White House AI policy adviser Krishnan to leave position

Well, well, well — Sriram Krishnan, the White House's go-to AI policy brain, is buggering off at the end of June. The very same week his boss, the President, signed an executive order that politely asks leading AI developers to 'voluntarily' submit their most capable models for government cybersecurity tests before unleashing them on an unsuspecting populace. Voluntary. Because nothing says 'we take existential risk seriously' like a system that relies on the goodwill of companies whose fiduciary duty is to ship first and ask forgiveness later. It's the regulatory equivalent of asking a toddler to please not eat the entire jar of Nutella.

The timing is chef's kiss. Krishnan departs just as the administration unveils its big AI safety play — a play that amounts to 'pretty please, with a cherry on top.' The order doesn't compel anyone; it just 'directs federal agencies to ask.' If I were a frontier lab, I'd be laughing all the way to the compute cluster. Remember when the UK's AI Safety Summit produced a communiqué that everyone signed and then ignored? This has that same 'we did something!' energy, but with lower stakes and a shorter shelf life.

And now the architect of this masterpiece is leaving. One can only assume Krishnan has been headhunted by a top AI firm to help them 'engage constructively with regulators' — i.e., write the same voluntary frameworks he just authored, but from the other side of the table. The revolving door between government and industry isn't just spinning; it's become a centrifuge, flinging policy wonks into private-sector salaries that make a GS-15 look like pocket change. There's a gallows-humour gold medal in watching the AI policy carousel go round and round, and we've just claimed it.