Gates calls for mandatory AI safeguards in a year Goldman expects $1 trillion of AI spending

Gates put the cost of required safeguards at "a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they're doing" ^[1]. Goldman Sachs expects global AI investment to exceed $1 trillion in 2026, according to Cryptopolitan's account of the forecast ^[4]. On that base, each percentage point of compliance cost comes to roughly $10 billion a year ^[17]. Neither source estimates the percentage, or the size of the AI-security industry that Cryptopolitan calls booming ^[11].

Most of the money is recent (or rather, most of it is this year's). Goldman's cumulative figure for AI investment since 2022 approaches $1.8 trillion by the end of this year ^[6]. Take out the 2026 forecast and 2022 through 2025 together come to about $0.8 trillion at most, less than this year on its own ^[16].

The claim that rules would entrench incumbents has to deal with who is asking for them. Anthropic's Dario Amodei wrote that "The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all U.S. frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily" ^[2]. That is an incumbent asking for a rule that also binds the rivals who will not slow down on their own ^[2]. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has said which side he is on. "I don't think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination," he told NBC News ^[3]. OpenAI's Sam Altman went to the United Nations and asked for international standards for "measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving meaningful human oversight" ^[14].

Who pays depends on which rule arrives first. A federal law scoped the way Amodei describes would put the cost on the handful of developers at the top, including the ones asking for it ^[2]. State rules could reach further, and they are the ones moving: Maryland's Wes Moore and New York's Kathy Hochul have each released plans aimed at boosting AI regulation in their states ^[10]. Washington may also simply wait. "They don't themselves even have the answer as of today. So we can't rush in and have Congress do something that would be detrimental to national security," House Speaker Mike Johnson said of the AI chiefs ^[8].

In my view a frontier-only federal rule entrenches less than Cryptopolitan's framing suggests. The small labs and poorer countries it worries about ^[11] sit outside a scope aimed at "all U.S. frontier AI companies" ^[2], and the cost lands instead on whoever reaches the frontier next. The counter-thesis is that capacity is already concentrated: the OECD finds it limited to a handful of countries and firms, as Cryptopolitan reports ^[12], and a fixed compliance cost widens that gap whatever the scope. The view is wrong if the first rules to pass, most likely from governors, attach to anyone deploying AI and not only to frontier developers. A fixed cost would then fall on the firms with the smallest budgets to spread it over.