The President announced the DOJ will rein in artificial intelligence if necessary. Not the FTC. Not some new tech oversight board. The Department of Justice. The same people who prosecute mail fraud and antitrust cases are now on deck to wrangle neural networks.
This makes perfect sense if you've never thought about it for more than three seconds. AI regulation falls naturally to the agency that handles criminal prosecution, just like we let the Treasury Department perform heart surgery and OSHA run our nuclear submarines.
Trump wants to beat China at AI development. He also wants to rein it in. These are compatible goals in the same way that stepping on the gas and brake simultaneously gets you to work faster. The strategy here is bulletproof: let American companies build whatever they want until we decide we don't want them to, at which point we'll deploy lawyers who still use BlackBerrys to technical problems they can't spell.
Retail traders are now pricing in DOJ AI enforcement risk. They're scanning press releases for hints about which machine learning startup might get raided first. They're building spreadsheets with columns labeled "regulatory overhang" and "enforcement probability" as if any of this means a f*cking thing. One guy on Reddit just sold his NVDA shares because he's worried the Attorney General will personally audit gradient descent algorithms.
The competitive advantage Trump wants to maintain is apparently so fragile it requires threatening to destroy it preemptively. This is the same energy as buying a racehorse and immediately promising to shoot it in the leg if it runs too fast.
The DOJ will rein in AI if we have to. And if we don't have to, we won't. And if we can't figure out which one applies, we'll just issue a subpoena and see what happens. That's not policy, that's a Choose Your Own Adventure book written by someone who never read the instructions.
Photo by History in HD on Unsplash
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