MILLERMAN SCHOOL
Carl Schmitt and the open/closed question
These are the notes I spoke from, the passages I read, the quotations I collected while preparing, and the books behind all of it. The talk was built to be argued with, so the three questions I put to the room are here too.
A German jurist of the last century, a Nazi, who wrote on constitutional theory and political romanticism. The permission to use him for cross-domain mapping comes, if it is needed, from Peter Thiel, who discusses Schmitt's katechon (the restraining power) and his themes of the state of emergency in "The Straussian Moment."
Schmitt's most famous work is The Concept of the Political. Its argument: the political is the friend/enemy distinction. Liberalism concealed it. Liberalism can tend toward wars more intense than ever, because it dehumanizes the enemy, and it can also tend toward a world without war, where man is entertained and amused. Schmitt wanted to reassert the position of the enemy, existential depth, the way-of-life question.
There is already something like a political dispute over open source: within the US between open and closed positions, and geopolitically over Chinese open source as a threat, and over American open and closed source as necessary for American supremacy. We have friends and enemies, and the best AI is the surest way to help the one and hurt the other. That is Polemarchus's definition of justice in the Republic.
Two things from Schmitt's Political Theology. First, that the significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts: the exception in law is akin to the miracle in theology, since a miracle interrupts the natural order and the exception interrupts the legal order. That gives a method of theological analogizing, which Thiel also uses when he writes about antichrist, apocalypse, and the medieval priority of intellect over will. Second, the sentence: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The law cannot anticipate its own suspension, so we need to know who decides. For open-source models, the debate is about where to draw a line: between what can safely be released and what should remain in reserve, seen from one side, or between what can safely be entrusted to centralizing authorities and what should remain freely distributed, seen from the other.
Each century had a central domain: theology in the sixteenth, metaphysics in the seventeenth, morality in the eighteenth, economics in the nineteenth, technology in the twentieth. Each step was an attempt to move away from a field of battle onto neutral territory, and each new neutral domain ended up repoliticized. I would add that each repoliticization, at its most intense, is also a re-theologization. Technology was supposed to be the ultimate neutral ground. Schmitt says it is not: it serves everyone, and precisely for that reason it is a weapon for everyone, and no political decision can be derived from it. Whoever invokes humanity cheats.
if you think great power should be held in reserve by a caretaking authority
"We were wrong. Flat out, we were wrong. If you believe, as we do, that at some point, AI — AGI — is going to be extremely, unbelievably potent, then it just does not make sense to open-source. It is a bad idea… I fully expect that in a few years it's going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise."
Ilya Sutskever, 2023
The closed lab as custodian of absolute power, and as the great restrainer that protects against the unleashing of a destructive force.
if you think dispersion better protects freedom and the other principles you cherish
"The future has to be open source, if nothing else, for reasons of cultural diversity, democracy, diversity. We need a diverse AI assistant for the same reason we need a diverse press."
Yann LeCun, 2024 — open-source liberalism
"Will AI be a tool of dominance, or a force for empowerment? We choose the future where AI is built by the many and for the many."
Arthur Mensch, Mistral, 2026 — open-source democracy
Open source as Reformation. The vernacular weights, legible to all, distributed to all. No intermediary between man and scripture, or the models.
All from The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929) unless marked otherwise, in the Schwab and Konzen translation printed with the expanded edition of The Concept of the Political.
The religious belief in technologyConcepts are existential"Already in the 19th century technical progress proceeded at such an astonishing rate, even as did social and economic situations as a consequence, that all moral, political, social, and economic situations were affected. Given the overpowering suggestion of ever new and surprising inventions and achievements, there arose a religion of technical progress which promised all other problems would be solved by technological progress. This belief was self-evident to the great masses of the industrialized countries. They skipped all intermediary stages typical of the thinking of intellectual vanguards and turned the belief in miracles and an afterlife — a religion without intermediary stages — into a religion of technical miracles, human achievements, and the domination of nature. A magical religiosity became an equally magical technicity. The twentieth century began as the age not only of technology but of a religious belief in technology."
