At the start of the week, the AI world looked briefly aligned behind regulation.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including third-party evaluators inside labs, coordination across the domestic industry, and international agreements potentially backed by government help. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and even SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly appeared to agree on parts of that approach.
Then the cracks showed.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg came out against limiting companies’ autonomy. The Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg, Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang helped scuttle proposals for an industry-funded independent regulator for AI, modeled on FINRA, the private nonprofit regulator in finance. OpenAI is still pushing for some form of oversight, with Chris Lehane, its global affairs chief, saying the AI policy window is open and that Congress should turn growing bipartisan support into mandatory national safety standards for frontier AI.
'Amodei wrote in his essay that the company has 'always ... advocat[ed] for well-considered regulation of AI, even when this gets us accused of hype, 'doomerism', or regulatory capture.'
A venture capitalist in AI, who asked not to be named because of current investments, said regulation has to happen eventually, comparing the moment to electricity, cars, and airplanes, where industries had to define safety standards before the technology spread more widely.
Government involvement, though, looks shaky for now. The Trump administration has attacked the idea of an AI safety crisis as a 'hoax.' Trump also told a crowd over speakerphone that 'The robots will not be taking over,' and later posted that the only guardrails AI needs are a 'STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.' He said the administration has already stopped AI people from doing bad, or potentially bad, things using its 'tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies.'
That is a remarkable shift from the first Trump administration. Nick Reese, a former director of emerging tech policy at the Department of Homeland Security, said Trump signed Executive Order 13960, which focused on principles for federal AI use meant to protect 'privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties.' Reese said, 'There is a real change in the president’s position on the topic.'
Read the changelog and the real story is plain: AI leaders want safety rules, but they do not agree on who gets to hold the leash. Some want labs to police themselves. Some want Congress involved. Others want no slowdown at all. For taxpayers, innovators, and everyone else stuck living with the fallout, that difference is not cosmetic. It decides whether the market gets guardrails or another round of platform-first, consequences-later shipping.
