“It is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 AI agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover their parking lot and solar panels, but they can accelerate into recursive self-improvement … whenever they so choose.”
The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · September 2026
Context
Klein's argument in this solo essay is that 'pacing the frontier' — the labs' own phrase — sets the bar too low, and that the burden of proof should sit with them rather than with the public. This line is his answer to the idea that the absence of AI regulation is somehow natural: in the same cities where these labs sit, you cannot put up an eight-storey building without an agonising public review. He calls the gap a political choice, not an inevitability.
Transcript
…AI first. The result is this tragic collective action problem. The AIs we are building, they're not safe. But the CEOs and the politicians, they fear the other companies and countries that are building AI are even less concerned with safety and ethics than we are. In the words of Ted Cruz,
they're going to be killer robots. I'd rather they'd be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.
…building without an agonizing public review process, and probably not even then. And yet somehow it is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 AI agents to build a society-altering super intelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover their parking lot and solar panels, but they can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever they so choose. There is nothing inevitable about any of that. These are political choices, and we can and should make other ones. And I want to be very clear about this. I do not mean to suggest that stopping RSI until we can prove it's safe, that that's all we need to do to control the AI frontier. That is the beginning of such an agenda, not the end. But it is the beginning. It is the decision that will do…
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