by Dean Karayanis:
Americans are leading in the artificial intelligence race, a fact that will loom large when President Xi Jinping of Communist China meets with President Trump next week. Beijing’s communist system is making efforts to close the technology gap difficult; so they’re using a forgotten bit of Cold War deception to buy time.
On Wednesday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of the United Nations said that “the world cannot afford a race to the bottom on AI safety.” His remarks were a rebuke to Mr. Trump. Monday on Truth Social, the president pushed back on “the AI Hoax,” likening it to warnings that “everyone was going to die from extreme heat.”
The independent of Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders, attended the Pro-Human Assembly at Washington D.C. last week and, earlier this month, he introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Like many on the left, he has replaced climate doomsaying with warnings about AI, fixing blame on America while holding Communist China innocent.
Mr. Sanders wrote in a statement that his bill aims “to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.” Such rhetoric invokes a ubiquitous sci-fi trope depicted too often not to fear. The legislation “would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI” in America. It would also “direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements.”
Yet it’s doubtful that foes like Communist China would abide by any such agreement. While Mr. Xi will pay lip service to the need for regulating AI next week, expect that he’s employing a strategy that the USSR developed when America detonated the world’s first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945.
That mushroom cloud cancelled out the advantage the USSR had with conventional forces in Europe and struck fear into the Kremlin. Although allied with America against Germany in World War II, the communists sought to defeat the West, but lacked the scientific knowhow or even the uranium to make bombs.
Augmenting their research through espionage, the USSR began work on their own nuclear program in secret. Meanwhile, Soviet diplomats gave speeches pushing for the immediate prohibition of atomic weapons at the UN and backed Western “No Nukes” protests to “Ban the Bomb.”
The USSR’s party boss, Joseph Stalin, in a classic misdirection, dismissed the usefulness of nuclear weapons. In 1947, he told a Wisconsin Republican, Governor Harold Strassen, that the atomic bomb was not “as serious a force as certain politicians are inclined to regard it.” America’s monopoly on the technology, he insisted, was the only problem.
Stalin said atomic bombs were “intended for intimidating weak nerves, but they cannot decide the outcome of war,” although they had done just that in Japan.
by Amuse:
The Washington Examiner published two related reports on September 15. OpenAI lobbyists are backing regulatory provisions in the bipartisan FRONTIER Act, H.R. 9925, introduced in July by Reps. Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who co-chairs the House work on the subject, is pressing a different method. He wants mandatory government review of the most advanced models and has said third-party audits alone do not meet the moment. The live argument in Washington is now the machinery. Who assesses a model, what standard that person uses, and how long a developer can survive a refusal will decide whether the statute protects the public or merely rations the right to compete.
Cities inspect bridges because collapse is final and inspection is cheap insurance. The trouble starts when only 3 firms qualify to inspect, every appointment takes 9 months, and an engineer whose design is rejected never learns why. The shortage does the work a ban would have done. Congress is writing a version of that arrangement into federal law for artificial intelligence. Safety is doing a lot of the talking. The identity of the gatekeepers is doing too little.
I argued in June 2025 that Congress, not 50 legislatures, should write the rules for this industry. The White House took the same view in its December 2025 fact sheet calling for a national framework to replace a pile of state mandates. A company should not need 50 legal opinions to ship one product. Uniformity still has to shrink the total burden. Swap many uncertain demands for one expensive bottleneck and the tidy map produces less opportunity than the sponsors promised. The test that matters is practical. Can a new lab read the obligations, budget for them, and meet them before its capital runs out? If it cannot, the framework has failed on the terms used to sell it.
H.R. 9925 is tiered, and the text should be read as written. It distinguishes frontier developers from large developers and from very large developers. Large developers must publish a frontier AI framework covering catastrophic-risk thresholds, model-weight security, and deployment decisions, then undergo annual independent audits for compliance with that framework. Only very large developers must retain licensed independent verification organizations for ongoing assessment. That last category requires both revenue above $5 billion and at least $10 billion in AI development spending over the preceding 36 months, counting affiliates. A garage lab does not walk into a federal licensing board on day one. The pressure the bill creates sits in the assessor market; it would stand up. An independent verification organization would judge whether a very large developer’s published framework, followed as written, is adequate to hold catastrophic risk to an acceptable level, including when the model is used inside the company. That is a serious job. It only works if more than a handful of organizations can do it on a calendar a growing industry can survive.
The Department of Commerce would license those organizations and set their qualifications through a new Under Secretary for AI Security. Sections 3 and 7 address assessor conflicts of interest and assessor licensing, and they require the Government Accountability Office to examine the assessor market every year for capacity, entry barriers, and independence. Section 9 preempts state law in a targeted way, with exceptions. Section 8 pairs emergency restrictions for imminent catastrophic risk with administrative review, constrained judicial review of provisional orders, and an exception that preserves constitutional claims. The sponsors saw the concentration problem. That credit is real, which is why they are the audience for a harder draft rather than a dismissal.
Gottheimer’s track and the FRONTIER design are two different gates. He would put the review inside an agency. H.R. 9925 puts it in a licensed private market that Commerce would supervise. The private version is easier to defend in a hearing because it looks like independence. It is harder to defend in an actual queue if only a few shops can do the work, if those shops take months to schedule, and if a rejected developer cannot learn why the verdict came down.
A formally even rule can still land unevenly. Joshua Levine’s June 2025 study for the Cato Institute treated auditing and impact-assessment procedures as natural sites of regulatory capture, and the mechanism is ordinary rather than conspiratorial. Large compliance departments are a fixed cost. A firm with $5 billion in revenue can absorb delay, keep a scarce assessor on retainer, and staff the paperwork. A lab of 12 engineers with a better training run cannot. The statute uses the same words for both. The calendar does not. The Heritage Foundation has made the same warning in plainer language. A centralized partnership between government and a handful of frontier firms, sold as safety, is the outcome to fear. Heritage’s critique of California’s earlier frontier bill ran on the same rail. Thresholds and reporting that look neutral on paper become barriers once only a few shops can staff them. Competition among open and closed models, and among multiple providers of apps and infrastructure, is often the discipline that actually works.
A rulebook written around the habits of today’s leaders also risks treating one business model as the only responsible way to operate. Congress should ask of every provision whether it measures a danger or merely rewards familiarity with a particular laboratory’s methods. That question still matters when everyone in the room believes the public purpose is real.
Vice President Vance’s remarks on September 14 named the tension in public. He granted that AI carries real risks and real benefits, said the administration wants to “regulate smartly,” and said he was uneasy that frontier companies are the ones asking for the rules. Lydia Moynihan made the same observation in the New York Post that day, warning against a “please regulate us” turn that just happens to freeze the field. Established firms have an incentive to favor industry-wide constraints they can carry and rivals cannot. The incentive is visible on the balance sheet. Chris Lehane’s September 9 statement for OpenAI says a federal framework should target “the handful of well-resourced laboratories developing the most capable systems” and that “a serious public framework should reduce, not increase, the concentration of power.” Convert the second sentence into terms a competitor could enforce. A shared line in a white paper is where the drafting starts.
Once an outside assessment becomes a condition of competing, access to competent assessors is public policy. The GAO review in the bill is useful and late. A report on a concentrated assessor market after it forms is a different task from building capacity before the obligation bites. Congress should require published waiting times next to completed assessments. It should set qualification standards that a new evaluator with a different technical approach can actually meet. It should decide whether a developer may carry valid assessment evidence from one evaluator to another, so changing shops does not mean repeating a year of work. Security and intellectual property will force a defined handoff. Portability makes exit practical, and exit keeps an assessor honest.