“Killer robots” aren’t (yet) a real thing, but they certainly are a useful threat if you’re an artificial intelligence maker worried that cut-rate competitors might enter the AI market and ruin your planned stock sale.
“We’re all going to die horrible deaths at the hands of killer robots. Or so say the voices that speak loudest in Silicon Valley. All the big tech leaders are saying we need increased regulation or AI is going to be out of control,” cautions investigative reporter Peter Schweizer. “But is this actually being ginned up to benefit them and their businesses?”
“I can’t remember a time when you have the leaders, not just a lone whistleblower from a company, but the leaders of companies come out and say our products might be dangerous,” adds Eric Eggers, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute and co-host of The Drill Down podcast.
Schweizer, GAI’s president and an eight-time #1 bestselling author, replies, “I’ll go even further on what you said. The heads of the companies are not saying, ‘We need to stop doing this.’ They’re saying, ‘You need to make us stop doing this.’ That’s what is so weird.”
Right now, two of the largest AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are planning IPOs, while their leaders are relentlessly warning Americans about the dangers of “killer robots” and begging Washington to regulate them. For Schweizer, the situation parallels the financial crisis of 2008 when the country’s largest financial institutions begged DC to impose regulations, which came to be known as Dodd-Frank, and which, coincidentally, their lobbyists mostly wrote themselves. Those rules resulted in the elimination of smaller competitors unable to operate while complying with all the new paperwork.
Meanwhile, tech realists like Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, calls the “killer robot” scare an overblown fear. And President Donald Trump hasn’t been impressed either, telling reporters, “I don’t worry about it. If something is bad, they have to fix it. And if they don’t fix it, that’s why you have the Department of Justice.”
The scare tactics have made some strange bedfellows, Schweizer notes, bringing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Trump associate Steve Bannon together on the same “pro-human” stage to bemoan the coming robot apocalypse.
The hosts also quote Brad Gerstner, a large investor who pointed out on CNBC that there is already U.S. government review — by the Center for AI Standards and Innovation in the Commerce Department — of AI models as they come out.
“It’s interesting the heads of these companies are saying, ‘Maybe the government should be regulating us.’ But here’s an investor who isn’t part of a company rushing towards $1 trillion IPO, saying, ‘Actually, the U.S. is the global leader at regulating it,’” observes Eggers. “So, there is a cop on the beat.”
Schweizer cited investor Steve Eisman, who used the word “moats” to describe what is really going on. Author Wynton Hall’s recent bestseller on AI called Code Red describes that perfectly: “As free-market conservatives know all too well, many supposed ‘safety’ regulations advocated by industry insiders are thinly veiled examples of regulatory capture — attempts by powerful, established companies to box out smaller firms and shield titans from competition.”
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is on the side of more regulation, saying it’s “just a little more overhead.”
Hall’s book also quoted Vice President J.D. Vance on the same idea (p. 58): “Who is most aggressively demanding that we… do the most aggressive regulation? It is very often the people who already have an incumbent advantage in the market. And when a massive incumbent comes to us asking us for safety regulations, we ought to ask whether that safety regulation is for the benefit of our people or whether it’s for the benefit of the incumbent.”
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