McCormick floats dedicated department to handle AI

Sen. Dave McCormick, Republican of Pennsylvania, has stared into the abyss of federal AI regulation and concluded the abyss should keep its hands in its pockets. His two exhibits for government incompetence: the pandemic response and the government's handling of Silicon Valley Bank. The latter is a particularly nimble choice — a bank the authorities were, definitionally, handling, and whose handling went so poorly that it is now deployed as an argument for fewer handlers. This is the regulatory equivalent of citing a house fire as proof that fire brigades are a menace to public safety.

The proposed fix is an 'industry-led, FINRA-like group' that would establish 'regulations, oversight and compliance.' All three, from the same people. The industry-led bit deserves a second pass: FINRA is the financial sector's own self-regulatory body, which means the people being supervised would be supervising themselves — a model that has, in the financial sector, historically gone about as well as you'd expect, and occasionally better for the supervised. McCormick frames it as a matter of risk, which is honest, if not in the way he intends: the risk being that someone might actually write down a rule.

Note also the headline of this thing: a 'dedicated department to handle AI.' What McCormick has floated is the opposite — not a department, not dedicated, and a body whose first instinct would be to handle nothing at all. It's the oldest trick in Washington: when the public starts asking who's in charge, announce that the industry has generously volunteered. You can set your watch by it, though the watch will be made by a company that has conveniently regulated itself into not being regulated. Meanwhile, actual frontier models ship on actual quarterly cycles, and the alternative to federal oversight remains a working group with excellent lanyards and a Slack channel.