There's only one voice that matters in this administration, and he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue, and he is more than happy to trample over his agencies to enforce his opinion.
Then you can be never tried again for the same crimes. There is some law against being tried for the same crimes multiple times.
which is putting it very mildly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824686
Just speculating here, there is no way to predict how that will play out
Though it’s pretty depressing that we can’t just dismiss it directly…
They will also put up only PR-oriented #resistance, aiming all attacks at Trump (as you have) and ignoring the AI companies themselves.
They'll save their criticism for loudmouth AI CEOs that agree to jump out and catch a few bullets (that will bounce off harmlessly, it doesn't matter what the public thinks about them) aimed at Democratic politicians who just voted for something they said that they were against because the Republicans didn't have enough for a majority.
Loudmouth CEO: "Actually people should be grateful that they're losing their jobs - if they actually loved their jobs, and loved the world, they'd be happy that it was being done better than they ever could, because AI is perfect and guided by us wise, wonderful people."
Democratic Congressman who just voted to take away a state's ability to stop a data center being built in the middle of a reservoir: "Do you have no shame sir! You give a bad name to the majority of CEOs who are beautiful people who defend us from the inscrutable Chinese hordes. It's thoughtless talk like this that is leading to the rise in subversion among the paranoid terrorists that are emboldening the bullies who show up to city council meetings and anti-data center protests! I'm going to demand that we not award you the 634th no-bid contract that you asked for, and when we are forced to admit that we can't actually cancel that award, I'll ask that you be officially censured by Congress!"
AI is shaping up to be a major concern amongst the non-tech segment of the population. Some of the arguments are good, some are dumb, but people largely are forming up against AI and datacenters. Yes, you should expect politicians to act on that; it's how the system is meant to work.
And if the FTC chair is not agreeable, they will be threatened by said lobbyists and eventually be fired.
If this sounds far-fetched, it is exactly what happened to Gail Slater, then-head of the DOJ's antitrust division and her deputies in 2025 over HPE’s bid to acquire Juniper.
Wall Street Journal archive link: https://archive.ph/IMer9
I wonder if this is just self-consciously a self-dealing thing explicitly designed to block off further investigations. Clear them, then they can't be properly investigated for that activity in the future.
> It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” and will not acknowledge the usage of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in any applicable setting.
Good thing the US uses the imperial system one less source of confusion /s
- The US government's official policy is metric (and has been for something like 50 years now).
- The population uses a mix of metric and US customary units, not imperial.
UK is kinda similar, I suppose, but their typical usage of metric/imperial tilts more heavily in favor of metric. I wonder how many other countries are also still doing mixed measurement systems at this point?
From an international perspective, America is Trump, in a way that is far more acute than even when it was Obama or GWB. Back then you could understand POTUS as sitting on top of an enormous apparatus that didn't just act out his whims; in the current situation we have to treat him as a sort of dimwit emperor.
Perhaps the right wing always thought that the government was the personal weapon of the sitting president, and that is why they are so comfortable with actually making it so, but the left wing has predominantly seen it as an enormous bureaucracy governed by policy and laws that only changed relatively slowly, and not at the whim of an individual.
Now when I see data and the source is the federal government, my reaction is "this is probably fake, or at least biased heavily." Makes me a little sad to have that reaction, e.g. I used to like going to the NIH web site to find information, but now I assume it has been curated to meet an ideological narrative.
I also do not have a lot of confidence that this situation will be a one-off aberration and the democrats will bring sanity back and implement better safeguards against the next demagogue. On the contrary, I think it is very plausible they will see this as an opportunity they had not dreamed of before.
>“Review all Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations commenced under the previous administration to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.”
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ...
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/us-government-regulat...
and the 2008 financial crisis: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2008/11/24/the-revolving-door...
just to name two obscure examples that had some small impact on society
Of course, this story also points towards how people sometimes get confused. Most opportunities companies have to be unethical are complex, so if you're not already inclined to trust a company, it's easy to come up with reasons to distrust any claims of ethical behavior they make. Maybe they didn't want to do the unethical behavior in the first place, maybe they've made up self-serving ethical standards, maybe they're just being performatively ethical as a marketing strategy and they'll misbehave when nobody's looking.