Concepts are polemical — from The Concept of the Political"All concepts of the spiritual sphere, including the concept of spirit, are pluralistic in themselves and can only be understood in terms of concrete political existence. Just as every nation has its own concept of nation and finds the constitutive characteristics of nationality within itself, so every culture and cultural epoch has its own concept of culture. All essential concepts are not normative but existential. If the center of intellectual life has shifted in the last four centuries, so have all concepts and words. It is thus necessary to bear in mind the ambiguity of every concept and word."
"…all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result (which manifests itself in war or revolution) is a friend-enemy grouping, and they turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions when this situation disappears. Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on, are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term. Above all the polemical character determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as nonpolitical (in the sense of harmless), or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to portray oneself as nonpolitical (in the sense of purely scientific, purely moral, purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities) and thereby superior."
Apply this to the words "open source," "closed source," and "frontier." Treat the whole vocabulary as polemical rather than neutral, and ask who is being combated, refuted, or negated by each term.
Is supporting open source because of cultural diversity a political position or a post-political one? There is a defence of open source that sees it as good because it de-politicizes, and the flip side of that defence sees closed source as political and therefore bad.
"The specific concepts of individual centuries also derive their meaning from the respective central domains. One example will suffice. The concept of progress, i.e., an improvement or completion (in modern jargon, a rationalization) became dominant in the eighteenth century, in an age of humanitarian-moral belief. Accordingly, progress meant above all progress in culture, self-determination, and education: moral perfection. In an age of economic or technical thinking, it is self-evident that progress is economic or technical progress. To the extent that anyone is still interested in humanitarian-moral progress, it appears as a byproduct of economic progress. If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain — they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved."
"In a theological age, everything runs smoothly if theological questions are in order; everything else is 'provided' by definition. The same is true of other ages."
What is our central domain? One answer: AI, and everything depends on getting it right, though what that means is in dispute. Another, which Alexander Dugin has recently suggested: eschatology, with AI as one of several competing versions of the end times. Either way, the open-source question is not a peripheral technical matter. It participates in the debate at the heart of the age.
"So far the hope that a politically dominant elite would develop out of the community of technical inventors has not been fulfilled."
Does AI, or whatever our central domain is, lack an intelligentsia and a politically dominant elite? Do the think pieces by the lab heads constitute one? And do supporters of open source want a politically dominant elite of open-source technologists, or should the technology be developed for the benefit of all, or of whichever group you want to benefit, without respect to intellectuals and political elites?
"Technology serves everyone, just as radio is utilized for news of all kinds or as the postal service delivers packages regardless of their contents, since its technology can provide no criterion for evaluating them."
"Unlike theological, metaphysical, moral, and even economic questions, which are forever debatable, purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them. They are easy to solve, and it is easily understandable why there is a tendency to take refuge in technicity from the inextricable problems of all other domains."
This explains part of the reaction whenever someone anthropomorphizes AI. When you anthropomorphize, as when you theologize, you signal a movement away from the technical domain and its neutrality, and you risk reintroducing the "forever debatable" issues that technology was supposed to sidestep.
Technology is not neutral"Technology is always only an instrument and weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral. No single decision can be derived from the immanence of technology, least of all for neutrality. Every type of culture, every people and religion, every war and peace can use technology as a weapon."
"The decision concerning freedom and slavery lies not in technology as such, which can be revolutionary or reactionary, can serve freedom or oppression, centralization or decentralization. Neither a political question nor a political answer can be derived from purely technical principles and perspectives."
Those for whom open source is something to be fought for, as part of a political project against centralization, already know this. But some couch their support of open source not only as against centralization but as for "all of humanity," and therefore as almost trivially, neutrally good. Schmitt's line from The Concept of the Political: whoever invokes humanity cheats. Thinking in terms of humanity means no longer acknowledging friend/enemy groupings. It suppresses the figure of the enemy. It is a depoliticization, even when it is directed against centralization and looks like a political position.
Collected while preparing. Attributions are as I recorded them; before you cite one, check it against the source.
"In truth, the great conflict over our megapolitical future is only just beginning. On the dimension of technology, the conflict has two poles: AI and crypto. Artificial Intelligence holds out the prospect of finally solving what economists call the 'calculation problem': AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy. It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian."
Peter Thiel, preface to The Sovereign Individual, 2020
"As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI should mean that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally OK to not share the science."
