← The New Commonwealth

Paper 04: Own Your Tools

Signed 1 October 2026.

Plank: The tools and property people use to make a living should belong to them, not be rented from someone who can meter, revoke, or price them out.

1. What we want

We want a machine shop, a two-lawyer practice, an accounting firm, or a family farm to be able to own its tools outright. These include the software it computes with, the equipment it repairs itself, and the land or building it works from. We want those tools passed down without being taxed apart or priced out by someone who can afford to move faster. The trend now runs the other way, with the most powerful software rented by the month from three companies. Farm and consumer equipment increasingly comes with a lock that only the manufacturer's dealer can open. When property changes hands, whether through a will or a tax foreclosure, the rules often favor whoever has the most capital to move first. They often give that person priority over the person who would actually live in the house or run the shop. We want the law to stop favoring the renter-of-capital and start favoring the owner-operator.

2. The evidence

Software. The strongest AI models today are not sold, they are metered: a business pays per token or per seat to a provider who can raise the price, change the terms, or cut off access entirely. An "open-weight" model is different: once a company downloads it, it runs on that company's own machine forever, at a cost the company controls, with no one able to revoke it. The capability gap between the best open-weight models and the best closed ones has nearly closed. In January 2025, DeepSeek released its R1 model as an open download and it matched OpenAI's o1 on core reasoning benchmarks like AIME and SWE-bench Verified, edging past it on some and trailing on others [1][2]. Through 2025 and into 2026, the gap between open and closed models did not move in one direction. Stanford's AI Index found the top closed model's advantage over the top open-weight model on the leading benchmark leaderboard narrowed to about 0.5 percentage points by August 2024, before widening back out to about 3.3 percentage points by March 2026, as the largest closed labs pulled back ahead [21]. Meta, the one large American company that had committed to open weights at scale, released Llama 4 in April 2025 and then shipped no further open-weight model for more than a year, only returning to openness with a smaller model line in August 2026 [3]. That left the leading edge of open models disproportionately Chinese for most of that stretch. The stakes here are strategic: whichever country's open models the world's developers build their tools and habits on ends up owning the standard, the way Android did for mobile [3].

Farm and consumer equipment. A new John Deere X9 combine, the largest class the company sells, runs from roughly $600,000 to over $800,000 depending on configuration [4]. On January 15, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission, joined by the attorneys general of Illinois and Minnesota, sued Deere, alleging that the company restricted the diagnostic and repair software needed to fix its equipment to its own authorized dealer network, forcing farmers to wait for a dealer technician, often during planting or harvest, instead of using an independent shop or fixing it themselves [5][6]. Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin joined the case by amendment in the following weeks. In July 2026, Deere agreed to a proposed ten-year FTC consent order, subject to public comment, to give farmers and independent repair shops the same fault-code, reprogramming, and diagnostic access it gives its own dealers, and to stop dealers from punishing customers who use independent repair [7]. That order runs only against Deere and only for ten years; it is not a general rule, and the FTC that filed the case in January 2025 was not the same FTC that agreed to the order eighteen months later, so nothing stops a future commission from declining to bring the next one.

Land and inheritance. Five states, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, tax inheritances directly, at a rate that depends on who receives the money and how closely they are related to the person who died; Maryland also layers a separate estate tax on top [8]. At the federal level there is no inheritance tax at all, only an estate tax that applies to the entire estate before it is divided, and only above an exemption that reaches $15 million per person in 2026 [8][9]. That exemption is now so large that the federal estate tax falls on a small number of very large estates and has nothing to say about whether an estate is split among ten heirs or left whole to one. On the local side, cities that end up owning vacant, tax-foreclosed property often sell it to whoever bids fastest, which in practice tends to be an investor buying in bulk rather than a family that would live in the house. Where cities and federal housing agencies have instead given owner-occupants an exclusive window to bid before investors, the effect has been measurable: after Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD lengthened their "first-look" period for foreclosed homes from 20 to 30 days in 2022, owner-occupants bought a larger share of the lower-cost distressed homes that came up for sale [10]. Milwaukee runs a similar rule on its own inventory of tax-foreclosed houses, reserving the first thirty days of any listing for owner-occupant offers only [11].

