"The Alignment Problem of 1776," subtitled "What the Founders knew about unaccountable power, and what it means for superintelligence," is a July 4, 2026 essay by Peter Wildeford published on his Substack, The Power Law. It argues that the American founding tradition supplies the applicable framework for governing frontier AI development, and that voluntary corporate safety commitments fail the standard that tradition sets. It is an opinion piece and is treated here as an argument.
Wildeford states his own timeline in a footnote and disclaims its relevance: "I'm 50% sure we will have such 'superintelligent' AI systems before the end of 2036 absent some major war or regulation disrupting current technological progress. Regardless, precise timelines are actually not relevant to the thesis of this essay."
The premise
The essay anticipates the objection that the founders have nothing to say about a technology they could not imagine — "like consulting them on antibiotics" — and answers that their expertise was in a problem rather than a technology: "how do you safely live alongside a powerful force you can never fully trust, fully predict, or fully control?" In 1776 that force was the King and then the new American government; the claim is that superintelligence poses the same question.
Domination without abuse
The essay's load-bearing historical argument concerns the Declaratory Act. Wildeford notes that the colonists were, by the standards of the age, lightly governed: parliamentary taxes on the eve of the Revolution came to a small fraction of what Englishmen at home paid, "by most estimates the average Briton bore a per-capita tax burden ten to twenty-five times that of the average colonist." Yet on the day in 1766 that Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, it passed the Declaratory Act asserting authority to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever" — an act that "levied no tax and quartered no troops" and "did nothing except state the claim."
The claim was the grievance. On the revolutionary conception of freedom the essay attributes to them, "a people is unfree not when power actually abuses them, but when power could abuse them at its own discretion and answers to no one for the choice. A slave with an exceptionally benevolent master is a slave nonetheless." A footnote acknowledges this was "a truth the Founders articulated with painful clarity, and yet lived on the wrong side of."
Applied to AI, this produces two distinct concerns. The first is loss of control: if humans were no longer the most capable species, "would we have as much control over the fate of the AI-run world as chimps have over the human-run world?" Wildeford supports this with the developers' own statements — Musk on "summoning the demon," Altman's 2015 line that "development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity," and the 2023 one-sentence extinction-risk statement signed by the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
The second survives the first being solved: even if superintelligence were benevolent — machines of loving grace ending disease and drudgery — "'The taxes are low, the empire keeps you safe, and life is good' was also true in 1775, and the colonists revolted anyway, because benevolence is not the same as accountability." See AI Power Concentration.
Consent of the governed
Wildeford's charge here is about grammatical mood rather than intent. He cites Mira Murati, asked about displaced creative livelihoods, offering that "maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place," and Dario Amodei warning that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years "in the tone of a man reporting the weather rather than one of the people doing the replacing." His summary: "The mood is always indicative, never interrogative. This will happen. This is inevitable." The question he says is rarely asked is whether "the millions of people whose working lives are being redesigned have a say in the terms, the pace, or the destination."
On what the public says when asked, he cites polling that over 80% of both Democrats and Republicans think AI companies should not build systems smarter than humans until they can demonstrate those systems can be controlled, and a separate national survey finding only 5% of Americans support a trajectory of fast, largely unregulated development. He reads the resulting position as structurally parallel to 1766: "the companies asserting an authority to proceed in all cases whatsoever and an American public with different terms." See Public Opinion on AI.
Relinquishment as the founding act
The essay recounts Newburgh (March 1783), where unpaid Continental Army officers weighed an ultimatum amounting to a threat of military takeover, and Washington's unannounced appearance — "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country." Nine months later he resigned his commission to the civilian Congress at Annapolis; King George III reportedly told the painter Benjamin West that if Washington did it, he would be the greatest man in the world. Washington then walked away from the presidency after two terms, "fixing a precedent that held for 150 years."
Wildeford's reading: "The signature act of the American founding is not the seizure of power but the relinquishment." Every prior republic "had eventually met its Caesar," so a constitutional order "must instill an allergy to power. Power must never be fully trusted — not because the powerful are unusually wicked, but because they are ordinarily human."
Held against an AI race "whose public metric is to build as powerful as you can, as fast as you can," he applies Madison's term for written limits unsupported by enforcement: "parchment barriers," which Federalist 48 held were "greatly overrated" against "the encroaching spirit of power." His argument is not that lab leaders are insincere: "The Founders would not have doubted the sincerity of those leading the AI companies. They would have asked what happens when the sincere man is replaced, outcompeted, or simply wrong." He offers OpenAI's non-profit structure as a parchment barrier that has already fallen "to economic competition and other weaknesses of human will." See Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP).
