Trump bets existing laws can police AI amid scrutiny
The Trump administration has looked at artificial intelligence and concluded that existing statute will do nicely, thank you — no need to draft anything new when there is a perfectly serviceable book of law already on the shelf. The Hill reports that this reliance on current law is quietly undercutting the congressional push to codify rules holding tech companies liable for what their models get up to. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have deferred to the president's preference for a hands-off approach, which in Washington translates as 'the market will handle accountability.' One admires the confidence. It is the confidence of a man declining a seatbelt because he has not crashed yet.
Consider the division of labour. The federal government has 'scrambled to address the technology's risks' — scrambled, note, not legislated — while state legislatures and attorneys general have been 'charging ahead' with actual accountability efforts. Scrambling implies motion without a destination; charging ahead implies somebody has looked at a map. The result is a patchwork of state attorneys general, each with their own subpoena template and their own press-release ambitions, functioning as the country's most active AI enforcement body. That is either federalism in its purest form or an abdication wearing federalism's coat, and The Hill, being a Washington publication, declines to say which.
The genuinely interesting bit is liability, because liability is the one word that makes a lab's general counsel sit up straight. Codifying it is precisely what the industry would rather nobody did, and a reliance on 'existing laws' means the rules of the road get set by whichever court the first expensive case happens to land in. That is a policy of deliberate ambiguity, and it is not nothing: it is the most reliable method yet devised for ensuring nobody knows the rules until after the wreck. The bet may pay off. Nobody will know until the first genuinely costly incident, at which point the statute book will look exactly as it does today and the incident will be somebody else's problem.