3. Why it happened

Software. No federal law licenses AI models today, but California's SB 1047, passed by the legislature in 2024 and vetoed by Governor Newsom that September, shows the shape the next attempt will likely take. It would have applied to models trained past a threshold of roughly $100 million in cost or 10^26 floating-point operations, and it would have held the developer of a model liable for serious harm caused by anyone who later modified or fine-tuned it [12][13]. Andreessen Horowitz and Meta argued publicly that the liability rule would fall hardest on companies that release their model weights openly, since an open release can be modified by anyone and the original developer has no way to take it back, while a company that keeps its model locked behind an API can control who uses it and how [14]. Newsom's veto message agreed that the bill regulated by compute size and cost rather than by how a system was actually deployed or the harm it caused [13]. New York enacted a narrower version of the same idea in December 2025, the RAISE Act, which regulates developers using the same kind of compute threshold and adds safety-protocol, incident-reporting, and state-fee requirements that take effect January 1, 2027 [15]. None of this has stopped open releases yet. But a compute or revenue threshold is the exact shape a future bill would need to take to look narrow while in practice requiring a compliance staff that only a handful of companies can afford, and the same argument that sank SB 1047, that it would specially burden the open, modifiable version of a model over the closed one, will be available again the next time a bill like it moves.

Farm and consumer equipment. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998, made it illegal to bypass a "technological protection measure" that controls access to copyrighted software, a rule written with DVDs and video games in mind. Farm and construction equipment now runs on onboard computers whose control software is copyrighted, so the same 1998 statute applies to a tractor's engine control unit. Every three years, the Copyright Office can grant narrow exemptions letting an owner legally bypass that lock for specific purposes; the current exemption, renewed in October 2024, covers accessing a vehicle's own diagnostic and operational data, including on agricultural equipment [16][17]. But the same law's separate anti-trafficking provision, a different part of the same 1998 statute, still bans making, selling, or distributing the tool that performs the bypass, and the Copyright Office has said it has no authority to exempt that provision [17][18]. The result is a right that exists on paper and rarely in practice: a farmer may legally read his own combine's fault codes, but almost no one is allowed to build or sell him the device that does it, which is why Deere's dealer network stayed the only practical repair channel until the 2026 FTC consent order forced it open by court order rather than by the underlying law changing.

Land and inheritance. The modern federal estate tax dates to the Revenue Act of 1916. It was built to tax the size of a fortune at death, and it has never distinguished between an estate left whole to one heir and the same estate split among ten; the tax bill is the same either way, because it is assessed on the total before distribution. An inheritance tax, assessed instead on each recipient's share, does not have that blind spot: splitting a fortune among more heirs moves each share into a lower bracket and past a larger number of individual exemptions, so the tax code actually rewards spreading ownership rather than staying neutral about it. On the vacant-property side, most cities that inherit tax-foreclosed housing through the ordinary foreclosure process have no rule at all requiring a first look for an owner-occupant, unlike the federal mortgage agencies, so a bulk buyer who can close in cash within days routinely beats a family still arranging a mortgage before the city or land bank ever advertises the sale.

4. What to change

Federal. Write into statute that no AI licensing or safety regime may be triggered by compute size or training cost alone; if Congress or an agency regulates frontier models, the trigger has to be a demonstrated capability or harm. A compute or cost threshold catches a startup or an open-weight release long before it catches a well-resourced closed lab that spends the same money differently. Make manufacturer repair access, including diagnostic software and the tools to run it, a condition of sale for equipment sold to American buyers, not a privilege the manufacturer can grant only to its own dealer network. Replace the federal estate tax with a federal inheritance tax assessed on what each heir receives rather than on the estate as a whole.

State. Pass Colorado- and consumer-electronics-style repair statutes covering both farm equipment and consumer devices, so the right to repair does not depend on a federal consent order that runs against one company for ten years. Fund land banks with a fixed, dedicated share of delinquent property tax collections, the way Ohio directs up to 5 percent of collected delinquent taxes, interest, and penalties to its county land banks, so land banks have money to operate and hold property responsibly instead of letting it sit vacant for lack of funds [19].

Local. Any vacant property a city or its land bank owns goes to an owner-occupant buyer first, through an exclusive bidding window before it can be sold in bulk or to a non-occupant investor.

