Google's top AI executive is warning that superhuman artificial intelligence is just years away—and he's got a regulatory framework ready that would hand incumbents like Google the keys to lock out competitors.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, published an essay Tuesday on X and Substack declaring a "precious window" to act before artificial general intelligence—AI matching or exceeding human cognition—arrives. His solution: a US-led "Standards Body" modeled on FINRA, the Wall Street self-regulatory organization funded by the industry it oversees.
This is the oldest playbook in Silicon Valley. Sound the alarm, then volunteer yourself as the only responsible actor qualified to manage the threat. A FINRA-style body funded and run by the biggest players doesn't protect the public—it protects incumbents from upstart competitors who can't afford the compliance costs.
Business Insider framed Hassabis's proposal as a response to the Trump administration's "more hands-on approach to regulating AI," noting it follows White House interventions targeting OpenAI and Anthropic. What BI buried: the structural conflict of interest when the market leader proposes the rules everyone else must follow.
Meanwhile, nearly 200 economists and tech leaders—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—signed their own warning about an AI "tsunami" that could surpass the Industrial Revolution in scale. Economist Justin Wolfers, a signatory, warned that AI could make top industry players "10 to 100 times wealthier," creating a wealth gap far larger than previous technological shifts. He noted the stock market's record rally is driven almost entirely by a handful of AI companies, while the broader economy stagnates.
Benzinga reported the wealth-gap angle prominently. Business Insider omitted it entirely from its coverage of Hassabis's proposal—convenient, since the gap Wolfers describes is exactly what a Google-backed regulatory regime would widen.
Hassabis wrote that "resolving these questions obviously cannot and should not be left to technologists alone," calling for "every part of society to come together." But his proposed body would be industry-funded and modeled on a Wall Street watchdog that has repeatedly failed to catch financial fraud before it devastates ordinary investors. FINRA is funded by the firms it regulates—the same firms that capture its governance and set rules that burden smaller competitors.
Hassabis has previously predicted AGI could arrive by 2030. "What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilisation unfolds," he wrote. The question is who "we" means—American citizens and their elected representatives, or the handful of trillion-dollar companies angling to write their own rules.
The real risk isn't that AI arrives too fast. It's that the regulatory architecture gets built by the companies with the most to lose from open competition.