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OpenAI lobbied for restrictive rules, and now they want an "out" but only for themselves. Absolute naked regulatory capture.

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I believe with regulatory capture the companies that pushed for the regulation in the first place at least comply with it (and hopefully the regulation is not worthless). This behaviour by ClosedAI is even worse: push for the regulation, then push for the exemption.

Regulatory capture is usually the company pushing for regulations that align with the business practices they already implement and would be hard for a competitor to implement. For example, a car company that wants to require all other manufactures to build and operate wind tunnels for aerodynamics testing. Or more realistically, regulations requiring 3rd party sellers for vehicles.

Regulators can require all manufactures to build and operate wind tunnels for aerodynamics testing, or alternatively allow someone from south africa to be president.

That's the first time I've ever heard someone make this unusual and very specific definition. It's almost always much simpler - you get favorable regulatory findings and exemptions by promising jobs or other benefits to the people doing the regulating. It's not complicated, it's just bribery with a different name.

That’s not regulatory capture at all. Grandparent’s definition is correct.

I haven't heard that definition of "Regulatory Capture" before. I mostly thought it was just when the regulators are working for industry instead of the people. That is, the regulators have been "Captured." The politicians who nominate the regulatory bodies are paid off by industry to keep it that way.

You’re correct that this is the broad definition, but GP is correct that that is a very common form of regulatory capture in the US.

I’ve seen this happen many times during the RFI/RFP process for large projects, the largest players put boots on the ground early and try to get into the ears of the decision makers and their consultants and “helpfully” educate them. On multiple occasions I’ve seen requests actually using a specific vendor’s product name as a generic term without realizing it, when their competitors’ products worked in a completely different way and didn’t have a corresponding component in their offering.

I agree. I wasn't trying to strictly define it just specify the form it usually takes.

In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws against web scraping. Things that look harmless but ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market. Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder for them to get new data if it means they don't have to compete.

Regulatory capture has different flavours, but it basically comes down to the regulated taking control of or significantly influencing the regulator. It can be by the complete sector, but in my experience most often by the leading incumbants in a domain.

It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for new entrants.

We all predicted this would happen but somehow the highly intelligent employees at OpenAI getting paid north of $1M could not foresee this obvious eventuality.

Also textbook Fascism.

Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.

Can you explain why this is associated with fascism specifically, and not any other form of government which has high levels of oligarchical corruption (like North Korea, Soviet Russia, etc).

I am not saying you’re wrong, but please educate me why is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?

It might be basic, but I found the Wikipedia article to be a good place to start:

> An important aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism

It’s a poor definition. The same “subsidization and directive influence” applies to all of Krugman’s Nobel-wining domestic champion, emerging market development leaders, in virtually all ‘successful’ economies. It also applies in the context of badly run, failed and failing economies. Safe to say this factor is only somewhat correlated. Broad assertions are going to be factually wrong.

The key element here is that the power exchange in this case goes both ways. The corporations do favors for the administration (sometimes outright corrupt payments and sometimes useful favors, like promoting certain kinds of content in the media, or firing employees who speak up.) And in exchange the companies get regulatory favors. While all economic distortions can be problematic — national champion companies probably have tradeoffs - this is a form of distortion that hurts citizens both by distorting the market, and also by distorting the democratic environment by which citizens might correct the problems.

That's because it's not a definition, it's simply a summary of a description of one characteristic.

So then you agree that the original post that called this "text book fascism" was wrong, as this is just one very vague, and only slightly correlated property.

This can be bad without invoking godwin's law.

All snakes have scales, so there is a 100% correlation between being a snake and having scales.

That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).

That’s not accurate either. Scaleless snakes, thigh a rare mutation, do exist as genetic mutants.

https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/corn-snakes/scaleless...

> there is a 100% correlation between being a snake and having scales.

That's a strange definition of "correlation" that you're using.

For correlation to be 1, it's not enough that all snakes have scales. You also need all scaly animals to be snakes.

Here's a toy example. Imagine three equally sized groups of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish. (So all snakes have scales, but not all scaly animals are snakes.) That's three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with probability 1/3 each. The correlation between snake and scaly comes out as 1/2.

You can also see it geometrically. The only way correlation can be 1 is if all points lie on a straight line. But in this case it's a triangle.

You’re looking for the logical argument here, not the statistical one. You sampled from snakes and said there is a 100% correlation with being a snake (notwithstanding the counterarg in an adjacent comment about scale-free snakes).

I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in the provided definition. If “some” attributes hold in a definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That is why I said: ‘this is a poor definition.’

Sounds like South Korea and her Chaebols

Yea fascism, communism, etc aren’t abstract ideals in the real world. Instead they are self reinforcing directions along a multidimensional political spectrum.

The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.

That's not fascism, that is the dysfunctional status quo in literally every single country in the world. Why do you think companies and billionaires dump what amounts to billions of dollars on candidates? Often times it's not even this candidate or that, but both!

They then get access, get special treatment, and come out singing the praises of [errr.. what's his name again?]

It’s not Fascism on its own, but it’s representative of the forces that push society to Fascism.

Start looking and you’ll find powerful forces shaping history. Sacking a city is extremely profitable throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have defensive capabilities which then…

In the Bronze Age trade was critical as having Copper ore alone wasn’t nearly as useful as having copper and access to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as where trees.

Such forces don’t guarantee outcomes, but they have massive influence.

It's rather amusing reading the link on dirigisme given the context of its alleged implication. [1] A word which I, and suspect most, have never heard before.

