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Europe, Britain face AI dependence

3h

European leaders and British ministers warned they faced a stark choice on AI — shun it or risk dependence on US and Chinese technology — and companies feared growing liability exposure.

by Robert B. Reich

18%
rbreich.bsky.social
A reminder as we discuss AI safety: Deregulation (or allowing corporations to "self regulate") only masks another kind of trickle-down economics — one where the financial gains go to the top, and nothing trickles down except risks and losses for everyone else.
September 18, 2026 at 10:15 PM

by David H. Kaye

22%
davidakaye.bsky.social
it's really essential to underline that the use of failing or problematic software tools/AI tech IN NO WAY ABSOLVES THE ACTORS OF CRIMINAL CULPABILITY.
maxkennerly.bsky.social Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 9h
Lot of issues here but one part that sticks out in light of the almost-attacked-a-Chinese-ship story today: people with very important jobs where lives are at stake have bought the hype and outsourced their whole brains to AI. We're going to see more and more of this.

www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
September 18, 2026 at 11:44 PM

Reposted by Rebecca Tushnet, Nathan P. Kalmoe, John R. Hutchinson

11%
karlbode.com
honestly some of the most apocalyptic impacts of "AI" will be shit like this, and most of the doomsday dipshits predicting SkyNet can't be bothered to notice or care
September 18, 2026 at 1:30 PM

Reposted by Gary Marcus

7%
adambecker.bsky.social
@aoc.bsky.social just put out a great statement on AI. Refreshing to see a major politician on the left nail this.

"Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves."

🎯
Charles, Last weekend, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest Al companies in the world, publicly asked his industry to slow down Al development. Shortly after, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAl, followed suit. Then Elon Musk. This all came days after an Anthropic researcher quit, citing his belief that this technology could wipe out humanity and that Al companies are "gambling with our lives." For years, people have warned that generative Al could slip out of our direct control. Those safety concerns must be taken seriously. And this is why I have advocated for strict safety standards on how Al is built and deployed, public oversight over this technology, and using existing laws to hold these companies accountable when they cause harm. But I want to draw your attention to another reality: Right now, the U.S. economy and our financial futures are riding on Silicon Valley's bet that Al will soon be immensely profitable and pay off. And that bet isn't looking good. The formula for a profitable business isn't complicated: make more money than you spend. But the biggest Al companies aren't doing that. They are spending hundreds of billions per year on data centers, chips, and other costs while their ability to make revenues that exceed their already-immense sunk costs are unclear. Experts estimate that these Al companies will require another $600 billion of debt just to finance themselves in 2026 alone. That is more than the entire budgets of the U.S. Departments of Justice, Transportation, & Education combined. Meanwhile, despite almost every single one of these companies not turning a profit & having sunk billions of investor dollars in development of data centers & other infrastructure, Al companies are also on a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying & dark money in our elections. It would be one thing if we were discussing a few private companies with a poor business model. But last year, virtually all stock market gains - 80% - rested entirely on just a handful of Al companies. That tells us two things: 1. Nearly the entire U.S. economy outside the Al industry is relatively stagnating and faring poorly & the gains from these few companies are disguising it; & 2. Millions of people's retirements - including their pensions, 401ks, & investments - are potentially exposed to this risk. That's why these Al companies' dubious financial positions matter to working people. These companies argue that debt is necessary. They'll tell you that building transformative technologies requires upfront capital, & that massive borrowing today will pay off in generating unprecedented prosperity tomorrow. But this is not the typical debt that startups take on while they build out a company. We are talking about billions going on trillions of dollars leveraged with no indication that these companies will be able to recoup these funds profitably. And they are increasingly looking to the government as their source of cash. In an effort to hide their debt, tech companies have been relying on "circular financing" where tech giants like Google, Amazon, & Microsoft give billions to Al startups like OpenAl & Anthropic, only for those startups to hand that money right back to buy Al processing power. In other words, these Al companies are luring in new investors by making it look like their financials are healthier than they really are. What's even worse is that retirement & pension funds are key to supporting this illusion. When the Al companies issue bonds to raise more money, your pension funds & retirement accounts are some of the biggest buyers. When Musk's Al business went public, it became part of index funds where millions of Americans invest our savings. Many Americans don't even know that their retirement investments are tied up in these companies at all. From Big Tech's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug. By tying our futures to their reckless gambling, Al billionaires are trying to make themselves too big to fail. They think they can take such dangerous risks because we will bail them out if things go wrong. Sound familiar? This scene is dangerously reminiscent of the rampant speculation, corruption, & broken incentives leading up to the 2008 financial crisis that plunged millions of working class Americans into financial chaos that we never fully recovered from. It is no accident that these warnings from Altman & Amodei come months-if not weeks-before these companies were meant to go public. When companies go public, they have to be more transparent about how they are doing financially. And after a waiting period, they typically have to let private investors-like their own employees-sell their shares. The New York Times recently confirmed that OpenAl has postponed going public for this very reason. They are in no rush for the truth about their finances to come out. But the moment these oligarchs began to seek our public tax dollars & public contracts while exposing their companies to public pension funds & investments, they opened themselves to public accountability & scrutiny. Silicon Valley billionaires have rigged the game & are attempting to shift their financial risk to working people: If they're right about Al's potential, they reap the profits. If they're wrong & the bubble bursts, they are setting up the American people to pick up the tab. Heads, they win; tails, we lose. We can stop this, and we shouldn't play their game. Together we can address both the economic and safety threats of unrestricted Al development and prevent financial chaos and stabilize market risk. We must make it clear now that should the Al bubble pop, Congress should not bail out Big Tech. And across our federal agencies, we have the authorities and tools to hold Al companies and their leaders accountable for releasing dangerous, unvetted, and defective products. We must not wait. Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves. It's time we hold them accountable. Thank you for reading. In solidarity, Alexandria
September 19, 2026 at 1:19 AM

