Barrett urges skepticism of doomer CEOs and the China canard

In a Tech Policy Press essay dated September 16, Paul M. Barrett argues that the AI industry's loudest safety warnings work as misdirection. Silicon Valley CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, he writes, "underscore that their technology does indeed pose an existential threat while suggesting that they are somehow passive witnesses to an inevitable danger which someone else should prevent."

Barrett takes Altman's warning that OpenAI's next models would be "going to be sobering for everybody," stated nine days before Altman endorsed a slowdown call from Amodei, and turns it into a plain challenge. "If the company truly believes this necessary, it should simply implement these measures itself," he writes. Amodei, he adds, "ought to go ahead and slow the pace at which his company builds, tests, and releases its products."

The policy alternative he points to is the bipartisan FRONTIER Act. Its centerpiece, Barrett writes, is "a federally mandated system of independent verification organizations, external third-party entities licensed to assess the practices of 'very large' AI developers, defined by revenue and R&D spending thresholds." The Commerce Secretary would gain authority to suspend the development or release of an AI model that "presents an 'imminent catastrophic risk.'"

The essay's second target is the argument that regulation will hand the AI race to Beijing. Citing Matt Sheehan, Barrett writes: "For the past four years, China has had the world's most extensive and burdensome AI regulations. And during that same time, China largely caught up with the United States in AI technology." Recent Chinese rules cover "mandatory labeling of AI-generated content, mitigating psychological harms for users, addressing AI-related job losses, and more."

That case is being made after the Trump administration rescinded Biden's basic safety-reporting requirements on AI companies. Two of the AI policy watchers we track shared the piece the day it ran.