Compute governance
Governing the hardware that trains frontier systems rather than the software.
What it commits you to
Compute governance targets the input side: chips, clusters, and the power to train at scale. Its appeal is that training compute is countable, which makes thresholds verifiable in principle. Its weakness is that capability is no longer a function of compute alone — algorithmic efficiency and data quality trade against each other, so a fixed FLOP threshold buys a moving boundary.
Which realms lean on this
Procedure, not conviction. This is the vocabulary of constitutions, audits and the people who have to sign.
governance · 2 realms — The Contractual Court, The Ubuntu Weave.
Canon that discusses this
modern · 2002
No Future Without a Past
Tutu argues from ubuntu — that a person becomes fully human through relationship with other people — to a politics of shared responsibility rather than blame. The formulation that matters for a governance question is the negative one: a future without the past that made it is not a future anyone can build on. The excerpt below paraphrases the essay rather than quoting it.
modern · 1950
The Human Use of Human Beings
Wiener applies the theory of feedback and control to law, politics and medicine, and argues that communication is more fundamental than command. The book that gave cybernetics its name in 1948 becomes, two years later, the founding text of the ethics of steering large systems without crushing what they steer. The excerpt below paraphrases the book rather than quoting it.
See also
Export controls
governanceNational restrictions on shipping advanced chips and related technology across borders.
Capability threshold
governanceA pre-specified level of capability that triggers an obligation or a prohibition.
Arms race dynamics
governanceThe pattern in which each party's precautions are read by the other as a threat.
Open weights
governanceReleasing model parameters publicly, which makes irreversible capability available to anyone.