Why AI is a First Amendment fight.
Because compute is speech infrastructure — the physical layer through which speech is composed and published at scale — and a federal licensing regime for compute is prior restraint on the First Amendment, no different in principle than a federal licensing regime for printing presses.
Full essay by Sayer Ji · September 13, 2026 · ~12 min read
This explainer is the argument the whole section rests on. The full essay lives at its original URL — it’s the anchor piece for the entire AI Rights front:
In brief: The printing press was the physical infrastructure through which speech was composed, replicated, and distributed at scale in the eighteenth century. Compute — the servers, chips, and language models on top of them — is that infrastructure in the twenty-first. Every act of American speech now runs through it. A federal licensing regime for compute is prior restraint on the modern printing press, and the Founders wrote the Free Press Clause specifically to prevent one.
The corollary is Pillar 6 of the coalition’s Restore the First platform: “Don’t tread on my compute.”