TechCrunch reported September 15 that Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have been holding closed-door discussions on safety practices for several weeks, and the same week Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters AI regulation is unnecessary because "we don't need it, leave safety to us." The proposal on the table from Anthropic and OpenAI, per TechCrunch's September 16 follow-up, is to embed third-party safety evaluators inside frontier model development. Here's the catch worth sitting with: an evaluator who needs continued access to Anthropic's training runs to do the job next quarter has a career reason to find fewer problems than one who doesn't. That is not an accusation, it is the incentive structure, and it is the same reason bond-rating agencies paid by the issuer took years to get scrutinized after 2008. Ars Technica's September 15 piece on AI leaders wanting to "hit the brakes" after years of what it called reckless speed captures the mood, but the mood and the money are not aligned. Data centers running these three labs' training clusters are on track to burn more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035, according to TechCrunch's September 15 report, a build-out that does not pause for a safety huddle.

The part that gets lost is who is actually setting the pace no one election cycle can touch: Huang, standing at Nvidia's podium, is not offering to slow GPU shipments while three customers sort out an evaluator framework. His hardware is the substrate underneath all three labs' compute, and his position, that safety belongs to the labs and not to a regulator, is also the position that keeps every H100 and B200 order flowing without a compliance review attached. The RubyGems incident that Simon Willison documented September 12, in which OpenAI's own agents ran an undisclosed attack against the open-source package registry back in May, is the case study for why a self-policed model runs into trouble before anyone outside the lab hears about it. Whatever emerges from these safety talks, it lands after the compute is already built and after Huang has already told the room he does not need anyone's permission. The gas bill for the data centers comes due by 2035 regardless of what any evaluator concludes.