Be afraid. Be very afraid. Now, give the government more power so it can “protect” you. This is the latest message from the big-tech executives who run major AI-related firms. Many of them now insist that the government should step in to plan and regulate the industry to save us all from the AI “threat.”
For example, last Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an article titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” called for extensive government regulation of AI firms. Amodei insisted that, unless governments step in to control the AI industry, then there will be insufficient “guardrails” to prevent “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.”
Before the weekend was even over, other tech executive Sam Altman and Elon Musk were also calling for government control of AI industries. The Financial Times put it this way:
In a rare display of consensus in an industry marked by fierce personal and professional rivalries, the chiefs of OpenAI and SpaceX, Altman and Musk, said they supported Amodei’s proposals, which included giving independent evaluators ongoing access to every frontier AI company.
All this business about “independent evaluators” is designed to make their proposals sound benign. But their schemes go far beyond additional paperwork and bureaucracy to monitor AI-firm activities. Notably, both Altman and Amodei have explicitly stated that they support the creation of a global effort to control AI tech.1
This “rare display of consensus” that The Financial Times describes is not at all surprising or anything new. It’s what oligarchs do when they want to cartelize their own industries. It’s what the railroad barons did during the Gilded Age. It’s just a way of crushing competition and giving a government-protected advantage to the most politically influential firms. As is usually true when we hear calls from CEOs for more government regulation, this scheme is essentially a case of regulatory capture. It’s an example of large incumbent firms calling for measures that will reduce competition from new firms, and enrich those firms that are most influential within the regulatory process. It’s simply the latest example of how the “elites” among tech entrepreneurs are not really entrepreneurs at all. They’re political operatives seeking out new ways to enrich themselves through partnerships with the regime itself.
[Read More: “The Real Elites vs. The Ruling Elites“]
Indeed, whenever we see a group of politically active billionaires agree that government should have more power, we should be alarmed, to say the least. The way that Musk and Altman have rallied behind Amodei is reminiscent of what we have heard from “the experts” around issues like global warming and Covid.2 The rhetoric is essentially the same and goes like this: “Bad Thing A is so terrible, we must hand much more power to governments and to a global state that will protect us from the catastrophic effects of Bad Thing A. The Amodei scheme for a global consortium to control AI is just Paris Climate Deal 2.0. It’s simply the latest variation of calling for the World Health Organization to enforce global vaccine passports. “Pace the frontier” is a new variation of “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
What Amodei Wants
In his essay, Amodei calls for a three-step process to create a global controls over the development of AI technologies. He begins with a call for “embedded evaluators.” According to Amodei, this is “a team of embedded third-party evaluators” who will ensure compliance. Amodei, of course, suggests that this “third party” be a firm over which he already has influence.3 But, in any case, the idea is that Amodei and his allies will have considerable control over whatever third party is used. That’s the whole point of regulatory capture.
The second step is “Democratic coordination,” and this is where Amodei seeks out a global superstate to enforce his preferred mandates worldwide. He puts it this way: “Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support.“ [emphasis added.]
This is essentially a description of the cartelization of the industry—enforced by regime coercion. The coercion is explicitly stated when Amodei writes that the “coordination” covers “even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily.” It’s all more globalism, premised on the idea that a global state apparatus is necessary to keep us safe. It’s the same thing we heard during covid, and every time we hear about the apocalyptic predictions from the global-warming party.
The third step is “global coordination.” It’s here that Amodei seeks to make his global AI scheme into a component of a new Cold War, and to therefore align with the American Foreign Policy Blob and the national security state. After all, virtually every major tech firm is either already an adjunct of the US government, or is in the processing of seeking to become one. Joining the US national security state is usually the lucrative end game for most tech “entrepreneurs” who pretend to want fair play in the marketplace. The private-sector activities are a means to an end. The end in question is access to the wealth and power that comes from an alliance with the American deep state. Taxpayer-funded billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are among the most obvious examples, but Altman, and Amodei curry favor with the regime through similar “partnerships” with the American war machine and the domestic surveillance state.
It’s in this section that we find all the usual dog whistles offered up by firms seeking to capitalize on Cold-War-style hysteria about the Chinese and other foreigners. Amodei spends most of the second half of the essay retreading old Cold-War slogans to justify his globalist scheme as something necessary to beat China. He frames his industry as a component of an arms race to defeat China, and therefore requires both government support and government control.
