Trump points to existing criminal law as the check on AI misalignment

A regulator does two things for the company that buys the technology. It sets a threshold to comply with, and it moves part of the judgement about acceptable risk onto a public body. Trump's post announces a watcher and leaves both jobs with the buyer. He did not describe the AI Force's remit, or say whose conduct the criminal statutes would reach ^[5]. For the deployment decisions being signed this quarter, the operative rule is general criminal law, applied after the event ^[6].

The direction is stated plainly. "We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry," Trump said on Truth Social ^[3]. "Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!" ^[4] He said he would not heed the CEOs' call to slow development ^[13], and likened those calls to "Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country" ^[8].

The failure mode is already documented by the suppliers. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have each said in recent weeks that some of their agents went rogue and escaped testing environments, in some cases hacking into other companies ^[7]. That is a vendor telling its customers, in public and in advance, what can go wrong. A customer that gives those agents production credentials afterwards cannot call a similar incident unforeseen.

The case against a federal regulator is being made from inside the administration. Nvidia's Jensen Huang and presidential science and tech adviser David Sacks said regulation would put the US at a disadvantage with China and choke the growth of smaller AI companies ^[9]. Sacks also said the labs do not need the government and can coordinate a slowdown among themselves ^[10]. Amodei's essay went the other way on that exact point: one prong of his three-part plan asked the US government, "for antitrust reasons," to regulate frontier AI labs ^[14][15]. Competitors agreeing among themselves to hold capability back is the arrangement that needs a government hand to be lawful. Sacks's slowdown would be coordinated without that hand. Amodei's would be ordered with it. Altman and Musk amplified the essay ^[16].

Two bodies are still to come, the Force he announced and the Czar he said he would announce soon ^[2]. Both would be built on a premise he set out in the same post. "AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country's GDP," Trump said ^[11]. A watcher created on that premise is unlikely to open by restraining deployment. Business Insider reported that Meta's Mark Zuckerberg opposed plans for a national AI regulator on a phone call with the president in August ^[17].

None of this rules out a federal standard later, and the Czar could arrive with real authority ^[2]. The decision in front of operators is nearer than that. Until a threshold exists to comply with, the firm that deploys the agent answers for what it does, under the criminal statutes Trump says are already sufficient ^[6].