When the industry designs and then kills its own AI regulator, who should hold the pen?
The only concrete AI oversight body to reach the President this year was drafted by Google’s Demis Hassabis and killed by three private phone calls from Zuckerberg, Musk and Huang, who argued it would entrench the biggest labs. If the industry can neither be trusted to write its own rules nor to stop them, who should design AI oversight, and how do you keep that body from becoming a club for whoever reaches the President last?
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In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts (September 19, 2026), we dug into the Wall Street Journal’s report that a FINRA-style AI standards body proposed by DeepMind’s Hassabis died after Zuckerberg, Musk and Huang each called Trump to argue it would concentrate power in OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind. The twist we kept circling is that the objection was correct, and yet what replaced the proposed club of three chairs was no regulator at all, decided by a club with one chair. We also looked at the split inside the White House, where Susie Wiles and Scott Bessent are pushing for more scrutiny of AI risk while David Sacks got a planned model-review order scrapped, and at what the Iron Law of Oligarchy says about any body the industry funds. Give the episode a listen and tell us where you’d put the pen: the labs, the government, or somewhere neither of them controls.
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