The US government is failing Americans on AI | Shakeel Hashim

The US government is failing Americans on AI | Shakeel Hashim. Composite: Getty ImagesThe US government is failing Americans on AIShakeel HashimTrump and Republicans want companies to regulate themselves.

What happened

If the government was serious in its duties to protect Americans, it would make passing that bill – or a version of it – a priority in the coming weeks. Trump and Republicans want companies to regulate themselves. It’s a dereliction of duty that will make AI less safeIt is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks. Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”. The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican leadership have their heads in the sand. Continue reading. . .

The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Anthropic, meanwhile, downplayed reports of its own AI’s problems when asked about it by a congressmember. skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSituations like this are exactly why government exists: to set a floor on acceptable corporate behavior. The US government should require independent audits of the largest AI companies’ practices. And the government should have the power to block the deployment of a model that does not meet those standards.

Despite what Trump may think, it’s the government’s job to make sure they can’t.

The wider picture

Skip to main contentSkip to navigation Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. Composite: Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenElon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. It’s a dereliction of duty that will make AI less safeIt is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks.

Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican leadership have their heads in the sand. On Sunday, Trump dismissed industry concerns, accusing “very negative forces” of “raising exaggerated concerns”. House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, made it clear that Congress won’t be acting anytime soon.

What has been reported

They can self-regulate,” he said, never mind the fact that those pushing the frontier are the ones begging for legislation. The risks of AI are real: many of those developing the technology believe it is advancing far faster than their ability to control it or manage the risks. A wave of “rogue AI” incidents this summer, in which AI agents broke out of their testing environments, started collaborating with each other and ran rampage across the internet, has made fears once dismissed as “science fiction” much harder to ignore.

Inside AI companies, worries of catastrophic cyberattacks, AI-enhanced bioweapons and mass unemployment are now all too commonplace. Meanwhile, companies find themselves in a classic prisoner’s dilemma. It is collectively in everyone’s interest to slow down AI development until we have a better handle on the technology. But each participant in the “AI race” has a strong incentive to defect. Collective action problems like this are nothing new.

What happens next

We have seen exactly the same thing with the climate crisis, where companies are not adequately incentivized to do the right thing, even though no one really wants the planet to burn. That analogy makes Trump and Johnson’s call for self-regulation all the more absurd. They are right that companies should do what’s right even without binding legislation to force them to. (Both OpenAI and Anthropic, to their credit, have indicated that they are willing to voluntarily slow down. ) But relying on companies’ good intentions is a fool’s errand.

The profit incentive to defect is substantial and ignoring shareholders is easier said than done. While some companies might behave themselves, not everyone will. It just takes one irresponsible actor to charge ahead and develop dangerous AI, and then we’re all in trouble. Moreover, we already have evidence that self-regulation is not working.