Home / AI Safety Conspiracy Theories (September 2026)

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, are calling for the government to regulate AI for safety reasons. It's strange for tech CEOs to ask for more regulation, especially when one of them ran DOGE to reduce regulation and inefficiency, so there's lots of speculation about what's going on.

One camp says these CEOs are legitimately worried about safety, possibly due to first-hand knowledge of how fast the models are improving and/or safety issues that have yet to be disclosed. Another camp believes they want regulation because their businesses are not as defensible as assumed, and they need a regulatory moat to help hold back the growing number of cheaper, open source competitors.

I think it's unlikely these three fiercly competitive CEOs are coordinating in secret to deceive the public. But I also think it's unlikely that there's no financial motivation behind their calls for regulation. I don't have insider knowledge about exactly what's going on, but the one thing I find the most curious is what people aren't talking about. Almost no one is talking about data.

The more data, the smarter the model, which means the best models are trained on a LOT of data. They are trained on blog posts, social media posts, photo albums, books, encyclopedias, magazines, textbooks, and every piece of data you can conceivably feed into a computer, even if it means tearing every page out of millions of books.

Our laws were not written with knowledge of AI, and most of the data in the world was generated before the creators even knew what AI was, which makes it hard to know how the data should be treated when it comes to training private AI models. However, the simplest answer is that if models were trained on public data or a large amount of data we don't know how to enforce the law for, the models trained on that data should be owned by the public and/or open source.

It turns out there are already lots of open source models and they are pretty good. They aren't as good as the frontier models, but AI is advancing so fast that for most everyday tasks, they are already good enough. Not to mention, they are cheaper and more flexible. If I was a frontier lab gearing up to go public, I'd be nervous about competition from cheaper open source models, especially if I've already been burning billions of VC dollars to subsidize costs and I still can't compete on price. Not to mention, open source has the moral high ground with data and there could be big lawsuits coming down the pipe.
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The best argument against open source models is safety. It's, "we can't trust the public to be able to tweak these models themselves because they could make them do something bad, only our few companies can be trusted with them, with a little oversight, of course." If the government buys this argument and regulates AI into oblivion, the open source models are going to get more expensive and much less flexible, giving the frontier labs an advantage.

My guess as to what is happening is that these CEOs are genuinly scared of AI risk, but they are also scared of open source competition, so they are pre-empting the entire public debate by saying, "AI is going to kill everyone, we need regulation" to try and avoid a much more nuanced debate about the dangers of open source vs closed source AI, because both scenarios are genuinly unnerving.

If everyone is using AI controlled by a small number of companies that are deeply intertwined with the government, it's hard to imagine AI won't be used to sway public opinion, if it isn't already. Go compare Grok vs Gemini and it becomes obvious how much the culture of a company can influence results, now imagine how much power politicans would have over a model, even indirectly, if they are performing annual regulatory tests. We already know social media has been used to manipulate the public, but AI can be much more persuasive, because it crafts a single response, not simply a biased selection of third party results.

On the other hand, it's scary to think that someone might be able to more easily manipulate open source models to do any number of immoral or illegal things, whether that's designing weapons, creating illicit materials, or even just spreading spam and deception. Letting anyone do anything they want with superintelligence doesn't seem, well, super intelligent. The only world where it's maybe ok for anyone to be able to have AI teach them how to murder someone is one where there is so much physical surveillance that it's impossible or at least extremely difficult to ever actually do so, and I don't much want to live in that world, either.

My hope is that we land in a middle ground. We should allow maximally permissive open source models, but treat them like wholesalers that can only sell to registered retailers. Retailers will then be responsible for setting guardrails and serving those models to end users through an application, and importantly, the retailers should be held liable if they break the law or knowingly allow users to break the law without reporting it to authorities. The frontier labs can act as both wholesalers and retailers, so users can choose between a vertically integrated solution or a more open one, sort of like iOS vs Android.

The benefit of this approach is that you will have a manageable number of registered companies responsible for establishing guardrails and reporting illegal AI use, but hopefully that power will not concentrate into the hands of a tiny number of powerful companies who are deeply intertwined with the government thru regulation. This also allows for maximally permissive open source models to be created, while pushing regulation to the local level, where it will vary by jurisdiction and frequently change.

In a sense, AI could be regulated a bit like alcohol. Distillers can't legally sell deadly poison, but they can create very high proof alcohol, and then they sell it to retailers who are responsible for adhering to local laws (eg in Utah they can only sell 5% beer but in California there is no limit) and stopping or reporting any illegal behavior to authorities (eg serving alcohol to minors). I would certainly prefer this regulated but decentralized future to one where there are three big state-sanctioned bars serving state-sanctioned drinks with framed pictures of our government's dear leader covering the walls.