GoKawiilA perspective from Aidan Gomez, Co-founder & CEO of Cohere
Artificial intelligence is remaking the world we live in. Within a generation, the way we discover medicine, manage power grids, and secure our national infrastructure will be completely transformed. Many people already realize this and are working to build that future responsibly. Many people underestimate the scale and pace of change coming. Some, however, claim to foresee this change and use it to serve their own ends.
Here is the question nobody is asking clearly enough: should a handful of select, market-dominant AI companies from Silicon Valley get to define the rules and safety standards of a generational technology for the entire world? All while simultaneously determining how fast this technology progresses? We have tried that before with very poor results. Once again using fear under the pretext of protecting the public, these oligopolies are now requesting to bend competition rules and be permitted to dictate the terms for everyone else. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, a cartel by any other name.
I believe in the potential of AI technologies to bring benefits to our world, and I do not downplay the risks. I run a company that builds AI systems deployed inside banks, telecommunications networks, and defense ministries. These are among the most high-stakes environments because failures in these sectors can have consequences far beyond an individual user – disrupting financial systems, critical infrastructure, national security, and essential services at scale. The same capabilities that find vulnerabilities in your code can find them in someone else's, and cyber offense is getting cheaper faster than defenses are getting better. That gap should worry you as much as it worries us.
AI needs guardrails. That is not the dispute and never has been. The dispute is over who writes them, who gets to participate and whose interests the rules are protecting. The question is truly about whether we should have the freedom to choose based on scientific evidence or if we should hand the reins of the most consequential technology in human existence to a few Silicon Valley executives.
We’ve been here before
Before I break down the self-serving framework the big labs are pushing and offer ideas for an alternative, let’s take a couple lessons from the recent past and think about the word cartel, because the history is specific and it is the accurate term.
In 1975 the Securities and Exchange Commission needed reliable bond ratings for its capital rules. It designated three firms as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations and never published criteria for how anyone else might earn the designation. These were government-blessed outside evaluators, paid by the very issuers whose securities they graded, sitting behind a barrier the regulator itself had built. Twenty five years later there were still only three of these evaluators. Then they rated subprime mortgage securities triple-A and nearly took the global economy down with them.
Europe ran the experiment again in 1985. Car manufacturers lobbied for a sweeping antitrust waiver, the Motor Vehicle Block Exemption, arguing that modern vehicles were complex, safety-critical machines and that manufacturers therefore needed control over who was qualified to sell and service them. The subsequent regulation let manufacturers set the standards for premises, equipment and staff training, explicitly in the interest of safe and reliable vehicles. But what followed wasn't safer cars. It took the European Commission roughly twenty five years of reforms to unwind, and to establish what should have been obvious at the start: it is possible you can hold strict safety standards without handing the incumbents a monopoly on meeting them.
Nobody set out to build a cartel in either case. In both cases, the stated goal was safety. But the result was a market structure that protected incumbents and limited competition, all under the justification of serving the public interest. I don't doubt the sincerity of the people involved: many were concerned about the risks and worked earnestly to resolve them. But complex problems aren’t always solved on the first try, and any responsible scientist, engineer, or lawmaker knows that to solve new problems you must learn from past history.
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