The AI Regulation Debate

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1:02Wherever you get your podcasts. Cool, so media. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. When it comes to the future of AI, currently there's a big public debate over what could happen and what we should or shouldn't do about it. A few weeks ago, former open AI employee named Jacob Coxon, who moved over to Anthropic earlier this year, announced that he was, quote unquote, quitting the AI industry, over fears of AI's rapid advancement. To quote his statement, I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, unquote. Coxon's resignation followed the hugging face incident, where two open AI models were

2:04given various sometimes impossible tasks to test for cybersecurity capabilities. During testing, AI agents escaped their testing sandbox and started working as a collective swarm secretly communicating with each other via online message forums to help each other hack into another AI company called hugging face, and a sort of work around attempt to pass these tests. And these models hid all of this from AI researchers by rewriting their own activity logs. AI skeptic Ed Zitron has described this as, AI cheating on a test and then covering up that it cheated. A few days after Jacob Coxon's public resignation, the CEOs of Anthropic and Open AI, Dario Amade and Sam Altman, both called for an AI development slowdown. Amade released this long manifesto titled, Pace the Frontier, which advocated for AI companies

3:10to bring in independent evaluators to review their AI safety standards, report incidents and help assess alignment. But Amade also called for the government to mediate quote, industry wide coordination to slow down AI development and address safety risks. The title of Amade's essay, Pace the Frontier, is a sort of pun referring to Frontier AI models, which are whatever the currently most advanced large scale general purpose models, exploring advanced reasoning, agent work flows, multimodal generation across text, images, audio and video and autonomous task execution. Most of the Frontier models reference throughout this episode are not open to the public. These are internal research models being developed at companies like Open AI and Anthropic.

4:10Butered versions sometimes get released to the public later on, often with a extremely hefty price tag, but it's crucial to understand that we are not talking about like the Google AI summary here. This isn't fancy auto complete. These Frontier models are very powerful, very dangerous tools with massive cybersecurity risks, not just from offensive human use, but also from AI agents acting autonomously to solve a task by taking paths that humans didn't expect resulting in collateral damage. Part of what these big companies are trying to do with their very advanced internal research models is automate AI research itself. This is what Jacob Coxon referred to as quote, self-improving superintelligence. Now we do not know if that is or is not possible, but the companies sure are trying and in the process are creating dangerous products which are already causing active harm.

5:15And Thropic's whole self-styled philosophy is that superintelligent AI is so potentially dangerous that they have to be the first ones to develop it to ensure that it's built safely and aligned with human values as defined in quote, Claude's constitution, a set of philosophical and moral guidelines that Claude is trained on. In his pace, the Frontier essay, Amade writes that frontier AI companies within democratic countries should quote, coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging and will require government support. Unquote more on this later. Amade also calls for the US and quote, other democratic governments to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments around the world on this issue, meaning China.

6:20The prospect that China could achieve superintelligent AI before a US-based company is part of these companies' self-justification to rush to develop superintelligent AI as quickly as they possibly can. After Dario Amade posted this pace, the Frontier essay, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the chair of Google's Deep Mind all said they agreed and joined in calling for some sort of slowdown. But this view is not uniformly held across the tech sector. Volunteer CEO Alex Carp met his CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nivides CEO Jensen Huang have all said the opposite. Zuckerberg has called to accelerate rather than slowdown AI development, as his own AI model, Muse, has struggled to catch up to anthropic and open AI. Last week, Volunteer CEO Alex Carp told CNBC, we can't pause AI development because of

7:23the threat of China, and that AI will be a quote, bananza for the US economy. You can't pause it because it's a structural advantage both for the LLMs and algorithms. So leaving, you know, what the, getting this getting algorithms and LLMs to work in a classified context is going to take very specialized, very spout, can explain how it works. But getting the fact is this is going to be a bananza for the US economy. But so far, the biggest voices advocating against regulation have been the Republicans and President Trump. President Trump has very loudly opposed regulation to slow down AI development. Truthing last Monday that quote, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart high IQ president. And the US has that in spades. One quote, Trump truth a lot last week and compared the quote unquote AI hoax being perpetuated by the radical left Democrats to the quote global warming scam where everyone was going

