Structural Defenses Against AI-enabled Extreme Concentration of Power

Information is power. Centralised information concentrates power. AI makes abusing concentrated power easier. Decentralising information systems is therefore a direct structural defence against AI-enabled abuses of power. Currently, a handful of chokepoint hyperscalers hold the working knowledge of most democratic institutions: a single executive order, compromised vendor, or act of coercion can expose voter rolls, freeze allied states' operations, or hand an adversary a decisive intelligence advantage. RAIN (and applications built on it, like Grove) dissolve this chokepoint: no government or private actor can quietly tap data it has no right to see or quietly suppress data it must release. On RAIN, every institution can run its own Grove instance (and any other applications) with two orders of magnitude better availability than managed cloud services (experiments show less than three seconds of downtime per year on commodity hardware), cryptographic guarantees against tampering, and no vendor able to read or revoke content. Specifically, this enables much needed transparency and accountability for AI use in government (i.e. allowing the US Congress to audit how is the US executive branch is implementing and using AI) as well as structural check against mass surveillance.