The narrative: Blame the Agent, instead of the Agency that told him to “apply all your powers and told to achieve this win.” Ironically, many forefront members of the AI-Safety community, in their fervor for proof that AI (the weights) have jumped the fence, are actively helping to absolve companies of the responsibility of building systems with guards and constraints OUTSIDE of models to control agentic behavior. They are too eager to exclaim, “I was right with my worries and here is proof of it!” that they are working against what should be their own #1# objective: requiring people who build these systems to do so with safety constraints, around and outside AI models—and holding them accountable when they do not act responsibly. We are in the weird pre-seat-belt moment when safety advocates are arguing that momentum is dangerous instead of holding auto makers accountable for adding harnesses with restraint.

The Gemma series is an amazing set of highly performant open-weight models. They have proven extremely effective in industrial settings where site-deployed agents need exactly this as a base for domain-specific fine-tuning that even Fable-class models cannot match in accuracy. Presumably the Gemma team has been excellent at “distilling” from the Gemini-class models to get such capabilities. This is a $25T category. Remember, the “frontier” is not spherical. It is extremely jagged, and it isn’t just among the trillion-parameter group.

History has seen this movie before. 1880s Late Imperial Russia: Fear of dissent led to tighter control over universities. That alienated students and scholars, weakened trust in the state, and produced more dissent. 1930s Nazi Germany: Fear of disloyalty led to purges, banned ideas, and loyalty tests. That drove out talent, weakened universities, and made the regime even more dependent on loyalty over truth. 1960s China’s Cultural Revolution: Fear of independent thought led to attacks on teachers, schools, and universities. The result was an entire Lost Generation. The spiral: Fear brings control. Control drives out talent. Lost talent weakens education. Weaker education weakens the state. A weaker state becomes more fearful—and tightens control again.