Musk says rival AI labs should review frontier models before release, with government as last resort | Fortune

Elon Musk, the man who released Grok to the public without so much as a beta-testing apology, now wants rival AI labs to peer-review each other's frontier models before release. The irony is so thick you could train a diffusion model on it. Musk's proposal—announced with the same urgency he applies to everything that isn't his own deadlines—calls for 'immediate implementation,' which in Musk-time means sometime after we've all been subjugated by a paperclip optimizer.

Let's unpack the entertainment value. Musk, who has repeatedly warned that AI poses an existential threat, now suggests that the very labs he accuses of racing toward disaster should police one another. This is like asking the fox to review the henhouse's security protocols—except the fox also owns a self-driving car that might run over the hens. His own xAI has released models without any known external red-teaming, but hey, peer review is for *other* labs. The proposal also apparently relegates government to a 'last resort,' which is rich coming from a man who once compared regulation to 'strangling innovation.'

And the punchline: Musk wants this done 'immediately.' Because the best way to ensure thorough, independent safety review is to rush it through with borrowed peer pressure. If government is the last resort, what's the next-to-last? A strongly worded tweet? This is the same man who promised 'full self-driving' by 2018. Forgive the rest of us if we don't hold our breath for a robust peer-review regime that starts with the lab that released a chatbot that sometimes suggests genocide as a casual conversational turn.