Does anyone need a license to build superintelligence?
Not as of October 2026. No jurisdiction requires a general government license before a frontier AI model is trained. China’s pre-launch filing system comes closest. The EU, California, and New York rely on notification and transparency duties instead, and the United States controls frontier AI mainly through export licenses for chips.
“Licensing” an AI model can mean a government permit, a registration or filing, a notice to a regulator, an export license, or the private license that governs a model’s weights and training data. This site covers all of them and links its sources, using the primary text wherever it can be opened.
Guides
7 guides to both meanings of the word: the rules governments apply to the most capable models, and the licenses that govern models and data. Each states its facts as of the date at the top.
AI licensing explained
The six things “licensing” an AI model can mean, and which ones actually exist in law today.
Frontier AI laws compared
The EU, California, New York, China, South Korea, the UK and the U.S. federal government, side by side.
Compute thresholds
Why lawmakers count floating-point operations, how the count is estimated, and where the method breaks down.
AI export controls
The one place the U.S. already requires permission for frontier AI: export licenses for chips and, on paper, model weights.
Open-weight model licenses
Apache 2.0, MIT, the Llama license, Gemma terms and OpenRAIL, compared clause by clause.
Training data licensing
The public content deals behind AI models and the court rulings that set their price.
Should superintelligence need a license?
Both sides of the licensing debate, with named sources for the main arguments.
Where did the idea of licensing AI come from?
Much of the current debate traces to May 2023, when OpenAI’s chief executive told a US Senate subcommittee that a new agency should license AI efforts above a capability threshold. Since then, lawmakers have mostly chosen lighter tools: compute thresholds that trigger reporting, safety frameworks that must be published, and incident reports. The policy debate guide sets out the arguments on both sides.
What this site is and is not
It is a free, sourced reference. It does not lobby for or against any rule, it is not written by a law firm, and it is not legal advice.