Trump proposes ‘AI Force’ amid rogue-agent fears but rejects new regulations

A president has looked at the possibility of AI agents going rogue and reached the only conclusion available to a man with a branding instinct and a pathological allergy to paperwork: what this needs is a Force. Not a statute, not a regulator with subpoena power and a filing cabinet — a Force, capital F, per Business Times, presumably with a nameplate, a ribbon and a photo opportunity. The rogue agents will be absolutely terrified. It is the policy equivalent of putting a scarecrow in the car park and calling it perimeter security.

The article notes that Trump continues to side with the 'accelerationists,' the faction arguing government should stay out of the way — which has the elegant quality of never requiring anyone to actually define 'rogue.' Barack Obama, speaking at Colgate University, supplied the counter-argument in a single line: 'there's no replacement for an effective, government regulatory structure.' He also criticised a president who has apparently said that's for losers. Which is at least a philosophy. Not a good one — 'for losers' is doing the work 'statutory authority' does in countries that bother — but a philosophy nonetheless.

So we arrive at the familiar arrangement: a Force for the fears, no law for the causes. The accelerationists keep their runway, the labs keep their vacuum, and if an agent ever does something genuinely spectacular there will be a body on hand to hold a press conference about it afterwards. The article frames the moment as a debate over regulating frontier models or slowing development, which is generous — a debate implies two sides drafting things. A Force, after all, is what you deploy when you've decided not to pass anything. The rogue agents, for what it's worth, do not read press releases.