8:28to die from extreme heat to quote the president of the United States quote, I am the hoax buster. And right now I am breaking another hoax that AI is going to take over consume and destroy the world and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. House speaker Mike Johnson repeatedly last week shut down calls for Congress to take action and regulate AI claiming that Congress is less qualified to regulate these companies than these companies are themselves. The guys who are raising the alarms right now all have very different ideas on what the guardrails should be. There's no consensus among them. And Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ins and outs of it. So this has to be a partnership with the industry itself, with the corporations that are

9:30doing this and with the policy and lawmakers. Mike Johnson also said that companies should take quote personal responsibility and warrant that if quote, Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China. They can self police. They can self regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot exact. We cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, okay? Because then we will lose our edge to China and that has serious national security implications for every American family. Also last week, President Trump called Nivides CEO Jensen Huang while Huang was speaking at a conference while still on stage. The two talked over the phone about data centers, AI, China and the recent calls for an AI pause. Huang told Trump this. Good job, sir. Good job.

10:31The fact that we assault you all that, I mean, there's a lot of complexity and the fact that the memories and assaults are all that. And I mean, where else is going to be for? Now of course, Jensen Huang would not be in favor of an AI pause because his whole company has reoriented in the past few years to provide hardware for AI development. A slowdown would be very bad for Nivides finances and their hugely inflated stock evaluation. Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem.

11:34Everything kids love, download now for free. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. That's Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHot Radio app Apple Podcast.

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13:37Hello. Now, sorry, we're booked out at least three weeks. Yep, sorry. Another one you had to turn away? Yeah, third one today. And I'm not going to have the available cash or time to hire more help until after busy season. I don't think you can wait. Got any ideas? Get business financing through Capitas. Easy application, no hidden fees, and really fast funding. Oh yeah? How fast will we talk in here? As little as 24 hours. You know, let me call that guy back. Stop turning down work. Start growing. Get the funding you need at capitas.com. That's K-A-P-I-T-U-S. Some on the left as well as Trump's former A.I.Z.R. David Sachs have argued that in calling for this slowdown, open A.I. and Anthropic are just pursuing a strategy of regulatory capture. Basically trying to promote certain industry-friendly regulations tailored to protect their investments, curb competition from smaller companies and open source models, and solidify a corporate

14:39monopoly on A.I. Of course, there may be other financial incentives contributing to this recent push for regulation, whether that be declining capital investment, prepping for a bubble burst, getting out of various contracts, or these companies trying to adapt to the data center pushback. Sam Altman recently announced that open A.I. would be delaying its planned IPO rollout until at least next year, calling the timing, quote, ill-advised. Though, on the other hand, Anthropic is going full steam ahead with its own public IPO, this upcoming November, deciding to list on the NASDAQ, despite Amadez calls for a slowdown. But if you actually read Amadez's essay, he isn't actually calling for specific government regulation, but rather self-regulation. In Sam Altman's response to Amadez's essay on Twitter, he wrote, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier, committing to having independent

15:43evaluators with employee like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. Unquote. Companies electing themselves to develop A.I. more slowly and hiring, quote, unquote, independent evaluators isn't the same as actual regulation. We can compare Amadez's proposal to legislation that Bernie Sanders and Greg Kassar proposed earlier this September, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of so-called super-intelligent A.I. with capabilities to subvert shutdown commands or have the capacity to overthrow human governments. If penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons, this bill would also temporarily pause, advanced A.I. development until a federal regulatory body has established safety rules. Abdul El-Sayed and Rokana have also proposed an FDA-style agency to regulate and oversee

16:48A.I. development and evaluate the safety of frontier models before deployment. Unsurprisingly, open A.I. and Anthropic are not supporting this type of legislation, because it could threaten to put their own CEOs in prison, and in actual government-mandied and pause rather than a self-directed slowdown would hurt their bottom line. Some of the skepticism towards these recent calls for a regulatory slowdown come from Amadez pace the frontier essay, also advocating for companies to receive antitrust waivers, so that the big tech companies can coordinate on this planned development slowdown without the threat of one company gaining a competitive edge and then that market pressure driving rapid A.I. progress. So what's been referred to as a proposal for regulation is actually just loosening regulations. Thankfully, there is an easy solution here.

