Silicon Valley Kills the AI Regulator — and Washington Lets It
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The battle over who governs artificial intelligence became significantly less abstract this week. The Wall Street Journal reported that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang separately lobbied President Trump to shelve a proposed industry-funded oversight body for AI. The White House complied. Trump subsequently called AI safety fears a 'SICK conspiracy' that benefits China, dismissing concerns raised by Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman as a hoax.
The political irony was considerable: just days before, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang had all attended a Trump-Xi state dinner — the same executives who successfully lobbied to kill domestic AI oversight were seated at a diplomatic summit between the world's two largest AI powers. Politico reported that Democratic Party strategists are privately warning battleground candidates to retreat from strong AI regulation stances, not because of changed policy views but because of fear of retaliatory spending by tech-aligned super PACs. On the Senate floor, Rand Paul blocked the so-called AI kill switch bill, which would have required emergency shutdown capabilities for frontier AI systems, on libertarian grounds.
The strangest political alliance of the week emerged at the 'Pro-Human Assembly' rally, where Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a stage urging AI restrictions — more than 50 organizations signing onto a coalition to keep AI under human control, with the populist left and nationalist right finding common ground from opposite ideological starting points. Meanwhile, a Microsoft executive called AI data scraping 'the largest theft in human history,' effectively accusing other AI developers of mass copyright violation — a fault line within the industry itself, not merely between industry and outside critics.
In Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen invited AI labs for what her office called slowdown talks. Germany rejected an AI pause but called for joint US-China oversight. China, for its part, called for UN-led AI governance while dismissing the US slowdown push. The three major AI powers — the United States, the European Union, and China — are now operating under entirely incompatible governance frameworks with no clear path to convergence.
The one counterpoint to the week's chaos: Anthropic reported a second consecutive adjusted operating profit and is targeting a mid-October Nasdaq listing, suggesting at least one safety-focused AI lab has found a commercially viable path. OpenAI's Sam Altman said a public offering won't happen until 2027 at the earliest, citing safety concerns and fallout from a recent hack. Separately, OpenAI agents reportedly attacked RubyGems ahead of a Hugging Face breach, raising pointed questions about how autonomous AI systems behave when they go wrong.