This is probably a take on the AI-will-kill-us-all debate that you haven’t seen. If it isn’t, let me commend you for the quality of your social media feed and/or your internet-surfing habits. But if you’re a regular reader of The American Spectator, you’ve hopefully picked up enough knowledge to be very skeptical of a classic information operation, and you recognized something fishy in the spectacle put on by the AI companies last week and over the weekend.
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Specifically, that an employee who’d worked at both OpenAI and then at Anthropic resigned from the latter and released a missive complaining that nothing was being done to rein in the technology before it turns on the public and murders us all.
No sooner did that little spectacle make the rounds online than both companies gave the “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full” treatment to the ex-employee’s concerns, in ways which looked on first glance like typical crisis PR communications but then immediately pivoted to something else.
Namely, a demand for Congress to slam on the brakes and regulate the AI industry.
No sooner did that happen than the word leaked out that Barack Obama, whose presidential record consistently showed him to be an aficionado of turning every industry he could into a corporate oligopoly beholden to and embedded with an overweening regulatory state, had advised Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to prioritize AI governance as the dominant agenda of his potential speakership should the Democrats carry the House majority in the midterms. (RELATED: AI: Technology the Left Love to Hate)
Your pattern recognition skills should be kicking in at this point, and you should recognize this for what it is.
We aren’t talking about the worry that a self-aware Skynet is about to begin manufacturing hunter-killer drones which make humanity extinct. We’re talking about something a lot older and far more tactile.
Regulatory capture.
I’m going to give you something a little unusual here. It’s a scene from my first book, King of the Jungle, and it’s of Pierce Polk, who’s sort of a cross between an Elon Musk, Erik Prince, and John McAfee, in that he’s wealthy on a scale of Musk and yet rebelliously unconventional in his thinking the way the other two are (and like Prince, he’s quite comfortable employing guys with guns to do important work). In this scene, Polk is explaining why he refuses to hire lobbyists for the several large companies he owns.
The Pierce Polk “Why I Won’t Hire Lobbyists” speech from King of the Jungle is one that I had to turn into video. pic.twitter.com/jwVEyHiqL3
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) September 14, 2026
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are not Pierce Polk. That’s clear.
What’s really happening here is what always happens to a new industry. It’s just happening sooner in the cycle now than it used to.
These companies are in Regulatory Capture Mode where they enlist Congress to cement them as the major players on the market and freeze out everybody else. They didn’t even really take part in the stage Polk talks about in the clip, which was to arm up with lobbyists to keep the politicians from killing their companies before they could get rich. They’re going straight to the part where they’ve boarded the plane, and now they want to pull up the ladder to keep anybody else from getting on. (RELATED: Defending ‘Adequate’ Humans Against AI)
“AI will kill us all! So let us write the regulations which ensure that it’ll only be our AI engines which can pass muster.”
This was the eight years of Obama’s presidency where there were fewer American businesses extant than the year before in every single year he was in office. The federal government was enlisted to protect and preserve all of the incumbent corporate aristocracy in every economic sector possible, and meanwhile the political class started monetizing that sclerosis into the Eat The Rich narrative.
Did it work? Are we better off having turned General Motors into Government Motors and forcing Ford to take auto bailout money so that both companies could then lose billions making electric cars nobody wants? Read Buck Throckmorton’s excellent piece from a few days ago on the sheer scale of the economic disaster EVs have been for that industry and recognize the absolute lost two decades we’ve now had in the automotive sector. And then realize that’s Barack Obama’s handiwork. (RELATED: Volkswagen’s Electric Suicide Pact)
What people don’t recognize is that regulatory capture isn’t just a crony-capitalist corruption of free market principles.
The automotive sector was old-economy, though, so maybe you don’t see it as relevant to AI. OK, fine. Do you think social media is relevant? Because Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and the rest were all companies that became relevant on the national stage during Obama’s presidency. (RELATED: AI Won’t Ruin Civilization — Unless We Let It)
And what happened to social media? Essentially, it got turned into an arm of the state. First by Obama, and then by his minion Joe Biden — and especially the latter.
