Panic-Induced AI Regulations Are Backfiring — Why Do Some in Washington Want Even More?

Last year, I re-read "I, Robot" — Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories from the 1940s where he imagined what a robotic 21st Century might look like. The most profound of his musings were his Three Laws of Robotics, where he laid out the ethical guidelines programmers would use so robots would always serve humans. 

Indeed, Dr. Susan Calvin (the Bridget Moynahan character in the Will Smith movie) says these laws are so good that robots should be our leaders, not our servants. She says:

“I like robots. I like them considerably better than I do human beings. If a robot can be created capable of being a civil executive, I think he’d make the best one possible. By the Laws of Robotics, he’d be incapable of harming humans, incapable of tyranny, of corruption, of stupidity, of prejudice. … It would be most ideal.”

Sounds great, right? I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords? But there’s one huge problem: real 21st-century AI is not being programmed with Dr. Asimov’s Three Laws. It’s not being programmed with any ethical constraints of any kind, and many of the people doing the actual programming seem to be a bit nuts. We see signs of this every week. “AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed” and “AI could cause human extinction by 2030,” after one engineer at Anthropic quit his job in protest. And so on.

Of course, sometimes we in the media exaggerate (just a little bit) to catch more eyeballs. So do executives when they’re promoting their own company. And when executives talk to the media, our combined powers for blowing things out of proportion tend to really blow things out of proportion. 

Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI models could soon replicate themselves across the Internet, infiltrate connected devices, and resist attempts to shut them down. So that’s it! Pack it up! Soon you will just be the litter bearer for your phone.

However, this doesn’t really appear to be happening. Anthropic's experiments demonstrated limited capabilities under controlled conditions rather than an autonomous AI system spreading uncontrollably like Ultron through real-world networks.

And this isn’t the first time that Amodei’s predictions have been off. In 2024, Amodei foretold that Artificial General Intelligence or “superintelligent” systems could plausibly arrive as early as 2025. But earlier this year at Davos, he added three more years to his timeline. In March 2025, he predicted that AI would write 90 percent of computer code within just months … but later that year AI safety researcher Ryan Greenblatt said it’s closer to 50 percent, and companies are realizing they need more software engineers, not fewer. If you’re feeling shades of Y2K in all of these dire tech predictions, well, Amodei was reportedly on the doomer train back then, too.

Ultimately, these don’t feel like the warnings of a well-meaning, disinterested philosopher. They feel a bit more like PT Barnum-style “There’s a sucker born every minute” self-promotion. Amodei insists AI is an existential threat, then implies only he can save us from this threat. Perhaps acting a bit more altruistic than a business-owner ever could be, Dario insists we need more regulation, because he’s in a better position to shape that regulation than any upstart competitors might be. 

Dario‘s calls to regulate AI, harness power, and pace the frontier, in order to ensure we will be safe ultimately ring false. A U.S. slowdown, or regulatory guardrails, won’t stop bad actors in China or elsewhere from pushing forward, building their own versions and celebrating the U.S. falling behind. 

We’ve already seen controls on tech sales backfire massively. The U.S. pulled back from China, in attempts to keep our highest tech safe, and stop China from gaining traction. Instead of outmaneuvering them, China has taken American industry out of their process altogether, developed its own capabilities, and started selling them globally. Chinese behemoth Huawei notoriously thanked the U.S. for the export controls because they forced Chinese tech companies to step into the gap and innovate. Even former Biden administration officials confirm the controls accelerated China’s development of their own products.

Now we’re at risk of panic-induced AI regulations backfiring in a similar manner, cementing the advantage of a handful of the biggest U.S. AI companies who can afford to navigate endless bureaucracy, killing off smaller startups that don’t have the same resources, and pushing our competitor nations to move ahead while we dither.

To say nothing of the fact that it's very possible we don't need brand-new AI regulations, which even former FTC chair and antitrust crusader Lina Khan understands. Our current regulatory framework seems well-suited to handle this, she told George Stephanopoulos. And as always, our free-market system seems best suited for beating China.

So with that in mind, the real casualties of letting a handful of AI executives lead regulatory debate aren’t hypothetical. They’re the young startups leveraging large language model capabilities in new apps built by the next generation of American makers, thinkers, and workers.

In the wake of the midterms, we are already seeing calls for blunt-force regulations or even all-out opposition to AI and calls to clamp down on U.S. tech sales all over again. Huge political swings are exactly the moment to consider the source of calls for policy change. Gaslighting is a sign you may be in a toxic relationship. Washington shouldn’t let itself be gaslit into regulating a promising new technology into oblivion. AI isn’t going to kill us. It’s going to help us, if we let it.

Jared Whitley is a longtime D.C. politico, having worked in the U.S. Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult International School in Dubai. This year, the Society of Professional Journalists named him among the best columnists in the Intermountain West.

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