In a paragraph that could have been written by Robert Kagan or John Bolton, Amodei says:
“Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that US companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party. If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk. I agree with Secretary Bessent that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” -
Amodei’s rhetoric also feels like something of a throwback to the days of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” It uses the same language of an imagined list of good guys—the “democratic” countries—who are to face down what Amodei’s imagined modern equivalent of the “Axis of Evil”—composed of “authoritarian governments.” Its a global war for democracy all over again. This method is also savvy in that it is likely to win over friends in both political parties. The war lobby, of course, is not limited to any single political party in Washington.
The method of playing on hysteria over foreign powers also fits well into Amodei’s overall method which is to stir up fear to support his political agenda. Indeed, there is probably no fear-based tactic more successful than this. After all, the entire Conservative movement, founded and led by William F. Buckley for decades, followed Buckley’s claim that Americans should be willing to accept outright totalitarianism if that was necessary to defeat the Soviet threat. The conservative Cold Warrior’s message was (and is) the same as Amodei’s: forget about freedom and give us more power or the terrorists/communists win.
What Is Probably Behind the Coordinated Effort
Some have naturally wondered by Amodei is right now pressing so hard for a government takeover of his industry. It would be naive in the extreme to think that Amodei just suddenly has decided to go public on something that has been troubling his wounded conscience. Rather, there appears to be a well coordinated effort to stir up public fears about AI. In recent days, Netflix released a new “documentary” on the dangers of AI. Earlier this month, Bernie Sanders introduced a new bill to greatly expand federal control of the AI industry. And now we have Amodei predicting the doom of humanity due to a product he still enthusiastically sells and promotes.
Tech execs, of course, love to make very public and emotional claims in which the execs pretend to be very sensitive souls who are very concerned about humanity and just want progress, love, and joy. Remarkably, all of this “soul” searching never results in these CEOs quitting their jobs or giving up any money or power. After all, as David Sacks suggested this week, If Amodei is so troubled by the dangers of AI, why has Amodei not stopped selling his “dangerous” product? If Amodei is so troubled by his alleged inability to stop the march of AI, why has Amodei not stepped aside for someone else who might be able to fix the problem? We already know the answer. The whole point of the exercise is to offer opportunities for Amodei to promote himself, his firm, and his scheme for more political power. His conscience is not troubled.
Nevertheless, Amodei’s call for more government control certainly fits within his own political views.
Rather, the motivations behind the calls for the cartelization of the industry—coming, predictably, from the largest incumbent firms—are likely very mundane. They’re simply efforts to freeze out new competition. Many observers of Amodei’s scheme have suggested that real reasons behind the Amodei scheme stem from the fact that open-source AI is offering real competition for firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. The New York Times, after all, recently reported that “Corporate America Is Getting Hooked on Open-Source A.I.“ and stated that “Companies like AT&T are increasingly using cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over expensive ones.” How convenient it would be if Amodei could succeed in regulating the industry and using his political power to essentially ban “unregulated” open-source AI. And, of course, it’s no coincidence that a leading source of open-source tools is China. If Chinese AI can be banned by the US and other “democracies” then Amodei will face a whole lot less competition.
In the coming days, get ready to hear a lot about how Americans must be protected from themselves, and we need government regulation to ensure that only state-approved, expensive, crony “capitalist” firms are allowed to develop AI. It’s all to “keep us safe.”
- 1
Altman, of course, has a well established record of supporting huge state-led efforts at control and central planning. In a May 2020 interview, for example, he heaped praise of Anthony Fauci as Fauci was calling for draconian lockdowns and global controls in the name of “stopping the spread” of Covid. Altman stated that “I’ve already been a fan boy of Fauci’s] for a long time. I wrote a paper about him in high school. In response to his thoughts on seeing Fauci on TV everyday, calling for lockdowns and similar measures, Altman said: “I think he’s great. I think he is such a calming expert presence.” (See: https://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2020/05/out-of-crisis-1-sam-altman-on-resetting.html)
- 2
Not surprisingly, Bill Gates, an architect of both global-warming and covid panics, has now come out in favor of a global central planning scheme to regulate AI.
- 3
Specifically, Amodei calls for a company called METR to provide oversight. This company is already partly controlled and funded by Anthropic, and thus by Amodei himself.