5. What a bill would do

The federal piece would consist of two short statutes rather than one long one. The first, an AI licensing bill, would state that no state or federal AI regulation may use training compute or cost as its sole trigger for a licensing, safety-protocol, or liability regime. The trigger would have to be tied to a specific, demonstrated capability, so a company could not satisfy the rule simply by being big enough to afford the paperwork. The second, a repair bill, would make repair access a condition of sale: a manufacturer selling equipment to American buyers would have to provide parts, tools, diagnostics, and documentation to the owner and independent shops on the same fair terms it gives its own authorized dealers. Because the obligation would attach to the sale itself, not to a lawsuit or a complaint, an owner would not have to sue or wait for a consent order to get access. A narrower fix to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-trafficking provision, which still bars selling the tool that bypasses a manufacturer's lock even where the underlying use is legal, may also be needed to fully close the gap Section 3 describes; that question belongs in a later paper and is not a proposal here. On inheritance, the bill would repeal the federal estate tax and replace it with a tax on each individual recipient's share above a per-recipient exemption similar in size to today's per-estate exemption. Rates would rise with the size of an individual's share, not the size of the whole estate, and because the tax would attach to the share received, dividing an inheritance among more heirs would lower the total tax owed rather than leave it unchanged. State repair statutes would mirror Colorado's and New York's existing language, requiring manufacturers to sell parts, tools, and documentation to owners and independent shops on the same terms given to authorized dealers, with that requirement extended explicitly to cover farm equipment. A land bank funding bill would dedicate a fixed percentage of delinquent tax collections to the local land bank rather than leaving its budget to annual appropriation. A local ordinance would require a minimum 30-day exclusive window, matching the federal mortgage agencies' own first-look period, during which only owner-occupant buyers may bid on a city- or land-bank-owned vacant property.

6. What would prove us wrong

If a compute-based AI licensing trigger gets enacted somewhere and small and open-weight developers keep releasing models at the same rate as large closed labs, without a compliance cost gap opening up between them, the regulatory-capture argument here is wrong. If, several years into the Deere consent order and the state repair statutes now in effect, independent repair shops have not gained measurable market share or price advantage against authorized dealer networks for covered equipment, the repair argument is wrong. If, in the five states that already tax inheritances rather than estates, the number of heirs per estate and the share of estates split among multiple heirs is no different from estate-tax states after controlling for estate size, the inheritance-tax mechanism does not do what we say it does. And if cities and land banks that adopt an owner-occupant first-look rule do not see a higher owner-occupant purchase share than comparable cities without one, matching what happened when the federal mortgage agencies extended their own first-look window in 2022, the local ask is not doing the work we think it is.

Sources

  1. TechCrunch, "DeepSeek claims its 'reasoning' model beats OpenAI's o1 on certain benchmarks," January 27, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/27/deepseek-claims-its-reasoning-model-beats-openais-o1-on-certain-benchmarks/

  2. International Institute for Strategic Studies, "DeepSeek's release of an open-weight frontier AI model," Strategic Comments, April 2025. https://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-comments/2025/04/deepseeks-release-of-an-open-weight-frontier-ai-model/

  3. Digital Applied, "Open-Weight Models H1 2026: DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama Recap," 2026 (benchmark comparisons, DeepSeek/Qwen/Llama release timeline including Llama 4's April 2025 release and Meta's subsequent gap in open releases). https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/open-weight-models-h1-2026-retrospective-deepseek-qwen-llama

  4. Farmonaut, "John Deere X9 Combine Price & Series 2026 Guide," 2026 (X9 pricing range); cross-checked against active listings on TractorHouse.com. https://farmonaut.com/usa/john-deere-x9-combine-price-series-2026-guide ; https://www.tractorhouse.com/listings/for-sale/john-deere/x9/combines-harvesters/1112

  5. NPR, "John Deere faces U.S. lawsuit over farmers' ability to repair tractors," January 15, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5260895/john-deere-ftc-lawsuit-right-to-repair-tractors

  6. National Agricultural Law Center, "FTC Files Suit Against John Deere," 2025. https://nationalaglawcenter.org/ftc-files-suit-against-john-deere/

  7. Federal Trade Commission, "FTC, States Secure Settlement with Deere & Company, Advancing Farmers' Right to Repair," press release, July 8, 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/07/ftc-states-secure-settlement-deere-company-advancing-farmers-right-repair

