AI Is for All Americans, Not Just the Gatekeepers

Unleashing innovation is the best path to human flourishing.

In Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella Anthem, a young man rediscovers electricity. He has spent years working in secret, alone in a forgotten tunnel beneath a dystopian collectivist city, where all forms of once common knowledge have disappeared. Equality 7-2521, a young man in the collectivist future society, possesses great intelligence and curiosity, but he lives in a society that punishes such attributes, and he's been assigned by the Council of Vocations to be a Street Sweeper despite longing to be a Scholar.

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Nonetheless, he builds this miraculous glass box that turns darkness into light. He believes he has given his society a gift unlike any in living memory. So he carries it to the World Council of Scholars, the body that governs all knowledge. He assumes that certainly, they will rejoice.

Not the case. Instead, they want to crush his discovery.

It’s not because of any kind of functional issue. Rather, because he made it alone, without their permission, and because his light threatens the Department of Candles. What is not done collectively cannot be good, they tell him. It took fifty years and the agreement of every council just to approve the candle. A single man with a better idea isn’t progress in their eyes. He is a danger to not just the plan, but society as a whole, they’ve determined.

That scene is a cautionary tale for a future ruling class that fully centralizes control. And today, we are at a crossroads when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence. We hear a lot these days about “responsible deployment,” and this notion that such powerful tools need to be managed by an elite hierarchy that knows what’s best for us. The question in AI was never really about capability. Instead, it is about access. Who gets to determine access to innovation?

One vision says the answer is a small, credentialed priesthood. They’ve determined that we need a hand-picked set of “trusted parties” granted something close to moral authority by a cluster of Effective Altruist and liberal internationalist Davos class-aligned ideologues on the West Coast, who have appointed themselves the stewards of what the rest of us are permitted to use. The other vision says the answer is the whole of American society. On AI, this means literally everyone with an internet connection. The kid in rural Appalachia, the suburban shopkeeper running a small business on main street, and the eighteen-year-old urbanite who can’t afford college but can now summon, in his pocket, the world’s best tutor, coder, and strategist on demand.

Such easy access to knowledge and capability has never existed before in human history. We are watching the cost of expertise collapse toward zero, and with it the oldest barrier is being torn down. This is not a job-killer, though the professional doomer class insists otherwise. It is the opposite, as the most powerful distributor of knowledge, leverage, and opportunity ever invented. AI is bringing us the fairest and freest playing field in American history.

So why the alarm? Why the urgent push for licensing regimes, “safety” bureaucracies, and deployment gatekeeping?

Anthem answers that, too, and it is worth remembering that Rand was not writing fantasy. She was born in St. Petersburg, watched the Bolsheviks seize her father’s pharmacy in the name of the people, and escaped to America in 1926 with a firsthand education in what centralized control of everything actually produces. The society in her novella is the logical end of that experience. It is a world where knowledge has been captured, catalogued, and rationed by committee, and the result is not a glittering scientific utopia by any means. It is a place lit by candles, one that has forgotten electricity, that recoils from the new because the new was not authorized by the trusted moral authorities. When you put bureaucrats or some kind of public-private fusion committee in charge of who may know what, you do not get safety. You get stagnation, impoverishment, and authoritarianism. Technology doesn’t advance under that arrangement. Innovation stalls out (which is the overt goal of “pause/stop AI” groups), gets gatekept, and remains inaccessible to the masses.

The AI gatekeepers speak as if the danger is too much capability in too many hands, when history’s far more reliable catastrophe is the reverse: capability concentrated in too few.

There is a name for an AI architecture built around central control, mandatory permission, and a managed hierarchy of who counts as trustworthy. We see it in China, and it’s called the CCP model. It is surveillance and compliance and a populace kept on the receiving end of tools that some will never be able to wield in order to try to make something of themselves. We should want no part of it, and we should be honest that some of the loudest voices calling for the centralization of AI are, intentionally or not, building the American version of exactly that.

There is no legitimate ethical or security reason to gatekeep this technology indefinitely. The case for doing so always seems to arrive wrapped in the language of caution, but the structure underneath it has so many historical examples that results poorly. We end up with a small group deciding it alone can be trusted with things as simple as a candle, and everyone else should be grateful for the candle.

America does not win by managing AI into an elite ladder of privilege. America wins by leaning into the thing that made it exceptional in the first place: distributed power, open access, faith in ordinary people to do the right thing when you stop standing between them and the tools they need to succeed.

America wins when we distribute knowledge and unleash innovation.