Selling snake oil to the United States Congress is an ancient American craft, and the frontier artificial intelligence industry is currently attempting the most audacious hustle in modern corporate history.
it’s a well written article. glad to see more opinion pieces countering the current AI Boogeyman narrative.
By convincing gullible politicians that unmonitored models represent an existential catastrophe capable of destroying the internet, the labs are engineering a regulatory moat to strangle open-source software in the crib. Mandatory compute thresholds, federal licensing schemes, and embedded monitors will never stop a determined foreign adversary. Those regulations simply make it a federal crime for independent developers, universities, and small startups to publish code without government clearance.
The outcome of this lobbying blitz remains in active contention, as deregulatory resistance in the executive branch pushes back against Silicon Valley’s manufactured panic. Even so, the sheer desperation of the campaign exposes the true fragility of the frontier labs. Gullible lawmakers genuinely believe they are debating the survival of the human species, while the corporate executives sitting across the table are simply fighting to erect a legal wall around a commoditising market.
it’s a well written article. glad to see more opinion pieces countering the current AI Boogeyman narrative.