Reposted by Brendan Nyhan, Rebecca Tushnet, Greg Linden , and 3 more

26%
kjhealy.co
This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.
kjhealy.co Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 13h
That’s a load-bearing assumption, Dr Strangelove. www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
program. sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the familiar with the incident said. The report, according to one of the sources, was "entirely false." But it also "almost started a war," the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese nations.
September 18, 2026 at 6:56 PM

by Brendan Nyhan

21%
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Makes me think of Stanislav Petrov, one of the greatest heroes in history. We're going to need to build systems that don't rely on people like him to stop a rush to judgment.
maxkennerly.bsky.social Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 9h
Lot of issues here but one part that sticks out in light of the almost-attacked-a-Chinese-ship story today: people with very important jobs where lives are at stake have bought the hype and outsourced their whole brains to AI. We're going to see more and more of this.

www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
September 19, 2026 at 12:55 AM

by Lawrence B. Solum

25%
lsolum.bsky.social
Ho-Dac on The EU AI Act and the Challenge of Protecting Fundamental Rights

Marion Ho-Dac (Artois University) has posted The EU AI Act and the Challenge of Protecting Fundamental Rights…...
Ho-Dac on The EU AI Act and the Challenge of Protecting Fundamental Rights
Marion Ho-Dac (Artois University) has posted The EU AI Act and the Challenge of Protecting Fundamental Rights on SSRN. Here is the abstract: While the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race is raging on the world market, several voices have called for effective regulation of this multifaceted technology and its ever increasing capabilities. In this context, the European Union has recently adopted the first-ever comprehensive, binding law on AI, known as the EU AI Act.
legaltheoryblog.com
September 19, 2026 at 3:55 AM

by Brooke Harrington

13%
ebharrington.bsky.social
I tire of these parasites.

They do everything in their power to destroy the democratic governance and regulatory systems of the countries that enabled them to grow rich, but they always come running when it's time to foist the costs of their reckless decisions onto taxpayers.

See also: SV Bank.
beyerstein.bsky.social Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 9h
Alex Karp of Palantir says the AI industry must be nationalized to protect it from lawsuits if it accidentally destroys the world. More likely, he sees the bubble about to burst and he wants to be bought out with our tax dollars before that happens.
September 18, 2026 at 11:22 PM

by Adam Bonica Reposted by Stephen A. Meserve, Nathan P. Kalmoe

29%
adambonica.bsky.social
It takes a special kind of calculated cowardice to oppose regulations supported by two-thirds of voters because you rank the threat of the AI industry maybe buying some campaign ads above it maybe killing everyone.
Democratic advisers are warning their candidates not to go too hard at AI
Democratic consultants are warning their candidates in some key races not to lean into AI regulations out of fear that powerful tech groups could spend heavily against them.
www.politico.com
September 18, 2026 at 12:05 PM

