But in Washington, the sudden legislative urgency looks less like a grassroots miracle and more like a highly coordinated pressure campaign. After weeks of stalled negotiations, the Senate's leading vehicle for AI regulation - negotiated by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) - is suddenly being positioned as the "only viable option" to pass before the end of the year.
We all gonna die!
Regulatory Capture by Panic?
Sept 10, today: Semafor reports the Klobuchar-Cruz-Thune bill is suddenly "the only viable option" before 2027 and "may be introduced as early as next week." Klobuchar: "it's clear we need to act now and not wait." Cruz: working on legislation "to address catastrophic risks involving biological or nuclear threats." Frontier labs and advocacy groups are already feeding Hill staff on unreleased draft text. Bernie Sanders is teeing up a superintelligence ban and a briefing.
It really does look like a case of "plz regulate me harder, daddy", doesn't it?
What's the over / under on that recent Anthropic guy who resigned being a plant?
I didn't think of it at the time, but it is weird that some random junior AI researcher resigning was making headlines at major newspapers.
Anderson Cooper interviewed him. He stressed how companies are begging to be regulated because they are scared too.
They definitely are scared. Of their competitors in China eating their lunch. And dinner. And breakfast. And drink all the champagne.
These labs have no real moats except sunk cost. Anthropic itself proves that OpenAI's first-mover advantage is already minimal - they caught up in less than 18 months of product-market fit. Chinese open models will destroy any long term value these guys have, except that there is so much money riding on their faked-and-will-never-make lasting excellence, that if they get a little bit of protection by erecting barriers to entry for others, they might actually survive on sunk cost alone.
Now I'm more convinced that it's orchestrated
I was thinking the same thing at first, but on the other hand, I don't really think Anthropic would need to orchestrate that, the papers will build that oppty all by themselves because they think they're doing humanity a favor.
People entering every thought or data into a database loses its surveillance value if its self hosted or offshore
Intel agencies use venture firms to operate as companies (look where in-q-tel is headquartered and see if it's familiar)
So it's not companies asking to be regulated, it's the IC protecting their companies.
Now ask what data they already have that can be used to blackmail pols... It's a closed loop system.
It's not a problem of we're all gonna die so much as corporations love to externalize their costs. If they fuck up your shit, they need to pay for that. So far their misdeeds have been framed not as negligence but as p(doom). Rather than face lawsuits they've framed corporate culpability as civilizational risk. There's no turning back but we should not lose accountability.
On the upside these tools stand to help decentralize power and expertise. You can have the software you want and you can run services (like mail servers and nostr relays) for man-minutes a month that used to be a full time job.