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J.D. Tuccille: AI execs don't want safety. They want to block competitors

Established businesses have a history of using government as a weapon against upstarts

If you take recent statements by some artificial intelligence (AI) executives at face value, they’re demanding that governments stop them before they destroy the world as they call for regulation and oversight. It’s a curious position for innovators who have made grand claims about their products’ potential and who could, presumably, simply drop their efforts if they believe the risks outweigh the benefits. Their position seemingly ignores the reality that, if they get their way, dissenters will almost certainly move their highly mobile work to jurisdictions that maintain a light regulatory touch. But it all makes more sense when you remember that established businesses have a history of asking politicians to impose red tape burdens that pose barriers to entry for upstart competitors.

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“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote last month. He proposed “giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators” and called “on governments to require other frontier companies to match.” He also asked for “government support” for AI companies in democratic countries “to establish common safety standards” and to “attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments.”

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