“If you believe your product is going to destroy humanity, then don't build it.” Jonathan Kanter · Decoder with Nilay Patel
Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026
Jonathan Kanter, who ran the Justice Department's antitrust division, was arguing with Nilay Patel about whether ordinary products-liability law can reach AI harms. He had just finished a long complaint that Congress is incapable of setting basic safety rules and that the tech companies asking for regulation are lobbying against it. Then he refuses to let any of that work as an excuse, and reframes safety as an engineering problem rather than a regulatory one.
Transcript
Both and, right? And so companies employ people and they build technology. And when those people and those technologies do things that are problematic, including stealing or breaking into someone else's property on behalf of their employer, there's liability. And that could be products liability, but it could be more than products liability. You're just people doing bad things or companies creating technology that's doing bad things. And the products liability framework actually. Did work most recently in the case against Meta for Facebook and Instagram and child safety and security and mental health.
Wait, hold on. I want to hold. That is really fascinating to me. Like this is a thing I'm really interested in talking about because it took a decade for it to. That's
the problem. This is where the government needs to step in, right? And so companies have an obligation today to build safe and secure products. And the pace of innovation isn't an excuse not to go do that. So let's be very clear about that. At the same time, we've invented cars and trucks and trains, and we have no crossings, we have no lights, we have no lines on the road. And Congress is completely incapable of pretty much doing anything. And while these tech companies are out there saying that they want regulation, they're actively lobbying against it and have been for a very long time. And so the whole thing is a complete mess. And it's a symptom of our system, which is a complete mess. And frankly, if the political scientist in me would trace that back to things like gerrymandering and Citizens United, where our process has gotten out of control. And Congress, which should be doing its basic job of putting basic safety standards and responsibilities in place, hasn't done that. That having been said, the lack of action by Congress is not an excuse to deliver dangerous products. If you believe your product is going to destroy humanity, then don't build it. If you believe your product is going to go break into someone else's stuff, then go back to the drawing board and figure out how you build it in a way that's safer. And guess what? That's innovation. These are innovation problems, not just regulatory problems. We need to do a better job incentivizing our companies to build safer and secure products. And when they do that, those products will perform better and we will see better innovation. Right now, innovation is asymmetric because it's done without the proper regard for safety and security, just like we saw in social media. And as a result, now we have products that are good at really, really good and really effective at letting people communicate, but really bad when it comes to childhood addiction and mental health. And so perhaps we should learn our lesson and encourage people to build safer, more secure products from the get-go at the outset of this technology. Well,
let me make the comparison to social media regulation just a little more tightly.
Okay.
We just had the big meta case that is a products liability case, right? Your products were designed in a way that caused harm to teenagers. Meta settled the case because I think Mark would prefer to build AI than care about
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