The Week AI Governance Stopped Looking Like One Thing: Hangzhou, Karlsruhe, Oakland, and Colorado

How AI governance stopped being a framework conversation in spring 2026

Hello everyone. I have been keeping a small list this week, in the margins of my notebook, and it turned into the spine of this letter. Each item on the list is a place where, in the past seven days, an institution made a binding decision about AI. Looking at them together, what struck me is that the institutions are not the ones I expected, the venues are not the ones we usually talk about, and the directions they pull in are not the same.

Here is the list, more or less in the order I came across it.

• A judge in Hangzhou ruled that a tech firm cannot fire a worker because it replaced him with a model.

• A prosecutor in Karlsruhe filed Europe’s first criminal indictment for AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

• A jury in Oakland heard Elon Musk testify for three days about whether OpenAI’s for-profit conversion amounts to “stealing a charity.”

• The Pentagon signed AI deals with eight major vendors for classified networks, and left Anthropic off the list.

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts a…