Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI begged Congress to regulate them. Congress said no thanks and went home to ask people for money.
This marks the first time in American history that billion-dollar companies asked the government to tie their hands and the government responded by checking their fantasy football lineup. The AI labs wanted guardrails. They wanted oversight. They wanted someone to stop them before they built the thing that ends civilization. Congress wanted to know if their opponent started Davante Adams this week.
House members flew back to their districts to campaign on a platform of doing absolutely nothing about the most urgent technological development since fire. Voters will surely reward this. Nothing says electoral gold like ignoring three companies that specifically flew executives to Washington to say please regulate us before we accidentally invent the Terminator.
The urgency came from companies worth a combined half-trillion dollars. These are not bleeding-heart nonprofits. These are the people building chatbots that hallucinate legal advice and image generators that can't draw hands. They looked at their own roadmap and thought maybe someone should pump the brakes. Congress looked at their own calendar and thought maybe someone should pump gas for the drive home.
Retail traders are pricing in regulatory clarity that will never arrive. They bought AI stocks expecting Washington to create a framework. Washington created a vacation schedule. The framework is there is no framework. The plan is there is no plan. The strategy is to let Sam Altman and Elon Musk fight it out in the group chat while representatives knock on doors explaining why inflation is someone else's fault.
Your portfolio needed Congress to act like adults. Congress needed to ask strangers for campaign donations. Guess which need won.
Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash
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