On AI and Government Regulation

How should governments oversee AI – if at all?

As should be clear to readers of this site, I am a Christian primarily, while a conservative secondarily. Often the two go together, but not always. The Christian is concerned as much about moral, cultural and social matters as he is about political and economic concerns. I certainly care about both.

Some conservatives, especially secular ones, seem to be only interested in the latter items. They can be more libertarian than actually conservative. That is, they might worry more about things like limited government, balanced budgets, and reducing taxation, than they are about the culture war issues and so on.

But I have discussed that elsewhere. See for example this piece and the many comments under it: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/12/27/conservatism-libertarianism-and-christianity/

So when it comes to things like AI and transhumanism, as a conservative who is also a committed Christian, I have real concerns about where all this might be going, and what it might do to people, and to humanity itself. After all, early on in the biblical narrative we have stark examples about, and warnings against, men wanting to become gods.

Thus Adam and Eve fell from their idyllic position when Satan tempted them, saying “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (see Genesis 3). And the same thing happened at the Tower of Babel incident when the people said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens” (see Genesis 11).

Humanistic searches for immortality and the divine always end in failure and destruction. Much of the transhumanist project seeks to do the same, and much of AI has a role in all this. That is why I so far have 64 articles on these new technologies.

Here is one issue to consider. In a recent piece I said that “Trump wants to press ahead with AI, lest nations like Communist China get the upper hand and use it to our detriment. And there is a case to be made for his concerns.” https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/09/14/ai-elites-warn-about-ai/

That article spoke about how Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei had said in a recent piece that the push for all things AI needs to slow down, and that there is a need to get genuine safeguards and guardrails in place before we move even further.

In my view we must resist two extremes. Allowing open slather on AI with no checks and balances whatsoever is just as bad as allowing our enemies to go full speed ahead with it while we unduly restrain and constrain ourselves. Some sort of carefully considered balance is needed here.

A brand-new article by Dr. Robert W. Malone looks at all this in general, and at a new Democrat initiative in particular. I refer to the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act that Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced earlier this month.

The lengthy article examines this proposal in some detail, and the piece is well worth considering. Here is just a small part of what he says:

There are two things to watch as this legislation moves forward. First, who pays for the mandatory evaluations and regulatory apparatus: taxpayers, the companies being regulated, or both? Second, does the compliance burden increase with the company’s size and resources, or does essentially the same regulatory threshold apply to Anthropic and OpenAI as to a startup or an independent developer running an open-weight model?

 

Those details will determine whether this is primarily a safety regime or another case of regulatory capture.

He also looks at the China-US situation:

China is not waiting for the United States to decide how much AI development it considers safe. That is the fundamental weakness in any proposal for the United States to slow development while hoping China will do the same.

 

Amodei acknowledged the problem himself. In his September 13 CBS interview, he described the U.S.-China competition as the “toughest dilemma” facing his proposal. At the same time, he has urged Washington to tighten restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China and take action against Chinese companies extracting capabilities from American AI models.

 

The contradiction is difficult to avoid. The United States is supposed to slow its own development while simultaneously preventing China from catching up. That strategy depends on China accepting constraints that are directly contrary to its strategic interests.

 

Beijing has given no indication that it intends to do so. China’s Foreign Ministry responded to Amodei by accusing the United States of “fearmongering,” while the state-backed Global Times characterized his proposal as an attempt to contain China through a “Cold War” strategy. Chinese officials continue to call for international AI governance while rejecting American efforts to restrict China’s access to the technology.

 

China’s incentives are clear. It wants access to advanced chips. It wants access to American models and their capabilities. It wants Chinese models distributed internationally. And it does not want the United States to maintain a technological advantage over it.

 

The United States should assume that China will pursue those interests. An American policy that restricts American open-weight models while Chinese open-weight models remain freely available does not contain China. It reduces American competition with China.

Malone finishes his piece this way:

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the other major laboratories will survive a federal licensing and compliance regime. They have the money, lawyers, infrastructure, and political access to operate within it.

 

The competitors most likely to disappear are those without the money and infrastructure to comply: independent developers, startups, university researchers, small businesses, and Americans building on open-weight models outside the major technology companies. These are also the environments where much of the innovation in a new field occurs.

 

Small organizations have fewer bureaucratic layers, shorter decision chains, and greater freedom to experiment, fail, reorganize, argue over new ideas, and rapidly change direction. They do not need approval from compliance departments, corporate counsel, multiple levels of management, or shareholders before trying something new. That organizational flexibility is one of their greatest competitive advantages.

 

A regulatory regime that requires them to build the bureaucratic infrastructure of a trillion-dollar corporation before they can compete does more than protect the incumbents. It systematically removes one of the primary sources of innovation from the market.

 

If Washington regulates them out of the market while Chinese open-weight models remain freely available, the result will be even worse. The United States will have protected its largest AI corporations, weakened its own independent developers, and ceded more of the open-model market to China.

 

That is not controlling the AI industry, Bernie. It is consolidating American AI in the hands of a few giant corporations while handing China the open-weight market. https://substack.com/inbox/post/215832105

And a second article can also be mentioned here. The New York Post just did a cover story on the Amodei proposals. It has this as its title: “The Woke Wizards of A.I. – Revealed: Far left group that Silicon Valley wants to oversee our tech-led future”.

It begins this way:

Meet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s handpicked super-woke globalists he thinks will save us from an AI apocalypse.

 

Worried what AI will do to the world? Don’t fret — we got a group of woke elitists who will protect us. That’s the pitch from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn’t destroy the world. It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronouns and promote “Effective Altruism,” that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology.

It continues:

Among the skeptics was former White House AI czar David Sacks, who called on Amodei to “stop pretending METR is independent when it is interviewed with Anthropic’s investors and staff.” “Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” he added. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”

 

It’s also unclear if the AI industry’s push to police itself will pass muster with US regulators. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned that “everyone should be deeply suspicious” of any request to grant AI companies an antitrust exemption to coordinate safety efforts.

 

“I will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” Ferguson said during a Tuesday event at Georgetown University. https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/business/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodeis-handpicked-ai-watchdog-has-deep-ties-to-effective-altruism-movement-a-complete-joke/

In sum, I applaud those involved in the AI industry if they have legitimate concerns about where it is heading, and have realistic and reasonable solutions as to how safety and security can be achieved and maintained. But if it simply results in even more Statist control, or more power given to woke capitalists, then it could cause as much harm as unfettered AI might cause.

The more one reflects on the future of AI, the more one wonders if there is any safe way forward.

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