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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Any time I see a company in support of regulation that they would also have to comply with, all I can think is the proposed regulations are something the company is already doing, or isn't a burden for them, but would create a higher barrier of entry for new competitors.

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Regulatory capture is the name of the game. And it’s huge.

Don't you think it's a little circular that you always default to assuming that their support is about regulatory capture?

Like, what if they had that opinion before they built the company? If you saw evidence of that (as is the case with Anthropic), would that convince you to reconsider your judgement? Surely, you think... some people support regulatory frameworks, some amount of the time... and unless they banned themselves from every related industry, those might be regulatory frameworks that they might one day become subject to?

OpenAI and A16Z are vigorously opposing this one. So this should at least discount the simplest anti-competitive conspiracy scenarios.

AI already has significant cost of entry, given the amount of data/compute you need. Why would regulatory compliance be the limiting burden?

Why not advocate for additional burdens?

All I'm doing is challenging a vague accusation. You can claim regulatory capture for any proposal. All policy has tradeoffs; speculating vaguely about negative consequences does not help me weigh that balance.

In a profit driven world, regulatory capture is the default assumption. Genuine corporate philanthropy is the exception that deserves special attention.

Suspecting a company to act in its own profit enhancing interest is borderline tautological.

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