The most effective systems of control rarely arrive wearing jackboots. They arrive wrapped in reassuring language about innovation, security, and public safety.

In a blistering critique of the Trump administration’s new artificial intelligence executive order, economist and commentator Jeffrey Wernick argues that Washington is quietly constructing something far more consequential than a technology policy: a framework for government-managed access to the most powerful AI systems ever created. Not through outright bans or formal licensing requirements, but through classified thresholds, privileged partnerships, and incentives that make resistance increasingly irrational.

At the center of Wernick’s warning is a troubling reality. The government insists it is not creating an AI licensing regime while simultaneously empowering the National Security Agency to determine—through secret benchmarks—which models qualify as “covered frontier models” and therefore warrant government scrutiny before public release. In Wernick’s view, this transforms the rules of technological development from transparent regulation into something more elusive: invisible power exercised through discretion rather than law.

The result, he argues, is the emergence of a new surveillance-industrial complex, where intelligence agencies, military priorities, and corporate technology giants become increasingly intertwined. Unlike traditional forms of state coercion, this system does not compel compliance at gunpoint. Instead, it restructures the marketplace so thoroughly that cooperation becomes profitable and dissent becomes costly.