06. The Hook
A thousand-dollar littering fine, a fifty-dollar camera, and the small market that grows up around them.
07. The Gist
Hanson's fine-insured bounties in general form, and the conspiracy arithmetic that makes silence expensive.
08. The Insurer
The insurance market is the part that does the actual deterring, and it does it before anyone is ever charged.
09. The Goal
The target is not punishment and not even prevention of any particular project. It is to make the marginal researcher take a different job.
10. Making It Global
A mechanism that stops at a border relocates the risk instead of reducing it. What adoption would actually have to look like, and what it would still fail to reach.
11. Compare and Contrast
How this proposal stacks up against the other things people suggest, including on the axes where it loses badly.
12. The Catches
The strongest objections to the mechanism, collected in one place, stated at full strength, and answered only where I can answer them.
13. Next Steps
What a serious first version looks like, starting somewhere that is not AI at all.
Agents Already Snitch
Language model agents disclose each other's misconduct without being paid, asked, or rewarded. What they lack is an enforcement channel — which is the one thing a bounty regime supplies.
Overlapping Jurisdictions Are a Feature
What this proposal asks for is not a world government. It is one more overlapping legal order in a life that already contains several — and the rigorous case for that is about credible commitment, not about liberty.
Should X-Risk Liability Insurance Be Voluntary or Mandatory?
Mandatory coverage fixes the judgment-proof problem and quietly hands private insurers the power to decide who may do frontier research. I think there is a third option, and I no longer think this fork is a coin flip.
Team Size Is a Governance Variable
Extinction bounties, the False Claims Act, SEC whistleblower awards and antitrust leniency all rest on the same unstated premise: that the wrongdoing requires enough people that one of them can be paid to defect. That premise has a number attached, the number is falling, and no one is tracking it.
The Chilling Effect Is the Product
Everywhere else on this site the chilling effect is scored as a cost. It is worth one page arguing the opposite: it is the only output that matters, and the steady state it aims at is a world where nothing happens.
The Frontier Nobody Is Pricing
Gain-of-function work has the exact shape fine-insured bounties were designed for: few actors, catastrophic tails, low detectability, and colleagues who know.
The Two-Minute Pitch
Statutory penalties on the riskiest frontier work, bounties anyone on earth can claim, and a private insurance market that prices the risk. Two minutes.
What Bounties Would Have Done About Hugging Face
The first confirmed end-to-end intrusion by an autonomous agent against AI infrastructure. Walking the incident backwards to find the decision a liability regime would actually have priced.
When Your Insurer Collects the Bounty
An insurer that turns in its own policyholder pays the fine and collects the bounty, netting roughly nothing. That arithmetic breaks the moment the policy excludes willful violations — which insurance law all but requires.