{"id":618205,"date":"2026-09-16T20:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T20:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/618205\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T20:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T20:52:09","slug":"dont-give-ai-companies-what-they-want-u-s-treasury-secretary-tells-lawmakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/618205\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Give AI Companies What They Want, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tells Lawmakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

While debates about whether AI could exterminate all of humanity<\/a> continue to rage across Silicon Valley, a growing number of current and former federal officials are warning lawmakers: Don\u2019t let the companies building the supposedly deadly technology call the shots on how it\u2019s regulated.<\/p>\n

Speaking before the bipartisan House Financial Services Committee in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the federal government should be wary of any calls from AI leaders for any kind of liability exemption. \u201cThe best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate,\u201d Bessent reportedly<\/a> told the committee.<\/p>\n

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a nearly 4000-word essay on Saturday titled \u201cWe Must Pace the Frontier,\u201d calling for a coordinated slowdown on AI development among the industry\u2019s leading labs. He also suggested that since the current rate of development was far outpacing the speed at which new laws can be passed, top AI companies should be allowed to work together to establish safety standards. \u201cFor antitrust reasons,\u201d Amodei wrote, \u201cit\u2019s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions\u2014they don\u2019t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Bessent\u2019s view, such a \u201cnarrow waiver\u201d would be a slippery slope towards regulatory capture\u2014i.e. a small group of private entities being allowed to shape policies that directly affect the broader public (a role usually played by government). <\/p>\n

OpenAI also supported an Illinois state bill introduced<\/a> earlier this year which would ensure that AI developers aren\u2019t held liable for \u201ccritical harms\u201d caused by their AI models, including the \u201cdeath or serious injury of 100 or more people,\u201d Wired reported<\/a> in April. The strategy echoes legal arguments made by social media companies for decades, invoking Section 230 of the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act, that they should not be held accountable for any harmful content that users share on their platforms.<\/p>\n

Growing skepticism <\/p>\n

Bessent isn\u2019t the only Washington insider wary of the arguments Amodei presented in his essay, which was flatly rejected by President Trump but endorsed by OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI\u2019s Elon Musk, and former Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

David Sacks, Trump\u2019s former AI czar and a current cochair of the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wrote in a X post<\/a> on Saturday that companies making demands for their \u201cpreferred regulatory framework\u201d to be put in place before they agree to hit the brakes on building a technology which they themselves are warning could wipe out the entire human race \u201cwill look like blackmail of the public and the political system.\u201d The next day, Alvaro Bedoya, a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, accused<\/a> frontier AI companies of stoking fears of an AI-triggered doomsday \u201cto justify what seems to be a call for the creation of a cartel of billionaire AI companies.\u201d And Andrew Ferguson, the current chairman of the FTC, said<\/a> on Tuesday that \u201ceveryone should be deeply suspicious\u201d of calls for an antitrust waiver coming from leading AI companies.<\/p>\n

Bloomberg reported<\/a> yesterday that OpenAI had been working with Anthropic and Google for several weeks to address safety risks posed by AI, and that the company\u2019s global policy chief Chris Lehane said it doesn\u2019t currently believe an antitrust waiver is necessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While debates about whether AI could exterminate all of humanity continue to rage across Silicon Valley, a growing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,56996,1463,343,344,48596,183119,133,85,46,1748,2635,125],"class_list":["post-618205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-regulation","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-dario-amodei","tag-department-of-the-treasury","tag-google","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-openai","tag-scott-bessent","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}