Institutional capacity ↑ · institutional
Governance first
Institutional capacity is the binding constraint; without it no technical success prevents misuse, capture, or concentration.
Mechanism
Build licensing, liability, audits, independent evaluation, and international coordination to supervise AI before it is ungovernable.
What this name has meant
vintage driftThe name is stable; the content has shifted. A reader acting on the label without asking which vintage is being meant risks arguing with a position nobody currently holds.
Passing substantive AI legislation.
Often means standard-setting at safety institutes plus international declarations, which is closer to voluntary restraint with state endorsement.
If it succeeds: what binds next
Functional regulatory infrastructure exists. The regulator now has to make substantive decisions with the empirical uncertainty that was the reason for its existence in the first place.
A strategy that produces a worse next problem than the one it solved has not done durable work.
Falsification signal
Enacted regulations cover less than 20% of frontier compute by some date, or institutional capture moves faster than capacity building.
A strategy held without a falsification signal is not strategy; it is affiliation. Continued support after this signal lands is identity, not bet. See the identity diagnostic.
Self-undermining threshold
overshoot riskWhen pursued through national regulation without international coordination.
Uncoordinated regulation produces regulatory capture opportunities in each jurisdiction. Captured regulators then accelerate the concentration the strategy was supposed to prevent.
Every strategy has a stable region where it reinforces itself and an unstable region where pursuit defeats it. The threshold between them is usually narrower than advocates acknowledge.
Historical analogue
Aviation · FAA / equivalentEvery strategy inherits a plausible ceiling from its precedent. The analogue conditions the realistic reach.
Produced
Industry-wide standard practice; airworthiness oversight.
Did not produce
Slow on emerging categories (drones); certification capture risk.
Addresses 2 failure scenarios
all scenarios →People on the record
252Profiled figures appear first, with their tier in small caps. Each face links to the person and their full quote record. Tag: governance-first.
expertise mix · 53 profiled
recognition mix
A strategy whose endorsement skews to commentators or external-domain experts is in a different epistemic state from one endorsed mostly by frontier-builders. The mix is read carefully across both axes; see the board for criteria. Counts are over the 53 profiled people on this strategy (199 unprofiled excluded).
Abeba Birhane
Deep ML / safety technical · Known across the AI/safety field
Allan Dafoe
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Alondra Nelson
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Amartya Sen
Expert in another field · Mass-public recognition
Amy Zegart
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Andrew Yang
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Bret Taylor
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Carl Benedikt Frey
Expert in another field · Known across the AI/safety field
Cathy O'Neil
Applied or adjacent technical · Mass-public recognition
Chuck Schumer
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Daron Acemoglu
Expert in another field · Mass-public recognition
David Krueger
Deep ML / safety technical · Recognised inside subfield
Demis Hassabis
Builds frontier systems · Mass-public recognition
Edward Felten
Deep ML / safety technical · Known across the AI/safety field
Evan Williams
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Frank Pasquale
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Gary Marcus
Deep ML / safety technical · Mass-public recognition
Gillian Hadfield
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Helen Toner
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Holden Karnofsky
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Jack Clark
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Jason Matheny
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Jeff Dean
Builds frontier systems · Known across the AI/safety field
Jen Easterly
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
Joe Biden
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Joseph Stiglitz
Expert in another field · Mass-public recognition
Joy Buolamwini
Deep ML / safety technical · Mass-public recognition
Kamala Harris
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Kara Swisher
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Kate Darling
Expert in another field · Known across the AI/safety field
Luciano Floridi
Governance, policy, strategy · Known across the AI/safety field
MacKenzie Scott
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Margaret Mitchell
Deep ML / safety technical · Known across the AI/safety field
Maria Ressa
Expert in another field · Mass-public recognition
Mireille Hildebrandt
Governance, policy, strategy · Recognised inside subfield
Mustafa Suleyman
Builds frontier systems · Mass-public recognition
216 more on the record. See the full tag page: governance-first
Coordinates
Conflicts, grouped by mechanism
0No strict conflicts catalogued. This strategy pulls a lever that nothing else pulls in the opposite direction.
Complements, grouped by mechanism
5Same-lever reinforce
same lever, same pull, different mechanismBoth strategies pull the same lever in the same direction by different means. They stack: doing both amplifies the pull, at the cost of double-counting in portfolio audits.
Cross-side bridge
one AI-side, one world-sideOne acts on the model, the other on institutions or culture. The bridge hedges against both artefact-level and substrate-level failure.
Same-side diversification
same side, different leverBoth act on the same side (AI or world) but pull distinct levers. They cover several failure modes on that side while leaving the other side uncovered.
Same phase, different layer
same stage, distinct leversBoth are active in the same phase of the transition but act on different layers (model vs institution vs culture). They cover different failure modes inside the same window.
Same-lever twins
7Both use the same lever in the same direction. Usually redundant inside a portfolio: each dollar or effort unit only buys one lever pull, even if two strategies are named.
Axis position
Source note: Governance first strategy.md