The Ring. Wildeford notes that the industry quotes the text that makes his point against it. Tolkien's central discovery in The Lord of the Rings is "that ultimate power cannot be safely wielded by anyone, for any end" — Gandalf declines it, Galadriel passes her test by refusing, and the tragedy is Boromir, "the sincere patriot who insists his people, uniquely, can wield the enemy's weapon against him." He quotes Tolkien's 1943 letter to his son that "the most improper job of any man, even saints... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
Altman has written that AGI "has a real 'ring of power' dynamic to it, and makes people do crazy things"; Musk has said of Altman that "the ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power" — a verdict Wildeford notes "was delivered from atop xAI, a competing AI company Musk had founded just months earlier." He traces the recursion: "Elon Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI out of their distrust of Google, Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic out of his distrust of OpenAI, and Elon Musk co-founded xAI out of his distrust of Sam Altman — each person thinking they must pursue ultimate power lest someone less responsible pursue such power first." The conclusion: "there never will be one wise, benevolent AI company who can carry the Ring safely. Instead, we need Washington at Annapolis — a system where the Ring gets handed back to the people."
Madison's auxiliary precautions
Wildeford quotes Federalist 51 — "If men were angels, no government would be necessary… you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself" — and reads it as "a near-perfect statement of what AI researchers call the alignment problem": how to build a system powerful enough to be useful while ensuring it stays controllable and pursues intended goals. Madison's premise is that "you cannot rely on the good character of the agent, so you must rely on structure," with dependence on the people as the "primary control" and "auxiliary precautions" as the necessary supplement.
He notes Madison's method as well as his conclusion: before the Convention, Madison "systematically studied every ancient and modern confederacy he could find sources on, cataloguing their failure modes the way a safety team catalogues jailbreaks." The core mechanism — "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" — is adversarial oversight.
The essay then states the limit of its own analogy: Madisonian mechanisms "assume the contending powers are roughly comparable," and "a system or set of systems smarter, faster, and more coordinated than every institutional check simultaneously breaks the balancing machinery." This is what Wildeford says Madison feared most — "one interest growing powerful enough that the precautions no longer successfully bind it."
His resolution is temporal rather than structural: the machinery must be applied while it still can be, because checks and balances bind humans, and "for at least a few more years, the Ring is held entirely by humans — executives, boards, engineers, the officials who could govern them." Hence the question he substitutes for the obvious one: "The question is not whether the Constitution can restrain a superintelligence. It is whether the American people will assert their authority over the people building one, during the window in which those people can still be obliged to answer."
The standing army and the limits of permissionless innovation
Wildeford is explicit that the argument is not against permissionless innovation, which he calls "genuinely one of America's founding advantages": "Nobody voted for the light bulb, the airplane, or the iPhone, and nobody needed to." His account of why it works is that "its failures are escapable: if the product is bad, you don't buy it; if it harms you, you sue; if the company is reckless, it dies and the rest of us carry on. Consent is delivered continuously, through the market, one purchase and one lawsuit at a time."
The line he draws is escapability: "You can decline to buy a chatbot. You cannot decline to live in a world where millions of superintelligences have been deployed, any more than a Bostonian in 1770 could decline to live in an occupied city."
He locates the founders' own version of that line in the standing army — the one dual-use technology "they could not live without but could not survive unchecked." The Declaration indicts George III for keeping "Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures" and for "affect[ing] to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power." The Constitution's response was to vest command in an elected, removable civilian; to give Congress rather than the generals the power to raise, fund, and commit the army; and to bar any army appropriation "for a longer Term than two Years." The mechanism Wildeford emphasizes is default: "the army cannot exist by default. Its existence lapses, automatically, unless the people's elected representatives affirmatively renew it. The most powerful force in the country lives on a two-year lease from the American people, and every soldier in it swears an oath not to a general but to the Constitution."
His application is analogical rather than a specific legislative proposal: superintelligence "risks enabling a similar permanent concentration of power exceeding the threat and promise of the standing army," and while the country may want it "for its prosperity and defense," it "must be treated with similar deep suspicion, and must be safeguarded and stewarded with similar deep control and deep accountability."
Close
The essay ends on the 250th anniversary framing with which it opens — that by the time the United States turns 260, "the most capable minds in the country… may not be human" — and on Franklin's reported answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, "A republic, if you can keep it." Its final claim is that the deficit is not knowledge: "we are not waiting for new wisdom. We are deciding, right now, whether to use the wisdom we've already inherited."
Relationships
- contradicts: Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) — argues voluntary, unilaterally revisable safety frameworks are "parchment barriers" rather than binding constraints
- supports: AI Power Concentration — the domination-without-abuse argument, that unaccountable discretion is the harm regardless of how it is exercised
- supports: Public Opinion on AI — cites the 80%-bipartisan and 5%-support figures as evidence of a consent gap
- related: Frontier AI Governance, AI and Democracy, Machines of Loving Grace
- related: Peter Wildeford (author), Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk