President Donald Trump renewed his commitment to seeing America win the AI race at his recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Trump administration has rejected the Biden approach of centralized government control and heavy regulation and taken the right approach of allowing American technology to flourish.
However, these efforts are being challenged by key players such as Anthropic, which has become the chief advocate of Biden-style AI regulation, who seek to undermine Trump’s market-oriented approach in favor of regulations they believe will protect their incumbent position and enhance their bottom line.
It’s an age-old problem with government red tape. We have seen before how novel industries start out opposing regulation, but somewhere down the road — usually after growing large — they have a change of heart, realizing that regulation can be used to build a moat around their strong position and keep out competitors. Looking at AI, Anthropic has been attempting to figuratively “pull the ladder up” on nascent players by endorsing legislation that adds new liability expenses, additional disclosure laws, and bans on competitors exporting the physical chips that AI data centers rely on.
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These efforts amount to a significant barrier to entry for competitors, which White House AI czar David Sacks incisively warned against, stating: “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fearmongering.”
Anthropic’s recent moves suggest the company has adopted the mantra, “If you can’t beat your competitors, regulate them.” This is a curious approach as the company’s Claude chatbot is widely considered one of the best currently on the market. Nonetheless, the company seems to lack confidence in its own product without the protective moat of federal regulations and trade restrictions.
This strategy is particularly worrisome considering the imperative of winning the global AI race. If the federal government starts handpicking winners in this space, we will inevitably wind up wasting more money on companies such as Solyndra and Fisker, the federal solar and EV darlings that went belly-up. Anthropic is a real company, but it appears more enamored with pursuing expansion based on influence in Washington rather than excelling in the market.
If Anthropic is able to game the system and write the rules of the road, it could force companies to implement its constrained vision of what AI should be, limiting innovation and competition and ultimately risking U.S. leadership overall versus Chinese competitors who are not constrained by prescriptive federal rules.
Another problem with federal regulation and collaboration with AI companies is that these tools increasingly shape the way we perceive and understand information, which makes them inherently political. In a market system, that’s OK. We can avoid the tools that exhibit political bias in favor of others that are more neutral or align with our own views.
But when a small band of tech insiders collaborates with federal bureaucrats to set the standards for artificial intelligence, the resulting so-called guardrails are almost certain to impose some left-wing vision of regulators rather than the practical needs of consumers. Instead of focusing on objective performance and technical security, AI models under a Bidenesque regime would be forced to conform to ideological litmus tests.
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In the end, the vision of centralized control offered by Anthropic is fundamentally anti-American, and, quite frankly, the discipline and ruthless authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party mean we can never beat China by adopting their model. We can and will beat them by doing it the American way, through a decentralized, hands-off approach that ensures that the best ideas, driven by raw American ingenuity and free-market competition, will rise to the top and expand our global lead.
Anthropic can and should be a part of that, but to get there, they should drop all the doom-and-gloom, regulate-us-please political advocacy, and focus on competing in the market.
Jon Decker is the executive director of American Commitment and a senior fellow at the Parkview Institute.