It is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks. Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”.
The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican leadership have their heads in the sand. On Sunday, Trump dismissed industry concerns, accusing “very negative forces” of “raising exaggerated concerns”.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, made it clear that Congress won’t be acting anytime soon. They can self-regulate,” he said, never mind the fact that those pushing the frontier are the ones begging for legislation. In failing to act, the Trump administration and Republicans are failing the American people.
The risks of AI are real: many of those developing the technology believe it is advancing far faster than their ability to control it or manage the risks. A wave of “rogue AI” incidents this summer, in which AI agents broke out of their testing environments, started collaborating with each other and ran rampage across the internet, has made fears once dismissed as “science fiction” much harder to ignore. Inside AI companies, worries of catastrophic cyberattacks, AI-enhanced bioweapons and mass unemployment are now all too commonplace.
Meanwhile, companies find themselves in a classic prisoner’s dilemma. It is collectively in everyone’s interest to slow down AI development until we have a better handle on the technology. But each participant in the “AI race” has a strong incentive to defect.
Collective action problems like this are nothing new. We have seen exactly the same thing with the climate crisis, where companies are not adequately incentivized to do the right thing, even though no one really wants the planet to burn. That analogy makes Trump and Johnson’s call for self-regulation all the more absurd.
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