AI is finally making us question our bias in favor of deregulation

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging tech leaders to slow the pace of AI development.

On a Sunday CBS News interview , he added that it “could be a good idea” to have an AI kill switch — not unlike what Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) have proposed . “Some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance,” he argued, is needed to stave off “great risks” to the public, including “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.”

Somewhat astonishingly, rival tech billionaires Sam Altman and Elon Musk swiftly backed Amodei’s warning : “Dario is right,” Musk posted on X.

What Amodei, Altman and Musk are saying, loudly and clearly, is that there is a vital role for government regulation when it comes to AI. Since the 1970s, however, Republicans and many leading Democrats have pushed deregulation as a priority. Republicans have especially preached that that “ the role of the federal government should be limited ,” and that Congress should take aggressive steps to “alleviate federal regulatory and bureaucratic burdens on individuals and businesses.”

Deregulation has broadly been achieved across numerous industries, including banking, energy, labor, the environment, and telecommunications. The underlying economic argument is that deregulation enables businesses to hire and spend more, increasing productivity and ultimately lowering costs for consumers. Trump’s 2025 AI Action Plan explicitly emphasized removing regulatory obstacles to AI development and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, federal income-tax rates on businesses have fallen substantially over the same period on a similar rationale: that lower tax burdens encourage investment and economic growth. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act cut the top individual income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed during President Trump’s first term, reduced the federal corporate income-tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

What has been missing from the debates over deregulation and tax-cuts is a basic recognition that regulation provides crucial public benefits that businesses are not incentivized to provide or pay for on their own — for example, cleaner air, safer workplaces, financial stability and consumer protection.

“My view here,” Amodei told CBS, “is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time — why isn’t this being built by government. And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them, I’m uncomfortable.”

Yet in countless other ways, the Trump administration has increasingly fused public power with private enterprise. As part of his ramped-up ICE crackdown, for example, he has massively expanded the reach of private prison companies. Their 2025 revenue estimate is pegged at about $5.5 billion, $2.4 billion of which came from ICE alone.

Trump has also brokered numerous public-private financial deals with taxpayer money, such as a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnet company tied to Donald Trump, Jr. The federal government is now a partial owner in companies such as Intel , in which Trump made an $8.9 billion investment of federal dollars in exchange for a 9.9 percent equity stake . Just this month, the Pentagon acquired a 35 percent equity position in North American Blue Energy Partners , giving the U.S. government an ownership interest in a company involved in Venezuelan oil production.

The federal government is thus using private companies to achieve public objectives — including becoming a shareholder in major private companies whose bottom lines depend on favorable federal regulation and investment.

This is not how American government is supposed to work. With rare exceptions , the Constitution does not bind private conduct, on the theory that the government requires specialized constraints due to its uniquely coercive and monetary powers. That public-private power structure is radically changing.

All the while, the Republican Party continues to pretend that corporations and the market have all the answers to the public’s problems. Let them do their thing and everything will work out well, the theory goes, including for the average American worker.

It’s increasingly clear that the bountiful mantra of deregulation and tax-cutting for corporations is a myth. Or worse, a deliberate lie. Said Amodei: “I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”

But who can really blame corporations? Under the influential laws of Delaware , directors of for-profit corporations are restrained from adopting business strategies that deliberately reject shareholder wealth maximization in favor of unrelated social objectives. The government’s job is exactly the opposite.

Members of Congress, federal judges, and the president all take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and, in effect, its underlying values — including “justice,” “domestic tranquility,” “the general welfare,” and the “blessings of liberty.” If it takes AI to get voters to demand a government for the people — not for corporations — maybe that’s a good thing. November will tell.

Kimberly Wehle is currently a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and author of “How to Read the Constitution — and Why,” as well as “What You Need to Know About Voting — and Why” and “How to Think Like a Lawyer — and Why. “