AI Doesn’t Need a Permission Slip From the Same Elites Who Broke the Internet

Opinion | Valeria Rios | Shadowfetch Right

The next great technology fight is not “humans versus machines.” That is the bumper-sticker version, useful mostly for politicians who want a microphone and industries that want protection. The real fight is whether artificial intelligence becomes another closed clubhouse run by Big Tech lawyers, regulators, legacy media bosses, and credentialed scolds — or whether it becomes a tool that small businesses, independent creators, parents, churches, tradesmen, coders, and startups can actually use.

My conservative answer is simple: protect property rights, punish theft and fraud, harden our digital defenses, and then get the government out of the way of builders.

That is not the same thing as “let the AI companies do whatever they want.” Please. I was raised around small business, not venture-capital fairy dust. A free market is not a permission slip for giants to scrape, copy, censor, collude, or hide behind 900-page terms of service. But it is also not a permission slip for government to turn every new tool into a licensing maze that only Google-sized companies can afford to navigate.

Today’s news gives us the whole mess in miniature. In Australia, Labor MP Ed Husic warned that weakening copyright law to benefit AI companies would go against Labor’s ethos and undermine “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” according to The Guardian’s July 14 live coverage. The same report noted his warning that AI companies “can’t be trusted to regulate themselves.” That concern is not crazy. Copyright is property. Work has value. If a novelist, photographer, journalist, musician, designer, or software developer builds something, Silicon Valley does not get to put on a hoodie and declare it communal feedstock.

But conservatives should be careful here, because the policy trap is obvious. The left hears “AI companies can’t be trusted” and too often jumps straight to bureaucracy: commissions, compliance boards, ministerial discretion, speech codes, licensing gates, algorithm audits written by people who have never shipped a product, and “safety” regimes that somehow always end with incumbents safer than competitors. That is how you get a market where the biggest companies pay the toll, small competitors die in the paperwork, and consumers are told this is progress.

No thanks.

A serious right-of-center AI policy starts with ownership. If AI companies use copyrighted work in ways that violate the law, courts should decide real cases, Congress should clarify narrow rules where needed, and licensing markets should develop without bureaucrats picking winners. If creators want to license training data, let them. If publishers want to block crawlers, enforce that. If companies lie about provenance, punish the fraud. But do not create a national AI priesthood where every startup needs a permission slip before it can build a model, deploy an assistant, summarize documents, or automate a workflow.

The conservative line is not “Big Tech good, artists bad.” It is “property rights good, cartel regulation bad.” Those are different things, and Washington needs to relearn the difference before it accidentally hands the AI future to the same handful of companies it claims to distrust.

The automation panic has the same problem. A Washington Examiner report today described a joint statement signed by almost 200 AI and economic experts warning that AI may become “radically more powerful over the next 10 years” and could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but faster. The report also noted the upside: possible productivity gains, higher living standards, and wealth creation.

That is the part our politics keeps muffling. America should not treat productivity like a public-health emergency. Productivity is how working families get cheaper goods, better services, safer jobs, more flexible work, and new businesses that were impossible ten years earlier. The Industrial Revolution was disruptive. So was the personal computer. So was the smartphone. So was cloud computing. Every time, the managerial class predicted mass helplessness, and every time, ordinary Americans adapted faster than the experts expected — when policy did not choke them first.

The right answer to AI disruption is not a universal basic income hammock, a federal “pause,” or a permanent subsidy program for yesterday’s business model. It is pro-worker capitalism: portable benefits, aggressive skills training, school choice that includes technical pathways, tax rules that reward investment, and a regulatory climate where a laid-off bookkeeper can become an AI-enabled solo operator instead of waiting six months for a state-approved credential.

If you want workers to survive automation, give them ownership, tools, and mobility. Do not trap them inside legacy institutions and call it compassion.

And while the political class obsesses over theoretical AI harms, the real cyber battlefield is already sitting in American homes and small offices. Ars Technica reported today that the federal government is warning users of home and small-office routers to secure their devices as Russian state hackers continue compromising them to disguise attacks on public and private targets. The report cites CISA saying Russian FSB Center 16 actors exploit poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices worldwide, and that governments including Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom joined the advisory.

That story matters because it exposes the weakness in elite tech politics. Washington loves grand speeches about “AI safety,” but millions of families and small businesses are still running outdated routers with weak passwords, old firmware, exposed services, and no clue that their hardware can be turned into someone else’s attack infrastructure. Digital sovereignty is not only about semiconductor subsidies and AI summits. It is also about whether the family restaurant, the church office, the local accountant, and the machine shop can secure the box blinking under the desk.

A conservative technology agenda should be patriotic and practical: secure the networks, open the markets, defend property, punish fraud, and stop outsourcing the future to bureaucrats or monopolists.

That means no lazy libertarianism where Big Tech is trusted just because it is private. Conservatives should not be their fan club.

But it also means no European-style regulatory cosplay where every innovation is presumed guilty until cleared by committees. America did not become a technology leader by asking permission from the people most afraid of losing control.

So yes, make AI companies answer for real copyright violations. Yes, require truthful disclosures when systems impersonate people, fabricate evidence, or handle sensitive data. Yes, enforce privacy promises. Yes, break up illegal collusion and anticompetitive conduct. Yes, harden routers, cloud systems, app stores, and critical infrastructure against foreign adversaries.

Then let builders build.

The future should not belong only to Big Tech, Big Government, and Big Credential. It should belong to Americans with laptops, garages, storefronts, classrooms, churches, family businesses, and enough freedom to turn new tools into real prosperity. That is the conservative technology bet: not blind trust in machines, but confidence in free citizens.

AI does not need a permission slip from the same elites who broke the internet. It needs law, competition, property rights, security — and room to run.

Sources

• The Guardian, July 14, 2026: “Hanson’s meeting with UK far-right activist will ‘play out poorly’, Coalition MP says – as it happened,” including Ed Husic’s comments on AI companies and copyright: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2026/jul/14/australia-news-live-nt-police-peter-falconio-anthony-albanese-ai-artificial-intelligence-copyright-antisemitism-royal-commission-bondi-universities-ntwnfb
• Ars Technica, July 14, 2026: “The US government warns that Russia state hackers are coming after your router”: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/the-us-government-warns-that-russia-state-hackers-are-coming-after-your-router/
• Washington Examiner, July 14, 2026: “Top economists and AI leaders warn of ‘unprecedented transformation’”: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/4646940/top-economists-ai-leaders-warn-unprecedented-transformation/

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