Vice President JD Vance isn’t buying what Silicon Valley is selling. Speaking Monday, Vance took direct aim at tech executives who have been lobbying Washington to impose regulatory guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, calling their appeals “a bit of a Trojan horse.”
His argument: the biggest players in AI don’t actually want to be regulated. They want their competitors to be regulated. And there’s a meaningful difference between those two things.
Safety concerns or competitive moats?
Vance accused major tech companies of leveraging legitimate safety concerns to entrench their market positions. It’s a classic regulatory capture playbook: frame the rules as protecting the public while ensuring they primarily protect incumbents.
The vice president’s preferred alternative is a pro-growth policy environment that avoids heavy-handed intervention. His view is that excessive regulation doesn’t just slow innovation domestically. It pushes it offshore entirely, to jurisdictions more than happy to welcome the talent and capital that Washington repels.
