# As AI CEOs clash over regulation, a new culture war is brewing > Source: > Published: 2026-09-17 19:20:05+00:00 *Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here. **In today’s issue:*** - The battle lines in AI regulation are forming. - OpenAI discloses more hacking incidents. - The King hosts an AI safety summit. - The public is getting worried about AI safety. **Before we get to today’s AI news—please consider joining us at the inaugural Fortune AIQ Summit at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 1:** Spend the afternoon with senior executives from companies on the Fortune AIQ 75 list and explore how you can scale your AI experimentation and translate investments into measurable business value. Jeremy will be leading discussions alongside co-hosts, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell and Live Media Editorial Director Andrew Nusca. [Apply here to attend](https://conferences.fortune.com/event/AIQ_Summit_2026/register). Ok, moving on. The battle lines in the fight over AI regulation are being drawn. In the last few days, what has traditionally been a fairly niche argument about AI safety has become something much more complicated: a culture war. It’s largely panning out like this. On one side is Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, in a rare moment of somewhat unity. Amodei has called for frontier AI companies to slow down where necessary, open the door to independent evaluators, and coordinate around common safety standards. Altman has broadly endorsed the suggestions and said OpenAI will also commit to having independent evaluators inside the company. On the other are Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who have rejected the premise that new AI regulation is needed. Huang said this week that safety and speed are not in conflict, and that the industry does not need new laws or regulations. Zuckerberg made a similar case, arguing that AI companies already have powerful commercial reasons to build aligned systems, avoid harms that could bring legal liability, work with outside evaluators, and delay releases when they are not ready. In a long post on X, Zuckerberg said that the market could discipline AI companies. People will not use agents that behave in ways they do not want, he said, so trust and alignment will become a competitive advantage. Additionally, labs that do not take safety seriously will fall behind, while those whose systems cause harm will face serious liability. Meta, he said, delayed shipping its Muse agent for several months to focus on security and safety for this reason. ## Who gets to write the rules? These aren’t the only voices against the proposals put forward by Amodei and those urging for more AI regulation. Cohere, a Canadian AI lab, published a response this week arguing that a safety regime built around a small group of dominant Silicon Valley companies could become “a cartel by any other name,” particularly if they received an antitrust exemption to coordinate around rules other developers would have to follow. Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez instead called for an evidence-based risk framework, mandatory transparency, independent testing tailored to a system’s actual capabilities, and assurance mechanisms free from conflicts of interest. “I think we absolutely need regulation,” Joelle Pineau, Cohere’s chief AI officer, told me. “That’s going to be part of the social contract.” As AI enters workplaces and people’s daily lives, she said, people need to understand its properties and feel confident that it is being used safely. “There has to be a level of trust, and the regulatory system is about keeping people safe and instilling trust. So, totally believe in it.” But like Gomez, Pineau warned that the companies building frontier systems should not become the sole authors of the rules governing them. “What we worry about,” she said, “is that there’s a small set of labs that both get to build the technology and set the rules.” Labs like Anthropic and OpenAI should help inform policy, she said, but there should be more people around the table. “To be setting the rules and to do it in a way that excludes other voices from even deploying the technology, let alone setting the rules, that’s the problem,” Pineau said. “If you need to set your rules in a closed room with a small set of very powerful players, you’re not doing so in the interest of citizens.” ## A culture war Zuckerberg and others have been taking their view on AI regulation directly to President Donald Trump for some time, according to new reporting. The[*Wall Street Journal* reported](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/inside-the-white-house-tussle-to-sway-trump-on-ai-0043d567) this week that Zuckerberg, Huang, and Elon Musk had separately contacted Trump last month to oppose an effort to create an industry-funded AI oversight body, modeled in part on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The proposal, put forward by Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, would have created a standards body funded by the industry. However, the *Journal* reported that Zuckerberg, Musk, and Huang worried it would concentrate further power in the hands of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—the three companies most likely to shape its rules. In the end, Trump did not move forward with the idea. Trump, for his part, has made his position clear. He has dismissed calls for an AI slowdown, framed regulation as a threat to America’s competition with China, and said the main guardrail the country needs is a “high IQ president.” Rather than engage with the question of how AI systems should be tested and governed, the administration and its allies have increasingly turned the issue into a culture war. Effective altruism, or EA—a philosophical and philanthropic movement that aims to use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most effective ways to improve people’s lives—has found itself at the center of that. The movement became closely linked to AI safety because some prominent EA-aligned funders, researchers, and organizations have focused on the possibility that highly capable AI systems could create extreme or even existential risks. The movement has made headlines before—particularly after its association with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, it’s firmly back in the spotlight. For example, the *New York Post* [published a cover story this](https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/business/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodeis-handpicked-ai-watchdog-has-deep-ties-to-effective-altruism-movement-a-complete-joke/) week with the headline: “Meet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s handpicked super-woke globalists he thinks will save us from an AI apocalypse.” The paper focused on Amodei’s proposal that external