Such commentary tends to go viral, because it's easy to propose and impossible to refute in a short comment or video.
I predict they’ll be forced to install an “ombudsman” in the data cleaning / training team, so Trump can inject propaganda and filter out science. (As has been done to many US news outlets already).
Also, they will somehow each put >> $1B into his personal checking account, and hope presidential pardons cover bribing the president after the next few elections.
Should this be the way it happens? No
Is it? Yes
The main thing I’ve seen recently is people learning how the world works then being shocked when it’s nothing like what is sold publicly
I am legit curious though: what changed specifically in your information gathering process that revealed these things?
For example pretty much everything happening now has been well described by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn specifically about American politics since the 1960s. I mean similarly for the entire black community and don’t forget Martin Luther King was killed because he was trying to organize sanitation workers.
Chris Hedges has been reporting about the state of things daily for two decades now. Similarly for Jacobin magazine.
Ron Paul (whatever you think of him) was talking explicitly about this corruption in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the bail out of the banking market in 2008.
Ross Perot famously described how Nafta was a big sellout to the multinational corporations and would devastate US industry - on stage at the 1992(?) presidential debate and everybody just made fun of him because he was short and had slightly larger ears because he was an older guy.
The blatant nature of it now and complete complicity of large swaths of the government in the corruption are a level that has never been seen before. The Teapot Dome scandal involved the equivalent of tens of millions of present day dollars. The actions of the president alone now are what would have been considered dozens of individual career-ending scandals only a couple generations ago.
"Gail Slater" is not a democratically elected person of any kind, and exists as a function of the executive, and hence of the president's policies. Insofar as the DOJ's anti-trust's leaders depart from the will of the elected president, it is that leader to be fired and replaced. Or else: what ever was the point of electing a president?
There's nothing in principle wrong in a president disagreeing with the execution of his executive powers, delegated to Gail, and hence firing him. Indeed, if that were not the case, the election of a president could never change the operation of the executive, making the election pointless.
If you disagree with the anti-trust decision, the issue isn't with the political mechanism by which it was over-ruled, but with the election of that president.
Let's not kid ourselves.
With AI it seems to be internal testing produces wild results, which is unsurprising to me, all of these models can be jailbroken, and as long as that's the case, they're all likely to be exploited maliciously.
I’m repeating it because that has to be internalized: the largest IPO ever will be for a company that casually consider they might kill us all and their own employees too. Including their children.
What about the price of gas?
FTC is still mostly not compromised by industry sleeper agents. FBI is still independent also.
CAISI NIST is very compromised by EA sleeper agents. very luckily they have no law enforcement role.
Perhaps it does not need saying but if you leave it to nonprofits overflowing with industry operatives and ai blood money, you get whatever openai or anthropic want you to hear (METR report).
When Trump is gone they'll forget about him. If we elect someone far-left next they'll suddenly be mega-woke. Watch.
How is this a fair, level, playing field, U.S.? Making a large pile of money to put millions of people out of a job, it warrants some investigations!
They can only do that because of circular finance deals and other fraud. Those deals are also the reason a machine that’d run ~ Claude Opus 4.6 locally costs $5000 instead of the original $1400 MSRP.
Eh, their AI is going to put millions of people out of a job ...
If this is not unfair competition, then what is?
The concern is predatory pricing [1]. Which may or may not result in job loss (the surviving company could hire/acquire the dieing companies).
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Therefore, the only solution is to ensure people act according to the spirit of the law, not the actual law.
If you talk about "fair competition" then "fair" also applies to how the law works. If one party is always one step ahead, then that is not fair.
According to this analysis, at 70 tokens per second for Kimi K3, you could expect to run >800 parallel streams on that setup:
VC creates little wars of attrition in every industry and calls it "disruption" but it mostly pulls the money out of workers' pockets.