Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?
AI Snake Oil Sayash Kapoor
Researchers argue against extraordinary government intervention in AI, contending that AI's economic impacts follow normal diffusion patterns and that misuse risks are better addressed through societal resilience rather than precautionary restrictions on companies. They cite the example of nuclear nonproliferation, which required massive ongoing investment and enforcement, and note that AI lacks a comparable physical bottleneck, making nonproliferation brittle—open-weight models and API access mean the gap between frontier and public capabilities is at most a few months. They contend that governments should instead invest in building resilience across society to prepare for inevitable widespread access to advanced AI capabilities, while warning that extraordinary interventions risk creating a permanent expansion of government control over technology research and publication without clear limits.
Why it matters
Let’s not skip the hard work of AI governance
