Technical Governance·Exploring·Last reviewed May 1, 2026
This page is a stub. I’ve marked the territory but haven’t written my views here yet. The headings below are placeholders — the actual beliefs, uncertainties, and evidence are still in my notes. If you want my current take on this topic before it lands here, get in touch.
Where I currently stand
<Headline view: HEMs are the only tool that plausibly enforces compute-based commitments at the level of physical chips; current designs are early but the trajectory is real; the central tension is between expressivity (what mechanisms can verify) and tractability (what chip vendors will adopt).>
Current beliefs
- Hardware-enabled mechanisms are the most credible long-term enforcement layer for compute governance. ~XX% — <why>.
- The bottleneck is chip-vendor adoption and supply-chain politics, not cryptographic design. ~XX% — <why>.
- <Claim about flexibility versus rigidity in HEM design.> ~XX% — <why>.
Uncertainties
- What is the minimum useful HEM — what set of properties must it verify to be regulator-relevant? Why it matters: defines the floor for adoption.
- Can HEMs survive a heterogeneous compute landscape with multiple vendors and accelerator types? Why it matters: determines real-world deployability.
What would update me
- A major chip vendor shipping a working HEM in production would shift the conversation from "will this happen" to "how do we use it".
- Convincing demonstration that HEMs can be robustly bypassed at hardware level would force a redesign of the whole agenda.
Recent reading
- <date> — <title> — <takeaway>.
Related writing
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