AI Regulation Was Coming. Then Trump Killed It.

The investigation below raises a disturbing question: What if rogue AI agents are learning from the secrecy and rule-breaking of the humans who created them? Lever founder David Sirota explores that idea in a companion analysis exclusively for paid subscribers.

Two years before this month’s nationwide panic over the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence, a first wave of Silicon Valley resignations began — and so did the omens of human extinction.

As OpenAI’s safety officials resigned or were pushed out, they made headlines warning about the company’s lax safety standards and reckless deployment of powerful AI models.

Soon after, Biden officials decided to act: On the 2024 anniversary of 9/11, they began advancing a first-of-its-kind rule to require AI companies to tell regulators exactly what kinds of experiments they were running at the edge of the technological frontier. Federal officials said the rule was needed to prevent “dangerous accidents” that “could result in injury or even loss of life.”

But within a year, the regulation was dead , amid a flood of tech industry campaign cash to President Donald Trump’s political machine — and a pressure campaign waged by the same AI giants now claiming to have always welcomed federal regulation, according to documents reviewed by The Lever .

The transparency initiative quietly disappeared from the U.S. government’s rulemaking docket just a few months after OpenAI’s top executive and his wife poured $25 million into Trump’s biggest super PAC, MAGA, Inc.

Without the rule, national security officials and other federal regulators trying to assess and contain AI threats “are flying with a lot less instrumentation than they would have had,” said Vishal Misra, vice dean of computing and artificial intelligence at Columbia University’s engineering department.

“What exists now is much looser,” he told The Lever . “As far as I can tell, there is currently no general federal rule that says: If you are training a sufficiently capable frontier model, you must routinely tell the government what you are building, how it is secured, and what unexpected behavior you are seeing.”

Had the proposed 2024 rule been in place, experts say it could have given regulators a better understanding of the cybersecurity, development, and safety infrastructure of frontier, or cutting-edge, AI models. That information could have been relevant to understanding recent high-profile hacking incidents involving tech companies OpenAI , whose bots hacked into a foreign government’s website in June, and Anthropic .

Some say the regulation could have even helped deter the riskiest experiments that have already gotten out of control.

“Reporting forces the AI industry to not only be more transparent about how they’re developing things that possibly go rogue, but also it sets up a precedent where you have to be much more deliberate in the way you develop things,” Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and director of the AI and Human Rights program for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Lever . “If you know during the development phase that you are going to have to share all of that with an authority — and they will see if you are being sloppy, if you are leaving gaps, if there are blatant security risks that you’re ignoring — that affects how you develop a product.”

In response to the recent hacking events, Trump has said that the only protection the AI industry needs is a “strong and smart (High IQ!) president.”

Executives at the largest AI companies now purport to disagree with the hands-off approach, insisting they want more formal government regulation and transparency.

But according to documents reviewed by The Lever , those companies and their lobbying groups pressured federal regulators to weaken or drop the kind of regulation they now claim to support. They argued that despite being awash in hundreds of billions of dollars of cash, such reporting requirements would be too expensive — and would force them to answer too many questions.

“The proposed language does not indicate what [regulators] will ask of respondents and raises the risk that respondents will need to address broad, bespoke questions about frontier models every few months,” OpenAI complained in a 2024 letter to regulators. “The open-ended nature of the proposed rule is potentially burdensome and would add costs.”

This week, lawmakers from both parties proposed several bills aiming to create a new federal agency to oversee AI — including one co-authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and several others that would require tech companies to provide regulators with the sort of information the 2024 rule would have mandated.

The proposals come as Americans are “freaked out by the warnings of AI researchers,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), co-author of one of the disclosure bills.

“It’s clear that we can’t leave it to AI companies to self-regulate,” Welch told The Lever . “The reporting requirements for AI catastrophic risk incidents included in the [bill] will give Americans the reassurance they need that there is an independent expert agency advocating on behalf of the public good and public safety as emerging AI technologies continue to develop.”

But until such a law is enacted, Misra said, national security officials lack the information they need to fully evaluate AI developments, like the recent doomsday scare, and determine which threats are spurious — and which are real.

“If something like that regulation was in place, then actual cybersecurity [experts] would have looked at the incident and identified what the problem was and not created the scare that civilizations are rising and plotting against humanity,” Misra said.

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