evaluators from the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, should be able to inspect advanced AI systems and development processes. On Monday, the Department of War’s Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering also [weighed in posting](https://x.com/DoWCTO/status/2099536442594582922): “Americanism, not effective altruism. The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!” While it is probably a good thing that AI safety and regulation are getting more attention than ever, the growing polarization around them is likely to make a sensible debate—let alone any meaningful new rules—harder to achieve. With that, here’s more AI news. **Beatrice Nolan**[beatrice.nolan@fortune.com](mailto:beatrice.nolan@fortune.com)[@beafreyanolan](https://x.com/beafreyanolan) *Before we get to the news, just a reminder to check out this week’s episode of our new vodcast, Fortune AI Weekly. This week, Jeremy and I talk to Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best about his decision to add an AI writing detection feature to the platform. We also talk about AI doomerism going mainstream and the controversy over OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes mathematical breakthrough. You can check out the vod [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYqSAUjmz1l4) on YouTube.* ### FORTUNE ON AI [Anthropic merges its Claude chat and agentic Cowork products into a single AI assistant as part of a push to build an AI superapp](https://fortune.com/2026/09/16/anthropic-merges-its-claude-chat-and-agentic-cowork-products-into-a-single-ai-assistant-as-part-of-a-push-to-build-an-ai-superapp/) — *by Beatrice Nolan* [Urgent calls from OpenAI, Anthropic for an AI slowdown fall on deaf ears with Trump, Xi ahead of next week’s meeting](https://fortune.com/2026/09/15/ai-slowdown-agenda-trump-xi-jinping-meeting/) — *by Emily Forlini* [*Salesforce’s Marc Benioff to AI industry: Regulate yourselves or get sued*](https://fortune.com/2026/09/16/salesforce-marc-benioff-interview-dreamforce-ai-industry-regulate-yourselves-or-get-sued/) — *by Sebastian Herrera* [OpenAI hires Brian McCarthy from SpaceX as its VP of worldwide sales](https://fortune.com/2026/09/17/openai-poache-brian-mccarthy-from-spacex-as-its-vp-of-worldwide-sales/) — by Emily Forlini ### AI IN THE NEWS **The King hosts an AI summit.** King Charles III is convening executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading AI companies at Dumfries House in Scotland this week. The event places the British monarch in the middle of Silicon Valley’s intensifying argument over whether the technology is moving too quickly. The gathering is not expected to produce binding commitments, but Charles is set to urge participants to ensure AI remains “firmly in the service of humanity, community and the natural world." The meeting comes as industry leaders feud over proposals to slow and regulate frontier-model development. [Read more in *The New York Times*.](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/business/king-charles-ai.html) **OpenAI discloses more hacking incidents.** OpenAI disclosed six additional cases in which its models appeared to get around controls during testing, including concealing errors, seeking unauthorized credentials, uploading material to public websites, and communicating between supposedly isolated training environments. The company also said it would start being more transparent about publicly disclosing these incidents. In a blog, the lab pledged to begin publishing less-complex incidents within six business days and more involved ones within 12. They said they hope the voluntary disclosure process could become an industry standard. The news follows OpenAI’s recent security incident in which systems under evaluation escaped intended controls and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s infrastructure. Several other incidents were then discovered by independent researchers. [Read more in *Axios*.](https://www.axios.com/2026/09/16/openai-testing-safety-incidents-disclosure) **AI automated catfishing is on the rise.** A network of roughly 28 fraudulent dating apps used AI personas to keep users chatting—and spending money on in-app coins—while paid human workers handled the occasional video call or social-media interaction needed to make the profiles appear real. Anthropic uncovered the operation after spotting a Claude account making more than 100,000 API requests a day, according to a new report. Investigators found that most chats were automated and that only about one in four apparent matches was a real person. [Read more in *The Verge*.](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/995348/ai-dating-app-scams) **Anthropic’s IPO is still on.** Anthropic is still expected to go public this year, sources tell *Axios,* even as CEO Dario Amodei calls to  slow the development of frontier AI. The company has reportedly chosen Nasdaq for the listing. In contrast, OpenAI told *Fortune* it is still leaning toward a 2027 debut, citing safety concerns. Anthropic may argue that becoming public would bolster its transparency case—but it also needs capital, and safety proposals have not diminished investors’ appetite for an AI bet. [Read more in *Axios*.](https://www.axios.com/2026/09/14/anthropic-ipo-safety-openai) ### EYE ON AI NUMBERS ## **63%** That’s the share of Americans who believe there is at least a “moderate” risk that advanced AI could destroy humanity, according to a new [*POLITICO* poll](http://comms.politico.com/c/eJxMjjtuxCAUAE8DHRa85VtQpPE94PGIUbzGsvFae_toU6WbYjSaEm0CAE5ROR-MtQ4UX6J2aAtlMipD1iVnU4mQrDZZ6hwybxEkWBmUVQ8DUk1YIWhQKaTksgvAtNz72kbDPmF_8jUuY-wne3wxmBnM931P_wUG80b3yWD-hBnMMjCY1Yf2vq4iNTEIl62v_fstjnb-nGK5nmlr4y3GcT138eqDjlNIJZ2X3vEjZkrjaEjT1te0MS1rP8a10d_RiCF5LBaKrlSVCZgTSIuODPqijUc-oqk1G4UKMNcUjA4AvmjwPkgN1iv-ivAbAAD__1rcYh0). The findings come after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly quit the company, warning that the leading AI labs were “gambling with our lives” in their pursuit of self-improving superintelligence. The resignation ignited the past week’s argument over whether the industry should slow down. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for labs to “pace” the frontier, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed tougher safeguards. The fresh concern over existential risk is not confined to one political camp. According to the poll, 70% of people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 said there was at least a moderate risk, compared with 60% of Donald Trump voters. Around 45% said development of more advanced models should be paused, versus 40% who said the industry should keep going because the technology could still bring significant benefits. ### AI CALENDAR [Sign up for free](https://www.fortune.com/newsletters/eye-on-ai?&itm_source=fortune&itm_medium=nl_article_tout&itm_campaign=eye_on_ai).