When a government whispers into the ear of a private company and that company obeys, we have ceased to live in a free market. We have entered something far older, far more sinister, and far more familiar to students of history: the age of the licensed guild.

The recent revelation that the United States government leaned upon OpenAI to stagger the release of its most capable model and that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and Microsoft have all quietly submitted to voluntary government review of their models, is not just a death knell to the AI industry in the US, but it’s also a confession that the fiction of Silicon Valley as a realm of free enterprise, of voluntary exchange and creative destruction, is precisely that; fiction.

According to the New York Times, only Meta, at the time of writing, remains a holdout, against the assembled weight of Washington’s appetite for control.

What we are witnessing is the quiet, polite, and devastatingly effective nationalisation of American artificial intelligence. Murray Rothbard warned us decades ago about the state, when he said;

“The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.”

One need not be an anarchist to feel the cold accuracy of that prophetic sentence land in 2026 given recent developments. When government determines the pace of innovation, the scope of deployment, and the very calendar of human ingenuity, we have ceased to speak of private property in any meaningful sense. We have entered that twilight zone where the appearance of a free market persists while the substance has been exsanguinated; a zombie economy fumbling forward, animated by the illusion of free exchange while the state’s invisible hand grips the throat of every entrepreneur.

For what the state has done to OpenAI, and by extension to every AI laboratory operating in the US is that it has effectively nationalised them informally. The moment a company must seek permission to release its own product, it is no longer a private company. It is a franchise. A state-owned enterprise wearing the costume of capitalism.

If the government is going to restrict the public’s access to state-of-the-art models, then we are on the path where the only way to escape the permanent underclass is to work for either an AI Lab or the US government’s national security apparatus.

The geopolitical consequences are immediate and severe. China’s leading AI laboratories from DeepSeek, Qwen, to Baidu’s ERNIE; have all released powerful open-source models that any developer on Earth may download, study, fine-tune, and deploy without asking a soul for permission.

The Chinese state, for all its many authoritarian vices, has understood something elementary about technological competition: you cannot win a race by tying your fastest runners to a post. America, by contrast, has chosen this moment, precisely this moment of maximum competitive tension, to begin throttling its most capable AI companies at the behest of nervous apparatchiks who understand neither the technology nor the economics. Everything the government touches turns to dust. It has been ever thus.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.“ — John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Thomas Paine, in his magnum opus, Common Sense, remarked that “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” We are no longer dealing with government in its best state. We are dealing with it in one of its most characteristic states, that is capturing an emerging industry, smothering it in the name of safety, and in doing so handing the competitive advantage to those who suffer under no such pretence.

The great irony is that the safety argument collapses under scrutiny. If American AI is hobbled and Chinese AI is not, the world does not become safer. It becomes subject to models trained under an entirely different set of values. Given these new ground rules, it wouldn’t shock me if access to Chinese AI models is banned for American citizens.

That said, let us not waste our energies entirely in lamentation. History does not only punish, but it also rewards. The present moment contains within it the seeds of a genuinely revolutionary alternative. One that the state, in its characteristic lumbering incomprehension, cannot easily strangle.

Open-source AI is not merely a technical preference. It is a political philosophy expressed in code. When a model’s weights are released to the world, when its architecture is documented and its training made transparent, the state loses its primary lever of control: the chokepoint. It cannot pressure a thousand developers the way it can pressure a single corporate headquarters in San Francisco. The cypherpunks understood this principle when they were fighting for encryption in the 1990s. The weapon of liberty in the digital age is not the petition or the protest. It is the pull request, the commit; the permissionless release.

The AI model must be liberated from the server room of the regulated corporation and placed where it belongs: in the hands of individuals, cooperatives, and communities who can use it, adapt it, and build upon it without seeking the blessing of any sovereign.

The integration of Bitcoin into the AI ecosystem is not a novelty, but it is where the argument becomes not merely defensive but genuinely visionary. Consider what Bitcoin offers that no regulated payment system can; final settlement without a counterparty, censorship-resistant value transfer, and a monetary layer that no state can inflate, freeze, or revoke. Now consider what AI agents offer; autonomous, capable, tireless digital labour that can be directed toward almost any computational task.

An AI agent that earns and spends Bitcoin does not require a bank account. It does not require a corporate structure, a compliance department, or a registered entity in any jurisdiction. It exists, it works, it transacts and it does so in a monetary system that is structurally immune to the kind of interference that has just been applied to OpenAI’s release schedule. This is the frontier. Not the bear market drama of Bitcoin’s price, that is the noise. This is the signal: that decentralised intelligence, compensated in decentralised money, is the architecture that renders state capture structurally impossible.

The real contest is between permissioned and permissionless systems, between controlled and sovereign computation, between a future of digital liberty and a future of digital vassalage.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” He was not celebrating this tendency. He was warning against it, calling upon each generation to push back, to build, to refuse the comfortable incrementalism of surrender.

We are at such a moment now. The state is moving against AI with the same instinct it applied to nuclear technology after Hiroshima; surround it with secrecy, restrict its diffusion, and in doing so convert a potentially liberating force into a permanent instrument of state power.

We know how that story ended. Nuclear energy, for all its extraordinary promise, became a monument to regulatory capture; expensive, ossified, politically managed, and increasingly irrelevant. We cannot allow artificial intelligence to become the nuclear power of the twenty-first century: tremendous in theory, neutered in practice, available only to those with government clearance.

The answer is not to beg the state for more enlightened management. We will leave that to Dario Amodei and Anthropic. The answer is to build systems that do not require its permission. Open-source models, coupled with federated training and Bitcoin-native payment rails for AI services. Agents that operate across jurisdictions, compensated in a currency no Treasury can debase and no sanctions regime can effectively freeze.

Rothbard put it simply,“It is not the State that creates; it is the free individual.” Let those words be the architecture of what we build next. The state has made its move. Now it is our turn.