The Government Wants to Vet AI Before It Ships. Good.

The Trump administration, in a plot twist nobody saw coming — certainly not anyone paying attention — is drafting an executive order to mandate government vetting of powerful AI models before their public release. This is a complete reversal from the previous stance that the invisible hand of the market would sort out AI safety, because if there's one thing we've learned from self-regulation, it's that tech companies always act in the public interest. (Cough, Theranos, cough. Also, every social media platform ever.) Now, the same government that can barely keep its own IT systems from being hacked by bored teenagers is going to 'vet' models from labs whose entire business model is 'move fast and break things.'

The order is reportedly in draft form, because nothing says 'urgent safety measure' like a document that will spend months in inter-agency purgatory being nibbled at by lobbyists from every corner of the industry. And let's not forget: this is the Trump administration, which has historically treated expert advice as optional and scientific consensus as a negotiation tactic. The labs themselves will surely welcome this with open arms — just like they welcomed the previous administration's voluntary commitments, by rapidly releasing models that could generate misinformation, deepfakes, and plausible-looking tax advice. OpenAI, which has been pleading for regulation while simultaneously racing to deploy the next generation, will no doubt greet this with the enthusiasm a fox shows for a chicken coop inspection.

But there is a silver lining: this reversal acknowledges that AI is powerful enough to warrant government oversight. The problem is the government that's doing the overseeing. We're handing the keys to a system that couldn't coordinate a national response to a pandemic, and we expect it to competently assess whether GPT-7 is safe? Still, it's a start. At least now when the robot uprising begins, there will be a government stamp of approval on the code that triggered it. 'Approved by the Department of Ineffectual Regulation.'