In a stunning display of economic confidence, the US government has decided that global AI safety standards are simply too much fun to pass up—and by fun, we mean the kind where nobody knows what the machines are doing but the stock market goes up anyway.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face’s Clement Delangue have all made the rookie mistake of suggesting that maybe—just maybe—we should evaluate AI risks before they become someone else’s problem. The US response: thanks for the input, but we’re going to wing it instead.
The logic here is airtight. Why bother with international coordination on safety standards when you can let every nation, corporation, and well-funded startup build their own AI systems with whatever guardrails they feel like installing that Tuesday? Sure, we might end up with competing, incompatible, and potentially dangerous systems racing toward capabilities nobody fully understands. But think of the GDP growth. Think of the innovation. Think of the earnings calls where executives say “we move fast” without actually finishing that sentence.
The irony is delicious: the companies literally building these systems are asking for rules, and the government is telling them no. It is the regulatory equivalent of a chef asking the health inspector if they can use fresh ingredients, and the inspector saying “absolutely not—surprise us.”
So buckle up. The future of AI governance is apparently “figure it out as we go,” which has never gone wrong before.