Privatized gains, socialized losses: Congress must forcefully say no to Big AI
A frontier technology company still in its infancy, of questionable profitability, is weeks away from a blockbuster initial public offering. Its co-founder is the poster child for a technology most people and governments do not understand.
Recent news has been one long, nihilism-inducing public service announcement about this technology’s risks, particularly for children. Washington is split on a cure. A Democratic senator wants prison time for anyone who uploads “indecent” material where a child might see it. A bipartisan pair of congressmen want the opposite: immunity from lawsuits over what users post, so companies can police themselves and their products.
Silicon Valley’s playbook is simple: Don’t look too closely at what your product, or your users, are doing; just get as many users as fast as possible. Heavy-handed government regulation threatens the essence of what will keep America winning: freedom, sovereignty and the pursuit of profit.
But the vignette above is not about artificial intelligence, Anthropic and Dario Amodei today — it is about the internet, Netscape and Marc Andreessen in 1995. The Democratic senator was James Exon (D-Neb.). The congressmen Chris Cox (R-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who co-sponsored the infamous Section 230 of the Communications Act.
The law’s words sound harmless: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Cox and Wyden were solving a real business problem: Dial-up services were being sued for moderating at all. They could not foresee a litigation liability shield meant to encourage disciplined self-regulation becoming the legal and business foundation of the social media era, letting platforms grow to billions of users without answering for what their algorithms amplify, including when users harm themselves or others.
In 2026, Silicon Valley is back with new demands — an antitrust waiver and liability protection from lawsuits over what their systems and their users generate. This month, Amodei published a viral essay asking for the former, so that frontier labs can slow down together. On Sept. 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a House committee these labs should not get a liability exemption.
“The best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate,” he said.
Anthropic reportedly plans a $2 trillion October IPO, roughly 700 times the value of Netscape’s.
Recent pushback has, thankfully, been bipartisan. Jonathan Kanter, Joe Biden’s antitrust chief, told CNBC frontier labs can adopt safety standards without an antitrust waiver. David Sacks, President Trump’s former AI czar, told CBS News “it is on them to make their products safe,” adding, “If you can’t control it, then don’t do it.”
Sacks is right, and history shows why. Washington could not write the best policies in 1996, and it cannot do so now.
The last existential technology came out of the Manhattan Project, where the government owned the atomic labs, the knowledge and the decision about who got access. Today’s AI labs are private and worth more than most economies; no free market would hand them to the state.
The House has gone home until after the midterms with months-old AI bills still stalled. Asking Congress to take the wheel is therefore like asking a passenger who has never driven to keep a school bus from crashing. A technology this poorly understood needs rules that evolve, not a campaign slogan or promise.
None of this is an argument against regulating AI. It is an argument against carving the rules into statute in the industry’s early years, before its full role in our society has settled. Section 230 has been amended just once in 30 years. The shield written to protect a few dial-up services outlived the companies it was drafted for.
A liability exemption or antitrust waiver could harden the same way, around whoever is largest now. Private AI labs asking permission to self-coordinate on safety are also asking permission to coordinate, and the only firms that can afford to slow down are already at the frontier. Begin to regulate now but write rules that can change as the technology does. Don’t hand over an immutable immunity.
Amodei is 43 years old. Unlike Andreessen, who was 24 in 1995, he has history to draw and learn from. This fall, the University of Chicago barred AI from its core social sciences courses so that students learn to read, write and think. Those old books hold a lesson for these new machines: A shield outlasts whomever it was built to protect, and those who remain must live with whatever was protected.
Accountability is the price of pursuing profit. You cannot privatize gains, socialize losses and ask for a permission slip for everything that could go wrong in between. If frontier AI labs believe their technology is that dangerous, they can slow down after reading this article. They don’t need our permission to hit the brakes.
Zander Cowan is a former employee in product at Lila Sciences, an AI lab pursuing scientific superintelligence.
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