The AI regulation smackdown isn’t over

What happened

At the start of this week, the who’s-who of AI seemed — at least tentatively — on the side of AI regulation. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including by embedding third-party evaluators in labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements potentially with government assistance.

” Zuckerberg’s line of thinking appears in vogue with Trump right now. A. ” He denounced a “SICK conspiracy” going on against both AI and data centers and that whoever wins AI wins overall. ” he wrote.

For Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and the Department of Homeland Security’s former director of emerging tech policy, Trump’s current anti-regulation statements about AI are confusing because he worked with the first Trump administration to develop Executive Order 13960 — which Trump signed and has not been repealed.

Why it matters

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly seemed to agree on aspects of all three things. Anthropic and OpenAI had already been dropping hints that they and other labs were working on some kind of industry framework. Appearing pro-regulation looked like both a good PR move and, potentially, a way for companies to address fallout from progressively more concerning hacking incidents.

For now, any government involvement in this process looks like a non-starter. ” The AI world itself is also divided.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly came out against limiting companies’ autonomy, and earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg, Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang scuttled proposals for an industry-funded independent regulator for the AI industry — akin to the ​Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private nonprofit regulator in finance. But parts of the industry aren’t giving up on the idea, including OpenAI.

“People want to know AI is being developed safely,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global affairs chief, told The Verge. “That begins with the steps companies like ours take on our own, but government has an important role too. The AI policy window is open, with growing bipartisan support for mandatory national safety standards for frontier AI. S.

” An AI venture capitalist, who requested anonymity due to their current investments, agreed that regulation was necessary. ’ Cars were unsafe, airplanes were unsafe, and then we had to create safety standards that everybody embraced that actually made technology more widespread. ” Other companies have remained quiet. , SpaceX, and Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment.

What to watch

” “Six years ago, the Trump Administration signed executive action on AI safety, so there is a real change in the president’s position on the topic,” Reese said. ” As AI-industry blogger Zvi Mowshowitz put it, Trump isn’t necessarily fully anti-regulation — after all, he’s the one who slapped some restrictions on frontier labs, like pre-release testing by the government.

But he’s driven more by, in Mowshowitz’s words, “vibes” than consistent policy. “Trump’s not yet buying this ‘existential risk’ thing, that’s ‘negative forces,’” Mowshowitz wrote. So government guardrails aren’t exactly ruled out, but they may bear little resemblance to what OpenAI or Anthropic want — let alone the plans of less-powerful, independent AI safety advocates.