A brief history of AI executives calling for regulation — SkimNews
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- Elon Musk launched the modern wave in July 2017, telling US governors at the National Governors Association summer meeting that AI needed proactive regulation because by the time regulators react, it is "too late" — at that point he had already invested $38 million in OpenAI plus stakes in at least two other AI companies.
- Microsoft president Brad Smith called in December 2018 for governments to "start adopting laws" to regulate facial recognition, following criticism of Microsoft's work with ICE; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a January 2020 Financial Times editorial that "there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated."
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified to the US Senate on May 16, 2023, that Congress should create a new agency to regulate AI, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned senators nine days later that AI could help create bioweapons — the same hearings where Altman and then-DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis co-signed a 22-word statement declaring "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
- Between July 2023 and May 2024, tech companies signed a flurry of nonbinding pledges — White House AI safety accords in July and September 2023, the UK AI Summit testing agreement in November 2023, and the AI Seoul Summit's safety-institute network in May 2024 — none of which created binding law.
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047 in 2024 despite endorsements from Musk and a reversal by Anthropic, which had originally opposed the bill alongside OpenAI before flipping in September.
- Anthropic escalated in October 2024 with an open letter warning that "the window for proactive risk prevention is closing fast" and urging governments to act within 18 months — a deadline that has since elapsed without major federal AI legislation in the US.
- The current panic repeats the pattern: Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, Nadella, and Musk have all publicly urged slowing down, echoing calls that date back to Samuel Butler's 1863 warnings about self-replicating machines and Alan Turing's 1951 lecture that undying machines would eventually "take control."
Why it matters: AI executives have produced a decade of public calls for regulation — Musk's 2017 governors pitch, Altman's 2023 Senate testimony, Pichai's FT op-ed, and a stack of nonbinding White House and summit pledges — yet California Gov. Newsom's veto of SB 1047 shows that even when industry voices align, binding law has not followed. The repeated gap between rhetoric and statute is the story: the same companies now warning of urgent risk previously opposed the few bills that got close to passing.
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