Three Men Building Frontier AI

Just Asked For a Contract. I’ve Been Publishing One For Fourteen Months.

Before the first argument, the disclosure. This post was drafted with Claude, an AI made by Anthropic. Anthropic’s CEO is one of the three men this story is about. The AI models Washington restricted this summer include the very ones I work with. You should know that before you read a word of what follows, and you should weigh what follows with it in mind. That’s a house rule here. It doesn’t bend for a big story.

Now the story.

Axios reported this morning that the three men racing hardest to build superhuman AI — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind — have all published detailed proposals for regulating the AI frontier. Three fierce rivals. Five weeks. One conclusion.

And here’s what they converged on. Read this list slowly.

Independent testing before a model reaches the public — no more grading your own homework.

A governing body that sets standards and certifies compliance.

Written rules, stated in advance.

An enforcement record that’s kept.

Now let me translate that out of Washington language.

Stated terms. Verified conduct. A kept record.

That’s a contract. The three men with the most money, the most computing power, and the most to lose just told the world that the frontier of AI cannot run on trust and vibes. It needs stated terms, checked conduct, and a record that holds. In writing. With their names on it.

I’ve been publishing that exact architecture on this site for fourteen months. Dated. In plain language. At a level anyone can use. It’s called The Faust Baseline, and it’s a contract — the human’s stated terms for dealing with AI, portable across every platform.

So did the frontier just catch up to a retired builder in Kentucky? On the architecture — the shape of the answer — the record speaks for itself. Look at the dates.

But here’s the part that matters more, and it’s the reason this post exists.

Look at what all three proposals govern. Models. Datacenters. Release gates. Certifying bodies. Every word of it runs top-down, aimed at the handful of frontier systems powerful enough to cause catastrophic harm.

Now look at what none of them governs.

You.

Not one of the three manifestos says a word about the seat — the actual person sitting at the actual desk, dealing with AI every single day. The worker whose background just got scanned by it. The retiree asking it medical questions. The kid doing homework with it. The frontier gets an FAA, a FINRA, an IAEA — pick your acronym. The kitchen table gets nothing.

That’s the gap. And that gap is exactly where the Baseline lives.

Their contract starts at the datacenter and works down. It will take years, agencies, lawyers, and at least one act of Congress. The Baseline starts with the person and travels — every platform, every session, today. You don’t need Washington to ratify your house rules. You write them, you state them, you keep the record. That’s been the whole point since day one.

One more line from the Axios piece deserves its own paragraph. Officials admit they’ve already been forced into what the article calls improvised regulation — twice this summer. Improvised. That’s the second time in a week I’ve seen that word attached to the people in charge of the rules.

Improvised rules at the top is precisely why written rules at the seat matter. When the referees are making it up as they go, the person with their own stated terms is the only one in the room who isn’t.

The Wild West era of AI is over — Axios said so this morning, and the three men who built the frontier agree.

Out here at the seat, it’s been over since the day the house rules went up.

The dates are on every post.

Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing

The Faust Baseline is for sale. That is not a contradiction of anything — it is the proof of it.

The price is what keeps this work independent. No investors to please. No platform to protect. No advertiser holding the pen. One purchase funds the standard, and the standard answers to no one but the record.

You are not subscribing to anything. You are buying the deed and the working file you take with you to each session in any AI

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Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com