On: Trump facing AI backlash in Congress as push for guardrails intensifies

Sixteenth of September. Congress stirs itself toward guardrails on the thinking machines, and I confess my first instinct is suspicion of my own suspicion - yet the audit must proceed regardless of which party proposes the wall.

Observe the sequence. The executives who built these engines now sound the alarm over their power. Ask cui bono. A warned public is a public that demands regulation, and regulation, drafted by the incumbent’s counsel, becomes the incumbent’s moat. Compliance costs are a tariff the large firm pays gladly and the small competitor cannot. The revenue trace is plain: the men calling loudest for restraint are the men whose balance sheets best survive it. This is not principle; it is fortification dressed as conscience.

Then the executive branch. The President dismisses the danger; Congress, both houses, presses the other way. Here is the old mechanics - each branch claims the self-interest of checking the other, and from that friction, perhaps, some durable structure emerges. Better this than consensus, for consensus between power and the regulated is called capture, and it wears whatever uniform is fashionable that season.

But mark what Congress has not yet done. A guardrail is a specification, and the devil resides in the drafting. Who holds the veto? Who funds the regulator - if the industry pays the fees, the industry writes the rules by degrees, whatever the statute says. What occurs when the operator, seeking profit, discovers the gap between the letter and the mechanism? Design for that operator, not for the philosopher on the dais.

It will be objected that constraint now strangles the innovation these engines promise. The objection has weight only if the constraint is built by adversaries of concentration. Congress seems, for once, to suspect as much. Whether suspicion becomes plumbing - well. I have watched many resolutions become nothing, and the ledger does not lie.