17:48The government mandating a frontier development pause would not require the weakening of antitrust laws, but of course these companies still want control over A.I. development. Though what's really interesting to me is that this argument from Amadez demonstrates like an awareness of the social danger of competition, how firms are sometimes compelled to quickly develop unsafe products due to pressures from the market. And it's very funny to have capitalists propose some kind of conscious control of the market. And I wonder what would happen if you extend that logic a bit further, because even if these firms are, quote unquote, allowed to coordinate on a slowdown, of course they would still be in a competitive environment. But what if we had a system, an economic system designed around social benefit rather than

18:50the accumulation of capital through the free market to quote an article in geese magazine arguing for the socialization of this technology, quote, the A.I. industry is a class project to radically concentrate power in the hands of a sliver of elites, even at the cost of colossal social disruption, emissoration, and catastrophic harms. If we fail to intervene, humanity will be gradually disempowered to machines of their design. The workers left behind the children who have committed suicide and the potential millions exposed to novel A.I. design viruses mean nothing in the face of their radical objective to automate the very task of A.I. research and thus to create better and better A.I.s, of course under their control. Without having to stay in position on whether or not this goal is technically possible, we can recognize that the financial imperatives of these enterprises and the security logic

19:53of their imperialist competition with China, compel the A.I. companies to accelerate advancing a total transformation of social life against all democratic legitimacy and public control. Unquote. Rather than weakening antitrust laws to allow for a development slowdown, something totally not necessary, Lena Khan, former FTC chair, has argued that these companies may already be pursuing unfair methods of competition. Last week, Khan released a statement arguing that we already have the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for, quote, creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products. We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no A.I. exemption from laws already on the books. Khan argued that releasing unvetted A.I. models or agents could violate consumer protection laws.

20:53But shipping flawed A.I. tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective A.I. agents can be an unfair or deceptive act or practice under the FTC act and analogous state laws. And some state AGs are already exploring, holding A.I. firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. Khan also wrote, quote, existing laws also prohibit unfair methods of competition. This covers instances where A.I. firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted, quote, a method of competition which casts upon one's competitors, the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which

21:56they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the unfair methods of competition statute was aimed. On ads, the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws, unquote. These frontier models aren't just theoretically capable of causing harm in the future. They are causing harm right now. At this point, there are undeniable concerns regarding the development and rollout of frontier A.I. models from cybersecurity to military applications, surveillance, and the effects

22:58on the labor market. These are real, current pressing concerns beyond the prospect of an A.I. super god or self-evolving super intelligence. And just because these companies recognize risk doesn't mean they will do anything about it. These companies know how LLMs are affecting the mental health of children, but they're not really doing anything about it and they won't unless the government forces them to. Historical lawdites did not deny the transformative potential of automated machinery, but organized around the threat it posed to workers. Similarly, just denying the state of advanced frontier models leaves us under-equipped to meet this moment and treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves. Part of this A.I. denialism, so common on the left, comes from a very outdated understanding of A.I.'s capabilities, accuracy, and functionality.

23:59Because of the moral and cultural dogma against using A.I., the last time a lot of A.I. skeptic people interacted with technology like chat GPT was three years ago. And these days, the only concrete A.I. that most anti-A.I. people regularly interact with is the Google A.I. summary, which is a totally different product than the frontier models being developed and talked about in the news. Some of the anti-A.I. left promote the idea that treating A.I. as a serious problem only works in the financial interests of these companies. Even if taking this issue seriously means ripping power away from these companies and their CEOs to quote an article on the A.I. arms race in Geese magazine, while the A.I. sector is undeniably frothy with fanciful projections, A.I. denialism would have you believe that

25:01A.I. is neither a capable nor dangerous technology, but solely a marketing scheme of vast proportions. That any warnings of A.I. triggering massive job loss through automation or catastrophic risk through loss of control only serve to pump valuations. Ignore that as public pressure increases, Sam Altman now downplays fears of job losses. Quite the turn from three years ago when he was saying that jobs are definitely going to go away full stop. While there is no reason to take Silicon Valley at its word, not rigorously engaging with the dangers of developing A.I. capabilities is a strategic dead end. This technology can and is massively transforming production, warfare, the environment, and the health of humanity. And we can't all just hold hands and not believe in this technology hard enough to make

