Keeping the Code at Home: Why a Wise Prince Refuses to Share His Engines

A president stands on a stage to unveil a new portal, America.gov, driven by learning engines that promise to smooth his citizens’ dealings with their own government. In the same breath he rules out any joint venture on this technology with the state he calls his main economic rival, saying it would mean handing over secrets. He adds that his country is “leading by a lot” in this field and should not “mix it up” with competitors. I note first what he does not do. He does not dress this in sermons about universal brotherhood. He speaks the language of rivalry, advantage, and secrecy. In politics, that is already a step toward sanity.

When I wrote *The Prince*, I advised rulers, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, to begin from “the effectual truth of the thing” and not from imagined republics. The effectual truth here is that two great powers are engaged in a long contest, and each believes the other seeks predominance in wealth and arms. Code that directs administration and surveillance is no mere toy: it becomes an arm, like artillery or coinage, because it multiplies the reach and speed of command. To share its inner workings in a joint venture would be to place one’s best artillery in a foundry jointly owned with a rival city.

The Romans faced an analogous problem twice: first with their Italian allies, then with the Greek cities. Each time, the question was how much to arm others without disarming themselves. In *The Prince* I wrote that a ruler must rely on his own arms, not on mercenaries or auxiliaries, because borrowed force turns against the borrower when fortune shifts. A joint enterprise in these thinking engines with a main rival would be a kind of auxiliary soldiery of the mind: you lend your engineers and data, they lend theirs, and whoever learns fastest escapes with the real weapon and leaves the partner with manuals and promises.

Some will object that there is already a new “dialogue” on this technology agreed between these governments, with further talks planned. Dialogue is not the problem; arms are. It can be prudent to talk about rules, limits, even red lines, so long as the core capability remains under your sole control. Rivers must sometimes meet to negotiate their course, but each city must still tend its own dykes. In my chapter on fortune’s floods, I argued that foresight consists in raising barriers while the river is still low. Here the barrier is not a wall of stone but a refusal to merge laboratories, data stores, and strategic code.

Notice also the theatre. The refusal is announced not in a closed council but at the launch of a patriotic portal, a gateway to the very machinery of the state. This is no accident. Most people, as I said then and still hold, judge by the eyes more than the hands; they see the glittering website, hear that their country is “leading by a lot,” and watch their ruler decline to “mix it up.” The spectacle ties technical prowess to political resolve. It reassures the people that their ruler guards the family silver, and it warns rivals that the cupboard is not open and the keys are not for export.

Yet the same reports tell us that many of this leader’s own supporters would prefer development in this field to be slowed or even paused. Here the republican in me pricks up his ears. In the *Discourses on Livy*, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, I wrote that “a People is wiser and more constant than a Prince,” and I urged that their fears be given institutional voice. A prudent ruler, even while refusing joint ventures abroad, would do well to couple technological advance with visible safeguards at home: tribunals, oversight, the equivalent in your century of Roman tribunes and censors. Otherwise he risks appearing to wield a mysterious weapon over a fearful and excluded populace.

As I wrote in *The Prince*, it is safer for a ruler to be feared than loved if he must choose, but he must above all avoid being hated, for hatred makes men reckless. To hand crucial secrets of these engines to a rival would be to risk the state itself; to ignore domestic anxiety about the same instruments would be to risk the people’s affection for the laws. The decision to refuse a joint venture is, by my lights, a skilful act of *virtù*; whether it ripens into true prudence will depend on whether the same firmness is shown in arming the republic with protections, not only arming the prince with code. In this storm, a wise city keeps its engines at home and its citizens on its side.