House Speaker Mike Johnson wants AI guardrails to stay voluntary. He said this ahead of a lunch with Trump and AI executives. The lunch happened Tuesday. The timing here is not subtle.
Congress has done nothing on AI regulation. Johnson now hopes they keep doing nothing but with a positive spin. Call it voluntary. Call it industry-led. Call it whatever keeps the donations flowing and the op-eds friendly.
The AI executives at this lunch will nod thoughtfully. They will express concern about safety. They will mention responsibility seventeen times. Then they will go back to their offices and do exactly what they were already doing. Which is the point.
Voluntary guardrails work great. For the people who would have ignored mandatory ones. Every other industry figured this out decades ago. Finance called them best practices. Tech called them ethical frameworks. Both meant the same thing. Nothing.
Johnson gets to tell voters he took a meeting. Trump gets to tell everyone he solved AI. The executives get to write their own rules. Everyone wins except the people who think regulations exist to protect them. Those people still believe price targets matter.
Congress could pass actual rules. They could define liability. They could set standards for testing or transparency or any of the shit that might matter when your job gets automated by a chatbot that hallucinates half its output. But that would require understanding the technology. Or reading. Or showing up to work on a Tuesday when there is no vote scheduled and the Rayburn cafeteria is serving fish.
The voluntary approach has worked so well for data privacy, content moderation, and not building algorithms that radicalize teenagers. Why would AI be different? Johnson sees the track record and thinks yeah, let's run that play again.
Photo by Jorge Maya on Unsplash
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