LLMs Should Be Common Carriers

Frontier LLMs are becoming infrastructure. People increasingly use them as the interface to the world's knowledge. They write software, learn, conduct research, communicate, and solve problems through them. As they become general-purpose infrastructure, they should increasingly be treated like other infrastructure. The closest historical analogy is the telephone network. Telephone companies made enormous upfront investments to build nationwide networks. Society allowed them to recover those investments and earn profits by charging for access. It did not allow them to decide who could make lawful phone calls or what services could be built on top of the network. They became common carriers: providers of a neutral service. Commercial LLMs should evolve in the same direction AI providers should be free to charge whatever the market will bear for inference. They should compete on model quality, latency, reliability, and price. But once a customer pays for inference, the resulting outputs…