  8. Tax Foundation, "Estate and Inheritance Taxes by State," 2025/2026 data (states with inheritance tax, states with estate tax, Maryland's dual tax). https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/estate-inheritance-taxes/

  9. Creative Planning, "2026 State Estate and Inheritance Taxes: What You Need to Know," 2026 (federal estate tax exemption of $15 million per person in 2026). https://creativeplanning.com/insights/taxes/state-estate-inheritance-taxes/

  10. Urban Institute, "New First-Look Policies Have Helped Owner-Occupants Purchase Lower-Cost Homes," 2023 (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/HUD first-look window extended from 20 to 30 days in 2022). https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/new-first-look-policies-have-helped-owner-occupants-purchase-lower-cost-homes

  11. City of Milwaukee, Department of City Development, "City Houses For Sale" program description (30-day owner-occupant-only offer period on city-owned tax-foreclosed houses). https://city.milwaukee.gov/DCD/CityRealEstate/CityHouses

  12. Gibson Dunn, "Regulating the Future: Eight Key Takeaways from California's SB 1047, Vetoed by Governor Newsom," 2024 (compute and cost thresholds, liability structure). https://www.gibsondunn.com/regulating-the-future-eight-key-takeaways-from-californias-sb-1047-vetoed-by-governor-newsom/

  13. NPR, "California Gov. Newsom vetoes AI safety bill that divided Silicon Valley," September 20, 2024 (veto reasoning: bill regulated by compute/cost rather than deployment or harm). https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5119792/newsom-ai-bill-california-sb1047-tech

  14. Andreessen Horowitz, "What You Need to Know About SB 1047: A Q&A with Anjney Midha," 2024 (industry argument that liability rules disproportionately burden open-weight releases). https://a16z.com/sb-1047-what-you-need-to-know-with-anjney-midha/

  15. Morrison Foerster, "New York Enacts the RAISE Act Regulating Frontier AI Models," January 5, 2026 (signed December 19, 2025; compute-based frontier-model definition; effective January 1, 2027). https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/260105-new-york-enacts-the-raise-act-regulating-frontier-ai-models

  16. Federal Register, "Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies," final rule, October 28, 2024 (Class 7 exemption covering diagnostic and operational data access on agricultural and other motorized vehicles). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24563/exemption-to-prohibition-on-circumvention-of-copyright-protection-systems-for-access-control

  17. Finnegan, "Final Rule Issued in the U.S. Copyright Office's Ninth Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding," 2024. https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/ip-updates/final-rule-issued-in-the-us-copyright-offices-ninth-triennial-section-1201-proceeding.html

  18. The Repair Association, "Copyright Infringement" (explanation of the Section 1201 anti-trafficking provision and why it limits the practical effect of repair exemptions). https://www.repair.org/copyright-infringement

  19. AVCOG, "Land Banks: A Short Overview," citing Ohio's 2009 land bank enabling legislation and its provision allowing counties to direct up to 5 percent of delinquent property tax, interest, and penalty collections to the county land bank. https://www.avcog.org/DocumentCenter/View/4401/Land-Bank-Intro-PDF ; Michigan Land Bank Fast Track Act, Public Act 258 of 2003. https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/mcl/pdf/mcl-Act-258-of-2003.pdf

  20. Colorado Governor's Office, "Boosting Colorado's Strong Agriculture Industry: Governor Polis Signs Bipartisan Legislation Into Law," April 25, 2023 (agricultural right-to-repair law, first in the nation). https://governorsoffice.colorado.gov/news/9991-boosting-colorados-strong-agriculture-industry-governor-polis-signs-bipartisan ; Consumer Electronics Daily right-to-repair tracker (New York, Minnesota, California, Oregon, and Colorado consumer-electronics repair statutes, 2022-2024). https://consumerelectronicsdaily.com/right-to-repair/right-to-repair-laws-us-tracker/

  21. Stanford University Human-Centered AI Institute, "The 2026 AI Index Report: Technical Performance" (top closed model's advantage over the top open-weight model on the Arena leaderboard narrowed to about 0.5 percentage points by August 2024, then widened to about 3.3 percentage points by March 2026). https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/technical-performance