Isobel Porteous and Matt Kaplan revisit the U.S. government’s Cold War-era Selective Availability policy, which deliberately degraded civilian GPS accuracy, to draw lessons for AI governance. They describe how commercial GPS manufacturing outpaced military procurement, engineers built workarounds such as differential GPS, and modernization pressure ultimately made the restriction untenable by 2000. The authors argue that current AI restrictions face a similar risk of technical decay and urge policymakers to invest in durable technical solutions, such as robust evaluations and hardware attestation, rather than relying solely on blunt access restrictions.
