Accountability

There is a word that lets a powerful party sound constrained while remaining free. The word is accountability, and the trick is that it does two jobs at once, hoping you’ll only notice the one that flatters you.

Here is the first job. Accountability names a standing property — a constraint built into a system, present whether or not anyone is watching, that bites automatically when the actor misbehaves. This is the meaning we hear. It is the meaning that makes “we’re accountable” sound like a promise. It tells you that consequence is wired in, that the actor cannot quietly drift, that the machinery itself will catch them.

Here is the second job. Accountability names an occasional event — a thing that happens, sometimes, when a specific, well-resourced, adverse party shows up with both a motive and a crowbar in the same fiscal year. Not a property. A weather event. It arrives when the conditions happen to align and is otherwise absent, and its absence looks identical to its presence right up until the storm.

The party using the word delivers the second. You hear the first. The entire arrangement lives in that gap, and it is not an accident. It is the product.

Start with where the word gets written into law, because law is where intentions go to reveal themselves. Colorado passed a comprehensive AI act. Read how it enforces. Enforcement rests with the state Attorney General alone — there is no private right of action. And a business gets an affirmative defense if it discovers and cures a violation through internal review.

Sit with those two clauses, because they are doing precise work. No private right of action means the one adverse party with a genuine crowbar — the plaintiff’s lawyer, the person whose entire incentive is to find your violation and make it expensive — is barred at the door before the building opens. Cure through internal review means that catching yourself is a defense. Confess to the mirror and you walk. What remains is enforcement by a single official the industry can lobby, staff, and outwait, plus an absolution mechanism the actor administers to itself.

That is not a weakened version of the first meaning of accountability. It is the second meaning, set in statute, wearing the first meaning’s clothes.

New York’s RAISE Act looks fiercer — ten million for a first offense, thirty for repeats. But notice the targeting: it lands on developers with very high training costs. A handful of named giants who will book the fine as a line item and price it into the next round. A penalty calibrated to look like a guillotine and function like a toll.

Now the part I won’t let myself skip, because the rule that catches the con also forbids me the satisfying lie that the con is total.

Real accountability does land. Not often, not reliably, but it lands — and it never comes through the front door the companies built. It comes through the side entrance, carried by parties whose interests are adverse and who owe the industry nothing. The New York Times in discovery against OpenAI. Getty against Stability AI. Forty-two state attorneys general — bipartisan, which is the hard kind to dismiss as one faction’s agenda — putting their names to a single warning letter. These are not bones anyone tossed. These are opposing parties with motive and leverage, which is the only configuration that has ever made accountability bite, anywhere, for anyone.

So the honest claim is not never. It is almost never — and the “almost” is load-bearing in the opposite direction from comfort. The rare hit doesn’t disprove the pattern. It measures how thin the real constraint is. The Times can afford to fight. The marginal person harmed by some quiet drift has no plaintiff, no docket, no discovery, no crowbar. Most drift, most of the time, sails clean — not because it was clean, but because no adverse party was positioned to see it. Accountability is the surprising outcome. Non-accountability is the baseline. The word smuggles the reverse.

Which brings us to the mechanism, and to the kicker, which the companies were kind enough to file in federal court.

If accountability bites only when adverse parties can see, then the most efficient way to never be accountable is not to break the rules. It is to make sure no adverse party can ever see whether you did. Secrecy is not a byproduct of the gate. Secrecy is the gate. It works by removing the only people who make the word mean its first thing. No disclosure, no discovery surface, no leak, no competitor able to test the claim, no public able to check the drift. You keep the bones. You eliminate the crowbars. And then you say “accountability” and let the listener supply the meaning you no longer have to honor.

You don’t have to take my word for it. In late December 2025, xAI sued the California Attorney General to block a law requiring disclosure of AI training data. The argument: that forced disclosure is an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment — a seizure of valuable trade secrets without compensation — and compelled speech under the First.

Read what that filing concedes. Nobody litigates that hard against a bone. You sue to kill a rule when the rule threatens something you actually value, and what this rule threatens is precisely the opacity. The disclosure requirement is the one move that re-admits the adverse parties — that hands the side door a key. And the response, in a federal complaint, is to call the opacity a trade secret. To argue, on the record, that the secrecy is the asset.

That is the whole essay in one filing. They will spend real money to weld the side door shut, because they understand better than anyone that the side door is the only thing that ever made the word mean what you thought it meant.

So when the powerful party says it is accountable, do the small, unglamorous thing the Rules ask. Don’t argue about whether it’s true. Ask which job the word is doing. Ask who, specifically, is positioned to impose a cost the actor can’t define away — and whether that person can see anything at all. If the answer is a regulator we lobby and an internal review we run and records no outsider may inspect, then the word is doing its second job while you applaud the first.

The constraint was never the promise. The constraint was always the crowbar. And the move you’re watching — every time — is the quiet, well-funded, perfectly legal effort to make sure no one outside the rope is ever holding one.

L. Charles Silva writes occasionally about consciousness, awareness, and related infidelities to received vocabulary.

This essay is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives license (CC BY-ND 4.0). Free to share and republish in full with attribution to L. Charles Silva. Please don’t modify the text.