Regulatory capture arguments against AI oversight are unfalsifiable, and an accountable public agency subject to potential capture is still preferable to today's status quo where informal, wealthy networks of AI industry insiders already control policy without any accountability.
Carson likens the anti-regulation 'capture' argument to searching for a pea under 100 mattresses — always assertable, never falsifiable — and argues that groups like a16z already informally capture AI policy, making a formal agency (like the SEC model) more accountable, not less. ✦ AI generated
Brad Carson · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-05-31 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:27
My view is that groups like A16Z or people in Silicon Valley have largely captured the process because they work very informally through networks of political influence... having an agency subject to regulatory capture yes is at least more accountable than the kind of informal very moneyed networks that are controlling AI policy as we sit here in 2026.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:27
6:27go back and forth on this question is like it's searching for a P under 100 mattresses. It's never falsifiable. You say well regulatory capture well you know right now we don't have any regulations and my view is that groups like A16Z or people in Silicon Valley have largely captured the process because they work very informally through networks of political influence that it's really about what the alternatives are going to be having an
6:52agency subject to regulatory capture yes is at least more accountable than the kind of informal very moneyed networks that are controlling AI policy as we sit here in 2026. We always have to look at politics about the alternative. Like imagine the SEC. So is the SEC captured? Well, I'm sure the industry has a lot of influence over the SEC both informally and formally. Would we be a better world
7:15without the SEC because it's been captured? So I think if the choice is kind of nihilism versus an agency that is subject to regulatory capture that you have to put, you know, prophylactics in to ensure that doesn't happen, it still strikes me that's a better world, even if it's not a perfect world. Um, and when people who usually argue for the regulatory capture side, like I see
7:35Andre tweet this out a lot, you know, they propose kind of a nihilistic regime that does privilege like a very few people who have kind of the informal ability to shape government policy largely because of their, you know, contributions or their public influence in some way. So I think having like public agencies for all of their problems, it actually is a better system. Anthropic made a bunch of
7:57changes to kind of Claude's behavior in terms of tokens and allocation and what models were running and things and it really frustrated a lot of the people in our in our Discord server in machine learning street discord. They felt like, hey, we were paying for something and then it just was radically changed, you know, overnight. And and yet there's there's no clarity around what were we paying for before and what are we paying
8:21for now and it's almost just at the whims of of the service companies, right? There's just no transparency to it. >> Yeah. I mean, you can think of that as consumer protection that people should tell you what the service is going to be that you're paying for and if they change it, right, this could be a breach of contract in some way. But I think now the AI companies, the frontier AI