Already existing laws governing AI simply being ignored, former regulators, analysts say

The headline is doing heroic work: existing laws governing AI are 'simply being ignored.' One admires the adverb. Not evaded, not litigated around, not creatively reinterpreted by a platoon of billable lawyers — simply ignored, the way one ignores a 'please queue here' sign at a motorway services on a bank holiday Monday. It reads less like a scandal than a weather report: drizzle over the statute book, expected to clear by 2031.

So Congress is 'winding through' its proposals, which is the correct verb for legislation moving at the pace of a glacier with a committee diary. Proposal one: a 'kill switch' letting a human operator shut down an AI system, with the Department of Homeland Security ensuring compliance — a department that will now locate the off button on software that has already been deployed, fine-tuned and wrapped around everything. Proposal two would stand up an oversight board inside the Commerce Department to set safety standards, presumably equipped with a lovely mission statement and the subpoena reach of a parish council. One wishes both institutions the very best of British luck.

Then the pièce de résistance: President Trump gathered tech executives at the White House to sign what he calls a 'morally binding' agreement on developing AI safely. Morally binding — a legal category invented for a photo opportunity, enforceable by absolutely no one, filed somewhere between a pinky promise and a thought-leadership post. And the article notes that questions about rogue frontier AI agents are swirling after that gathering. Swirling: the verb for fog, for rumours, for autumn leaves — not for software that writes code and makes phone calls on your behalf. Meanwhile Lina Khan and the other quoted former regulators get a paragraph, the analysts get a paragraph, and the AI gets on with it, unbothered, while somebody books a conference panel called 'Operationalising Enforcement.'