Does ASI Demand Nationalization?
The road to superintelligence has many exits to serfdom
Last week, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a comprehensive legislative AI framework, which contained a number of regulatory proposals for the nascent AI industry.
Blackburn’s TRUMP AMERICA AI Act — which stands for The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry — stitches together a number of bills from the more tech-skeptic wing of the Senate GOP.
Her proposed framework stands in marked contrast to the minimal framework published by the White House last Friday — as in three-pages-of-bullets minimal.
Blackburn’s legislation has also arrived after a year of mostly fruitless attempts by the White House and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to pass a federal moratorium or preemption of state AI laws, which are beginning to pile up in red and blue states alike.
One section of the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act uses language from Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act of 2025, which calls for the Department of Energy to establish an Advanced Artificial Intelligence Evaluation Program.
One of the duties of that program is to “develop proposed options for regulatory or governmental oversight, including potential nationalization or other strategic measures, for preventing or managing the development of artificial superintelligence if artificial superintelligence seems likely to arise.”
Now, it would be a mistake to read this line as merely proposing the development of a last-resort safeguard only to be deployed under conditions of acute existential risk, when the machine god knocks and we are left only with the choice to answer or hide. Taken at face value, guidelines for nationalization might appear to be a neutral, commonsense standard left dormant until there is no other choice — an option we would exercise only under duress.
But that’s not how power works. The incentives for states to gobble up civil society and private firms are too strong. They are competing centers of power and plenty. Though, in America at least, only one of those organisms has reliable, persistent recourse to violence. Even so, we’ve learned to live with the balance. It is, however, a precarious one.
The French political economist and futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel observed that the impulse toward domination is natural among states. It persists across time, space, and ideology. And that impulse is the best explanation of all nationalization efforts:
In the end, calling it socialization or nationalization, the state strives to make its own all the great castles of the economic feudal system, the railway companies, the electricity distributing companies, and so on. Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of Power’s behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at all in their nature from Henry VIII’s confiscation of the wealth of the monasteries. The same principle is at work; the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources; and in all these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is socialist or whether it is not, Power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth: in doing so it obeys the law of its nature. Whether it is socialist or whether it is not, it cannot but present itself as the ally of those who are under the dominion of the capitalist. Philanthropy, it is true, plays a part in this alliance. But the sure instinct for the distension of the state necessarily turns this philanthropy to the glory and strength of Power. [Emphasis mine.]
De Jouvenel would not be surprised by calls for nationalization from either the left or the right, particularly when the prize is the commanding heights of frontier AI labs, which promise real and projected wealth to whoever holds them.
Democratization, socialization, collectivization — call it what you like. The antagonism between the state and other macro-organisms has been a core feature of our political history. Unlike the specter of ASI, we have a seemingly unlimited number of case studies with which we can form a reference class.
Whenever the prize is high enough or the perceived risk is sufficiently costly, both rent-seekers and safety advocates alike will push for more control. This is the well-worn “bootleggers and Baptists” dynamic, which takes its name from the mutual desire of these actors to ban legal alcohol sales in pursuit of both selfish and altruistic ends.
The issue with even extremely preliminary contingency plans to nationalize AI firms is that any ASI threshold is unlikely to be reserved only for moments of existential crisis. There is simply too much of an incentive for interested parties to inflate the risk or loosen the definition to fit the desired ends of those who want to consume for selfish and altruistic reasons.
Early efforts to deploy a policy as risky as nationalization for a concept as murky as ASI will invite a high degree of lobbying and arbitrage that is at odds with the intent of otherwise well-meaning lawmakers.
And looking at the current admin’s actions against Anthropic over the past month, or its ambiguous, unchecked war-making, or its growing purchase of financial stakes in critical industries, or its willingness to sell our most advanced tech to our greatest adversaries for a cut of the deal…
Well, we should not hold strongly to the assumption that lawmakers are otherwise generally well-meaning.