Ilya Sutskever, internal email, January 2016. Elon Musk replied: "Yup."
"Open-sourcing big models is like being able to buy nuclear weapons at Radio Shack."
Geoffrey Hinton, 2024
"The problem with open source is if something goes wrong you can't recall it. With a proprietary model if your bad actor starts using it in a bad way you can close the tap off… but once you open-source something there's no pulling it back. It's a one-way door, so you should be very sure when you do that."
Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind, 2024
"…if we just continue to open source absolutely everything for every new generation of frontier models, then it's quite likely that we're going to see a rapid proliferation of power. These are state-like powers which enable small groups of actors, or maybe even individuals, to have an unprecedented one-to-many impact in the world."
Mustafa Suleyman, 2023
"Today, an even greater risk than a naturally caused pandemic is that a non-government group will use open source AI tools to design a bioterrorism weapon."
Bill Gates, 2026
"We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source."
"If at some point however there's some qualitative change in what the thing is capable of, and we feel like it's not responsible to open source it, then we won't."
Mark Zuckerberg, 2024. The open side also reserves the exception.
"I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future."
Mark Zuckerberg, "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," July 2024
"I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy."
Sam Altman, Reddit AMA, January 2025, the week of DeepSeek R1
"There are large tech companies that would rather not have to try to compete with open source, so they're creating fear of AI leading to human extinction."
Andrew Ng, Australian Financial Review, October 2023
"To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, we should let AI be used to prevent bad people from doing bad things."
Marc Andreessen, "Why AI Will Save the World," June 2023
"The future has to be open source, if nothing else, for reasons of cultural diversity, democracy, diversity. We need a diverse AI assistant for the same reason we need a diverse press."
Yann LeCun, 2024
"Will AI be a tool of dominance, or a force for empowerment? We choose the future where AI is built by the many and for the many."
Arthur Mensch, Mistral, 2026
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, expanded edition, translated by George Schwab, with a foreword by Tracy B. Strong and notes by Leo Strauss. University of Chicago Press, 2007. This is the edition that includes The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929), translated by Matthias Konzen and John P. McCormick.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, translated by Ellen Kennedy. MIT Press, 1988. For the argument that liberalism converts the decision into an endless discussion.
Carl Schmitt, "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History" (1950), translated by Mario Wenning. Telos 147 (Summer 2009), 167–170. Four pages on the katechon, Löwith, and the Christian image of history.
ThielPeter Thiel, "The Straussian Moment," in Politics and Apocalypse, edited by Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Michigan State University Press, 2007.
Peter Thiel, preface to James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, 2020 edition. Simon & Schuster.
The repoliticization of technologyAlexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Crown Currency, 2025.
PlatoPlato, Republic, Book I, 331e–336a, for Polemarchus on justice as helping friends and harming enemies. Allan Bloom's translation, Basic Books.
Primary documents from the labsOpenAI, "Introducing OpenAI," December 11, 2015.
Sutskever to Brockman and Musk, January 2016, released in the exhibits to Musk v. OpenAI, March 2024.
OpenAI, "Better Language Models and Their Implications" (the GPT-2 staged-release announcement), February 14, 2019.
James Vincent, "OpenAI co-founder on company's past approach to openly sharing research: 'We were wrong,'" The Verge, March 15, 2023. The source of the Sutskever quotation.
Mark Zuckerberg, "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," Meta, July 23, 2024.
Sam Altman, Reddit AMA, January 31, 2025.
US Department of Commerce, NTIA, Dual-Use Foundation Models with Widely Available Model Weights, July 2024.
In this order, if you have not read Schmitt before.
The Concept of the Political, the main text. About sixty pages. Read it for the friend/enemy distinction and for the sentence on humanity.
The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations, in the same volume. Fifteen pages. Everything in the second half of the talk is here.
Thiel, "The Straussian Moment." The reason a room of technologists can read Schmitt without apology.
Karp and Zamiska, The Technological Republic. A practitioner explicitly repoliticizing the central domain; read it against Schmitt on the neutral state.
Political Theology, chapters 1 and 3, for the sovereign and the exception and for the secularized-concepts thesis.
Then, for the ambitious: "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History," and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.