Josh Shapiro urges swift AI rules, says relying on tech companies is ...

Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania — and, by the filing address on this NBC story, a man with a 2028-shaped glint in his eye — has planted his flag in the AI safety debate by demanding the federal government pass new rules, quickly. Quickly, but not instead of anything. He explicitly opposes pausing development of advanced models until those rules arrive, which is a bit like demanding tighter speed limits while insisting nobody touches the brake. That isn't a policy position so much as a man jogging alongside a bolting horse, shouting directions at the horse.

His sharper line is that relying on tech companies is 'flat wrong,' which is correct, welcome, and roughly fifteen years overdue. The remarks land after researchers and leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google sounded alarms about the risks of advanced AI systems — the same three outfits that then went back to shipping. The labs ring the bell, everyone nods gravely, and the build continues gloriously unpaused. Shapiro deserves credit for saying the quiet part out loud in a state with a great many voters in it.

So we get the familiar choreography: alarm, ambition, then a timetable measured in election cycles. Rules must pass 'quickly,' which in Washington means after the primary, after the general, and after the inevitable paper explaining why the first draft was always a starter for ten. Meanwhile the industry supplies the technical vocabulary for its own oversight, because who else can define a frontier model on the record? The misalignment disclosures from OpenAI, which we read with interest, suggest the alarms are not decorative. Shapiro is right that the companies cannot mark their own homework. He has simply not named anyone prepared to collect it.