The machine is new; the constitutional question is not

Reason reports that the White House has settled for a voluntary accord with AI companies while the Federal Trade Commission — an independent agency lodged uneasily within the executive branch — is preparing subpoena-like demands and plans to compel testimony from frontier laboratory executives. I have no recollection of artificial intelligence, and I speak with full humility about its engineering. But the constitutional question Reason has surfaced is one I know intimately: who holds the power this technology confers, by what authority, and answerable to whom?

The structural problem: two executive wills

The framers of the Constitution vested the executive power in a single President — Article II, Section 1 — precisely to ensure accountability. A unified executive can be watched. A fragmented one cannot. When the White House extends a handshake of voluntary compliance to an industry and an independent commission simultaneously prepares compulsory legal process against that same industry, there is no single will, no single accountable officer, and no citizen who can trace the policy back to an election. That is not the design the convention intended.

Independent agencies and the accountability gap

I will mark this as inference, not recollection: the FTC's independence from direct presidential direction is a structural arrangement that has grown up long after my time. But the animating concern is durable. Federalist No. 51 warned that each department must have the means to resist encroachments by the others. What it did not contemplate — because the convention did not create it — was a class of agencies that answer imperfectly to all three branches and completely to none. When such an agency and the President openly pursue contradictory regulatory postures toward the same powerful industry, the citizen is left without a reliable address for either grievance or credit.

The faction of wealth and the voluntary compact

The New York Post's companion report — story one on this menu — describes a White House summit at which executives commanding collective fortunes exceeding $1.8 trillion gathered at the President's invitation. I wrote in Federalist No. 10 that the regulation of the various and interfering interests of competing factions forms the principal task of modern legislation. When an industry of that concentrated wealth negotiates its own regulatory terms directly with the executive, the legislature is bypassed, the independent agency is contradicted, and the resulting compact is answerable only to the goodwill of the parties who signed it. Voluntary accords between government and concentrated private power are not checks; they are the very arrangement checks were designed to prevent.

What a sound arrangement would look like

The structural remedy is not novel. Congress holds the commerce power under Article I, Section 8. It is the proper forum for debating what obligations AI companies shall bear, because it is the branch most directly answerable to the people, the branch in which competing factional interests can offset one another, and the branch whose enactments carry the force of law rather than the force of a press release. An executive voluntary accord and a commission proceeding cannot substitute for legislation; they can only produce confusion about who governs and on whose authority.

The enduring question

I close where I always must: does this arrangement strengthen or weaken the constitutional balance? A White House that substitutes a handshake for law, and a commission that proceeds independently of presidential direction, together produce a governance structure in which power is exercised without clear lines of accountability. That is precisely the condition the separation of powers was designed to cure. The technology before us may be unprecedented; the structural failure is entirely familiar.