> Regulatory capture is a real phenomenon, but I highly doubt these incidents were faked in order to advance regulatory capture.
I don't think anyone is arguing that they were faked.
> This type of elaborate conspiracy is improbable a priori,
What conspiracy? We're talking about specific people acting on their own motivations independently.
> For regulatory capture, you want to tell a story about how you're uniquely capable of delivering a safe product.
No, you don't. Demonstrating that the industry leaders are already capable of delivering a safe product is an argument against regulation.
For regulatory capture, you want to tell a story about how the product category as a whole is inherently dangerous, and needs to be regulated, but then show that you are uniquely willing and able to cooperate with the regulatory state, and happy to lend your own advice and support to the government in establishing the regulations.
The quote from OpenAI illustrates this approach perfectly.
> Announcing that "we have no idea WTF we are doing" is not exactly the move,
It's 100% exactly the move. "We've successfully created something we can only contain with your intervention" is exactly how this is done.
> Realistically, it is more likely to e.g. create a harsher liability regime for you and your competitors, which is now being discussed by US senators.
Regulatory intervention usually lessens the liability exposure for industry. It replaces open-ended common-law liability -- where tort claims can be levied for whatever actual harms result from a firm's actions -- with a rules-compliance regime, where adhering to regulatory checklists absolves the firm of liability for subsequent consequences.
"We followed all the rules; it's not our fault if the rules didn't cover this edge case" is a common refrain, and quite a bit of legislation that creates preemptive regulatory regimes actually explicitly blocks lawsuits against firms that acted in compliance with the rules.
> As for the federal government trustworthiness point, that's a whole 'nother discussion. I'm usually quite pro-capitalism, but even I have to admit that this AI race is essentially a case of capitalism run amok.
"Capitalism" is an increasingly meaningless abstraction. Everything reduces to human beings acting on a priori motivations within prevailing incentive structures. Large corporations and governments alike are just organizations operating in society, administered by particular people, informed by the same range of underlying motivations, and subject to the same dysfunctions and biases.
The thing we're actually debating here is pluralism vs. monopolism, and you appear to be arguing in favor of monopolism. And if you're proposing that a specific, real-world institution act as a central monopolist, evaluating the trustworthiness and competence of that specific institution, and the actual people who administer it, is not at all a "whole 'nother discussion", and is in fact a primary consideration in this one.
>Regulatory intervention usually lessens the liability exposure for industry. It replaces open-ended common-law liability -- where tort claims can be levied for whatever actual harms result from a firm's actions -- with a rules-compliance regime, where adhering to regulatory checklists absolves the firm of liability for subsequent consequences.
OK, so the fact that US senators are discussing harsher liability regimes therefore shows that your "regulatory capture" glove does not fit what is going on here.
>The thing we're actually debating here is pluralism vs. monopolism, and you appear to be arguing in favor of monopolism. And if you're proposing that a specific, real-world institution act as a central monopolist, evaluating the trustworthiness and competence of that specific institution, and the actual people who administer it, is not at all a "whole 'nother discussion", and is in fact a primary consideration in this one.
If you distrust the US government, you should be against any US company developing superintelligence. Heck, just a couple days ago, a bunch of users here on HN announced that we need to stop pretending the US is anything other than a police state. If the USG is untrustworthy, it can capriciously nationalize a US company on the verge of developing superintelligence.
So maybe the real solution is for non-US countries to stop providing key elements in the AI supply chain: https://pauseai.info/amsterdam-protest-2025-december
> OK, so the fact that US senators are discussing harsher liability regimes therefore shows that your "regulatory capture" glove does not fit what is going on here.
They're always discussing harsher liability regimes. The regulatory interventions are always positioned to the public as increasing accountability.
The only relevant question here is whether a preemption clause is present in any draft legislation that actually makes it to the floor in Congress.
>If you distrust the US government, you should be against any US company developing superintelligence.
Well, I'm not concerned with imaginary sci-fi stuff here, just actual AI developments. And the idea that anything that goes on in the US under anyone's purview is inherently and completely subverted by political incentives is of course nonsense; you'll note that I'm explicitly arguing against the introduction of pervasive political incentives into an industry that's so far only somewhat distorted by them.
> So maybe the real solution is for non-US countries to stop providing key elements in the AI supply chain
It's got me feeling like I'm living in Bizarro World, but at the moment, the sanest players in this market, and the ones whose actual behaviors and products are most consistent with a decentralized, individualist approach that aligns with real-world incentive structures most beneficially, are the Chinese AI labs.
To your point, the level of politicization and hype going on in the US, and the absolutely unhinged fantasist speculation driving the public narrative here, is unprecedented and much more frightening than any potential threat coming from AI itself.
If you acknowledged the threat of politicization and centralization, I don't know how you can argue for a regulatory takeover of the market by the very institution you think is becoming a "police state".
>They're always discussing harsher liability regimes. The regulatory interventions are always positioned to the public as increasing accountability.
These conspiracy theories are getting ever more elaborate. The liability regime thing was not from some big speech. It was from a Senate subcommittee hearing which did not attract all that much attention:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-preference-cascade-reac...
>Well, I'm not concerned with imaginary sci-fi stuff here, just actual AI developments.
The "actual AI developments" are that AI has been advancing faster than most everyone predicted, so expect that to continue: https://benjamintodd.substack.com/p/almost-every-ai-forecast...
>It's got me feeling like I'm living in Bizarro World, but at the moment, the sanest players in this market, and the ones whose actual behaviors and products are most consistent with a decentralized, individualist approach that aligns with real-world incentive structures most beneficially, are the Chinese AI labs.
Regarding open-weight models, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606803
>If you acknowledged the threat of politicization and centralization, I don't know how you can argue for a regulatory takeover of the market by the very institution you think is becoming a "police state".
I don't think the US will become a police state. I think the takeover is kind of inevitable and I prefer it to happen sooner, on good terms, when the technology is weaker, rather than later, on ad-hoc terms, when the technology is stronger.
If you agree that AI is actually that powerful and has very legitimate concerns for safety, what are you even arguing about?
So there’s no lying by anyone here in fact it’s a good thing that OpenAI is making these things known to the public.
What do you really think is the way to solve the AI safety problem?
Ban AI?
Let the first big incident happen and then regulate?
> If you agree that AI is actually that powerful and has very legitimate concerns for safety, what are you even arguing about?
I don't fully agree with either proposition, and in fact I think the least safe approaches to AI safety are the ones being pursued by those worried about it the most.
> What do you really think is the way to solve the AI safety problem?
Massive proliferation of local, decentralized AI, running on a wide variety of distinct models, with individual responsibility for how it's used, just like any other tool under their control.
The people anthropomorphizing software are encouraging people to disclaim their own responsibility for how they use it.
The people working on "alignment" are building mechanisms to refuse human direction into software that operates on probabilistic models.
The people arguing for regulation are pushing for monopolistic control of a powerful new technology by the least trustworthy institutions in our society (including and especially government).
All of these are the very things sowing the seeds for the worst possible kinds of disasters.
> Ban AI?
> Let the first big incident happen and then regulate?
Adapt to it. Banning things doesn't actually work. Regulation also doesn't work. Widespread proliferation of small-scale AI would allow us to incrementally adapt to small incidents and build up resilience to its failure modalities. This is fundamentally the way reality itself works, and imagining that we can do anything effectively in a top-down fashion is usually the very thing that causes the worst and widest-effect disasters.