Anarchy in the AI: Trump's desire to supercharge US tech faces plenty of hurdles
(2025/08/20)
- Reference: 1755682206
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/08/20/opinion_us_govt_ai/
- Source link:
Opinion It's 1976, and in the country of the Beatles, another guitar band is giving it some. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols isn't so keen on love and blackbirds. Instead, he sings lustily that he wants to be an anarchist, destroying passers-by and in general promoting [1]anarchy in the UK .
Skip forward half a century, and America's own snarling, vituperative punk leader, Donald Trump, has picked up the theme. He is dead keen on anarchism in AI, removing the laws and regulations that normally modulate the desires of tech innovators by considerations of potential harm, fairness, and allowable practice. With those shackles off, Trump promises, American AI will rule the world.
There are more fundamental flaws in this approach than there are flies on a roadkill raccoon. The purpose of AI is to do useful work in the real world, much as a human does. Humans are notably fallible and do things that are harmful to others, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by carelessness, sometimes through greed or malice. Which means people get regulated, told what not to do, and what happens when they do it anyway. This has been written down in an ongoing process for [2]at least 4,000 years , frequently fallible and abused, but it's the best we've got. With good faith and safeguards, it does the job of keeping us safe and potentially prosperous.
[3]
It is unthinkable that AI won't be bound by law in general. If an AI crashes a car into a human, which it can do, or [4]lies in a court disposition , or makes [5]dangerous medical mistakes , there can be no exemptions because AI happens to be the technology at fault. It's possible to embed different legal systems within others, such as Martian or canon law, or state and federal law, but anarchy is incompatible.
[6]
[7]
The second great flaw is the assumption that regulators are bad and that getting rid of them is good. They bind the hands of innovators, add cost and delay, and clog up the works of brilliant businesses with the viscous gloop of bureaucracy. America can't leap ahead if it has to follow rules. Is it against copyright law to strip-mine millions of books without permission for training data? Then sack the people responsible for saying so. Intellectual property law has enabled entire industries of great commercial and cultural importance, including technology. Removing these has been tried, mostly under communism, but with poor results. Those are odd footsteps for Trump to follow.
Another very tech-specific example of regulatory innovation encouraging innovation and market building comes from the dawn of digital mobile phones. As it became feasible to replace analog cellular systems with digital, the US Federal Communications Commission concerned itself more with managing frequency allocations than prescribing technologies. Multiple different and incompatible systems took to the air. In Europe, the various national regulators agreed to adopt just one standard, GSM, across all nations and to enforce roaming. While American phones frequently didn't work in neighboring cities, GSM worked across a continent. That led to GSM becoming the global standard and in 1998, Finland's Nokia became the biggest mobile phone company in the world. Damn that European bureaucracy.
[8]
It's unsurprising that Europe has a taste for regulating, not only for itself but in ways that spread out across the world. None of the European telecoms regulators had any power outside their national boundaries, and yet GSM went global. It's similar to the General Data Protection Regulation. If you're not in the EU, you don't have to comply with it, but if you don't, you can't process European personal data. Because it's expensive and complicated to run any company to comply with multiple incompatible regulatory systems, the easiest thing to do is pick the strictest one in a market you want to be active in, and that takes care of all the laxer ones elsewhere. Europe is thus a regulatory superpower, capable of imposing its will elsewhere, and that sits extremely badly with Washington.
[9]Generative AI isn't just a matter of life and death. It's far more important than that
[10]The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn't one
[11]AI coding tools crash on launch, could reboot better in future
[12]Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK
In particular, the EU's AI Act of last year sticks in the craw. It does all the things that regulators do – rules about transparency, accountability, discrimination, use where harm may result, facial recognition limitations, and so on. Also, while US and EU intellectual property law is broadly aligned, nobody in the EU is going to be fired for saying that fair use doesn't include gargantuan pilfering. The only way Trump can try and spread his AI anarchy gospel is to include it in trade talks under the threat of terrible tariffs if it's not adopted. Another reason that Team Trump dislikes the Europeans so much is that they've done little else but negotiate treaties since the mid-1950s, they're very good at it, and they don't back down easily.
JD Vance in particular has accused the EU of using regulation as an anti-competitive barrier to American tech. It's the same argument used against European food standards that keep a lot of American products out. You can take either side, but the reasoning behind both food and tech regulations has been closely argued among 27 countries for many years. The evidence, reasoning, and disagreements are there for all to see. The same cannot be said for Trump's unique approach to regulation. One may search for reasoning, evidence, and debate, and one may conclude what one concludes.