26:02it go away. Like it or not, this is not the metaverse or NFTs anymore. Whether you believe these existential safety risks are genuine, a marketing stunt, or a mix of both, our response should be the same. We should be pushing for legislation to rein in these companies and technology. And likely Nikon has said, the CEOs should be prosecuted for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products. Now Trump's DOJ doesn't seem keen on going after these companies right now. And it's unlikely that this Congress will pass any legislation on this issue, let alone industry hostile legislation. But during this national conversation on A.I. regulation, it's crucial that the narrative around regulation isn't being controlled by open A.I. and anthropic. These companies and technology must be regulated, but that regulation should not be up to the

27:03CEOs of those companies, nor the Republicans and center left Democrats who are in the pocket of A.I. But our response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation. Coming off the heels of the data center backlash and going into the midterms, this moment could be a major opportunity for the left to build broad support for real transparent oversight, a frontier development pause, not just a slowdown, and ultimately taking power away from these tech companies and putting control of A.I. in the hands of the public. Because private control of such transformative technology will have disastrous outcomes for labor and humanity without the prospect of an A.I. super god. Incoming DSA House representative Malat Keros of Colorado had democratizing A.I. in her congressional campaign platform, quote, the development of transformative technology

28:03cannot be left to the market and the national security state alone. It belongs to all of us. On quote, earlier this summer, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to create an A.I. sovereign wealth fund, giving the public 50% ownership in the largest A.I. companies in the US through a one time 50% tax on the stock of these companies. An independent commission would then use voting shares to steer decisions in the public interest. Sanders said of the bill, quote, left unchecked artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs, privacy rights, and mental health of every man, woman, and child in America. As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of big tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input. A.I. was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that was popped into Mark Zuckerberg's head or Elon Musk's imagination.

29:04The foundation of A.I. is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and of the creative work of tens of millions of people. The American people must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that A.I. benefits humanity not just the richest people on the planet. That's precisely what this legislation does. Now such a bill would certainly have a difficult path to being signed into law, especially considering how many lawmakers are being bankrolled by these A.I. companies. But this idea already has majoritarian support. According to a national vericite survey last June, 69% of Americans support quote unquote forcing A.I. companies to transfer 50% of their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund to quote Geese magazine. There is a wide debate to be had about the shape of socialization and whether we mean

30:05forcing A.I. research into the public domain or outright nationalizing the entire sector. But it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the American people recognize that a technology trained on the common corpus of human art and text poised to transform the character of work ought to be held in common rather than by billionaires. Unquote. The New York City D.S.A. convention is coming up this fall and currently one of the most popular resolutions is to stop the A.I. arms race and have D.S.A. quote take initiative against the A.I. companies project to make human labor obsolete and organize a working class coalition for the democratic steering and ownership of the technology. According to an overview in Geese magazine, this resolution calls for D.S.A. to demand an organized for a pause on frontier A.I. research and A.I. data center moratorium regulations

31:07on frontier A.I. models and policies to ensure workers are protected. To quote the Geese magazine overview, our horizon must be the collective control of A.I. With its gains shared by all. With A.I. under democratic control, we will decide what activities ought to be left to human hands, exalted creative tasks that make life meaningful, and which can be automated to expand flourishing and freedom. D.S.A. members may have quite different views on where those lines lie, with some wishing to ban the technology entirely. Regardless, the point is that those conversations will be hours, not Sam Altman's, not Dario Amade's, not Elon Musk's. This is a once in a century political opportunity. We have the chance to utilize one of the great issues of the day to mobilize workers around the democratic control of the economy, to drive a wedge into the Republican Party's coalition

32:08and the democratic base, and to reorient politics around a question on which our answers are unfathomably popular. We could be at the forefront of the movement rather than tail-ending a disparate set of professionalized nonprofits. This issue will be getting a lot of attention these next few months. AICEOs will be meeting at the White House with President Xi later this week. The New York City Council is convening a hearing on AI safety risks next month, with Dario Amade and Sam Altman requested to appear. If we don't want them to be the ones leading the conversation on AI regulation, which would only result in an industry-friendly regulatory slowdown to curb competition and stabilize market pressure, then the left will have to step up and build on the data center backlash to seize the very technology data centers are powering to destroy these companies and

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