Here’s a modest proposal for giving LLM AI service providers exactly what they want:
- Delay settling the rules until management and early investors have had an opportunity to issue an IPO and cash out.
- Add a new agency or committee to provide ample opportunity for capture.
- Grandfather existing providers and models. Apply the expensive new requirements principally to future entrants. Being first then becomes a government-protected advantage.
- Make compliance expensive regardless of company size. Require licensing, specialized counsel, extensive documentation, audits, and recurring certification. A fixed compliance bill is manageable for a giant and prohibitive for a prospective competitor.
- Let the leading providers define “safe AI.” Turn their existing practices, evaluation methods, and organizational structures into mandatory standards. Competitors must reproduce the incumbents’ overhead before offering an alternative.
- Make regulatory compliance a shield against liability. Once a provider has completed the prescribed paperwork, restrict injured parties’ ability to recover damages. Certification becomes protection for the company rather than protection for the public.
- Place responsibility on customers and downstream developers. Give providers broad latitude to disclaim responsibility through their terms of service, even where customers have little ability to inspect or control the underlying system.
- Regulate models rather than harmful conduct. Require permission to develop or release a general-purpose tool, instead of concentrating enforcement on fraud, negligence, discrimination, and other identifiable harms. That makes the regulator a gatekeeper to the market.
- Make open models and local operation presumptively suspect. Require centralized monitoring, identity verification, remote shutdown, and continuing provider control. Make running a model yourself legally difficult enough that renting access from an approved provider becomes the practical default.
- Preempt state remedies before establishing an effective federal substitute. Remove alternative avenues of enforcement while leaving the national framework unfinished, weak, or dependent on industry cooperation.
Additional points gratefully accepted. Extra points for providing an advantage to foreign competitors.
