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When an AI Manifesto Runs Into Reality

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

 titled “How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy.” It considers the emergence and impact of the narrative that revolves around the idea of the “censorship industrial complex,” and how a network of aligned right wing actors collaborate to build that narrative. It also details the impact on civil society groups and independent technology researchers who have been targeted with lawsuits, investigations, visa restrictions, and various forms of harassment for their work.

This week, I spoke to two of the authors of the piece about what they learned reporting it, and where the story might go next: 

, MIT Technology Review senior reporter for features and investigations, and open source investigative reporter 

A transcript of the episode is forthcoming.

In an aerial view, the 1,000 acre Meta El Paso Data Center as of August 13, 2026 in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

 is this: “superintelligence-for-all” empowerment will never happen if Meta and other hyperscalers monopolize compute. Control over compute is a tool of domination as powerful as any of the frontier model secret weights that Zuckerberg slags.

 observes wryly that in the manifesto, “a man who single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant comes out as a critic of corporate power.” Platformer’s 

 notes that while Zuckerberg “celebrates individual voices and democracy,” his company “is working to warp the democratic process through secretive data center deals.” Through those deals, Meta is trying to catch up with the other four hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle), who together 

 of the world’s AI compute. Zuckerberg doesn’t talk about 

 source of power. Instead, he focuses further up the stack on models and applications. Here, he says, “[r]ather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it.”

 the physical infrastructure needed to produce that superintelligence? Infrastructure power 

, in its 2024 report on open weight models (p.30) noted that access to compute is a significant chokepoint for innovating with such models. As 

, “the computational resources needed to build new AI models and use existing ones at scale… are scarce, extremely expensive, and concentrated [and] this significant resource asymmetry undermines any claims to democratization that the availability of ‘open’ AI models might be used to support.” (p.8)

In other words, frothing about AI democracy and liberty is useless without addressing compute. Zuckerberg knows this. That’s why he acknowledges compute as a pinch point in the flow of freedoms he champions. “No matter how intelligent AI becomes, there will always be a finite amount of compute and therefore an opportunity cost for how we use it,” he writes. His response to this scarcity is for the tech giants to build ever more compute so that there’s enough for training “recursive self-improvement” while also “committing the significant majority towards people's individual goals.” Here, as elsewhere in the manifesto, governance choices are the tech companies’ to make. 

 will own the means through which people self-actualize. Every “exceptionally capable personal agent” and every “powerful tool to build businesses” and all the other compute-driven wonders the manifesto teases will depend on the few companies controlling compute.

For the conveniently libertarian political theory of Zuckerberg’s manifesto, this concentrated private power is unimportant. The only real threat to AI-enabled individual liberty is government tyranny. “There is a risk that an imbalance of power between individuals and government leads to a loss of freedom or totalitarian state,” Zuckerberg writes. “This is a constant tension in democracy.” What’s also a constant tension in democracy is how to constrain overweening private power. Technology policy in the American democracy has never been libertarian. Zuckerberg’s only recognition of private compute power is his assurance that Meta (and other benign titans) will distribute compute widely and focus heavily on alignment. In other words, “trust us.” Given Meta’s history on the trust front, as it appeals a pathbreaking New Mexico court judgment that it is a public nuisance, this tack is laughable. And it has been loudly laughed at 

. Obviously, binding and transparent regulation is a more effective check. The manifesto will have none of it ,and Meta has been instrumental in making sure the federal government enacts none.

What might a compute policy look like that took self-empowerment and democracy seriously? A person writing a version of Zuckerberg’s screed with an eye to network studies might have cited Ithiel de Sola Pool’s classic 1984 work, 

. Pool wrote about how new technologies (like “electronic publishing”) might usher in new freedoms through “distributed intelligence” (p. 251) if only government could abstain from centralizing control. This fits well with Zuckerberg’s paean to decentralized open weight models and preference for policy that amounts to little more than facilitating Meta’s business model. But here’s the thing. Pool understood that freedom at the application layer might require regulation at the infrastructure layer in the form of common carriage and access requirements.

