The oligarchs of artificial intelligence are tearing a page from the Wall Street industrial complex, lobbying to turn AI over to regulators who will outlaw the competition, leaving consumers with fewer choices and higher prices. Those oligarchs also want a liability shield, courtesy of taxpayers, and they’re using fear to get the public on board.

Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned an open letter — well, an open tweet — arguing to “pace the frontier” and slow down AI. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Google DeepMind piled on, making it a trifecta of the big three who have nearly 90 percent of AI revenue. 

Of course, these companies could slow themselves down anytime they want, but that’s not the goal. Instead, they want to slow down their competition and crush any startups that might challenge their market share. 

The Trojan horse for this was a July cybersecurity exercise where OpenAI created a bunch of AI agents that broke into the online platform Hugging Face by the decidedly low-tech method of finding logins that engineers had lazily left on public posts.

While that is serious, it’s also a security test exposing a security failure, which is why tests exist. If a crash-test dummy goes through........

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