OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki published a long article, “An Alien Mind,” whose gist is: the entire operating mechanism of current AI is a black box, and current chain-of-thought-based monitoring methods are failing. The industry needs to voluntarily slow its pace so that there is more time to fortify AI defenses.
From “Frontier AI Safety Commitments” to “A Right to Warn,” this June saw a series of events in which the four major giants jointly wrote to the U.S. Congress calling for legislative restrictions, followed by a joint safety petition signed by 1,200 core researchers across institutions.
This familiar recipe, this familiar flavor, is in fact a standard play in industrial history before AI.
This is not because everyone has humanity’s safety at heart; rather, it is industry first movers using compliance and market-access mechanisms to reshape the rules of competition.
As the open-source ecosystem approaches frontier closed-source levels at extremely low inference costs, the technical moat built solely on compute scale begins to narrow. If one competes on performance and unit price in a fully open market environment, it is hard for the astronomical upfront capital expenditure and infrastructure investment to sustain an excess premium.
By defining large models as black boxes that humans cannot understand, or even as Alien, and elevating potential risks into threats to critical infrastructure and human survival, legislative bodies then have ample justification for administrative intervention.
Once a regulatory framework comprising safety ratings, compute filing, and full-process red-team audits is established, high compliance costs will directly raise entry barriers, keeping the open-source community and small and medium-sized teams out of the mainstream track.
Once administrative market access is in place, the refereeing power over the next stage of competition remains in the hands of the few institutions that were the first to submit safety petitions.