Who’s in charge of AI?

Everyone’s still guessing

A quick note before we start: this one runs a little longer than usual. I’d planned to come at this subject in smaller pieces over the next few weeks, but the news got ahead of me, so I’m covering the whole topic in one piece now, and I’ll come back to the other planned posts in a few days. For now, please read, comment and push back in the comments where you think I’ve got it wrong or where you think this is going…

Earlier in June, on Face the Nation, Ben Buchanan, a Johns Hopkins professor who also advises a private AI company, said the quiet part out loud: Artificial intelligence, he said, is “the first revolutionary technology that is primarily… from the private sector.” Governments built the atomic bomb and funded the space race. They did not build this one. And that single fact is why, right now, every government on earth is improvising the rules as it goes.

Governments want a hand on AI for two reasons: to use it, and to contain it. And they’re reaching for tools that run from a polite request to outright part-ownership. It is really too early, in my opinion, to know which ones fit, because the technology is moving faster than anyone can see where it’s going. The real task isn’t picking a rulebook. It’s building a process to keep watching and keep adjusting.

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