“Concerning AI,” US president Donald Trump  asked on Truth Social in mid-September, “when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

The answer, of course, is “never.”

When “industry leaders” start advocating for government regulation — or even, initially, for industry-internal “standards” bodies leading to such regulation — they’re not riding to the rescue of humankind, they’re looking out for their own bottom lines.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen rising public moral panic about the energy demands and environmental effects of AI data centers. While I can’t prove it, my perception is that the panic was algorithmically encouraged by, if not entirely created by, the same social media platforms that just happen to be operated by big players in AI.

Then, in mid-September, a sequence of events quickly unfolded that seemed pretty clearly artificial and contrived:

A researcher at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, resigned, stating that the big players in AI are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Following Coxon’s resignation, Anthropic’s “Alignment Science Lead,” Evan Hubinger, commented that “[w]e really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Within days — almost as if they’d just been waiting for a great news hook to roll their plans out for public consumption! — “industry leaders” moved from mildly asserting the desirability of an AI “standards” body (explicitly framed around a need for government to catch up with mandatory regulation) to openly coordinating with each other on forming such a body.

On September 18, four “paying subscribers” to AI services filed suit (seeking class action status) against Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google. The suit claims collusion between the firms, in violation of US antitrust laws, to establish “industry-wide coordination” that would “pace the frontier” of AI, slowing down its evolution (and thus depriving the public of whatever benefits that evolution might bring).

I’m not a big fan of antitrust law, but the case for collusion does look pretty strong, and that collusion really seems aimed at getting the US government to impose uniform and strict regulations on the development of artificial intelligence.

Why?

To keep new competitors — ambitious startups, smaller existing firms looking for new revenue centers, etc. — from entering the industry in the first place.

Those big industry players are already entrenched. They’ve established huge leads in building out AI infrastructure. They’ve already got the money and manpower in place to comply with such regulations.

Joe Blow, who just wrote some killer code at his desk, code to power a new kind of AI model running on a server in his garage, doesn’t have a data center to move his great idea onto.

He doesn’t have a major law firm on retainer to make sure his idea doesn’t violate any of the many government regulations that will inevitably evolve from the proposed “industry standards.”

And once those regulations are in place, he’ll have trouble raising enough investment capital to buy membership in a corporate club with a big “NO DOGS OR ENTREPRENEURS” sign on its door.

At best, Joe Blow might get one of those club members interested enough to hire him or buy his work product. More likely his big idea will just wither away and die.

That’s what the defendants in the lawsuit are really after: A shared monopoly.

Will AI kill all humans? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s either impossible or inevitable.

If it’s impossible, it’s nothing to worry about.

If it’s inevitable, all US government regulation — or “industry standards” — can accomplish is depriving Americans of the benefits of the most advanced AIs until the literal “killer app” emerges from Beijing or Bengaluru or Budapest.

Let’s not allow moral panic to deprive us of those benefits just so a few would-be monopolists can make bank.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY