As artificial intelligence grows more powerful, the companies building it have begun constructing the walls meant to contain it — a self-regulatory body modeled on financial oversight, funded by the industry itself. This move arrives against a backdrop of urgent warnings from former researchers and a Washington that has chosen, for now, to look away. The tension between those who see existential danger and those who call those dangers a hoax reflects a deeper civilizational question: who decides the rules for technologies that may outgrow any single authority's ability to govern them.