Economist Alex Tabarrok rebuts the claim that AI safety advocacy is regulatory capture
AndyMasley · x · 2026-09-16
Alex Tabarrok pushes back on the popular claim that Dario Amodei's proposal to slow AI development and add independent safety teams is regulatory capture. "Our product might kill you" is a terrible marketing pitch, he argues. AI experts' fears are sincere: Amodei, Altman and Musk warned about AI risk before they had companies to promote, and Geoffrey Hinton left a lucrative Google job to speak freely. The piece grounds the argument in regulatory capture theory itself, drawing on Marver Bernstein's 1955 classic on the regulatory life cycle, to show the theory doesn't fit here.
Related event: Debate rages over whether AI doom warnings amount to regulatory capture(4 posts)→
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