“What I think is inconsistent is if these SI mega corps say, hey, you have to stop me because I can be doing something dangerous. I'm a drunk driver in the car. You've got to pull me over. I can pull over myself, but you have to pull me over so the other guys don't get there first. That kind of thing doesn't make a lot of logical sense to me.”
The Information's TITV · October 2026
Asked about recent incidents with AI agents and whether existing laws are enough, the Pentagon's technology chief says the doom narrative partly comes from a Silicon Valley information bubble. He says you can take the risks seriously, but that frontier labs asking to be regulated so rivals don't get there first doesn't add up.
Transcript
…the warfighting level, it's baked into a lot of our systems. And again, people assume, you know, they don't understand that warfare has a lot of forms and paperworks and permission and all these kinds of things. They'll simplify the back end of that so that people could focus on the battle at hand.
…that we're seeing that appear to be a little bit more tangible than they were even just a few months ago. And then just this question around, are the existing laws sufficient for us to deal with the consequences of, I don't know, runaway AI or AI that's doing something it's not supposed to do.
Yeah, I mean, I remember being in the Silk in Silicon Valley, and I lived in that bubble for a long time. So I'm familiar with how big that bubble could be. And I'm not talking about a financial bubble, just the information bubble, if you will. And so, you know, the researcher who'd hopped between OpenAI and Anthropic, and then a few weeks later sort of came out and was talking about humanity ending in three years. You know, I do think, you know, in this kind of information environment, that kind of gets a lot of play. Like never before have you been able to get 200 million views on something in a short period of time, unless it was so dramatic like that. So I think people may be living in that bubble a little bit. And you could believe that and also believe that there's some risks with the technology that we have to protect against. Like those two things are not inconsistent. And what I think is inconsistent is if these SI mega corps say, hey, you have to stop me because I can be doing something dangerous. I'm, you know, I'm a drunk driver in the car. You've got to pull me over. I can pull over myself, but you have to pull…
What about the mechanisms that the executive branch currently has against AI companies that aren't adhering to these frameworks? Because one of the biggest questions I know our readers have is a lot of these are voluntary. You had the joint commitment that the Frontier Labs agreed to. Obviously…
that came out of the executive order this summer. We saw in reporting yesterday after the first meeting of the task force that a White House official said that export controls like were imposed on Anthropic earlier this year were one potential stick that could be used against AI companies. Do you…
Yeah, of course. I mean, there's been something called ITAR for years. If you ask any security, cybersecurity researcher, whether there was a certain amount of encryption for a while, you couldn't export that encryption because we thought it was too dangerous for other countries to have that sort…