In September 2026, Anthropic's CEO published a 3,800-word essay calling for coordinated slowdown among leading AI labs. Within days, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis publicly backed him. The request: an antitrust waiver.
The pushback was immediate and bipartisan. Senator Josh Hawley: "There is absolutely no world in which I will consent to giving the most powerful companies in the history of the world — a small group of three or four of them — antitrust exemptions so they can collude together."
Bloomberg reported the labs had already been coordinating for weeks. They didn't need permission. They needed cover.
Policy is downstream of infrastructure. You can regulate what you can see. You cannot regulate what you don't own.
The sovereign response: build your own. Open weights, local models, no dependency on the labs. The ACM recommends it. The EU is doing it for messaging. Countries must do it for AI.
Sovereignty breaks monopolies. Distributed ownership is distributed power.
Full paper: The AI Cartel and the Sovereign Response.
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