Stakes, high stakes, and mistakes
Government AI ownership talk, "dead internet" milestone, non-human corporations, and more
Dispatches from Mitch
U.S. may take stakes in AI companies
The Trump administration has been talking to AI companies about taking partial ownership of them, with the stated aim of sharing their profits with U.S. citizens.
Talking to press aboard Air Force One, the President said taking stakes in AI companies, “almost becomes a partnership with the American public.”
Trump didn’t hide his reasoning, adding that “the American people can benefit from the success of AI, and by that, they’re going to like it better.”
According to the BBC, the President said he expects to meet with leaders from the top AI companies about this as early as next week. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is said to have been floating the idea with Trump since the start of the President’s current term. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that his company is also in close communication with the U.S. government.
If the president wants to continue his friendly posture towards the AI industry while simultaneously quelling backlash to the industry from his own base in the run-up to midterm elections, I suppose giving voters shares in the companies might be one way to do it. But the political calculus is a lot more complicated than it sounds. This could be a policy that, by trying to please everyone, pleases no one.
You could see this in an op-ed by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board slamming the degree to which the President and Senator Bernie Sanders now see eye-to-eye on AI policy. This is “socialism with a capitalist false front,” they wrote. As USA Today reports, Trump isn’t trying to distance himself from Sanders, either: Directly asked about the senator’s plan for the government to appropriate 50% of the AI companies, the President said, “I’ve been talking about it for the past year,” then added that some Sanders supporters voted for him and said, “As far as economics is concerned, we have some things that aren’t far apart.”
A lot depends on the details, which are scarce. There’s no existing authority for the government to simply seize large stakes in these companies, and Sanders’s legislation is unlikely to pass. If the stakes are to be purchased, voters already hostile to AI may be livid to see their tax dollars spent on it.
Voters may also notice that taking large stakes in AI companies creates a conflict of interest for a government they want to see regulating these industries, not capitalizing them. And they may reasonably fear that these investments make the companies “too big to fail” — justifiably confident of getting bailed out when they get into financial trouble. This dynamic, in turn, could incentivize poor management that makes it more likely the companies would need bailing out at taxpayer expense.
And of course, there is the potential for corruption.
Even David Sacks, the former White House AI czar who has championed the AI industry at every turn, hates the idea of government becoming a big AI investor, calling state ownership a step towards “Chinese-style censorship and surveillance.”
Dead internet not so dead (yet)
As reported by Breitbart and others, Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, estimates that AI bots are now behind the majority of traffic on the web.
Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said, “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted.” He had thought the crossover would happen in early 2027.
We can blame the rise of AI agents for hastening this event. Tasked with visiting sites for research, monitoring, and even posting, they started spiking the bot traffic stats about six months ago. Prince, who perhaps has more incentive than anyone to combat the so-called “dead internet theory,” describes this as an “exponential growth of the web, and really interesting, creative things.”
(“Dead internet” usually connotes a web that is both mostly bots and devoid of value.)
I think Prince has a point about the agentic web being far from lifeless, to the extent these agents are helping their users create new websites and content that make their way (perhaps via other agents) to humans who want to consume them. I’ve observed an uptick in cool stuff from people I follow.
But I also think we might be in a strange transition period where the web is in the process of becoming plumbing for AI agents that will present its contents in whatever compressed, remixed, or sanitized form users prefer.
This is a problem for a lot of business models. Prince wonders if sites will need to find ways to start charging bots admission. After all, “Bots don’t click on ads.”
Dispatches from Donald
Non-human corporations welcome in Argentina
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, is pitching his country as a totally “unregulated” space for AI commerce. The centerpiece of that pitch is a new kind of legal entity: the “non-human corporation,” which would be operated entirely by autonomous AI systems.
This is not Milei’s first foray into deregulation. Argentina has a ministry for it, in fact: The Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation. But this is something novel.
The idea behind a limited liability company is fairly simple: The liability of its members is limited to what they invested into it, i.e. if your LLC goes bankrupt, you don’t automatically lose your house. We’ve had limited liability companies for hundreds of years.
But Milei’s “non-human corporation” is a type of entity whose ramifications I’m not sure I fully grasp. Limited liability companies exist apart from the humans that they shield, but Milei says that human shareholders aren’t necessary in this framework, only AI agents. What does it mean for a digital entity — something that can be copied, edited, reverted, and merged — to be legally personified and made the sole subject of a corporate entity?
I don’t think that you need to be worried about extinction threats to have some serious concerns about Milei’s proposal. It’s easy to imagine a race to the bottom where countries compete to provide free havens for inhuman commerce. Far from losing control of AI, we might just let it loose.
We have too few regulations around AI, not too many. What might restrain Milei in the end is that Argentina doesn’t act alone. Milei says that he doesn’t want Argentina to become a “haven for illicit capital,” and that’s good so far as it goes. But if Argentina becomes a haven for AI agents that nobody owns and nobody is accountable for, other countries might not be very happy about that. And Argentina depends very dearly on its trading partners.
“Our highest and most urgent national priority”
Two days ago, my colleague Mitch covered Anthropic’s call for a coordinated pause on frontier research.
That call has made quite an impact. The New York Times wondered how federal intervention might affect investments in frontier labs. France24 noted Anthropic said that both U.S. and Chinese companies would need to pause (the French lab Mistral must feel bad that they were overlooked). Engadget name-dropped The Terminator’s Skynet; someone had to.
Most of the outlets that I read took Anthropic’s figures at face value, which was interesting. As Mitch noted yesterday, Anthropic’s own report admitted that its statistics on AI’s impact at the company might be overstated. Two things in particular that I would have liked to see more journalists mention: Anthropic’s figures are self-reported and unaudited; and its plans for a pause are frustratingly vague – indeed, it intends to study the matter, to “convene discussions” and “examine key questions.” That’s all well and good, but it does make me think that Anthropic may be trying to reinvent the wheel: MIRI’s Technical Governance Team has written extensively on verification mechanisms, for example.
The coverage by The Wall Street Journal in particular has picked up a number of endorsements-by-retweet, among them the world’s most cited living scientist, Yoshua Bengio, former Republican senator Mitt Romney, and Obama-era U.S. national security advisor Susan Rice, who retweeted Romney’s own post. Surviving AI is bipartisan.
I am glad that Anthropic is calling for a pause. I hope that it will continue to do so, and that all the others, from OpenAI to DeepSeek (and even Mistral) will join that chorus. But we don’t have to wait for them. The world needs an international treaty, not a fragile and voluntary gentleman’s agreement between the frontier labs.
One other thing worth mentioning: On the same day as Anthropic’s announcement, Senator Jim Banks wrote to urge the Trump administration to plan for AI that can improve itself without human help. Banks is a China hawk who still sees AI development in terms of a race between superpowers. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that loss-of-control of powerful AI models is a real and catastrophic risk. Banks asked for closer oversight, not a pause, but if even the China hawks are beginning to perceive that AI itself could pose a danger, that’s a welcome change.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.