AI doom predictions won’t come to pass. But there’s a bigger threat we should be worried about: regulatory capture. If big AI companies succeed in weaponizing fear to get the government to slow down their competitors, we will all be worse off.

When former OpenAI and Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon claimed that frontier companies were “gambling with our lives” with respect to AI model development and the risks associated with continued growth toward superintelligence, he kicked off a firestorm of online discourse. In quick response, both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI development to slow down. Amodei’s three-step proposal directly calls for government standards and enforcement. Altman also suggested a government rule change to suspend antitrust rules may be in order.