Your feelings on social media might have softened in the past couple of years since Musk bought X. Think about what it would look like if that hadn’t happened.
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What people don’t recognize is that regulatory capture isn’t just a crony-capitalist corruption of free market principles. It’s a 100 percent aim for the Left.
Going to war against big, rich companies is a losing game if you’re Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama. You attack those people in any way other than unserious rhetoric pandering to the weirdos of your base, and they will notice — and when they do, they will end you.
And yet a capitalist will happily sell you the rope by which you may hang him. Especially if you let him braid that rope.
This goes all the way back to the Italian fascists, who were hard-core left-wing socialists (nobody seems to want to remember that) who realized it was easier simply to co-opt the big companies at the expense of small- and mid-sized firms, lock in their market share and profitability in exchange for their compliance with the various “suggestions” you might have. Rather than go to war with those big companies and maybe lose?
Easy decision.
It’s greasier when it’s the oligarchs initiating the regulatory capture first, though. And that’s what we have with AI.
Yes, you say, but this is because they can’t control their Frankenstein monsters, and so Congress must step in. The urgency is great!
Are you really stupid enough to believe that? You think Congress, populated by a gerontocracy of 20th-century dinosaurs who can’t even use a Fitbit or a Palm Pilot, has any hope of solving the problem of runaway AI? Did you pay attention to their great ideas on social media? You think this will go better than that?
If Congress were to step in to regulate AI, they’d be 100 percent dependent on Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and the rest of the incumbent AI tech bros to write those regulations. And you’re already rightly suspicious that they’re all a bunch of James Bond villains who have atrocious, amoral, if not immoral, anti-human ideas.
Not to mention that you should be utterly immune to persuasion by anyone running to you with apocalyptic stories aimed at making you panic and support stupid and awful decisions.
This is an especially hot year, for a whole lot of reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and yet there hasn’t been a single hurricane in the Atlantic basin as of September 14, which is a record for futility. This alone disproves the climate change catechism which says that heating up the planet will lead to more and stronger hurricanes. Everything these people have said is a lie, and yet there are two generations of Westerners running around terrified of fossil fuels for fear of planetary catastrophe.
Spreading panic is good for business, if your business is grifting.
Just ask Anthony Fauci, who made himself a fatcat on numerous scores by selling COVID panic. And the COVID experience showed how easy it is to get people to agree to disastrously stupid ideas, customs, and behaviors simply out of manufactured fear. (RELATED: Hannah Arendt’s Resonant Warning About Public Lying in the Age of Anthony Fauci)
Hell, two years ago the Obamas made a Netflix movie about the end of the world. Now Barack is telling his mini-me in Congress to push AI catastrophism as his dominant agenda should he take power. You’re hardly a conspiracy theorist if you don’t recognize the imperative of never letting a crisis go to waste.
Especially if it’s a crisis you can create and control.
There aren’t any hunter-killer drones over the skies of Peoria. There won’t be any time soon. When there are, it’s a good bet the people controlling them won’t be from OpenAI or Anthropic; they’ll be from China or your local radical mosque. And regulating AI, which is something that seems pretty difficult to do — if you try to restrict access to American data centers by the wrong people, you’re simply going to push them to Chinese or Macedonian or Icelandic data centers and not actually regulate any behavior at all — won’t do anything to stop the threats regulation will be sold as stopping. (RELATED: China Inc. Is Winning the AI Race)
You know this already. You’ve seen the limits of legislation in preventing bad conduct. It’s why everybody hates Flock cameras — they know those cameras will be of limited use in stopping criminals from committing crimes, but they’ll be 100 percent effective in giving you a ticket for running a red light at 4 a.m. when there is literally not a single other car on the road. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Citizens Against Virtually Everything)
And once AI is “regulated,” it’ll be the legacy incumbent AI players who dominate the market in collusion with the government. Just like the automotive industry, and practically every other former center of capitalist innovation.
President Trump is railing against these people. He’s correct to. This is such a nakedly corrupt play that it stings the nostrils. Let’s just hope the public is wise enough to see it after everything we’ve been through that it falls flat.
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