Sign inSubscribe
The Guardrails

Bessent compares AI chiefs calling for rules to Hannibal Lecter

Editorial

Editorial

— 2 min read
Share
Bessent compares AI chiefs calling for rules to Hannibal Lecter

Washington is done listening to the labs warn about themselves — the administration now answers doom headlines with a shrug, and Saturday brought the sharpest version yet from the Treasury Secretary.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the AI executives asking government to step in should just slow down instead. On The Axios Show Saturday, co-founder Mike Allen asked whether the doomsday fears now coming from lab leaders amount to "BS." Bessent allowed that "we have to be prepared for every occasion," then turned on the doomer camp: "this alarmism without solutions by some of the AI community, that's not leadership." Pressed on CEOs who are, in Allen's words, "basically screaming for regulation, warning of losing control of AI," Bessent's answer was blunt: "Well, then they should slow down. It's kind of like Hannibal Lecter: stop me before I kill again."

That lands harder coming from Bessent than from a cable pundit: he is the Treasury Secretary who convened the nation's biggest banks for urgent talks over AI-driven cyber threats earlier this year, and who now argues the correct response to model risk is restraint by the builders, not guardrails from Washington. It arrives in the same week as Hinton, Bengio among 22 authors warning of an intelligence explosion, and it flips the burden onto the labs: if the executives mean their own warnings, prove it with a pause — if they don't, stop performing panic. Either way, the White House's "tremendous self-policing" strategy just got its most quotable defense, and any future push for binding AI rules now has to argue past a Silence of the Lambs punchline.

Elon Musk says SpaceX's AI unit will answer the government's AI-to-super-intelligence rebrand with a rename of its own. After Trump's September 29 executive order directed executive-branch communications to drop "artificial intelligence" in favor of "super intelligence," Musk posted "No more AI. SI. It's better." — and when a user asked directly whether SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI, he replied "Yes, we will make that change," adding "SpaceX is a super intelligence company." No English outlet has picked up the corporate rename yet; right now the commitment lives on Musk's timeline, so it reads as a personal pledge rather than a formal announcement. It still matters because SpaceX's AI arm just turned itself into an AI cloud firm — and its owner is now front-running the White House's preferred vocabulary while his competitors stay quiet.

What to watch: whether "super intelligence" spreads from speeches into contracts, grants, and procurement language — that's when a rebrand becomes policy.

Is "alarmism without solutions" a fair charge against the labs, or is Bessent just handing them an excuse to skip guardrails? Tell us in the comments.

Read more

How OpenAI's own models helped build its Jalapeño inference chip

How OpenAI's own models helped build its Jalapeño inference chip

OpenAI is handing chip design to its own models, Google is pausing an open-source security program under a flood of AI-written reports, and a new benchmark puts numbers on how Chinese models handle political taboos. OpenAI's hardware team used the company's own models to help design Jalapeño, the custom inference chip it co-designed with Broadcom — and the models cut real work, not just slideware. In a Q&A published Sunday, VP of Hardware Richard Ho told Ian Cutress that in one example the inte

Open Source Radar — October 4: Cloudflare's OS for agents

Open Source Radar — October 4: Cloudflare's OS for agents

Today's trending signal is the toolchain opening up: Cloudflare handed the public its internal AI workspace, Addy Osmani's engineering skill pack crossed 100,000 stars, and a nonogram benchmark is puncturing model confidence in public. Cloudflare OS (TypeScript, ~10,700 stars, Apache-2.0) — Cloudflare just open-sourced the "AI productivity environment" a large share of its own workforce uses daily, and it reads less like a demo than an internal product with a security team's fingerprints on it.

Deep Dive — The intelligence explosion, in the labs' own numbers

Deep Dive — The intelligence explosion, in the labs' own numbers

On Monday, the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Policy published a 22-author report arguing that automating AI research could compress years of progress into months or less, and that the mechanics for it are closer than the field's usual hedging admits. The author list runs from Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio to OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Microsoft's Eric Horvitz, UMass Amherst's Andrew Barto, Berkeley's Dawn Song and UBC's Jeff Clune — every si

Hinton, Bengio among 22 authors warning of an intelligence explosion

Hinton, Bengio among 22 authors warning of an intelligence explosion

The people building frontier AI are now publishing the warnings about it — plus Musk recruits a second foundry for Terafab, and Apple moves to wall AI agents off the Mac's most powerful permission. Twenty-two AI researchers — including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark — argue that automating AI research could trigger an intelligence explosion, and that the mechanics for one are closer than the field's usual hedging admits.