There’s a Right Way to Regulate AI—and a Very Wrong Way

Opposition to regulating AI may not be so formidable as it seems. Venture capitalists like Sacks and Marc Andreesen are the most fervently opposed because they’re all about money. But tech entrepreneurs (omitting the Antichrist-obsessed Peter Thiel) are lately showing more sympathy toward the idea, perhaps because they’re more familiar with what AI can do. Gomez, for instance, after denouncing Amodei’s regulatory scheme, proposed one of his own, including an “independent testing” scheme that sounded a lot like Amodei’s bank-examiner proposal, only not with a risk framework defined by “a select few companies.” (Gomez even repeated Amodei’s clueless suggestion that bank regulators might provide a sound model!) Gomez’s definition of what constituted risk was too complex and technical for me to understand, but if the gist is that the focus should be on the really dangerous stuff, count me in.

Trump probably never heard of regulatory capture. But he’s right to observe that it’s unusual for a company to judge itself a threat, as Anthropic did last week. Jacob Coxon, a 27 year-old AI researcher at Anthropic, quit his job and posted on X a tweet that quickly circled the globe: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” In response, a top Anthropic scientist replied: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.” With Amodei posting his memo shortly thereafter, Anthropic was fairly shouting: Stop me before I kill again!

If the Frankenstein monster came up to you and said, “Stop me before I kill again,” you wouldn’t ask it which safety precautions to take. You’d lock it up. The fear among AI leaders is persuasive. If they’re afraid, then I’m going to be afraid, too. But finding the solution to ameliorate these fears shouldn’t be left to them. Our democratic institutions of governance are built to handle this. Electing a Democratic Congress in November will help speed the process along. Let’s hope Trump can be persuaded to get out of the way.