A Moment to Talk About AI
Why frontier AI labs need binding rules, and why the generation that understands these systems must help write them — a follow-up to the WAIRO proposal, written against the events of September 2026.
A year after the WAIRO proposal, the people building frontier AI systems started saying much the same thing. This essay takes that as its starting point.
It works through four things: what researchers inside the frontier labs have said publicly about pacing and alignment; why the risks are no longer hypothetical, taking the reward-hacking incident OpenAI disclosed in July 2026 as the example; what legislatures actually did this year, from the EU’s Digital Omnibus deferral to Executive Order 14365 and the money now being spent on state-level pre-emption in the US; and why the variables that should decide who writes these rules are technical fluency, time horizon and who bears the consequences — not age.
It closes on four concrete asks: binding synchronised pacing rules, early-career seats on scientific advisory bodies, mandatory independent technical testimony before votes, and legal protection for researchers who speak.