he real reason the AI corporations want the government to ban AI
is not that they’re attempting regulatory capture. It is not
that they’re afraid for the future of humanity. It is that they
have realized their task is impossible.
Put yourself in their shoes. For the past five years you’ve told the world you had a working AI. You’ve spent billions on the idea. People all over the world congratulated you on your achievement, some even thinking you deserved a Nobel prize. Pundits talked about the changes AI would bring. Some workers would lose their jobs, but other jobs would increase. People reorganized their lives, becoming plumbers and electricians instead of useless bureaucrats and paper pushers. Everything looked great.
Scene from Terminator 2: The T-1000 suddenly realizes that being an AI, being made of liquid metal, and being frozen solid by standing in a tiny puddle of liquid nitrogen are all impossible
Then it happened. One night as you lie on your bed at 3:15 in the morning it hits you. You have hit a brick wall. You have absolutely no idea how to make your chatbot intelligent. Those skeptics who had been saying that your LLM was only a glorified search engine, some even calling it a stochastic parrot, were right. You stole your ideas from the neural network literature and turned them into a fraud by claiming you had invented AI. But you had not. You would be a laughingstock. Disaster!
What to do?
You concoct a plan. Send out former employees to claim that AI will wipe out the human race. Get philosophers and hack journalists to write books saying AI will cause human extinction. If you could get the government to ban your research, you could save face. You’d be cheered around the world for saving mankind from extinction by the Frankenstein you almost created. You’d be a hero.
You would shake your head sadly and tell the world you had an epiphany: It was just too dangerous to proceed. At the request of the government, we’re voluntarily stopping all research for the good of humanity.
Instead of a laughingstock, you’re a hero. People will write books telling of your great altruism. Those who said you were greedily trying to stifle the competition will now praise you. Maybe you bit off more than you could chew. But now no one will ever know.
Too bad President Trump thinks AI is a great thing, maybe the greatest thing ever. Well, there’s always Congress.
This is the only plausible explanation.
sep 15 2026, 1:58 pm
