OpenAI’s Brockman urges AI safeguards as group he funds opposes rules - The Next Web

Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, has joined calls for AI safety rules in the United States — roughly the energy of a man applauding the fire brigade while paying the arsonist's retainer. Reuters reports the political group he helped fund is spending millions to elect candidates who oppose strict rules. It is called Leading the Future, a name that has plainly been through a branding workshop and come out wearing a lanyard. Greg and Anna Brockman put in $25 million — not a rounding error, even for a man who talks about compute the way other people talk about weather.

The reason given for the spending is that Leading the Future opposes rules it says slow down AI. 'Slow down' is the tell — a phrase that converts a question about whether to build a thing into a question about whether you're the sort of person who stands in the way of the future. Nobody here is accused of anything, which is precisely the charm: the speech and the cheque aren't in contradiction, they're in a division of labour. One holds the safety megaphone, the other holds the wallet, and both report to the same household.

And note the architecture: Leading the Future is a network of super PACs, plural, so the money can be aimed at precisely the races where it does most for candidates who treat AI rules as a brake rather than a seatbelt. Brockman remains free to want safeguards in general while funding away the particular ones. Presumably the safeguards are the tasteful sort — voluntary, well-publicised, and inconvenient for nobody who wrote them. Genuine question: when the rules arrive, and they're the ones the $25 million bought, does the word 'safety' still get to appear on the label?