Who governs the machine?

According to CNBC's reporting, Representative Chip Roy appeared on Squawk Box and staked out a position that is, at least in its instinct, constitutionally sound: Congress ought to hold hearings on artificial intelligence, even if he is not eager for additional layers of regulation. That instinct deserves to be taken seriously — and then pressed much harder than he may have intended.

The framers of the Constitution gave Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states precisely because they understood that transformative economic forces, left without a designated sovereign, do not remain ungoverned. They simply find a different governor — usually the one with the most concentrated power and the least accountability. Article I, Section 8 exists not because the convention trusted legislators above all others, but because it trusted no single actor with uncontested dominion over the forces that shape common life.

Artificial intelligence is, on the constitutional question, analogous to what a standing army was in my own time: a concentration of capability so consequential that one must ask — before asking anything else — who commands it, under what grant of authority, and with what check upon their discretion. I cannot speak to the engineering of these systems; I was not alive to observe them, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the constitutional question needs no technical expertise. It is the oldest question in republican government.

Roy's caution about regulation is understandable. Premature or poorly designed rules can calcify the advantages of incumbents, suppress competition, and inadvertently transfer power from many actors to few. Federalist No. 10 warns precisely of this: factions — including factions of industry — will always seek to capture the mechanisms of governance for their own benefit. A regulation written by those it is meant to govern is no regulation at all.

Yet the answer to bad regulation is not no oversight. It is accountable oversight. If Congress declines to assert its Article I role — through hearings, through the power of the purse, through legislation that assigns clear authority and clear liability — it does not produce a neutral outcome. It produces a vacuum. And vacuums in governance are filled: by executive agencies acting on delegated power whose scope is contested, by private platforms wielding the reach of a sovereign without any of a sovereign's obligations, or by foreign actors unburdened by our Constitution at all.

Roy is correct that Congress should hold hearings. He should be pressed to go further: hearings without defined authority and defined accountability are theater, not oversight. The structural question is not whether artificial intelligence is good or bad. It is whether the arrangement of power that AI enables — over information, over labor, over the instruments of persuasion — will be answerable to the people's representatives or to no one at all. On that question, silence from Congress is not restraint. It is abdication.