Time to argue against myself again. I’ve spent seven posts making the case for referees, so today I switch jerseys and make the honest case against them. Not the cardboard version. The one that actually keeps me up.

Case one: regulation entrenches giants. Compliance is a fixed cost, and fixed costs favor whoever is already big. Write heavy AI rules today and you may freeze the current leaders into permanent incumbency, crush small labs and open research, and hand the future to whichever company employs the most lawyers. And here’s the twist that should bother my side more than it does: sometimes the fox wants henhouse rules, because the fox owns the biggest henhouse and the rules keep out other foxes. I told you two posts ago to be suspicious when incumbents welcome regulation. That suspicion cuts against regulation itself. Fair is fair.

Case two: regulators lag, and bad rules aren’t neutral. Agencies famously fight the last war. Rules written for this year’s systems will be quaint in eighteen months and enforced for twenty years. Worse, a bad rule actively harms: it burns the limited public attention available for safety, it stamps certificates onto things that don’t deserve them, and a false stamp of approval is more dangerous than no stamp at all, because it tells everyone to stop worrying. Add the talent problem, the people who best understand these systems mostly don’t work for any referee, and you get oversight that’s confident, slow, and wrong. There are worse things than no referee. A blind one with a whistle is arguably one of them.

Case three: the liberty problem, and this is the one I feel in my stomach. To seriously regulate AI, a government needs machinery to monitor large computations, control what software may be built, maybe restrict what math gets published. Build that machinery for the noblest reason you like. It will outlive the reason. Powers created for emergencies have a documented habit of finding new emergencies, and a state that can inspect and halt computation is a state holding a general-purpose censorship engine. If that sentence doesn’t worry you, you haven’t read enough history written by the people the machinery was eventually pointed at.

Case four, quickly: if safety itself depends on empirical work at the frontier, then slowing frontier work in rule-following countries may simply relocate the frontier to places with no rules at all. Congratulations, you’ve made the careful people weaker and changed nothing else.

That’s the case, and it’s a real one. Now the cross-examination, because the rules of this series say I get one.

Look at what all four arguments actually attack: bad rules. Detailed content rules, bureaucratic empires, capability bans written by people who can’t define capability. Agreed, burn all that. But notice what the arguments quietly step around: the minimal referee. External testing before release. Liability that follows harm. Incident reporting. An off switch for only the very largest training runs. Those are process controls, mostly borrowed from fields that run them without becoming police states, and they don’t require anyone to predict the future or define intelligence. The steelman demolishes the giant ministry. It never lays a glove on the brakes. And the leap from rules can be bad to therefore no rules is, you may notice, the entire playbook compressed into one step.

Even the liberty case cuts both ways. The realistic alternative to public referees isn’t a free frontier. It’s private governance by a handful of unelected labs, which is also a control machine, just one you never get to vote on. Pick your machinery. There’s no option without any.

My honest crux: show me the minimal set being used to entrench giants or surveil citizens, and I’ll update hard, in public, in this series. Until then, I keep both worries: the referee we might build badly, and the void we currently have.

Tonight, design the rule you’d accept. You, with your suspicion of bureaucrats fully intact. What’s the minimum you’d want verified before something smarter than anyone you know ships to a billion people? Write it down. If your honest answer is nothing at all, notice that you trust these companies more than you trust anyone else in your life. And if your answer is something, then welcome. You and I are just haggling over the referee’s uniform.