Reposted by Tobias Lock, Ben Tonra, Peter Thorne

11%
johnnyryan.bsky.social
This is insanity.
Irish Presidency's draft text of amendments to the GDPR allows training & operation of any AI without safeguards & tough legal basis (under "legitimate interest" a company claims what it is doing is OK. Up to you to find out and challenge in court). This is a free pass for US Tech.
September 18, 2026 at 10:07 AM

by Will Lowe

23%
conjugateprior.org
If you mentally replace all references to 'robots' & 'AI' and 'off switches' to 'tech companies' and 'regulation' then these papers become potentially quite useful. This one seems to be about regulatory capture.
adasgupta.bsky.social Aditya Dasgupta @adasgupta.bsky.social · 13h
In light of this: www.politico.com/news/2026/09... — a good paper on the strategy around an off switch for potentially dangerous AI: arxiv.org/abs/1611.08219
September 18, 2026 at 10:02 PM

by Naomi Klein

12%
naomiaklein.bsky.social
What is the tech industry truly afraid of? Is it the AI they have unleashed, as they want us to believe? Or is it…all of us, standing up to them? Thanks to Chris Hayes for having us on.
September 18, 2026 at 2:57 PM

Reposted by David H. Kaye, Brendan Nyhan, Stephen A. Meserve

18%
maxkennerly.bsky.social
Lot of issues here but one part that sticks out in light of the almost-attacked-a-Chinese-ship story today: people with very important jobs where lives are at stake have bought the hype and outsourced their whole brains to AI. We're going to see more and more of this.

www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments. Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations. The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
September 18, 2026 at 10:29 PM

by Stephen A. Meserve

12%
smeserve.bsky.social
This is my absolute bone core experience (with many students, told AI is the best all the way up to the uni president). *This* is what AI is doing to people in society even worse than doing a iffy job at times, just letting it make decisions

(accidentally QTed a reply the first time!)
maxkennerly.bsky.social Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 9h
Lot of issues here but one part that sticks out in light of the almost-attacked-a-Chinese-ship story today: people with very important jobs where lives are at stake have bought the hype and outsourced their whole brains to AI. We're going to see more and more of this.

www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
September 19, 2026 at 2:11 AM

Reposted by Steve Peers

8%
motherjones.com
The AI companies have a lot of money and time. Newsrooms don’t. But we are battling for our lives, and for the truth that you need to know.

This is all of our fight.
We’re suing ChatGPT—and Trump just got involved.
Guess whose side he's on.
www.motherjones.com
September 18, 2026 at 10:00 PM

by Amir Attaran

11%
amirattaran.bsky.social
How interesting that all the incidents of AI going rogue have this in common: the same sketchy Israeli company doing “testing”.

Could it be they’re actually testing HOW to make AI go rogue? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/t...
September 19, 2026 at 3:47 AM

by Jared Yates Sexton

10%
jysexton.bsky.social
Not great when you recognize the whole AI thing reflects the mentality and worldview of white supremacist slavers looking for free labor to increase their profits while doing nothing and also living in total, all-consuming fear that there will be an uprising that leads to their violent comeuppance.
September 18, 2026 at 6:16 PM

by Martha Albertson Fineman

20%
mlafineman.bsky.social
AI and medical care… Frustrating future opportunities?
People Fear AI Will 'Kill All Humans.' But What if It Can Save Our Patients? www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/pres...
Opinion | People Fear AI Will 'Kill All Humans.' But What if It Can Save Our Patients?
As AI becomes an increasingly troubling brand, it's medical applications may be thwarted
www.medpagetoday.com
September 18, 2026 at 5:02 PM

Reposted by Catherine J. Frieman

0%
courtneymilan.com
Humans are doing harm. AI is the mechanism. The humans need to be regulated so that they stop doing that.
September 19, 2026 at 2:27 AM

Reposted by Brooke Harrington, Kate Jackson

8%
beyerstein.bsky.social
Alex Karp of Palantir says the AI industry must be nationalized to protect it from lawsuits if it accidentally destroys the world. More likely, he sees the bubble about to burst and he wants to be bought out with our tax dollars before that happens.
September 18, 2026 at 10:58 PM
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