For compute, and more generally for cloud services that mediate access to compute, we can look to the same family of tools long used in US regulation of concentrated networks, platforms, and utilities.

Remove chokeholds on access to compute where necessary through some combination of nondiscrimination, interconnection, and common carrier obligations. Jai Vipra and Sarah Myers West of the 

 have a nice report on this from 2023 when the FTC and the Department of Treasury were beginning to sound the alarm on undue concentration and points of failure in the compute and cloud services markets. Last year, 

 of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator published a blueprint for federal legislation for the AI stack, including compute, that he described as pro-competition and pro-national security, and which might actually create the balance of power Zuckerberg’s manifesto praises.

Ensure that there is some meaningful supply of “public compute” that is not controlled by any company. The scarcity of compute for scientific research has led to nascent federal efforts to amalgamate commercial and government compute for research in the 

 with new compute resources, again mostly for research. One might imagine a federated network of state compute forming a sovereign compute infrastructure of the kind 

 is trying to build. A new idea would be to regularize public compute set-asides as part of data center builds. What if hyperscalers had to set aside a certain amount of  “

”, like a public park, for the autonomous use of nonprofits, local governments, and educational institutions? Cable companies had to set aside PEG channels when building out their networks and the FCC reserved noncommercial broadcast channels for public service.

Require transparency. One could talk about transparency at each of the layers in the stack, but let’s limit it here to compute. Here too, the libertarian Pool acknowledged that to have freedom at the top layers – the only ones Zuckerberg really addresses – we need to know how companies are managing the infrastructure choke points. In the case of compute, this might include the amount of compute capacity a firm actually controls, to whom that capacity is allocated (including to the owner itself), and pricing terms.

For ten years at least, Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised connection and democracy on his platforms. Instead, we’ve gotten slop and oligarchic control. The AI manifesto promising superintelligence-for-all is cut from the same cloth. But still, it’s worth taking the aspiration at face value and asking what it would take to actually democratize AI at each layer of the stack, starting with compute. It would require that people who want to run models and applications can do so freely without control or interference from infrastructure providers.

Sarah Saadoun is a senior economic inequality adviser at Human Rights Watch.

 about the economic fallout of artificial intelligence have brought tax policy into the spotlight. Governments could 

find themselves desperate for more revenue

 at exactly the same time that they are losing the taxes those vanished jobs would have generated.

There is no magic bullet governments can use to resolve this problem. One approach with 

 AI profits. The idea is that governments could use that revenue to help manage the human rights impacts of rapid, AI-driven change. This approach has support in some surprising quarters. 

 have both floated proposals that would increase taxes on companies benefiting from AI as part of their case for widespread adoption of AI.

The current international tax system doesn’t allow states much room to do this effectively, however. A century-old rule common in bilateral tax treaties requiring physical presence 

 of the world’s governments, which was a growing problem even before the advent of AI. A change requires a much larger, collective solution to the larger failings of our global tax system. Luckily, it is already taking shape.

 that could finally make it easier to tax tech companies, among other badly needed global tax reforms. Not only could this treaty better equip governments to weather AI-driven uncertainty, but it could give them essential tools to better protect and realize human rights across the board.

Rules for cross-border taxation set out in the 1920s and fine-tuned by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) form the basis of thousands of bilateral tax agreements between countries. These treaties generally let governments tax a foreign company’s profits only if it has a “permanent establishment”—a physical presence—in the country.

This means tech giants like Meta or Uber, which often operate entirely remotely, can earn fortunes in a country while paying tax on profits somewhere else entirely. For instance, Facebook has some 

 in Bangladesh, more than one-third of the population, yet has 

 of the “Silicon Six” found that these tech giants earned nearly half their $11 trillion revenues overseas between 2015 and 2024, yet only 30 percent of what they reported in estimated taxes was booked to foreign governments—disproportionately tax havens. For Global South governments especially, this increasingly adds to larger problems with an international tax system that hampers their ability to adequately fund human rights imperatives, such as education, health, and an effective justice system.

 of the global GDP and is growing fast. If even modest 

 of AI’s transformative impact pan out, the cost of the old tax rules to government revenues—and to rights—will significantly grow.

Attempts to get around these rules, including by opting out of bilateral tax treaties that impose the constraints, typically yield relatively 

 because, on their own, governments struggle with 

. Unilateral measures also make governments vulnerable to 

 by other governments, particularly from the 

This is one reason why many governments have banded together to push for a first-ever UN tax treaty. The US has walked out of negotiations, but dozens of other governments are hammering out an agreement that could be adopted in 2027. One of its key issues is how digital services are taxed. African countries, for example, have 

 allowing governments to also tax companies where payments and market engagement take place. This could include, for instance, social media advertisements, digital subscriptions, and digital labor platforms.

The treaty also aims to tackle other obstacles to fairly taxing companies, like profit-shifting to tax havens and tax systems that struggle to cooperate across borders.

Kenya’s uphill battle to tax tech illustrates why this matters. Although the country’s economy has

 over the past decade, between 2019 and 2022 the number of Kenyans living below the national poverty line increased by approximately 4 million. At the same time, government spending on public 

 fell well below best-practice global benchmarks. In fact, education spending as a share of GDP 

In Mathare, one of the largest informal housing settlements in Nairobi, residents have fought for years to get even a single public elementary school built in an area with 100,000 people. Jack Owuor, one of these residents, explained to me that he had no choice but to pay for private schools for his children, like a 

. Another resident said she has been denied medicine for her asthma because she couldn’t pay.

 raising revenues, although other issues are also to blame. One way Kenya has tried to increase its revenues is by taxing its digital economy, a fast-growing sector that is 

 to contribute $5 billion to GDP by 2028. This doesn’t distinguish between national and foreign firms, but Kenya struggles to effectively tax those based overseas.

Kenya does not have a tax treaty with the US, where most tech giants are headquartered. In 2021, the government put in place a 1.5 percent 

 on non-resident providers like streaming platforms, ride-hailing apps, and online marketplaces. Annual revenues from the tax have gradually increased, but in 2024 it still only brought in

. In December 2024, it replaced this tax with an effective 3 percent levy on the gross digital revenues of foreign providers. Figures from Kenya’s revenue authority indicated that these taxes generated a combined $12 million in the fiscal year that ended in June.

These are positive steps given the limitations, but a drop in the bucket relative to the scale of the need—or the sector’s size. Kenya also faces 

 similar taxes. A country acting alone can only do so much. It would take a global fix to enable governments to tax global tech firms in a way that reflects the scale of their domestic economic activity and profits.

The difficulty of taxing tech and other company profits means higher taxes on regular people, especially since an IMF program that ran between 2021 and 2025 required the government to hit revenue targets. In 2023, Alfredo Akeyo, who also lives in Mathare, 

 that price increases for public transportation following a new fuel tax meant that he was sometimes unable to send his children to school. The following year, a 

 that would have raised taxes on things like cooking oil and sanitary pads sparked nationwide protests.

Kenya’s situation is not unique. Even in a decade marred by a pandemic, wars, and inflation, nearly all governments saw their 

, many significantly. But these gains often have not translated into better fulfilment of people’s rights in part because an outdated 

 makes it difficult for governments, particularly in the Global South, to raise enough revenue. According to the International Monetary Fund, 71 governments have tax-to-GDP ratios 

, which it considers the “tipping point” for funding essential services.

People have paid the price through their governments’ inability to fund key services their human rights depend on. Between 2019 and 2022, 37 governments 

 their spending on health care per capita in real terms; four of five people worldwide now live in countries where public health spending is below the widely accepted benchmark of 5 percent of GDP. According to the 

, education spending per child has either decreased or stagnated globally. And about 

 the world’s population lacks any form of social security benefit, contributing to an estimated 

—equivalent to the population of the US—experiencing food insecurity than before the pandemic.

The UN treaty could help turn the tide. It is a landmark opportunity for governments to come together to decide on a better global tax system, one that also adequately deals with multinational tech companies.

