John Colantoni

Policy Advisor to @govdanmckee /@bryantuniv alum. Golf enthusiast and expert 3-putter.

[Sam Altman @sama]

i want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and i am glad to see this

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

"But the fact of the matter is: The American people already benefit from the success of AI, whether that’s individuals using chatbots, banks using it for fraud detection, doctors using it to fight diseases, small-business owners using it to help with bookkeeping and marketing..."

[Mike Bloomberg @MikeBloomberg]

The government taking ownership stakes in AI companies would corrupt regulation, stifle innovation and competition, and endanger free speech and democracy.

Both Democrats and Republicans should reject it. Read more in @opinion: https://t.co/VtAMH3UFhF

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

Meanwhile NY has banned construction of new data centers.

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: https://t.co/R1nULCbFxr has completed a 1 gigawatt data center housing only Chinese-made chips, per Bloomberg.

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

I think @RyanFedasiuk hits the nail on the head here: "China’s model weights may be free, but the infrastructure required to run them is still incredibly costly. This matters enormously for U.S. strategy."
https://t.co/wwOcR4AmwV

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Some observations on Kimi:

1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run.

2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China.

3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.

4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.

5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.

6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

“I’m calling for a moratorium on mechanized agriculture; it must benefit all of humanity, not just a few oligarchs.”

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

@curl_justin @AnthropicAI Congrats Justin!

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

"The bottom line: Yapping authentically may get harder and harder in an AI world." Felt this deeply, as a yapper myself. @MadisonMills22 https://t.co/NDsRisBeGl #axiosai

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

China, Russia and Others Seek to Inflame Debate Over A.I. Data Centers https://t.co/ZURvcu9p7G

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

@NatPurser @AlecStapp @Miles_Brundage @AVERIorg Congrats!

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

“Uber was impossible without the smartphone, which itself was enabled by GPS, which was enabled by satellites, which were enabled by rockets, which were enabled by combustion techniques, which were enabled by language and fire.” @mustafasuleyman

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

Grateful to be a citizen of the greatest republic the world has ever known. 🇺🇸

[Nat Purser @NatPurser]

it’s never too late to read langston hughes’ “let america be america again.”

250 years of people trying, failing, fighting to bring back our mighty dream again. what a miracle, to be a part of it. 🇺🇸

[Matthew McConaughey @McConaughey]

America:
Forged by lofty ideals and the down and dirty fight.
May the right recognize the ideals and left the fight.

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

This is awesome

[Samuel Hammond 🦉 @hamandcheese]

OpenAI is reportedly considering donating 5% equity to the US government, potentially via a new "Public Wealth Fund" modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund.

They claim to want other AGI companies to participate too, but in practice this has the potential to become the most egregious case of "picking winners" in the history of human civilization.

Trump would likely want the equity to flow into the "sovereign wealth fund" he initiated by executive order last year but which is still unimplemented. He previously toyed using the fund to buy TikTok, while the admin has not shyed away from taking direct stakes in dozens of companies through other means, including noneconomic "golden shares" in US Steel. More generally, Trump has repeated said that he sees a sovereign wealth fund as a solution to the national debt, implying that he wants USG to take direct ownership in companies like OpenAI, not distribute shares to US households. Every AI safety reg, export control, procurement standard, antitrust action, etc., would have an embedded fiscal conflict, biasing all subsequent federal AI policy to the interests of one firm.

Even if shares were distributed to households, without equal participation from other AGI companies, every US household would suddenly have a financial preference for OpenAI over its competition. 5% equity is a cheap price for an incumbency moat.

At the same time, there's a legitimate argument for giving citizens exposure to the upside of AGI given its transformative potential; for power concentration reasons; and to help solve for post-AGI distributional issues.

If we are to go down this path at all, I'd rather Congress charter a passive trust with a narrow mandate to capture broad AI/AGI upside for citizens while avoiding favoritism. It could look ETF-like for liquid investments with a private sleeve for holding warrants, revenue-participations, etc., in covered frontier labs, at least until they IPO. The tricky part would be defining objective thresholds to remove discretion in which companies get indexed and at what weight, e.g. GDM would need to be valued as a standalone business unit.

This is all unnecessarily complicated, though. OpenAI and Anthropic should just go public and let ordinary investors own whatever they want, then use windfall tax revenues to subsidize accounts for households without savings.

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

Whoever designed the illustration for this morning’s Axios AI+ Government newsletter deserves a raise. This is so cool. @ashleyrgold

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Great news! But we have no idea what Anthropic did to make the models “safe,” what commitments Anthropic has made going forward, and whether or how any of this applies to other frontier models in the government’s licensing queue. We know that GPT 5.6 is in that queue, but it’s fair to assume that other model developers are at least in early stages of submitting their models.

This opacity will not lend itself well to a stable, investable, trustworthy industry over time. But USG needn’t figure all this out in a day, and a two-week review timeline is not insane in the grand scheme of things. The status quo is not tenable, but we made progress today: the Anthropic models are available worldwide. That progress is just a first step, but it is worthy of applause nonetheless.

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

So.. does the Fable token-based usage credit start right away when it comes back or do we get a grace period?

[John Colantoni @john_colantoni]

The two best AI models in the entire world are sitting away in a shelf. I don’t think that’s the future we want.