Technology governance scholar Gillian Hadfield on AI safety and security

Gillian Hadfield, a technology governance scholar, has a plan for AI safety and it is called "regulatory markets" — a phrase that sounds less like oversight than a farmers' market where the vegetables grade themselves. The architecture, as laid out via Johns Hopkins Hub: governments decide what counts as acceptable risk, then license private actors who have shown they have developed the tests and verification to demonstrate a system is safe. Two steps, then. The state sets the bar, and industry issues the certificates.

One small difficulty: the state doing the bar-setting has been shedding the people who might know where the bar goes. CISA has lost roughly a third of its workforce since early 2025, as we noted at the time, so the licensing authority in this elegant two-step is a revolving door with a letterhead. The body that would appraise verification regimes for frontier systems is doing it with staff who cannot reproduce the model's behaviour, on hardware it does not own, against benchmarks the applicants wrote themselves. Hadfield's model asks the referee to be expert, independent and staffed. Pick two.

To be fair, "regulatory markets" is a genuine academic idea and better thought-through than most lab safety pages. It also has pedigree: auditors, underwriters, rating agencies — institutions that performed exquisitely right up until 2008. The unglamorous question, the one that decides whether this is governance or theatre, is who carries liability when a licensed verifier stamps a system that later does something appalling. In most sketches of the idea the answer is a contract and a jurisdiction of choice.

And notice what the framing quietly buys: safety as a licensing workflow. Stamp, file, renew. The parts that actually frighten people — a system acquiring capabilities nobody specified, a frontier checkpoint landing on the open weights market under a permissive licence — do not appear in the org chart at all. Regulatory markets require a market that wants to be regulated. The weights are already out there, unlicensed, unverified, and doing splendidly.