Physical vs. Nonphysical Governance

Governance of physical assets and governance of nonphysical assets face fundamentally different challenges. The challenges to governing nonphysical assets are far greater.

Physical assets (fissile materials, delivery systems, cell cultures, hardware) can be monitored, tracked, controlled, and restricted. Nuclear nonproliferation works because you can monitor enrichment facilities and weapons tests.

Nonphysical assets (scientific knowledge, algorithms, software, model weights) resist these controls. Export restrictions on encryption software ultimately failed because the underlying knowledge couldn’t be contained. Motivated users who wanted strong encryption could still acquire it.

This matters for AI because the end products of AI development, model weights, code, architectures, are nonphysical. If governance mechanisms substantially depend on controlling these assets, history suggests they will fail.

The pattern: when protection of nonphysical assets fails, that failure is irreversible. And dedicated R&D can always reach the same outcome independently.

Related: 05-atom—consensus-erosion-pattern, 07-atom—collingridge-dilemma