When the biggest AI companies demand that Washington regulate AI, ask who gets put out of business.
It won't be them.
The companies behind ChatGPT and Claude warn that their own technology is "too dangerous." They want government to protect us from it. And somehow, the solution is a system in which a handful of giant companies get to control it.
How convenient.
"Dangerous" is sexy. OpenAI and Anthropic want you to want them. And they've succeeded. But there's more.
The incumbents face real competition, including open-source models you can run on your own computer. You don't pay a subscription. You pay for the electricity.
That's a problem if your business plan depends on charging everyone else forever. And if you're bleeding money.
So take a technology millions of people can use, improve, and compete to provide. Put it behind a regulatory wall. Make entering the business require lawyers, lobbyists, approvals, and compliance departments that only the largest companies can afford.
Then call the resulting oligopoly âsafety.â
The little guy disappears. The giants keep their customers. Washington gets control. You get the bill.
We've seen this before. Big Business and Big Government discover a danger so terrible that the solution just happens to eliminate competition and make both of them more powerful. The people paying for it are supposed to be grateful.
Global warming. Heck, global cooling! The Ozone Hole. The "population bomb". "Limits to Growth". "Two weeks to flatten the curve." Everything is always about "the emergency." And there's always a new emergency.
You'd think conservatives would see it. Yet some are joining the demand for restrictions, apparently convinced that they've seen the future because they've watched The Terminator a few too many times.
Try watching Star Trek instead. It's Commander Data who helps beat the Borg.
AI can be used against AI. Competition gives us different systems, different defenses, and people with a financial reason to find and fix each other's mistakes.
After an AI agent attacked Hugging Face's infrastructure, its defenders used AI tools to help investigate the intrusion. The technology that creates a threat is necessary to defeat it. But so is competition.
Give a few favored companies control, and everyone else becomes dependent on their competence, their honesty, and whatever they fearmonger incompetent Washington insiders into letting them do.
Does that sound safer to you?
There are real dangers. There always are. Airplanes can carry families on vacation, deliver food, or fly into buildings. Steel and coal helped create the modern world, but industrial pollution required solutions.
We developed cleaner technology and laws to prevent actual harms. We didn't decide that prosperity itself was too dangerous, or decide to go back to Little House on the Prairie.
Imagine restricting aviation in 1926 because somebody might someday fly an airplane into skyscrapers that hadn't even been built. Germany and Japan would still have developed their aircraft. Pearl Harbor still would have happened. But we'd have lost the war.
That is the danger we face with China now.
AI will help determine economic and military power. The country that leads can produce more, discover more, defend itself better, and shape the technologies everyone else depends on. Communist China won't stop because American activists persuade Americans to stop.
The Chinese Communists want to win. We should believe them.
But they also understand that Americans can be manipulated into sabotaging their own advantage.
The Chinese influence campaign -- posing as Americans -- to stir up opposition to U.S. data centers is well documnted. Many Americans have honest concerns, but China's propagandists want to exploit them while China races to build its own capacity.
Data centers aren't some sinister invention that appeared with ChatGPT. Your email uses them. Netflix uses them. Your online banking uses them. We've depended on them for decades.
Now we're supposed to panic because we need more of them?
Electricity and water are real issues. Address them. Cooling systems can use different combinations of water and electricity. Where water is scarce, design accordingly. Where the grid needs more power, build more power.
And indeed, that's exactly what's happening.
Look at their proposed "solutions," and you begin to understand their priorities. More government power. More control over ordinary people. More advantages for the companies already at the table. Always.
Hold wrongdoers accountable. Protect people against actual harms. Let competitors develop better defenses. Let Americans build the power plants and infrastructure the country needs.
Our enemies don't want Americans richer, more capable, or harder to defeat. They want to beat us.
Let's stop helping them.
If the AI giants want our business, let them earn it. If their products are dangerous, use product liability laws to force them to change. They don't get to use fear to turn competition into a government-protected franchise for the few: themselves.
America needs the freedom to build its future.
Don't let Washington sell it to a cartel. And don't let fear hand it to China.