Trump and Republicans want companies to regulate themselves.
Their workers are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”.
The combination of warnings from insiders and real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. 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.
In failing to act, the Trump administration and Republicans are failing the American people. 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 attack across the internet, has made fears once dismissed as “science fiction” much harder to ignore.
Inside AI companies, worries of cyberattacks, AI-enhanced bioweapons and mass unemployment are now all too commonplace.
Companies find themselves in a classic prisoner’s dilemma.
Collective action problems like this are nothing new.
The profit incentive to defect is substantial and ignoring shareholders is easier said than done.
Good bills already exist, most representatives Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan’s Frontier act. If the government was serious in its duties to protect Americans, it would make passing that bill a priority in the coming weeks.