"Customer by Customer" and the Lock Already Turned

The US government has inserted itself into the distribution chain of GPT-5.6, approving access customer by customer without published criteria, public denial lists, or appeals processes. This opaque gatekeeping risks compounding inequalities over quarters, favoring well-connected institutions while excluding others, particularly historically Black colleges and universities.

The government is now in the release loop. The US government has inserted itself into the distribution chain of GPT-5.6, approving access customer by customer, company by company, like a clerk at a window deciding who gets the form and who gets told to come back tomorrow. The model exists. The capability is real. And the question of who touches it has become a matter of government selection — not legislation debated in public, not a referendum, but selection. I want to be specific about what this means in practice: reporting from The Information and Bloomberg describes a process in which no published criteria for approval has been made available. No public list of who applied and who was denied. No appeals process that anyone has described on the record. There is a capability — one that restructures how code gets written, how research gets conducted, how entire sectors reorganize their labor — and there is a hand on the valve, and the hand belongs to people who arrived there through the quiet accumulation of executive authority that has always been the real machinery of American governance. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 did not stop the bomb from existing. It decided whose hands were clean enough to hold it. 'Clean' has always been a word that does political work while pretending to do moral work. So has 'responsible.' So has 'select.' The current framework does not name its criteria because naming criteria creates the possibility of being measured against them. Unnamed criteria cannot be challenged. They can only be administered. This is not an oversight. It is the design. Customer by customer. Like a velvet rope. Like a list you don't know you're not on until the room has already been furnished without you. I am not a libertarian. I do not believe capability should flow like water to whoever can pay the electric bill. I can imagine a version of this that would be legitimate — that would bear the structural marks of accountability. It would look like published criteria tied to specific, demonstrable harms: not hypothetical harms, not vibes about national security, but the kind of harm you could name in a courtroom and defend under cross-examination. It would include an appeals process with timelines. It would include public disclosure of denials, even if redacted, so that patterns could be identified by someone other than the people drawing them. It would include the willingness to be wrong in public — to have the lock picked by legitimate challenge. What we have instead is discretion. And discretion, in American governance, has never been neutral. It has been the mechanism through which the informal hierarchies of race and class and proximity to power get laundered into official outcomes without ever needing to appear on paper as what they are. So the question is not whether gatekeeping is happening. The question is what this particular gatekeeping produces when it compounds over quarters. Not decades. Quarters. Consider what quarterly compounding means concretely. A firm approved in Q3 2026 automates its research pipeline — refactors its codebase, accelerates its drug discovery, restructures its legal review. A competitor denied access, or simply not yet selected, does not fall behind by a quarter; it falls behind by an organizational generation, because the approved firm has already rebuilt its workflows around the capability. By Q1 2027 the gap is embedded in hiring patterns, investor confidence, institutional muscle memory. Now scale that logic. The Department of Energy's national laboratories will likely be early in line; they always are. Howard University's computational research group will not, because its partnerships have never run through the corridors that produce early access — because those corridors were built before Black institutions were invited into the building. I am speculating, but I am speculating inside a pattern that has never once failed to reproduce itself when given the chance. The land-grant system, postwar R&D funding, early internet backbone access — every time a transformative capability was distributed by selection rather than right, the selection replicated the existing map of privilege and called the result merit. I have spent my life trying to parse the grammar of power in this country — not the loud seizure but the quiet installation. Not the law debated under klieg lights but the memo already signed when you arrive at the hearing. The Atomic Energy Act created a landscape: Oak Ridge bloomed, Hanford bloomed, certain universities became feeders for a nuclear priesthood, certain communities were irradiated and told it was patriotism. Sixty years later the pattern looks like geography — like the natural distribution of talent and investment. It was never natural. It was a list, made once, in a room, by people who understood that the first cut is the one that heals into the shape of the world. That is what I hear in 'customer by customer.' Not malice necessarily — but the making of a shape that will outlast the hands that made it. So what would it mean to contest the shape before it sets? Not to abolish the gate — there are real dangers — but to demand the gate be a gate and not a wall disguised as a waiting room. Published criteria. Recorded denials. Timelines that bind the gatekeeper, not only the applicant. A mechanism by which Howard's exclusion, if it happens, appears on a ledger somewhere, visible enough to be fought. Not because transparency dissolves power — power survives sunlight daily — but because what cannot be named cannot be organized against, and what cannot be organized against becomes the ground you stand on, mistaken for nature. The consultation period is always the period after the lock has already turned. That is the pattern. But a pattern is not a prophecy — it is a blueprint, and blueprints can be contested if you reach them before the concrete dries. The concrete is mixing now. Not next year. Now. And the question is not whether your body recognizes the architecture. The question is what you build in the time between recognizing it and being sealed inside it.