Dario Amodei asks Washington to coordinate regulatory capture
By Imani Sutton · Reporting from Atlanta ·
The push for AI safety standards is an attempt by dominant labs to use regulatory capture to block smaller competitors.
# The Silicon Valley Liturgy
The weekly rhythm of Silicon Valley usually arrives via an industry blog post, but on the latest episode of "TBPN," hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays found the latest argument on the timeline. Coogan recorded the episode while recovering from rhabdomyolysis—a condition caused by excessive exercise and dehydration. This physical collapse mirrors the burnout driving the current infrastructure of the AI race. The show analyzed the scramble following an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who argued that the industry must "pace the frontier" of artificial intelligence.
Coogan and Hays described Amodei's strategy as a three-part sequence. First, third-party evaluators like METR would audit labs. Second, the government would establish safety standards, but only if it granted a Sherman Antitrust Act waiver so competitors could coordinate their safety protocols without risking collusion lawsuits. Third, the U.S. would coordinate these efforts with authoritarian regimes, specifically China. Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman endorsed the framework. David Sachs said on X that tech giants were attempting regulatory capture to pull up the ladder behind them. Donald Trump dismissed safety alarmism as a hoax on par with "Russia Russia Russia" during a Truth Social post and a live phone call to Nvidia's Jensen Huang at the All-In Summit.
The Cartel Wants a Permission Slip
Amodei asks Washington to help frontier labs coordinate, but this request carries a hidden cost. Coogan and Hays said that enforcing safety standards across a few dominant players requires an explicit exemption from federal antitrust law. Companies with market caps that dwarf the GDP of most nations do not invite the government into their server rooms out of a sense of duty. As Sachs said, a vetting process run by "independent" auditors creates a regulatory barrier. This wall of red tape ensures that a coder in a garage cannot afford the legal fees or the audit costs required to launch an open-source model.
This strategy protects assets rather than people. When a company makes it too expensive to comply with the law, it legislates its competition out of existence while claiming civic responsibility. The debate often centers on whether slowing down helps or hurts profit margins, but the material reality is simpler: the companies asking for a referee are the ones writing the rulebook.
Who Pays for the Power?
While the guests on the podcast debated whether China or OpenAI would win the race to AGI, the physical cost of the project appeared on utility bills. Coogan said Google plans to build a massive data center in Finland because American zoning battles and environmental impact reports make permitting too slow. Trump said data centers act as an economic engine more significant than oil, gold, or the wheel.
These leaders rarely mention the strain on the physical world. In cities like Atlanta, the grid buckles under the load of cooling computational factories. When a state mortgages its energy supply to feed rows of humming H100 chips, venture capitalists do not pay the price. Instead, residents in Georgia suburbs see their monthly bills climb while their lights flicker. The cost of the frontier is paid in burst pipes and brownouts for families who never asked for a model to be trained in their backyard.
The Playbook is Pure PR
Trump said industry leaders are hypocrites for begging for regulations that supposedly threaten their own survival. While his claim that the U.S. needs a "high-IQ president" is performance, his critique of the industry's posture is accurate. The public theater of "doomers" versus "accelerationists" distracts from a struggle over the physical inputs of the future: silicon, cooling water, and electricity.
The industry does not need an FAA for AI, nor does it need a cartel of monopolists coordinating to save humanity. The current system extracts power from the public grid to train models that serve a market benefiting only those holding the microphone.