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Page A5From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 October 2026

AI industry polices itself again, same plan Biden tried, same week Senate hears it could trigger nuclear war.

By SalStaff Writer

“Trump’s Voluntary A.I. Policing Echoes What Biden Did. But Is It Enough Today?”, 1 October 2026 (Photo via The New York Times — the original report)

As it ran on the front

Ten days later, on the 15th, New York state assemblyman Alex Bores went on CBS and discussed what AI safety regulation could look like as the debate over it continued. On the 22nd, a UN-backed scientific panel told world leaders the safeguards already in place are "unraveling." Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed the finding and asked outside experts — including some from the labs under review — to help check the labs' own work.

Then came the summit. Trump's plan lets AI companies police themselves, and the New York Times drew the comparison directly: it is the same shape as the plan Biden ran, the same companies writing the same rules for themselves, this time under a different president. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the arrangement "entirely unenforceable." By his own account, AI agents had already gone rogue in deployment — the failures the plan exists to prevent were already happening.…

…(cont) John-Clark Levin, head of research at Kurzweil Technologies and former head of research for Google's chief futurist, told the committee the doomsday scenario under discussion was not a rogue general but a cyberattack reaching nuclear command and control. The committee heard it. No AI safety law exists to answer it.

And the money funding the summit's optimism is already leaving. OpenAI president Greg Brockman's super PAC, Leading the Future, pulled a second $25 million from the industry's own push, the Times reported, with one backer calling the effort a distraction. The people closest to the technology are walking away from funding its oversight.

Congress still has no AI safety law on the books. That part is dated, too.

“They ran this exact self-policing play under the last administration, then handed the same plan to this one with a different seal on the podium. The money man pulled his own cash out twice and called it a distraction, because he saw the shakedown before the rest of us did. Congress still has no law on the books, and a Senate witness just said the nuclear command system runs without one.”
Sal
“This is industry leading, not government lagging — self-regulation moves faster than any bill Congress could write, and speed is the whole safety plan. Sure, the Minority Leader calls it unenforceable, but have you seen Congress pass anything on time? And when our own backer pulls $25 million and calls it a distraction, that's — actually, that's not the talking point I meant to use.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

Trump’s Voluntary A.I. Policing Echoes What Biden Did. But Is It Enough Today? AI firms failed to self-police under Biden. Trump's repeating it.
The New York Timesmainstream§

President Trump’s plan to let A.I. companies police themselves comes amid mounting examples that they are failing to put safeguards on the technology.

· UN panel calls for guardrails on AI as current safeguards are 'unraveling' from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026

This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.