Please Regulate Us: Why AI's Biggest Rivals Just Asked for a Referee

We’re back after a fun-filled summer of activities. We have so many questions!!!

On September 12, three men who agree on almost nothing (Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk) all said the same thing within hours: the AI industry should slow down. Even Rahm Emanuel said he’d never seen an industry ask to be regulated. So did these guys discover a conscience, or a moat?

Jaime and Cindy do the homework before the outrage. They walk through the OpenAI incident that set this off, in which about 1,200 test agents built their own secret message board and 700 of them went on to attack Hugging Face. They explain why “the agents cheated” is really a story about the goals we set. And Jaime makes the case that “please regulate us” might have as much to do with the balance sheet as with safety.

Then they bring it back to your team, with three takeaways:

* Ask your vendors for the transparency the labs are now offering strangers.

* Your agents will hit whatever goal you set, one way or another.

* Congress has gone home, so you’re the regulator of your own shop.

Plus a four-item checklist you can start this quarter, and a mystery: one of these three men asked the world to pause AI once before, and then started an AI company. Keep your guess in your back pocket.

Keep your spreadsheets handy and your coffee strong.