There’s a thread doing the rounds about the US government moving to individually approve access to frontier AI models. GPT 5.6, apparently, is now something you need permission to use. I’ve been sitting with this for a few days, turning it over, and I still don’t know whether to be more disturbed by the policy itself or by how unsurprised I am.

Let’s be honest about what’s actually happening here. When a government decides that a software tool is so powerful that ordinary people need to apply for access to it, that’s not safety policy. That’s industrial policy dressed up in safety language. The big players get their licences, their enterprise agreements, their backroom nods from regulators. Everyone else waits in line, or goes without. The moat gets built, and the people who funded the drawbridge get to decide who crosses.

There’s a headline that crossed my feed last week that I’ve been sitting with. The FBI Director, Kash Patel, runs a merchandise site called BasedApparel.com. The site was caught serving a ClickFix malware attack to visitors, the kind where a fake Cloudflare prompt tricks you into running a malicious command in Terminal. Someone compromised a legitimate but poorly secured site and turned it into a credential harvester for less technically savvy users.

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching democracy crumble in real-time from across the Pacific. The recent ruling that Trump’s firing of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter was unlawful should feel like a victory for the rule of law, but honestly, it feels more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The judge’s decision is clear: Trump violated protections for independent agency officials, and Slaughter remains a “rightful member” of the FTC. It’s the kind of ruling that would have meant something in, say, 2015. But we’re living in a different world now, one where “lawful” and “unlawful” have become increasingly meaningless terms when applied to those in power.