Ed Dowd: The AI Game Of Thrones

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BY SRH

Winter is coming for the AI industry, and the great houses are already drawing swords

On one side sit OpenAI and Anthropic, wrapping themselves in the banner of “safety”…House Monopoly.

On the other sit the accelerationists including David Sacks, President Trump, and a growing faction that wants the pathway cleared, not blocked…House Speed Racer.

The fight is being sold as existential risk versus national destiny.

This is a battle for power, money, and control.

The average citizen is not at the table.

I have been watching this movie since the post-Labor Day panic dropped. I wrote last week an article titled “The Post Labor Day AI Panic Psyop Has been Launched” where I detailed a former Anthropic and OpenAI employee with almost no prior X footprint posted a polished warning that the labs are “gambling with our lives.” It exploded to 123 million views in a day. Mainstream media, NGOs, and members of Congress materialize on cue. Two days later, after I wrote my Psyop post, Dario Amodei is on every airwave demanding we “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman nods along and then Elon agrees even after he questioned the well-coordinated messaging. I suspect his motivation for agreeing is that he wants to make sure he is in the room should this path gain momentum. Even Hillary and Obama weighed in…obviously on House Monopoly side. Basically House Monopoly wants embedded evaluators inside the labs and common safety standards. Coordination that would require government blessing and, conveniently, an antitrust waiver so the two biggest closed model shops can sit in a room and decide how fast everyone else is allowed to run and regulate their competition out of existence. This is not altruism, rather this is regulatory capture.

The reasons for attempting this regulatory capture are simple and I touched on it in my previous article.

Open source models are putting real pricing pressure on the closed frontier systems. The closed system companies are burning cash with profitability nowhere in sight. Enterprises are finally asking about ROI and whether they want their data sitting inside OpenAI or Anthropic. Secondary market valuations are starting to crack. Growth is slowing and capex is increasingly getting harder to finance.

House Speed Racer has not been subtle. Trump called the panic a hoax and a scam. He said the only guardrails AI needs are a strong president, that we already have criminal and regulatory power over these companies, and that whoever wins AI wins. Sacks, who has been in this fight longer than most, told Amodei and Altman they can pace themselves if they want, but stop pretending they need Washington to bless a cartel. Stop asking for the waiver. Stop dressing market protection as public salvation.

The alignment is political, and everyone in the room knows it. The safety rhetoric travels most easily through Democratic networks, legacy NGOs, the parts of the administrative state that grow when fear grows and of course the MSM. The acceleration side is MAGA coded: beat China, build here, do not hand the future to Brussels-style bureaucrats or to companies that spent years positioning themselves as the moral opposition to the current administration. That camp is not wrong that a slowdown written by the current leaders is a gift to Beijing. However it is also not wrong that data center buildouts, power prices, and labor displacement are already landing on regular people who never got a vote.

The ultimate governor for both sides is the credit market and its willingness to fund this so far profitless endeavor.

House Monopoly Pre-Trump

As an aside let us not forget what the plan was under the Biden Administration. Marc Andreessen told this story two years ago and has not stopped repeating it. In May 2024 he sat in the Biden White House and came away convinced the plan was to regulate the industry until only two or three companies remained and startups were finished. He walked out and decided he was for Trump. Last week Politico suddenly published a piece disputing the meeting.

Love the timing! When the narrative needs the origin story memory-holed, the memory-holing arrives on schedule. House Monopoly would rather have us forget their nefarious machinations before Trump was elected.

Andreessen’s larger point has always been the same: there is a difference between letting technology move fast and letting incumbents use the state to lock the door behind them. The “plan,” as he described it, was never about keeping humanity safe. It was about deciding who gets to own the stack…namely a few oligarchs and the deep state.

So here we are

House Monopoly wants a licensing cartel and a fusion of frontier AI with the administrative state for “safety reasons”…the digital jailer many have been warning about.

House Speed Racer wants the throttle open because the alternative according to them is losing the race to China under national security reasons.

Both houses are populated by people who will be fine either way. Valuations in the hundreds of billions, political access, and the ability to write the rules or write the checks to the people who write the rules.

Who represents the average citizen?

The person whose job might disappear, whose electric bill is already rising because of the buildout, whose data is being vacuumed into models he does not control, and who will live under whatever speech and surveillance norms the winning faction decides are “safe.” That person does not have a seat at the table. The hearings will feature the same CEOs, the same former officials cycling through the same firms, and the same senators who already have bills in the drawer.

I believe we are being presented with a false dichotomy. It is never black or white rather issues are more nuanced. There are no easy choices in this situation. Real risks exist…models that can crack cyber security and wreak havoc are not science fiction. Alternativity steam rolling local communities into accepting data centers is not the path forward. Additionally both sides ignore citizen’s rights addressing personal data integrity, the ability to opt out from the models using them for training, fears about future employment prospects and local community data center concerns. Will grass roots citizens be allowed in the room?

As always watch the cash, watch who writes the rules and watch who gets the waivers. This is Game of Thrones and the Iron Throne is up for grabs. The smallfolk are not invited to the coronation…yet. Hopefully we figure out a third path. In my humble opinion House Monopoly is a dystopian no go option and House Speed Racer needs to address citizens legitimate concerns or risk losing to these self-serving fear merchants in the narrative war.