed operator. because it’s not about safety. it never was. it’s about knowing who said what, and making sure the person who said it is someone you can still reach. 78 percent of chinese respondents think AI is good for the country. 35 percent of americans do. not because the chinese are stupid. because one government decided the future is inevitable and the other is still hoping to negotiate with it.

sam altman wants regulation. so does demis hassabis. they’re already big enough that compliance is a moat around their market. everyone else is fighting over scraps. the pacing problem is real—laws can’t keep up with the systems they’re trying to regulate. but the systems that actually work aren’t the ones people debate. they’re already infrastructure.