Governing AGI: Model laws, chip wars, and sovereign AI
By Rohit Krishnan, Freethink, August 15, 2025
Historically, the US government hasn’t excelled at regulating technology. Nobody really has. Maybe it’s because tech evolves too quickly, or because most politicians aren’t developers and simply don’t understand what they’re trying to regulate and can’t see all the potential consequences of their actions.
Take the 1990s, when US lawmakers capped exported software at 40-bit encryption keys to keep strong cryptography out of foreign hands. They didn’t foresee tech companies balking at the need to maintain separate US-only and international versions, and as a result of their regulations, the weaker standard became the global default, undermining security everywhere, even in the US.
We now have AI capable of completing multi-hour tasks, and the length of tasks it can complete is doubling every seven months. AGI is on the horizon. And the US government is once again attempting to shape the future of tech through regulation. It’s had limited success so far — and the pace of improvement means that it needs to decide its next steps relatively soon.
