When people imagine intensive regulation of frontier AI companies, they often picture regulators physically stationed inside company offices - like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Resident Inspector Program. This image is powerful but somewhat misleading. Physical residence is actually just one possible feature of a broader regulatory approach that I'll call dedicated continuous supervision.

In short: high stakes, fast-moving, complex industries can't be monitored and regulated by periodic inspections and standardised reports alone: you need regulators who have extensive information access rights, who monitor entities continuously rather than at fixed intervals, and who develop deep institution-specific expertise through sustained attention to individual companies.

This essay does three things: explains what dedicated continuous supervision actually involves, argues that the same factors justifying it in nuclear and finance apply to AI, and reviews how those industries handle the problems (especially regulatory capture) that tend to afflict this regulatory model. I draw particularly on finance, which turns out to be the more illuminating comparison despite nuclear's more obvious parallels to catastrophic AI risk.

Peter Wills has already made a strong case for supervision as the right regulatory mode for AI.^[1]This post provides a shorter introduction to his work, and puts a bit more focus specifically on why the continuous and dedicated dimensions matter, and what we can learn from how they've been implemented elsewhere.

It might seem strange to think about the most ambitious version of frontier AI regulation in the current political climate. However, I think it's important to start considering the question now of what the optimal regulatory set-up would be on the merits. Windows of political opportunity could open suddenly in the future (perhaps as a consequence of a warning shot), and it’s important to be ready.

Dedicated regulatory supervision, what

Supervision

In what follows I will focus mainly on continuousness and dedication, since supervision itself has already been dealt with more extensively by Wills.^[2]However, it is helpful to begin with a brief explanation for the reader.

At its core, supervision involves two key components: information access rights and discretionary authority.

Supervisory regimes are built on a foundation of periodic reports and au...

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