Washington opts for unregulated artificial intelligence

The federal government has decided that the best way to regulate artificial intelligence is to not regulate it at all. After months of internal debate and heavy lobbying from Silicon Valley, the Trump administration has effectively abandoned plans to create a dedicated AI oversight body. No new proposals are under active consideration at the White House, and legislative efforts in Congress have stalled with midterm elections approaching. The result: an industry reshaping every corner of the economy will continue operating under existing rules written long before large language models could pass a bar exam. How Washington talked itself out of regulation The trajectory here has been swift. Earlier in 2026, the administration floated the idea of a FINRA-like self-regulatory organization for AI. Think of it as a referee that the players themselves fund, similar to how the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority oversees broker-dealers in securities markets. That plan hit a wall in August 2026. Tech executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and AI policy adviser David Sacks, pushed back hard enough to shelve the entire effort. Their argument, distilled to its essence: even a self-r...