[Draft] AI misuse enforcement has a blind spot
AI providers ban accounts, not users. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
When a provider detects misuse, whether it is an influence operation, an attempt to extract dangerous information, or large-scale model distillation, the standard response is to restrict the offending account. But accounts are cheap. A new email address, an anonymous SIM card, and a VPN are enough to start over. OpenAI has reported that in multiple disruption rounds against state-linked influence campaigns, banned accounts were “consistently replaced by new ones exhibiting similar usage patterns.” North Korean threat actors whose accounts were terminated were observed re-registering with different email addresses and resuming similar activities. Anthropic has documented comparable patterns.