---

The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe the economic policies of France which included substantial state-directed investment, the use of indicative economic planning to supplement the market mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the period of substantial economic and demographic growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war, and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.

The term has subsequently been used to classify other economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada, Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]

---

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme

> A word which I, and suspect most, have never heard before.

It's a pretty normal word in British English, tbh.

Maybe it's because we do French at school.

Would describe e.g. social democracy too though. And in practice most govs work like this.

Social democracy has historically been a precursor to fascism, so it makes sense.

Socialism and communism are state ownership. Fascism tends toward private ownership and state control. This is actually easier and better for the state. It gets all the benefit and none of the responsibility and can throw business leaders under the bus.

All real world countries have some of this, but in fascism it’s really overt and dialed up and for the private sector participation is not optional. If you don’t toe the line you are ruined or worse. If you do play along you can get very very rich, but only if you remember who is in charge.

“Public private partnership” style ventures are kind of fascism lite, and they always worried me for that reason. It’s not an open bid but a more explicit relationship. If you look back at Musk’s career in particular there are ominous signs of where this was going.

The private industry side of fascist corporatism is very similar to all kinds of systematic state industry cronyism, particularly in other authoritarian systems that aren't precisely fascist (and named systems of government are just idealized points on the multidimensional continuum on which actual governments are distributed, anyway), what distinguishes fascism particularly is the combination of its form of corporatism with xenophobia, militaristic nationalism, etc., not the form of corporatism alone.

I think it is associated with fascism, just from the other party.

This is pretty common fascist practice that is used all over Europe and in any left-leaning countries, when with regulations governments make doing business on large scale impossible, and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies and so on. Governments gain enormous leverage to ensure corporate loyalty, silence dissenters and combat opposition, while the biggest players secure their place at the top and gain protection from competitors.

So the plan was push regulations and then dominate over the competitors with exemptions from those regulations. But fascists loose the election, regulations threaten to start working in a non-discriminatory manner, and this will simply hinder business.

>and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies and so on.

You mean like Germany has done?

Like Most Favoured Nation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_favoured_nation

Groan....

People who don't learn history will be condemned to repeat it. Granted this isn't necessary to be skeptical of american business....

Isn’t this the opposite? Trump has learned from history exactly so that he can repeat it?

Or his lackeys have anyway. I’m unwilling to believe the man has ever read a book.

Trump also isn't giving "nothing ever happens" vibes.

That's in progress. It's called the MAGA Parallel Economy.[1]

Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter Thiel are involved. Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.

But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration. That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched." "Loyalty is what Putin values above all else.” Three of the oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/13/maga-influ...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-oligarchs-rich-ukrai...

> That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched.

> Khodorkovsky [...] was arrested in 2003

Something doesn't square here

It was in 2000 [0]

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how...

Its a typo, the article says it happened in the summer of 2000.

Right re 2000.

Could just be a muscle-memory typo. Much more likely to be typing 2020 these days than 2002.

Why are these idiots trying to ape Russia, a dumpster fire, to make America great again?

If there’s anyone to copy it’s China in industry and maybe elements of Western Europe and Japan in some civic areas.

Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.

I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.

> I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.

It's not a Russia fetish. It's a Strongman fetish.

Because they aren’t interested in “making America great again”, that’s the marketing line used to sell it to American voters. They are solely interested in looting the nation for personal gain.

What do you think Melon Tusk is doing, apart from letting out his inner (and outer) (and literal) child on the world stage?

Selling the government to the highest bidder, which in many cases would be him too

Lots of Ketamine.

Elon Musk is a text book definition of an oligarch, combining tremendous wealth, control over major technological industries and political power.

so edgy

Perhaps that would be a use for the $TRUMP coin, whoever owns most gets to favorite corporation.

nice to see HN is no longer glazing Sam Altman

And it probably would have worked if David Sacks wasn't the AI czar. The Harris administration would probably have caved by now

Just like when people complain about OpenAI's ill practices then they use it the most

Can anyone say which of the LLM companies is the least "shady"?

If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't have a massively powerful local machine to run local models, what are the best options?

Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident about what's up with the other companies.

The Claude people seem to be quite chill.

Agreed. They're a bit mental on "safety" but given that's not likely to be a real issue then they're fine.

Given the growing focus on AIs as agents, I think it's going to be a real issue sooner rather than later.

“Safety” was in air quotes for a reason. The Claude peoples’ idea of “AI safety” risks are straight out of the terminator movies.

Wouldn’t you rather have a player concerned with worst case scenarios?

Defending against movie plot threats has been found not a good use of resources already 20 years ago in the war on terrorism.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/09/terrorists_...

These aren't worst-case scenarios. That would imply there was an actual possibility of it happening.

Claude has closed outputs and they train on your inputs. Just like OpenAI, Grok, and Gemini (API), mistral…

Who’s chill? Groq is chill

Just use what works for you.

E.g. i'm very outspoken about my preferences for open llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I'm very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.

However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI because it works better than what I tried so far for my use case.

That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS operator that serves my needs as well without major change investment, I will switch.

Why not vibe-code it using OpenAI

I'm not talking about me developing the applications, but about using LLM services inside the products in operation.

For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as such.

Just call it hacking, we don't need new names for coding without any forethought.

Who put you in charge of naming?

A: none of the above

claude and mistral seem to be in a good ethical place.

You actually can't fault llama either, as a standalone product. However it's still in Zuck Paradise

My AI strategy is still "No".

Amen

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/analogia-is-my-passion

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