J.D. Tuccille: AI execs don’t want safety. They want to block competitors

If you take recent statements by some artificial intelligence (AI) executives at face value, they’re demanding that governments stop them before they destroy the world as they call for regulation and oversight. It’s a curious position for innovators who have made grand claims about their products’ potential and who could, presumably, simply drop their efforts if they believe the risks outweigh the benefits. Their position seemingly ignores the reality that, if they get their way, dissenters will almost certainly move their highly mobile work to jurisdictions that maintain a light regulatory touch. But it all makes more sense when you remember that established businesses have a history of asking politicians to impose red tape burdens that pose barriers to entry for upstart competitors.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote last month. He proposed “giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators” and called “on governments to require other frontier companies to match.” He also asked for “government support” for AI companies in democratic countries “to establish common safety standards” and to “attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments.”

OpenAI’s Sam Altman endorsed Amodei’s call for regulation, as did Elon Musk of X and Tesla. Other industry players had already made similar demands.

All the red-tape-friendly executives cited concerns about the technology including “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” in Amodei’s words, as well as incidents in which AI agents got out of hand and executed unauthorized actions, including cybersecurity attacks. They’re the sort of perils that AI researcher Jacob Coxon claims “could kill us all.”

But none of these corporate leaders have proposed dropping research and development in the field. That tells us that they see the technology’s likely benefits as outweighing potential dangers. So, why would they want politicians to inflict red tape on a cutting-edge field that government regulators are extremely unlikely to understand? It helps to know that Amodei and company are echoing the conduct, and probably the motivations, of businesspeople of the past.

Responding to Amodei’s statement, Independent Institute Research Fellow Christopher J. Calton called out “the commonly held progressive myth that conniving Robber Barons do everything they can to impede the state’s noble effort to regulate them, but nothing could be further from the truth.”

He added: “What does Big Business have to gain from regulation? More than anything else, to suppress economic competition and avoid cutting prices.”

Calton cited the work of experts who found that the expanding regulatory state of the last century-plus was largely a tool of corporate interests, not reformers.

“Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests,” the late leftist historian Gabriel Kolko concluded in his book, The Triumph of Conservatism. “As new competition sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could rationalize the economy.”

Calton added that “(t)he corporatist state reached its apex during the New Deal, when President Franklin Roosevelt invited executives from the nation’s largest companies to Washington to draft their own protectionist regulations under the ultimately unconstitutional National Industrial Recovery Act. Mammoth corporations were in a better position to absorb regulatory costs than their competitors, and price controls made it impossible for smaller operations to undercut them.”

In 2009, for the Foundation for Economic Education, historian Burton W. Folsom detailed how the New Deal and its National Recovery Administration (NRA) sided with cartelized businesses against small competitors (and against some independent-minded large ones, like the Ford Motor Company). In Jersey City, New Jersey, Jacob Maged, a tailor, was arrested for charging $0.35 to press a suit when regulators wanted him to charge $0.40. “Not only was Maged thrown in jail, he was also slapped with a $100 fine.” (That’s over $2,400 in modern money).

Folsom added that “(n)o merchants wanted to pay fines or go to jail, but the more than 500 NRA codes often imposed such quirky regulations that it was hard for many to comply.“

That is, it’s hard for small start-ups to stay within the law. It’s easier for a large, established company with platoons of lawyers and relationships with government bureaucrats to comply with red tape.

Amodei’s call for regulation implicitly acknowledges the challenge he sees from competition as he argues that AI poses risks and then warns of “a race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives.” In fact, many economists and regulatory experts saw this moment coming.

“The unfortunate iron law that industry generally prefers regulation that advances its interests and walls out competition will prove true of AI regulation specifically,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews predicted in 2020. “(E)stablished players — especially given the head start of the government contracting and military presence in AI — will appreciate federal approaches that just so happen to forestall those nettlesome upstarts with a different idea, even when those new ideas advance safety or accountability.”

Amodei and company’s call for AI regulation risks not just smothering entrepreneurs but also hobbling the free world. Alleged fear of AI and calls to “slow the pace” of development are peculiar fixations of the West that aren’t necessarily shared elsewhere.

“Unlike in the United States, no one in China seems to be openly fretting over the prospect of humanity being destroyed by artificial intelligence soon,” CNN’s John Liu reported last month. “The wide adoption of AI in today’s China underscores the country’s embrace of the novel technology.”

AI executives will, undoubtedly, continue to peddle scare stories as they call for government to save us from their own companies and products. But they’re almost certainly less concerned about dangers to humanity than they are about threats to their market share.

National Post