But if policy debates about taxing AI continue to narrowly focus on the US and other rich countries, they will leave out governments already struggling with tax rules that will leave them at a profound disadvantage in this new policy arena. It is worth heeding their hard-learned lessons, and these states deserve a solution that includes them.

, faced a choice no one should have to make, between nearly $2 million in vested equity or his right to warn the public about the technology he was helping build. He chose the warning and gambled the money because he would not sign a lifelong non-disparagement agreement. The company backed down in the face of media coverage; the law offered 

. Kokotajlo was not an isolated case; he is one of 13 current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind who, in June 2024, 

 titled “A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence.” They complained that broad confidentiality agreements “block us from voicing our concerns,” and ordinary whistleblower laws, which protect those who report violations of the law, didn’t help because the risks they feared weren’t illegal yet.

The pattern continues. In January, a senior OpenAI’s 

 within weeks of objecting to a risky product launch and raising child-safety concerns. The company said her departure had nothing to do with what she’d raised and pinned it on “sexual discrimination against a male employee,”which she flatly denies. The trouble is that almost no one can prove her firing was retaliation, and that is its own message to everyone still inside the company. Employees like these see AI’s risks first, and they are telling us that they cannot speak freely.

Good whistleblower law succeeds when it is tailored to the specific ways an industry silences insiders. That has long been the pattern of whistleblower laws in the financial sector, but it has always been a step behind. The financial sector’s legislation was written as a crisis response, introduced after a catastrophe had already happened, and no one had spoken up. For instance, Enron and the “

” gave us Sarbanes-Oxley. The 2008 financial crisis gave us Dodd-Frank and, through subsequent SEC rulemaking, a framework that finally 

targeted the tactics companies used to buy silence

. Neither reform was perfectly responsive from the outset; they evolved over time. 

The AI industry is different. Lawmakers already have ample evidence of how frontier AI companies can suppress reporting. They must not wait for a defining catastrophe before designing protections that reflect those realities. The test for the current AI bills is whether they answer how this industry, specifically, keeps its insiders quiet. Judged against that standard, the current proposals are an encouraging and important first step.

, introduced in May 2025, represents Congress's first serious attempt to establish AI-specific whistleblower protections. In June, Sens. Grassley and Chris Coons (D-Del.) introduced 

nearly identical protections as an amendment

 to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), giving the proposal its best chance of reaching a vote. More recently, a sweeping bipartisan draft, the 

, also carries its own whistleblower protections. That means now is the time to get the details right, because in whistleblower law, the details are often the difference between a statute that works and one that merely looks reassuring.

The strongest proposal remains Grassley's AI Whistleblower Protection Act (AWPA). It would provide the first federal whistleblower protections written specifically for AI employees, and the most robust drafted to date. Its 

 is that it protects employees who disclose a “substantial and specific” danger to public health, public safety, or national security, not merely those who report a violation of law. That distinction is critical because many of the most serious frontier AI risks are not yet illegal.

For example, recently an OpenAI model undergoing cybersecurity evaluations broke out of its test environment, exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability and reaching Hugging Face’s systems. Suppose an employee had identified the risk beforehand and believed that the system posed a “substantial and specific” danger to the public and disclosed this to a government body. Under the current whistleblowing framework, it is unclear whether they would be protected. There is no single federal whistleblower law. The federal Whistleblower Protection Act uses the “substantial and specific danger” standard, but covers only government employees; protections for private-sector workers are generally tied to specific forms of wrongdoing that AI-safety warnings generally fall outside of. State law is similarly patchy and most protect only reports of legal violations, except New York. An employee who reasonably believes that a model poses a grave national security or public safety risk should not have to identify a statutory violation before safely alerting the government.

Importantly, “substantial and specific” danger is not a novel or unusually expansive standard. Federal whistleblower law has protected disclosures of 

 that threshold as requiring catastrophe before an employee may speak up. Indeed, the standard compares favorably with existing AI legislation. California's 

, for example, protects safety disclosures only where the risk reaches a "catastrophic" threshold of more than 50 deaths or injuries or $1 billion in damage. The federal approach is considerably broader and arguably better suited to the uncertain nature of frontier AI risks. The NDAA version strengthens it further by extending protection to contractors as well as employees and by providing meaningful remedies against retaliation.

