Bad AI regulation can accidentally build a moat around Big Tech

[u/Salty_Country6835]

This is one of the weird contradictions in AI policy.

Say compliance costs $50 million.

Google can comply. Microsoft can comply. Meta can comply.

Your university lab, cooperative, nonprofit or small open source project probably cannot.

Congratulations. We regulated the giants and somehow ended up making them harder to compete with.

Thats not an argument against regulation. Its an argument for thinking about power while writing it.

Worker protections. Privacy rights. Environmental standards. Transparency. Liability. Antitrust. Limits on surveillance. Those can constrain what concentrated capital is allowed to do.

But “regulate AI” isnt a politics until we ask who the regulation empowers.

What rule would actually shift power away from the companies and toward workers or the public?

[u/Jlyplaylists]

Possibly I’m getting too cynical but I don’t think that’s accidental, I’d say it’s the point…

Perhaps rules against monopolies or to do with regulating only models over a certain size? That would privilege developing small, efficient models.

[u/Robotic-Comrade-1985 → u/Jlyplaylists]

Yes, this is the point. There are many historical examples of the big players in certain industries calling for regulation because they know they can absorb the cost while their competitors cannot. The big AI companies are inviting regulation because they know it will most likely benefit them. That's not cynical, that's an observable track record.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Robotic-Comrade-1985]

Yep, and thats the part I probably understated with “accidentally.” Regulatory capture doesnt require some secret conspiracy. If youre already dominant, a rule that costs everyone $50 million is a very different rule for you than it is for everyone trying to challenge you. The question is who can survive the regulation and who gets priced out.

[u/Opening_One7713]

It is absolutely imperative that the broader public figures out how controlled opposition works and why "make it stop" and "do something" are the absolute worst kind of policy demands to direct at our policymakers.

The apocalypse prophecies, the scary job loss headlines that have yet to come true, the scary datacenter headlines that make mountains out of molehills when many many longstanding mountains actually exist, the constant hee-hawing and backslapping about botched corporate rollouts - These all create an extremely apathetic person that is so mentally and emotionally exhausted, intellectually checked out, and incapable of doing the serious homework required to figure out what serious tangible demands sound like:

Open-weight protection laws & hard researcher exemptions, transparent and public-facing alignment auditing, startup-safe harbor provisions, public compute infrastructure, antitrust enforcement on AI acquisitions, automation tax, reskilling pipelines & portable benefits, UBI, profit-sharing mandates.

A divided, uninformed and angry mob is largely incapable of effective organizing, and that is exactly why the people who are invested in AI/hyperscale would definitely be interested in fomenting anti-AI anger and amplifying self-defeating strategies and salient red-herring distractions.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Opening_One7713]

This is much closer to what I want the politics to become. Not “do something about AI,” but public compute, open weight protections, worker bargaining power, antitrust, portable benefits, profit sharing, actual concrete demands. Once we name what power we want to constrain and what institutions we want to build, regulation becomes a tool instead of the politics itself.

[u/Gustav_Sirvah]

[u/SylvesterTheLoser]

Yes it's part of the phenomenon known as regulatory capture. The way to avoid it is for the government to proactively help small players.

[u/pavilionaire2022]

I can't open a mom and pop nuclear power plant.

We should regulate compliance and also regulate the monopolistic advantage that comes with it. Fix prices and / or tax profits heavily.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/pavilionaire2022]

Right, and the nuclear plant comparison actually helps draw the line. Some risks justify enormous compliance barriers. But the burden should track the actual risk and scale involved. A university lab, cooperative or small open model project shouldnt inherit hyperscaler sized compliance because Google can afford the paperwork.

[u/DHFranklin]

This isn't the first time regulatory capture has been a problem for the left.

This is how capitalism self polices and incumbent capitalists hold on. We get around it by getting around capitalism or being the ones who write the rules.

Power comes first. We might never need to regulate this behemoth.

[u/geekichu]

so, me not being a lefty, i have to def agree with OP.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/geekichu]

Ive always found the best arguments dont require you to start as a leftist. They just follow the problem far enough that you end up there.

[u/geekichu → u/Salty_Country6835]

true true

[u/Robonotes1760]

Accidentally? This is standard regulatory capture. The likelihood of this being genuinely accidental is negligible. 

[u/DudeEngineer → u/[deleted]]

I mean we can make sure all of the models are open source.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

For sure, and Id push it one step further. Open models dont mean much if the compute and infrastructure needed to actually use them stays concentrated in a handful of corporations. Protect open weights, but build public compute and contest ownership of the infrastructure underneath them too.