The AI regulation smackdown isn’t over

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. 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 Trump administration has attacked the idea of a safety crisis in AI, calling it a “hoax.” 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. Congress should turn that momentum into a framework that strengthens safety, supports American innovation, and keeps the U.S. leading in AI.”

An AI venture capitalist, who requested anonymity due to their current investments, agreed that regulation was necessary. “You see these moments in every technology, whether it was electricity, cars, or airplanes, where, at some point, the industry had to come together to find a way to say, ‘How do we collectively embrace what safety means?’ Cars were unsafe, airplanes were unsafe, and then we had to create safety standards that everybody embraced that actually made technology more widespread. But the early days are always a little wild and unruly, and that’s how technology unfolds.”

Anthropic declined to comment, but Amodei wrote in his essay that the company has “always … advocat[ed] for well-considered regulation of AI, even when this gets us accused of hype, ‘doomerism’, or regulatory capture.”

Other companies have remained quiet. Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceX, and Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment. And Meta pointed to an X post by Zuckerberg, in which he distanced himself from the calls for a slowdown and regulation, writing, “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.”

Zuckerberg’s line of thinking appears in vogue with Trump right now. The president made headlines last week for calling recent fears about AI risks a “hoax.” He called Huang while the latter was onstage at a conference and told a crowd over speakerphone that “The robots will not be taking over.” That same day, he also posted on social media that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He added that the Trump administration has already “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’” using its existing “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” He denounced a “SICK conspiracy” going on against both AI and data centers and that whoever wins AI wins overall. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” 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. The order was centered on creating a set of principles for federal AI use that would protect “privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties.”

“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. “AI safety requires more than the intellectual abilities of one elected official.”

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.

Overall, the administration’s positions on AI regulation have been “wobbly and inconsistent,” Reese said. “The result of that is that we are now framing AI safety in this doomsday scenario where the robots are coming to get us. But framing it as ‘robots are coming to get us’ really distorts what the core problem actually is. The core problem is that we have AI that is not physical or embodied in a robot that is hurting humans now.”

Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social that the administration currently has both criminal and regulatory power over AI labs, but Reese said we’re nowhere near sufficient regulatory authority over the AI industry. As the technology advances, and the general public continues to push back — protests, boycotts, and outcry over the AI industry’s concentrated power in the hands of few — calls for regulation are only increasing, and that pressure could influence Trump’s current position.

Reese said the opposition to regulation boils down to a “tired” idea that it’s always bad for innovation. Instead, he says, it’s important to think about why anything gets regulated.

“We regulate things that we can tolerate no failure on … like the financial sector or airlines,” he said. “We build systems and checks and quality assurance and fallback mechanisms to make sure that those things don’t harm life or harm us systemically. But somehow we’re exempting AI from that.”