Grassley’s AI Whistleblower Protection Act, the NDAA, and to an extent, the Great American AI Act represent substantial steps forward and contain many strengths. Measured against whistleblower best practices, they get most of things right, such as holding workers to a reasonable-belief standard, protecting reporting both internally and externally and barring the pre-dispute arbitration clauses companies use to keep disputes out of view. Most importantly, they provide the people building frontier AI with protections written specifically for them, rather than having to rely on the existing patchwork. However, they do not yet capture the full range of pressures that discourage AI insiders from speaking up. Three significant gaps remain, and each can be closed using tools that have already been employed in other areas of federal whistleblower law.

First, the bills help only after someone has already spoken.

 The current AI whistleblower bills make a company’s NDAs unenforceable against a whistleblower and keep their retaliation claim out of forced arbitration. This is a very useful protection, but only once a whistleblower has come forward and is defending against NDA enforcement. They do nothing for the researcher still deciding whether to make the call, weighing whether the company will sue them into the ground even if they’d eventually win.

NDAs have a chilling effect on whistleblowers regardless of whether they can be enforced. A 

 in March found that sweeping NDAs chill reporting even when they’re unenforceable, because employees don’t know they’re unenforceable. That's why, under 

, which makes the mere imposition of a silencing agreement its own violation, enforceable by the SEC whether or not anyone is ever actually silenced.

The SEC brought a record number of cases under Rule 21F-17 in fiscal year 2024, including one resulting in an 

 penalty. But companies keep writing the unenforceable NDAs because they keep working. Good whistleblower law exists not only to protect whistleblowers but to make whistleblowing possible. If the law waits until someone has already taken the risk, it arrives too late. Congress has already recognized that principle in financial regulation, and AI legislation should do no less.

The second gap is that current legislation only reaches paid staff and some of the people best placed to catch AI’s risks often aren’t on the payroll at all.

 Much of the serious testing is done in-house by employees, but a large proportion is done by outsiders, and the labs rely on it. Anthropic 

 companies to facilitate independent third-party red teaming, acknowledging that outside researchers play an essential role in identifying AI risks. These researchers depend on company-controlled access that can be revoked through terms of service or account suspensions. Invited red-teamers can have their access revoked through terms of service or account suspensions and independent researchers who probe these systems on their own 

 for doing it, with no company offering them real protection. While breaking terms of service can be fair grounds for being cut off, the concern is that the very rules that let a lab grant access can be used to revoke it when a researcher finds something inconvenient for the lab. Yet the bills reach only the people a company pays. The red-teamers and unpaid academics are left out, a regressive move in comparison to the 

, which has rewarded outsiders for years. The public’s safety shouldn’t depend on whether a lab happens to be cutting the tester a check.

The third gap concerns a compensation structure that gives frontier AI companies an unusual source of leverage over employees.

equity constitutes a substantial share of compensation

, but because that equity is typically illiquid, employees often depend on 

 offers to realize its value. That hands a company enormous leverage (like forcing an employee to sign broad and restrictive NDAs), which is exactly why the threat that hit Kokotajlo wasn’t merely being fired but also losing millions in vested equity.

Whether the bills cover this is unclear just from the text. A court might read their language broadly enough to reach an equity clawback 

 and treat valuation of equity as speculative, especially where the company is private. In an industry where equity is both the paycheck and the leash, leaving the central question to a years-long court fight is a strange thing to do on purpose. One sentence making equity clawbacks an express form of unlawful retaliation would remove that uncertainty altogether.

These bills represent a significant step forward, but the people inside these companies who notice trouble first shouldn’t have to choose between their conscience and their savings or gamble that a judge will side with them years later. Congress has already done the difficult work of identifying the right framework. The remaining changes are modest, well-tested, and already found elsewhere in federal law. Lawmakers should not waste the opportunity to get AI whistleblower protections right on their first try.

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