AI AND ML

Surely, we can have rules that allow us to continue doing what we're doing

For more than three years now, we've been hearing from AI execs who insist that the government regulate their industries … until there's a chance such oversight could hurt business. OpenAI and Anthropic have led the way with the latter's CEO, Dario Amodei, calling for "binding regulations" in June 2026, only to push back when his latest models were suspended.  

Now Google, which has also called for AI regulation, would like to clarify its request for government intervention and ask for a "middle way" that's largely favorable to its interests.

"The debate over AI governance is stuck in a false choice between over-regulation and no regulation," said Google president Kent Walker in a blog post. "There is a middle way: A pragmatic, evidence-based approach that recognizes the unique challenges and opportunities of both frontier AI and widely-deployed AI applications."

Walker does not explicitly define "over-regulation," but presumably we're talking about the recent ban on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5. 

In Google's 21-page policy paper "A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America" [PDF], the company argues, "There is a middle path that would balance market-driven innovation and independent oversight: a federally overseen frontier AI regulatory organization (FARO)."

The FARO would be modeled after other notionally independent, industry-funded organizations like the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and the American Medical Association, each of which is overseen by some government commission or agency.

The conceit of a middle path is difficult to reconcile with the past decade of dire warnings about AI from technology leaders. If AI is indeed an existential threat with the capability to do harm, one might expect it to be regulated like lead or asbestos.

Yet here's Google arguing, "AI platforms should be required to take reasonable measures to feature persistent disclaimers, filter out sexually explicit or romantic content, avoid claims the model is a person (and regularly point out that it’s not), and not promote emotional dependency."

We've seen how well this has worked out on the internet, where Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has immunized platforms that take performative safety measures: we wanted some measure of free speech, but we also got no-fault misinformation and social media incitement as part of the package.

The middle road for AI governance is already here: some acceptable level of chatbot suicide promotion, non-consensual nudification images, copyright surrender, model bias, indemnified errors, and guidance toward harms. Hey, we tried.

It's not communities banning datacenters, but communities negotiating terms. "The question is not datacenters or no datacenters, but how to build datacenters the right way, responsibly and in partnership with communities," Google's paper states.

But already for many communities, it's not a question but an imperative. If there's one thing that unites the political spectrum at the moment, it's opposition to datacenters.

And this middle of the road approach looks more like "just let us have our way" with regard to copyright.

"Using publicly available web data for training models is a transformative, non-expressive use – like an art student taking inspiration from walking through a gallery – that should remain protected under fair use in the U.S. and text-and-data-mining exceptions abroad," Google's paper muses.

The courts are still considering claims about AI copyright abuse. But as analogies go, AI for Google is more like an art student who controls the tourist referral market capturing the entirety of the Louvre's imagery and then selling access to those images – fair, profitable use! – and laundered variations in a way that discourages tourists from visiting the actual Louvre.

And then, noting all the creative types who no longer get hired because AI sells their talent on tap, the art student throws in with a non-profit offering incentives to companies for job retraining programs.

Google is asking for a middle path, but one need only look at the growth in AI lobbying over the past few years – up 340 percent since 2023 – to understand that the AI industry is paying to pave this middle path in a favorable direction. ®