When it comes to deregulating AI to the extreme, thought, the risks and consequences are obvious to everyone. It's a highly dangerous approach, tempered by the fact it probably won't work – and by how it makes the EU look like the best place to build safe, market-ready AI. Anarchy makes for great three-minute punk songs, but lousy policies. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31WY0Aobro
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/attorneys_cite_cases_hallucinated_ai/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/27/biomedviz_ai_wrong_problems/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/opinion_column_gen_ai/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/14/the_plan_for_linux_after/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/opinion_column_ai_coding_tools/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/opinion_column_mexit_not_brexit/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Skip forward half a century, and America's own snarling, vituperative punk leader, Donald Trump, has picked up the theme. He is dead keen on anarchism in AI, removing the laws and regulations that normally modulate the desires of tech innovators by considerations of potential harm, fairness, and allowable practice. With those shackles off, Trump promises, American AI will rule the world.
There are more fundamental flaws in this approach than there are flies on a roadkill raccoon. The purpose of AI is to do useful work in the real world, much as a human does. Humans are notably fallible and do things that are harmful to others, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by carelessness, sometimes through greed or malice. Which means people get regulated, told what not to do, and what happens when they do it anyway. This has been written down in an ongoing process for [2]at least 4,000 years , frequently fallible and abused, but it's the best we've got. With good faith and safeguards, it does the job of keeping us safe and potentially prosperous.
[3]
It is unthinkable that AI won't be bound by law in general. If an AI crashes a car into a human, which it can do, or [4]lies in a court disposition , or makes [5]dangerous medical mistakes , there can be no exemptions because AI happens to be the technology at fault. It's possible to embed different legal systems within others, such as Martian or canon law, or state and federal law, but anarchy is incompatible.
[6]
[7]
The second great flaw is the assumption that regulators are bad and that getting rid of them is good. They bind the hands of innovators, add cost and delay, and clog up the works of brilliant businesses with the viscous gloop of bureaucracy. America can't leap ahead if it has to follow rules. Is it against copyright law to strip-mine millions of books without permission for training data? Then sack the people responsible for saying so. Intellectual property law has enabled entire industries of great commercial and cultural importance, including technology. Removing these has been tried, mostly under communism, but with poor results. Those are odd footsteps for Trump to follow.
Another very tech-specific example of regulatory innovation encouraging innovation and market building comes from the dawn of digital mobile phones. As it became feasible to replace analog cellular systems with digital, the US Federal Communications Commission concerned itself more with managing frequency allocations than prescribing technologies. Multiple different and incompatible systems took to the air. In Europe, the various national regulators agreed to adopt just one standard, GSM, across all nations and to enforce roaming. While American phones frequently didn't work in neighboring cities, GSM worked across a continent. That led to GSM becoming the global standard and in 1998, Finland's Nokia became the biggest mobile phone company in the world. Damn that European bureaucracy.
[8]
It's unsurprising that Europe has a taste for regulating, not only for itself but in ways that spread out across the world. None of the European telecoms regulators had any power outside their national boundaries, and yet GSM went global. It's similar to the General Data Protection Regulation. If you're not in the EU, you don't have to comply with it, but if you don't, you can't process European personal data. Because it's expensive and complicated to run any company to comply with multiple incompatible regulatory systems, the easiest thing to do is pick the strictest one in a market you want to be active in, and that takes care of all the laxer ones elsewhere. Europe is thus a regulatory superpower, capable of imposing its will elsewhere, and that sits extremely badly with Washington.
[9]Generative AI isn't just a matter of life and death. It's far more important than that
[10]The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn't one
[11]AI coding tools crash on launch, could reboot better in future
[12]Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK
In particular, the EU's AI Act of last year sticks in the craw. It does all the things that regulators do – rules about transparency, accountability, discrimination, use where harm may result, facial recognition limitations, and so on. Also, while US and EU intellectual property law is broadly aligned, nobody in the EU is going to be fired for saying that fair use doesn't include gargantuan pilfering. The only way Trump can try and spread his AI anarchy gospel is to include it in trade talks under the threat of terrible tariffs if it's not adopted. Another reason that Team Trump dislikes the Europeans so much is that they've done little else but negotiate treaties since the mid-1950s, they're very good at it, and they don't back down easily.
JD Vance in particular has accused the EU of using regulation as an anti-competitive barrier to American tech. It's the same argument used against European food standards that keep a lot of American products out. You can take either side, but the reasoning behind both food and tech regulations has been closely argued among 27 countries for many years. The evidence, reasoning, and disagreements are there for all to see. The same cannot be said for Trump's unique approach to regulation. One may search for reasoning, evidence, and debate, and one may conclude what one concludes.
When it comes to deregulating AI to the extreme, thought, the risks and consequences are obvious to everyone. It's a highly dangerous approach, tempered by the fact it probably won't work – and by how it makes the EU look like the best place to build safe, market-ready AI. Anarchy makes for great three-minute punk songs, but lousy policies. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31WY0Aobro
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/attorneys_cite_cases_hallucinated_ai/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/27/biomedviz_ai_wrong_problems/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aKWcvQjFu5hWFzbG10kwbQAAAAc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/opinion_column_gen_ai/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/14/the_plan_for_linux_after/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/opinion_column_ai_coding_tools/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/opinion_column_mexit_not_brexit/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/