Rob Wiblin

If someone were to steal $1,000, we don't fine them $100 and let them keep the other $900, but that's effectively how the law was written to operate here.

Second, voluntary commitments should be taken with an enormous bucket of salt.

Meta repeatedly made them very strategically just to buy time and stall binding regulation with no honest intention of following through in the end.

The documents are quite explicit about that being a deliberate strategy.

Another Reuters investigation revealed that Meta developed a global playbook for neutralizing regulators, including manipulating their own ad library so that when regulators searched it, scam ads were quietly scrubbed from the results and would give a misleading impression about how common they were.

So third, I think regulators need genuine access to internal information.

If the only window regulators have into a company is one the company completely controls, they're going to see whatever the company wants them to see.

Thinking about all this has brought me back to an idea that I found myself repeatedly mulling over with respect to artificial intelligence governance.

Compared to social media, AI technology changes faster, the potential consequences are larger, and the gaps between what companies know and what outsiders can verify is wider still.

With AI systems, model outputs often have to be secret, for good reason, much more secret than social media posts.

And regulators can't usually evaluate what a model is doing and why, and often even the company itself only vaguely understands.

These systems are literally the first invention humans have ever made that can independently determine when they're being tested and have been demonstrated to strategically shift their behavior to try to trick the very company that made them about their personality and likely behavior once released.

It's honestly bonkers and truly something new under the sun that we've never had to deal with before.

Just in general, it's a really complex situation to handle, clearly, and we don't yet know everything that we're going to want companies to do to address it sensibly at a reasonable cost.

That's why some of the smartest people working in AI governance from across the political spectrum are converging on the idea that AI regulation needs to draw in some ways on how the Federal Reserve and other central banks watch over massive financial institutions.

We'll link to a major report on this that I can definitely recommend to you.

It's worth reading.

But in brief, the Fed does not wait around for banks to collapse and then issue them a fine.

It embeds supervisors directly inside systemically important banks, people who have deep technical expertise, who remain there full-time, watching how decisions get made, reviewing internal risk models.

They're having constant conversations with leadership about what they perceive as emerging risks long before they can become crises.