"This should alarm you regardless of what party you are in. What you are seeing now will be used against you one day soon, if not by this admin then by its successors. This is the antithesis of the rule of law.
The administration cannot and will not fix this problem alone. We need Congress to step in and impose rules on this mess."
Precisely as I predicted, the recent cyber EO, which admin officials insisted was not a licensing regime, ends up in practice being a licensing regime. Forget “voluntary,” forget “permissionless.”
AI is licensed now, but the requirements change constantly and are always a secret, even to the administration itself, which will discover the rules spontaneously in real time as it reacts to events. This means also that the rules are in practice stricter and more roughly enforced for organizations the administration does not like.
Can you blame Anthropic for making itself so disliked? In a sense, sure. The problem is that this childish “he said, she said” is all we have to go on in our analysis of the situation. And because there is no transparency (it is all calls and texts between “White House officials” and “Anthropic executives”), in practice it comes down to who you trust more.
This is why we create laws! To abstract away from personal power struggles and grudges, to submit to the steady application of rules so that complex human activity can unfold with predictability.
The rule of law has been being eroded in the U.S. for my entire life, but it is especially acute in AI because of both the lack of much preexisting law to serve as bulwark, and because of this admin’s insistence that it is Not Regulating AI. This has become an excuse for vagueness and evasiveness in rule-drafting (see the cyber EO), and this in turn makes the lawlessness worse.
The government wants to apply its force to frontier AI, that much is clear. It wants to make the industry submit. And in service of that goal, it has discovered that “not regulating AI” is in fact a great excuse for refusing to support laws that could constrain the admin’s exercise of power. In other words, “not regulating AI” is a *justification* for the tyrannical control of AI by the state.
This should alarm you regardless of what party you are in. What you are seeing now will be used against you one day soon, if not by this admin then by its successors. This is the antithesis of the rule of law.
The administration cannot and will not fix this problem alone. We need Congress to step in and impose rules on this mess.
