CONCEPT
Limited Access Orders
North's late-career framework (with Wallis and Weingast) for social arrangements in which a dominant coalition controls access to valuable resources and uses that control to generate rents — the structural risk shadowing the concentration of AI capability in a handful of frontier labs.
In their 2009 collaboration
Violence and Social Orders, North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast developed a taxonomy distinguishing limited access orders from open access orders. Limited access orders are social arrangements in which a dominant coalition controls access to valuable resources — political, economic, or informational — and uses that control to generate rents. These orders are stable because the rents give coalition members an incentive to maintain the restriction and cooperate rather than fight. They are also economically inferior to open access orders, in which competition is broad, entry is unrestricted, and the
creative destruction that drives long-term growth is permitted to operate. The AI economy is exhibiting structural features that raise the risk of limited-access formation. The computational costs of training frontier models, data requirements, and engineering expertise create natural barriers to entry. Platform dynamics create winner-take-most outcomes. The prestige hierarchy of the AI industry further concentrates talent and resources.