An Author's Note on Where This Is Going
As I have confessed in the Author’s Disclaimer, I have serious doubts about the structure of this book, and a corresponding conviction that time is of the essence. The editions are arriving in the order I can feel ready to release them, given their imperfection. I am asking the reader's patience with the form.
I am also working with Claude — Anthropic's foundation model — as a thinking partner, in the manner Ethan Mollick describes in his book Co-Intelligence. The argument, writing and judgment is mine. The AI is helping me work through it.
But friends are helping me more.
This morning, I had a text exchange with a friend who serves in the United States Congress, on a committee that considers AI. He asked me what I thought about Claude Mythos and the cybersecurity issues attendant to it. I have opinions on Mythos, especially on what it means that a single private company can decide who gets access to a tool of that power and who does not. I will try to express those opinions in the editions that follow.
But the conversation with my friend made me realize that I do not have time to bury the lead. So here is where this book is going:
The laws that are currently being proposed and passed to govern artificial intelligence — laws about algorithmic bias, transparency, explainability, consequential decision-making, disclosure — are necessary. But they are also insufficient. They operate inside the existing structure of American corporate law, asking these corporations to behave better. Yet, they do not ask the more fundamental question, which is who the corporation is built to serve.
The answer the law currently gives is the investor, not the public. Public benefit, where it exists in our corporate laws, is incidental. It is not obligatory, rather it’s a welcome consequence of commerce, never the measure, never what the law was built to enforce.
We saw what happened when OpenAI tried to build a corporation explicitly organized around the public interest—In fact, Elon Musk and Sam Altman are in court now fighting about it. The financial structures of American business are continuing as they were designed, and the law can’t address the issues until the harm is done.
This is the structural problem. Power over the conditions of ordinary life — what jobs you see, what loans you are offered, what medical results are surfaced, what speech can travel, what vulnerabilities can be found and exploited at machine speed — has been concentrated in a small number of private companies whose legal obligation runs in one direction, toward their investors. Those companies have no obligation to protect anyone else.
No rules about bias, transparency or explainability will remedy a system whose foundational premise is the problem.
What the moment requires is a law that reverses the priority. Right now, the executives and directors of these companies have a legal duty to act in the financial interests of their shareholders. That is what corporate law was built to enforce. The law I am describing would change that. It would require the people running the companies that build these systems to put the public's health, safety, and welfare first — ahead of shareholder returns.
I have tried drafting such a bill. But I am no law maker, and it’s going to take our entire village to push this forward. I want the reader to see that. This is the argument the rest of this book is building toward.
Power has been concentrated in private companies. The law that governs those companies was not built to protect the public from them. Until that changes, every other reform we pass is a patch on a foundation that was never poured for us.
That is where this is going. I did not want to make you wait for it.
Thanks to my friend for shaking that out of me.
P.S. May 2, 2026 - One thing to be clear about. No single law is going to address the issues attendant to AI. The laws and court system are not nimble enough to keep up with what is happening. The U.S. constitution doesn’t recognize human rights in the way of that other constitutions do. Our societal values are so twisted up in materialism and productivity that it’s going to be hard to recalibrate in time. There’s so much work to be done by so many of us. My note yesterday was on point to my friend’s question. But this book is going broader than that. I just wanted to signal that intent.
